An aide said: "No one should underestimate his desire to see change. This will be a very big issue."A key role in securing change is expected to be played by David Blunkett, the Education Secretary, who is tipped to succeed Jack Straw as Home Secretary after the election.One minister said of lawyers: "Their fees are too high and they don't provide value for money. They have a big choice to make after the election: they can work with us or they will eventually be forced to act."A two-pronged plan of action is being drawn up. Ministers want to sweep away the traditional boundaries between barristers and solicitors by encouraging the growth of legal firms employing both. The Government would implement recommendations by the Office of Fair Trading, which criticised the profession's anti-competitive practices in a report in March.

The OFT called for further liberalisation of the rules ­ a move opposed by the Bar Council. The second part of the reform plan will see huge changes to the criminal justice system, to be proposed just days after the expected 7 June election in a report by Lord Justice Auld. He had been asked to review the system to give the Government a vehicle to deliver radical reforms, Mr Blair's aides said.Proposals expected to flow from the inquiry include: curbs on the right of appeal and to trial by jury; magistrates' courts and crown courts being replaced by a single criminal court with two magistrates sitting alongside a professional judge; setting up special courts for specific offences such as drugs; decriminalising many minor offences, such as non-payment of television and vehicle excise licences; more American-style plea bargaining; more agreement on the facts of the case before it comes to court; and courts to sit at night and at weekends.. Ronnie Biggs has lived in the bohemian quarter of Santa Teresa for much of his three decades in Rio, which is far better than 30 years in Parkhurst prison. Here the old tram line runs up the hillside past colonial whitewashed buildings with a view over the city centre.

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Ronnie Biggs has lived in the bohemian quarter of Santa Teresa for much of his three decades in Rio, which is far better than 30 years in Parkhurst prison.

Here the old tram line runs up the hillside past colonial whitewashed buildings with a view over the city centre.It was here that I first met Biggs in the early 1990s. I was in Rio making a TV documentary about murders of street children but I wanted to check out some information I had on the Great Train Robbery. Ronnie's number then, as now, is listed in the Rio directory under R Biggs He is used to calls asking him for dinner. With little legitimate work for a British former armed robber, Ronnie has learnt to sing for his supper."I call it the Ronnie Biggs experience," he said.

Visitors, usually British, can have dinner at home with him for about £40 a head, "which includes plenty of grub and all the drinks". He readily agreed to meet me and two colleagues at his local restaurant ­ as long as we paid. Ronnie is a charming and entertaining man and it is all too easy to forget that he was a part of the robbery that cost the train driver Jack Mills his life.Ronnie was clearly missing England "What do you miss most?" I asked "Wall's sausages" he said without a pause. I arranged for my TV crew to bring out some bangers with them I delivered the gift over a second meal. A grateful Ronnie was more relaxed this time and I felt able to ask him some difficult questions."I have been told there were other men ­ two from well-known London criminal families ­ who were on the robbery but never caught," I said, giving him two names Ronnie's affable expression fell.

He looked taken aback and then very serious."It's over 20 years since anybody mentioned those names to me, since before I came here," he said "I'm not going to say anything. If anyone was on the robbery and not caught, it's not going to be me that has them put away." I had enough confirmation and the talk moved on.Like many criminals, Biggs has a funny sense of the omert?ode of silence. Three years later, he published his first novel, Keep on Running, which he claimed "draws on the true events surrounding the Great Train Robbery". Biggs wrote that 50 uncut diamonds were stolen with the cash-filled mailbags. In the book, one robber, named David, and three gang members never caught, escape with half the gems ­ worth more than the £2.6m cash haul.As Biggs said: "For those three members of the gang, the Great Train Robbery was the perfect crime.'' One of these men, I know, still lives in an expensive flat by the Thames untroubled by the controversy surrounding Biggs for 30 years.. Whatever the reason ­ whether it was the prospect of a pint of bitter on Margate seafront, a meal in a curry house, or free medical care for his twilight years ­ Britain's most famous fugitive vowed yesterday to return home.