THE bugging by police of conversations between suspects and their solicitors was a breach of the law and against the fundamental principle of legal professional privilege, lawyers said yesterday.

They claimed that the practice was far more widespread than was commonly accepted after a judge threw out a murder trial because of bugged evidence.

"It is completely unacceptable," Stephen Wedd, of the Criminal Law Solicitors' Association, said. "But police to try various tactics - using flimsy walls in interview rooms, taping over the light showing a conversation is being recorded or putting calls through the central exchange.

"It may not be a criminal offence to intercept a legally privileged conversation but it is ethically and professionally wrong and it renders inadmissible any material they get."

Franklin Sinclair, senior partner with the Liverpool law firm Tuckers, said: "It is on the increase and that is very, very worrying.

"I have my suspicions that a number of interview rooms in police stations up and down the country are bugged and also I have a concern that some visiting rooms in prisons may also be."

He condemned the practice as completely wrong and a breach of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 as well as of the European Convention on Human Rights. Now enshrined in the Human Rights Act 1998, it which provides for the right to consult a lawyer in private.

David Corker, of the fraud and commercial crime firm Corker & Binning, said: "Bugging a solicitor and a client is a violation of legal privilege and unless it can be shown the solicitor himself was actively encouraging a crime to be committed, advising someone in the knowledge they were committing one, then it is completely out of order."

Legal professional privilege, the protection that governs conversations between a solicitor and a client, was a fundamental principle that had been upheld under common law for centuries, he added.

The lawyers also attacked attempts to conceal the illicit recording of conversations by seeking to apply for a "public interest immunity" certificate, which then allows police not to disclose material to the defence.

But Mr Justice Newman, the judge in the failed murder case at Nottingham Crown Court, refused to grant the certificate. "The judge will have rightly said that this is outrageous and the defence must know about it," Mr Corker said.

He added that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which came into force last year, had specifically said that privileged conversations must not be subject to surveillance without good reason. Lawyers needed to be on their guard because the privilege was being eroded.

by Frances Gibb, Legal Editor, The Times