THE MAJOR shake-up of the legal aid system, unveiled today by ministers, is said to be the biggest in its 46-year history.

It does not come before time.

This is not only because of the need to limit the spiralling burden on the taxpayer - now £1.4billion a year - but also to prevent Britain going down the writ-littered, sue-at-the-drop-of-a-hat American road at the public's expense.

For if the premiss of the legal aid system is that of allowing justice for all, it must be one that does so responsibly and even-handedly.

But, at present, it does not.

Because of the way it works, many not so-well-off people with sound cases are driven to drop them because of the legal costs and when they see their legally-aided opponents armed with lawyers which they cannot afford.

Additionally, there have been frequent insults to common sense in bizarre cases and in ones brought by non-British nationals which have siphoned the legal aid trough.

The reforms that the Lord Chancellor proposes for capping the legal aid budget and farming out bulk contracts under tender to firms of solicitors would bring both a sense of restraint and priority to the system and to the legal profession gathering a good deal of its livelihood from it.

For it would put the deserving cases at the front of the queue.

Similarly, a greater sense of responsibility would also be encouraged if litigants who won civil cases on legal aid paid part of the costs and if all parties embarking on court action were made to pay some money up front.

The legal profession may protest about rationing, but a better screening of applicants for legal aid, in terms of their means and the basic merit of their suits, is overdue when unnecessary cases keep coming before the courts at the taxpayers' expense and with the fee-collecting lawyers' encouragement.

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