By Hugh Levinson BBC News

Criminal cases get a large portion of the legal aid budget

Bridget Prentice told the BBC that too much of the legal aid budget was being swallowed up by criminal legal aid.

She was keen to redress the balance so that people involved in civil actions could get a solicitor.

"Extra efforts are being made to get more lawyers of a particular nature" to areas that are lacking, she said.

Fruitless search

In one example, a woman needed help with a legal dispute over housing, but could not find a solicitor near her home who was funded by legal aid.

She even travelled as far as Cambridge - a 50-mile round trip from her home in Essex - in a fruitless search for a publicly-funded lawyer who could take her case.

Research by BBC Radio 4's Law in Action suggests that an increasing number of people are finding themselves in a similar position.

This is a complete meltdown situation - and that is what I've been saying since I took office at the Law Society Kevin Martin Law Society president

There are, it seems, parts of the country where there are few if any solicitors willing to take on legal aid-funded clients - particularly for civil, rather than criminal cases.

"In the whole of East Anglia there's only one [legal aid-funded] firm that does immigration work for example," says James Sandbach, social policy officer for Citizens Advice.

"And yet in East Anglia you have a number of migrant workers working in the agricultural sector, working for so-called 'gangmasters' who often shunt them from pillar to post.

"Those are the sort of people who do need access to good legal advice."

Financial cuts

The overall legal budget has ballooned in recent years, mainly because of the rising cost of a small number of complicated criminal trials.

That has resulted in cuts to the budget for civil legal aid, down by 13% over the last eight years.

Many solicitors, like Andrew Philips, are finding that it is simply not worth doing legal aid work.

"There comes a point when those who are the carriers of that burden - the main legal aid practices - simply have to add up the sums and realise that they're not able to pay sufficiently attractive salaries to draw into their firms the talent that they need in order to keep the firms going," he says.

Two of the three offices run by his firm have got out of the legal aid sector.

Twin-track system

Ms Prentice hopes that a wider review of the entire legal aid system, by Lord Carter, will produce appropriate and sustainable solutions - although the overall legal aid budget will not be increased.

All this comes too late for Kevin Martin, president of the Law Society.

He argues that cuts have created a twin-track legal system, where legal aid clients receive an inferior level of service to those who can pay for their own representation.

"This is a complete meltdown situation - and that is what I've been saying since I took office at the Law Society," Mr Martin said.

"Words like crisis, catastrophe, are not overstating things."