BRITAIN'S pioneering legal aid system is being "destroyed" and planned reforms could see the end of high street practices.
This is the stark warning from solicitors in Redhill in response to controversial government changes to legal aid, which would see £220 million a year cut from the system's budget.
Members of the legal profession have rounded on justice minister Chris Grayling after the proposed changes were originally announced in April.
Some even warned that innocent clients could be persuaded to plead guilty in an effort to cut costs.
"Retaining choice of lawyer is paramount obviously to an independent legal profession," said Graham Guerin, a former senior partner of a local law firm and current committee member of the Surrey Law Society. "But the simple fact of life is these reforms will destroy local firms.
"If the government wants to concentrate on huge factory-type firms who conduct legal aid then the business model will make it impossible for small high street practices to survive.
"We used to have the best legal aid system in the world and it's now being totally destroyed."
Mr Guerin said it could take events equivalent to the Guildford four and Birmingham six, when men were wrongly jailed over IRA bombings with which they had nothing to do in the 1970s, to reverse these changes should they take effect.
And he added that potentially innocent clients could be persuaded to plead guilty by law firms looking to save on costs.
"I gave up doing all criminal law seven years ago because it was uneconomical even then. Even now a lawyer is given a financial incentive if their client pleads guilty at a certain point," he said.
Two weeks ago Mr Grayling was forced into a U-turn on one of the more controversial parts of the Transforming Legal Aid proposals when he announced that defendants would continue to be able to choose their own representation.
Other changes include regulating how many counsel can be appointed to a case.
But despite the U-turn, solicitors said the rest of the planned changes need to be scrapped if the government wants to avoid creating a system where innocent people plead guilty to cut costs and contracts are offered to "factory firms" who make the lowest bid for work.
Keith Goodhand, joint senior partner at Redhill-based Goodhand and Forsyth said: "None of them [solicitors] are in favour of this. We're waiting to see what the government line will be.
"The perceived wisdom, and I think I speak for a lot of other firms, is that this will be a disaster.
"It's going to erode the standard of justice and in general reduce the quality of help that's available."
