Wales and the Training Framework Review: even more problems?

PIn this article from the Autumn 2005 issue of Directions Patricia Leighton and Richard Owen (University of Glamorgan) review the potential impact of the Law Society of England and Wales’ Training Framework Review on the solicitors profession in Wales.

See our Legal Practice Course review page for full details of the Training Framework Review.

Amongst the most controversial aspects of the Law Society of England and Wales’ Training Framework Review (TFR) is the proposed increased (overwhelming?) emphasis it gives to ‘on the job training’. This has caused many concerns, not least that this training will follow an honours degree or equivalent not necessarily in law. Many argue that the burdens on the ‘trainer’ will be considerable, compounded by a possible lack of legal knowledge and skills on the part of the trainee. There will also be a heavy regulatory regime to comply with by the trainer.

In Wales the proposals, arguably, will have particular and severe impact. There are two major aspects to this. The first concerns the composition and nature of the solicitors profession itself. The second is the impact on legal education and legal skills in Wales.

Turning to the profession, in Wales it operates within a predominately rural economy, aside from the so-called M4 corridor that takes in Newport, Cardiff and the Swansea area. There are few large firms and only a handful that have a presence outside Wales. It is thought that there are, proportionately, far more sole practitioners in Wales than England. Most relevantly, earnings in Wales average only two thirds of those in England.

Analysing the solicitors profession in Wales is not made easy by the fact that Law Society statistics tend to aggregate Wales with the Midlands of England. However, there are a number of indicators that show that firms in Wales have lower incomes than those in England, and that, therefore, absorbing the inevitably high training costs under the TFR proposals will be very difficult. For example, equity partners in family law have an average charge out rate of £142 per hour. In Wales and the Midlands it is £120. The rate in Wales is likely to be lower, given that the ‘Midlands’ includes many major legal centres. In addition, many of the areas of advice, such as welfare and housing law which have many demands on them in Wales, are the most likely to be loss making. Unsurprisingly, there are major shortages of legal advisors in these and related areas such as employment, debt and immigration leading, some to term the situation in Wales as a ‘legal advice desert’. The ‘deserts’ also tend to be in rural and Welsh speaking areas. For example, in North Wales legal employment as a percentage of total employment at 0.48% falls well below the Welsh average of 0.72%. When it is borne in mind that Wales has much lower levels of professional service employment than other areas of the UK it can be seen how little access there is to legal advice and representation in these areas.

Should the TFR proposals come to fruition Wales will face many problems and dilemmas. Solicitors in Wales will only have time either to spend with a trainee or to provide legal skills in ‘shortage’ areas. Doing both does not appear feasible!

Indeed, the question of legal skills in Wales is so pressing that the professional bodies and legal academics have made representations to the National Assembly for Wales regarding the likely impact of the TFR. The National Assembly wishes to regenerate the rural and valley communities where employment deserts tend to exist due to the decline in agriculture and the traditional manufacturing industries in recent years. The development of legal services in these areas will therefore help local businesses, whose growth needs to be supported by local information and advice services.

What legal advice exists in these deserts also has to pick up the pieces left by a declining infrastructure. For example, solicitors often have to give lifts to clients to and from court, because public transport in these areas is frequently not a viable option. The extra training costs envisaged by the TFR could be the last straw for the few firms located in these deserts. They may be inhibited from taking on trainees, which eventually could lead to staff shortages, threatening the unique service that they offer their communities.

It is unclear what the response of the National Assembly to the professional bodies and legal academics will be, but it is known that in the light of the mounting research evidence about legal skills deserts in Wales and the implications of this inter alia for economic regeneration, it is highly unlikely that there will be support for changes that will make the problems worse.

In addition, there is anecdotal evidence that training contracts are already hard to obtain in Wales, again partly due to the high incidence of sole practitioners. Despite the stated aim of the TFR to widen access to the profession, if training contracts become harder to obtain it is unlikely that a more diverse profession will emerge.

Turning to the likely impact on legal education in Wales, it should be noted that the comprehensive geographical coverage of law schools is a recent phenomenon, as is the more widespread teaching of law and legal skills in Welsh. The worry must be that the TFR will lead to reduced demand for law degrees, and with it for Welsh medium teaching. Some Welsh medium courses are in their infancy and would be vulnerable to any downturn in student demand. The well supported policies to make Wales bilingual that have been successful in schools are moving to higher education, but these initiatives will probably be under threat. Many see the lack of consideration of these linguistic matters in the TFR documents as a matter for major concern.

There are also concerns over the law curriculum. We do not know enough about what a trainee will be expected to know before commencing a training contract. Hitherto there has been a high level of prescription about the law curriculum from the Law Society and Bar Council at both the undergraduate and vocational training levels. This has had its downside for Wales, in that, for example, the overwhelming emphasis of the Legal Practice Course on commercial subjects has not served the majority of potential practitioners in Wales well. The ‘shortage’ subjects have struggled to be on the curriculum, including at postgraduate academic level. If the teaching of law becomes more vulnerable to declines in demand and/or more private (and possibly unregulated), quality will deteriorate and opportunities for developing skills in shortage subjects will almost invariably decline. Universities and law schools can innovate and provide teaching for emerging legal topics, as they are able to cross-subsidise from popular income generating programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, but who will pay in the future?

Last Modified: 4 June 2010