No-one expected it to be good news. Even so, the preliminary findings of the Bar Council’s survey on the impact of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) make for demoralising reading.

65% of family law barristers said they undertake less legal aid work since April last year, with only 17% stating that the implementation of the Act had not affected their practice. 69% reported a reduction in their fee income. The number of family practitioners attesting to an increase in litigants in person exceeded even gloomy pre-LASPO predictions at 88%, and 80% of responses indicated an increase of delay in the family courts.

The Child Arrangements Programme envisages a more ‘inquisitorial’ court process functioning effectively in the post LASPO environment, and the Money Arrangements Programme may well follow suit. However, the result may in fact be a costly fudge of inquisitorial and adversarial systems: judges lengthily discharging their newly-expanded duties with two litigants in person, while represented parties wait expensively outside court.

For those still radical enough to suspect that wider legal representation could actually ease the strains on the MOJ budget, here are five suggestions gleaned from the Bar Council’s presentation of their preliminary findings on 12 July. All wording and extrapolation is the author’s own, and does not necessarily represent any official attitude.

(1) Share post-LASPO experiences

While the ‘quantitative’ element of the survey has now concluded, the project is still keen to hear more ‘qualitative’ accounts of the experiences of legal aid barristers since the implementation of LASPO.

For example, while the majority of respondents to the April 2014 survey said they had no immediate intention of leaving the Bar, many commented that they were ‘actively considering’ whether they have a long-term future in the profession. These statements give some weight to the argument that there is a real threat to the long-term future of the legal aid Bar.

The final report, with a full analysis of the responses to the April survey, will be published in September. However, further contributions could add considerable value, particularly as regards volume of work, level of fee income and the number of litigants in person encountered.

Anyone willing to contribute can contact the project at: Remuneration@BarCouncil.org.uk.

(2) Calculate the net cost of legal aid

The claim that we have the most expensive legal system in Europe has already been countered within the mainstream media. It was indicated at the presentation that the Office for National Statistics will conduct an independent calculation of the cost of the civil legal aid system.

This should, for example, exclude VAT, the inclusion of which has (it was suggested) misleadingly inflated government figures. It was also argued that the money recouped by the Legal Aid Agency via the statutory charge has not been taken into account hitherto and should be.

Another suggestion mooted was that individual counsel could consent to the disclosure of their anonymised income data from the LAA, giving an objective picture of their year-on-year remuneration from legal aid work. Anyone who supports this idea could contact the Bar Council on the address given above.