THERE is a certain irony in the Scottish Minister for Community Safety, Siobhian Brown, urging Scottish solicitors to get round the table to assist in the delivery of legal aid (“Minister calls for talks with lawyers over legal aid crisis”, The Herald, November 21). The delivery of legal aid was administered by the solicitors’ profession on a largely voluntary basis until 1976 when Parliament created a dedicated government agency, the Scottish Legal Aid Board, to administer the system. However, having sacked the profession in 1986 the Government now asks for its help.

If legal representation is to be provided at public expense then clearly the Government has to be involved but there are no votes in it and, as in other jurisdictions, it is always likely to be underfunded. The public may well ask themselves why it is the case that the worse a person’s conduct the more the state lavishes upon them in legal costs. We appear to be bound into a vicious circle of dependence upon the solicitors’ profession to deliver legal aid and the unwillingness of the tax payer to fund that provision.

I was impressed by a system I observed in Quebec a few years ago. My recollection is that practising solicitors were professionally obliged to provide a certain number of hours of work each year in the provision of free representation or to pay an equivalent sum of money towards that provision. The cost to solicitors of doing so could be recovered from fees charged to their fee-paying clients as a necessary expense of the profession’s public vocation. Presumably, if the state wished to provide supplemental legal aid to the public, it would be free to do so on its own terms.

An arrangement along these lines appears to enable the solicitors’ profession to deliver legal aid without government interference and also for government control of any legal aid provision over and above that provided by the profession. The practicability of such a system might depend upon what vision the legal profession holds of itself in this modern day and age and whether its main raison d’etre is the promotion of public access to justice with due regard to the constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers. Or perhaps it is really an adjunct of the now highly centralised state apparatus.

Michael Sheridan, Glasgow.

Read more letters

Madness of plaque process

WHILST Alan Simpson may think he has a legitimate grievance over planners banning certain types of plaques on buildings ("The balancing act between conservation and evolution laid bare in plaque row", The Herald, November 25) he should perhaps first try getting a "legitimate" one on a listed building.

A year ago our community group finished renovating a listed dovecot for which we then commissioned a commemorative plaque. Even though we already had listed building consent (LBC) the planners told me a separate lLBC was required. Furthermore I was required to open an account with the council to apply for this.

I wanted to do it manually, which I am entitled to do, but the council website would not let me. I therefore requested the relevant forms be emailed to me. Two weeks later and despite another email I still hadn’t received these so I downloaded our original application, amended the details to suit, and submitted it.

I duly received an angry reply saying that in doing so I had “acted illegally”. Nevertheless I did get the correct forms which I sent in together with a photo montage of what the installation would look like including a detailed drawing of the plaque showing colours and wording. I even specified the colour, size and fixing process for the four screws that were going to hold it up.

This prompted a demand that the four screwholes which were required should not affect any of the historic stonework otherwise permission might be refused. I pointed out that in a random rubble wall this would be difficult to achieve. A further request duly followed requiring a photograph of each screwhole that we drilled to be submitted to the planning department to check for compliance. After doing so I was then told that processing an application to put a plaque on a wall would take the planning team up to two months to deal with. In reality the whole process took close to three months.

Fifty years ago I worked as a planning officer responsible for the centre of Edinburgh. Putting plaques on buildings wasn’t in vogue then but if so I would have dealt with it in a day, subject to a quick check with both the neighbours and any conservation groups. If it had been a plaque for a commercial purpose, then my recommendation would have been refusal.

Personally I don’t like plaques on buildings because they detract from the very thing that you are trying to preserve, ie the building’s historic appearance. But I also accept that a "blue" plaque can make somebody stop, look, and appreciate something that they might otherwise have passed by.

What I find incomprehensible is employing planning officers to collect and examine pictures of screwholes whilst elsewhere planning applications for vital facilities are stalled as they await the resource to deal with them.

Robert Menzies, Falkirk.

A bid by Netflix to fit a plaque marking the hit TV series One Day at the Vennel Steps in Edinburgh was thrown out by city planners (Image: Netflix)

Memories of happy daze

THE dreich weather prompts me to reflect on holidays, both past and planned.

I recall the Paisley Fair Friday of 1969 when my fiancée and I had managed to persuade both sets of parents to allow us to go on holiday to the south of England but only after they’d scrutinised the booking confirmation (two single rooms) and the classic warnings "don’t dae anything that wid affront us".

Money was tight so we’d decided to sit up all night with reserved seats on a train leaving Central Station at 10.30pm. Our arrival meant five of the six seats filled, but as the guard blew his whistle, a well-dressed man in a three-piece tweed suit, collar and tie appeared in the corridor, came in, pulled the "Reserved" notice from the vacant seat, threw it out the window and sat down. It was clear he’d had a refreshment, a bit more than "a good bead in him" but not as much as "couldnae bite his fing’er". As we crossed the river he said "the river Clyde, the wonderful Clyde" but when nobody responded he said "please yersels" and promptly fell asleep.

As the night progressed, his head would fall on to the shoulder of the teenage boy sat next to him and the latter would elbow him in the ribs to get him to move. As soon as the words "tickets please" resounded near our compartment, our man immediately awoke and beetled off for 10 minutes until the Ticket Inspector had passed. This went on all night.

When the sign "You are approaching Euston" hove into view, he woke up, shot off and that was the last we saw of him on board.

We were on the platform deciding who’d carry which pieces of our luggage when we noticed him striding up and down. He clocked us and came over to ask "did you folks notice if I had any luggage with me when I got on the train last night?"

Happy days.

John Crawford, Preston.