Stephen Pollard: The Bar's rules are archaic – but don't expect any reforms

Once a year, I fill out my tax return. To be strictly accurate, I don't fill it out; I have an accountant who does it for me. I merely check over what he's done and sign it. I chose Alex Johnson for the task on a friend's recommendation. He gave me a quote for the job and that was that. I've been with him years.

Yesterday, Lord Irvine of Lairg confirmed that he is setting up a review of the Bar. If I want to see a barrister, I can't simply ask for a friend's recommendation, phone up, get a quote, and then sit back and enjoy the ride.

I have, first, to make an appointment with a solicitor. I then have to explain what I want to the solicitor, and pay him. He then puts me in touch with a barrister, with whom I then have to start all over again. If I am lucky, I will enjoy the services of a particularly eminent barrister – a QC. And for the privilege of his particular skills (I say him advisedly: only 8 per cent of QCs are female) I will pay double – perhaps more – the usual rate. Welcome to the world of the restrictive practice. If you want to get a job done, you can – so long as you pay twice for it.

Last March, the Office of Fair Trading harpooned the Bar with a 143-page report exposing how barristers in effect conspire against the public with antediluvian rules. The gist of the argument was that skilled workers, such as plumbers, operate in a market, while barristers are protected by "numerous restrictive practices". As Adam Smith put it in The Wealth of Nations: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but when they do, the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices ... Though the law can not hinder people of the same trade from sometimes meeting together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary." Quite.

It's not too often that anyone cites the medical profession as an examplar of good practice, and when it comes to "sod the consumer" attitudes the Royal Colleges are right up there with the best of them. But in one respect at least, they have something to teach barristers. The Bar's defence of the QC system is that it is a "kitemark", a badge of excellence.

The OFT had other thoughts: it is not a "genuine quality accreditation scheme" but merely an "informal quota" which raises fees. "This quota may act as a barrier to entry to the senior Bar and allow the incumbent QCs to charge fees higher than they would command in a normal competitive market," it said. Like barristers, all doctors have the same basic training (five years at medical school followed by one year as a house officer). The doctor is then accredited with the General Medical Council, much as the pupil barrister is with the Bar Council. And, for barristers, that's that – until the award, after secret soundings by the Lord Chancellor, of the QC badge.

Doctors, however, set out on further specialist training. A doctor wishing to become a GP must pass the membership exam of the Royal College of General Practitioners, just as a doctor wishing to become a surgeon must pass the membership exam of the Royal College of Surgeons. The exams are an objective test of the doctor's competence. If the Bar's rules applied to doctors, consultant surgeons with no qualifications beyond university would be appointed on the basis of secret soundings by the Secretary of State for Health.

By announcing an inquiry yesterday, Lord Irvine was most definitely not announcing the end of the Bar's archaic rules. We have been here before. In 1989, the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay, published a series of Green Papers proposing radical reform, not merely inquiring into the possibility. And guess what? Here we are, 13 years later, and we're still waiting. Lord Mackay was a genuine radical, committed to reform and backed by an all-powerful Prime Minister who, as a barrister, knew exactly what she was doing.

Apart from the sex of the Prime Minister, every word of that sentence applies today – except the most important. Lord Irvine is far from radical.

Left to his own devices, without the prompt from the OFT, it's clear there would have been no inquiry. If the Bar was able to defeat Lord Mackay, the omens under Lord Irvine are far from propitious.

I ought to declare an interest here, or rather the lack of one. Many years ago, I trained for the Bar but gave up (it might be truer to say that the Bar gave up on me) because I was no good. Since those days, I haven't given much thought to the Bar.

Last year, however, I needed legal advice. I'm lucky to have a number of good friends who are, by now, quite senior barristers. I had a drink with the most eminent QC is the field and he had a look at my paperwork. "I get to say this once every two or three years", he told me. "Your case is open and shut. You cannot lose. And it's even better than that: I act for your opponents quite regularly, and now that we've had this conversation, I can't act for them against you." Reader, I won. The Bar's great when you're on the inside.

stephenipollard@cs.com The author is a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, a Brussels-based thinktank.