Your article, "No help through the legal jungle" (The Argus, February 9), presented a less than balanced picture of the provision of publicly-funded legal services.

The Community Legal Service is charged with ensuring sufficient supply of services to meet demand and deliver value for money. To achieve this objective, we will spend in the region of £40 million in the South East over the next three years on legal help.

It's not the case that solicitors are withdrawing wholesale from legal aid work. The commission recently invited all current and prospective suppliers of legal services to bid for contracts for the next three years.

We currently hold 594 contracts and have received bids 650 bids. A total of 96 per cent of existing suppliers wished to continue and an additional 36 existing suppliers bid for contracts in new categories of law.

A further 27 organisations made new bids for work. In 2002/3 we paid for more than 38,000 new cases of family law at a cost of £6.1 million.

There are two specific points in your article I wish to address.

It is suggested that it is unreasonable for people to have to travel to a legal specialist, yet people readily accept the need to travel to hospital to see a medical specialist. There are legal specialists providing publicly-funded family law in all the major towns throughout Sussex.

The second issue concerns costs. In common with all agencies spending public money, we must keep an eye on costs. The commission is concerned at the rate at which average case costs are rising, currently at nine times the rate of inflation.

Complaints by the legal profession at the rate of remuneration for legal aid work are well-rehearsed but the profession does itself no favours in allowing the cost of individual cases to rise. The commission is working with its suppliers to reduce red tape where our suppliers are containing their costs and delivering value.

Finally, we have established Community Legal Service Partnerships, through which the legal profession, advice agencies and other public services can consider the supply of legal and advice services and develop local strategies to achieve better supply. The solution, to some extent, is in their hands.

-Martin Seel, Regional Director, Legal Services Commission, Brighton