Top law schools are charging as much as £5,000 more in fees than their competitors, a Times survey can reveal.

Fees for the Legal Practice Course (LPC), obligatory for would-be solicitors, have reached £11,550 while would-be barristers have to pay as much as £14,150 to study the Bar Vocational Course (BVC).

In recent months a price war — and a war of words — has broken out after BPP, the first profit-making private company to have degree-awarding powers, announced an increase in fees for its postgraduate LPC in London of 10 per cent.

Professor Nigel Savage, chief executive of the not-for-profit College of Law, has launched an attack on his main rival, claiming that BPP’s decision is driven by the bottom line; meanwhile, the Oxford Institute of Legal Practice has said that it is cutting prices.

BPP London is the most expensive provider in England and Wales, with an LPC costing £11,550, followed by City University’s Inns of Court School of Law at £10,600, and the College of Law up 5 per cent to £10,340.

In a statement, BPP said: “Our students receive the highest standard of education available in the market. Our fees are based on the service that students receive.” It cited high contact hours, modern facilities and investment in e-learning, and said it offered 15 scholarships.

Savage said: “I don’t think they can justify a 10 per cent increase. You’ve got to set a fee that covers your costs and overheads — in London it is expensive accommodation — but our cost base is the same as BPP’s. They are getting to the stage where they will probably start charging for admission to the lecture theatre.”

According to the Times survey, the least expensive LPC fees in London are at Thames Valley University, at £7,500 or £7,130 with early payment; London Metropolitan University, £8,000; and the University of Westminster, £8,500, with a discount of £500 for some students.

Outside London, fees for the LPC can be less than £7,000 — they are £6,710 at the University of Wolverhampton — and go up to £9,640 at the College of Law in Guildford.

Some law schools say that their hands are tied because the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board demand high staff numbers, set student-to-staff ratios and the courses’ intensive nature.

Miceál Barden, head of the school of law at Manchester Metropolitan University, where LPC fees are £7,650, and that offers the lowest-priced BVC at £8,950, said: “The LPC is hands-on, transactional and requires the students to do the things they are going to be doing in practice, and inevitably that involves high contact hours.”

Julie Brannan, director of OxILP, which has cut its LPC fees from £9,100 to £8,910, said: “On an LPC course your two biggest costs are premises and staffing.” She said OxILP had been able to reduce its prices by moving to less expensive premises after the transfer of OxILP to Oxford Brookes University.

Law schools also keep a close watch on fee announcements by rivals — a game that can be tricky. Barden said: “Not everybody ‘goes public’ at the same time.” MMU has a mission to help to widen participation to higher education and gears its prices towards students going into practice locally. “We are acutely conscious that the majority of our students are self-funders,” Barden says.

Andrew Boon, Dean of Law at the University of Westminster, which has 120 LPC students said that financially, the odds were stacked in favour of the big providers. “The bigger you get, the better economies of scale you have. It is not uncommon to hear of £30,000 to £40,000 of debt being carried into practice, and if you are going into a poor legal aid firm there is not much prospect of it being paid off.”

Big providers, he said, were taking “more and more numbers all the time. It is becoming quite difficult for the smaller ones to survive. I think it is a tragedy in some ways that students seem to think they are getting more from stumping up the fees when there are many other providers that the Law Society says are offering equal quality and who run smaller and more intimate courses.

“Students attending the big providers don’t get any of the enrichment that universities can offer from being a research environment.”

Savage, whose college has 3,200 full-time LPC students around the country, said smaller providers needed to find their niche, and should not try to compete with “the big players”. “Yes, there are big differences between fees, and students who choose on the basis of cost can find cheaper courses outside London. But students who choose us are buying a prestigious brand on their CV that they know guarantees a top-quality qualification.”

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