Stimulated by the philosophy of the new managerialist agenda to control and make public expenditure accountable,1 recent and proposed legal aid policies seek to make some dramatic and innovative changes to the legal aid system and to the funding structure through which access to criminal justice is achieved in the United Kingdom. The Lord Chancellor was quite open about these objectives when he warned the legal profession that the government is 'in the business of providing services, not preserving monuments'.2 These policies seek to control the legal profession's perceived influence over legal aid expenditure. This article explores the thinking behind recent and forthcoming legal aid policy, provides an introduction to the main debates, before considering its potential impact upon legal professionalism3 and the architecture of criminal justice. The first part looks at the spiralling increases in legal aid expenditure which gave rise to the crises in legal aid provision and politicized it. It then looks at the thinking behind legal aid policy, which is largely based upon a problem-solving theory termed the 'supplier induced inflation thesis'.4 This thesis assumes that lawyers are responsible for inflating both the overall level of demand for legally aided services and also expenditure on legal aid through, for example, over-billing. The second part goes on to consider the 'supplier induced inflation thesis' as a basis for policy making and suggests that it is based upon an analysis that has some grounding in practice, but is overly simplistic and narrow in approach. Rather, the reality of both the legal aid funding crisis and also of lawyerly behaviour is far more