£1m barristers

The first legal aid barrister to trouser over £1m for a financial year defends his income in the Times. His defence is predictably based upon how incredibly hard he works, how good he is and how if you can’t make £1m doing it, the best people would give up and do something else.

The real problem that people have with this comes out elsewhere in the piece: — “Premier league barristers do premier league work, he adds. Like premier league footballers? It’s a fair comparison”. Premier league footballers, paid huge amounts because they are rare and brilliant, are not paid out of taxpayers’ money. In this country, we are happy to allow the market to operate unchecked in the private sector, leading to multi–million pound bonuses for people who happen to be good at selling equity derivatives or £100,000 a week salaries for those who are great at kicking a ball about. But when it is public funds, we baulk at paying £1m in a year to any one individual, irrespective of brilliance or diligence. That’s why the Prime Minister doesn’t get paid tens of millions as CEO of the country. (Some of you may be able to suggest other reasons. I am not going to go into that here).

But why is that? There must be an equal, if not greater, interest in applying market forces to get the best people in public sector roles as compared with the private sector. I think what it comes down to is views about relative amounts of wedge and about who is the boss in each case. In the private sector, your bosses/paymasters generally make significantly more money than you. A manager who is on £100,000 is happy to pay his junior £30,000. A banker who is on a £7m bonus is happy to see his junior getting a £3m bonus. But in the public sector, we are the paymasters, in that all the money ultimately comes out of our pockets. And most of us do not earn anything like £1m/year. To most people in the country — in many cases, hardworking people, who consider their work to be an important contribution — £1m/year is an obscene, unobtainable salary. It is more than 20 times the average household income. A taxpayer who is on £40k, and is taxed £15k, is very unlikely to agree that a publicly funded legal aid barrister is worth every penny of his £1m, even if the barrister combines the wisdom of King Solomon with the work ethic of Aleksei Stakhanov.

Labels: law