This week’s Tuesday Truth is
brought to you by Rhona Friedman Criminal Defence Solicitor and co founder of Justice Alliance and Paul
Harris former President of London Criminal Courts Solicitors Association and Managing Partner of Edward Fail Bradshaw and Waterson
Dear Labour Party - Its called a System
for a reason
Eighteen months
of anti-Grayling rhetoric from the Labour Party have been accompanied by the
same period of fence sitting and stoic refusal to actually enunciate what your
plan is for the entropic, necrotic, post Grayling Justice System. A system
seriously diminished after LASPO and unsustainable fee cuts. In criminal
justice there have been no fee increases since 1994 (if you don’t trust us to
tell you that see Deloitte’s Report to the MOJ of May last year). You may have
to ask quite persistently though as they tend to hide reports until a court
tells them to disclose them.
We now hear from
the Shadow Justice Minister Andy Slaughter (if you were misquoted Andy do let
us know by the way) that a Labour Government would not reverse the cuts.
Putting aside whether a trip in the Tardis back to 2007 and 2008 and to a
Conservative strategy meeting would tell us once and for all that austerity is
an ideological and political choice to shrink the state rather than existential
economic necessity, it appears that you may be unfamiliar with the nature of
the Justice System and how it depends on both the rule of law and access to
justice across all its component parts. It is called a system for a reason. It is
interconnected and interdependent. You cannot blithely decide to “save” some
bits of it by policy or statutory reversals in Judicial Review, Conditional Fee
Arrangements and legal aid for children and abused women in civil justice and
then leave the criminal justice system in utter disarray and degradation.
Let us speak in
terms that the modern politician understands; a lovely binary of the deserving
and undeserving citizen. Victims good and Defendants bad.
Hang on a
minute, children and abused women are also victims in the criminal justice
system. Sometimes they are also defendants. What to do? Votes are at stake. Shore
up access to justice in the bits of the Justice System you think the general
public can stomach and ignore the bits that you think the public aren’t that
bothered about funding properly, the criminal justice system- police station
investigations, trials and sentencing.
Practitioners
invite you to walk a mile in our shoes and experience first hand the state of
our criminal justice system in the Magistrates
Court and Crown Court. These things happen every
day in every court:
Victims (good)
having their cases delayed for months because cuts to the courts budget mean
there is no available court. This is bad by the way.
Victims (good)
turning up to court to give evidence and being told to go away again because
the private contractor whose main contracting duty is to bring the defendant to
court has not brought them. This is also bad.
Victims (good)
turning up to court to give evidence to find that the privately contracted
Capita interpreter can’t actually do the interpreting (ok the victim isn’t now
quite so good because English isn’t their first language). Again though bad
outcome.
Victims (good)
turning up to court to give evidence to be told to go away again because a key
piece of prosecution evidence has not been served because of CPS staff cuts.
Bad, bad, bad.
Victims (good)
bumping into the accused on bail during the trial at the local Greggs because
the court canteen has closed due to cuts and because of, yes cuts, there is no
defence representative available to make sure the defendant maintains a
discrete distance. Really not good.
Victims (good)
not achieving justice because there has been a flight of quality from the
prosecutorial ranks. Very, very bad
indeed.
Defendants
(probably bad until they are proved innocent in which case they become so
careless that they have been prosecuted for something they didn’t do that if
they paid privately they can’t recover the money they spent on their own
defence) are on bail or remanded in custody for months because their trial is
delayed for, well take your pick of the reasons cited above. Not good.
Defendants
(probably bad etc) being convicted for something they didn’t do because the CPS
has not served undermining evidence or their defence teams are too under
resourced and lacking in experience to plough through the unused for the key
defence point or find the witness with the key recollection. Not good at all, actually disgusting and
terrible in equal measure.
This, for those
who remember the early 1980’s and 1990’s, is called a miscarriage of justice.
Miscarriages of justice cost money to fix but even more importantly they cause
human misery on an unimaginable scale and bring our Justice System into
disrepute. They are on the increase and if you get in you may find that you
have to do something about them because after a while they become impossible to
ignore, Royal Commissions and Inquiries start and it all gets public and
messy. There will be damage to social
cohesion because people see that only those of their fellow citizens with deep
pockets get a fair trial. People equate
access to justice with fairness and the social compact between citizen and
state, the executive and the political class.
Guess what, not just the Scots care about that.
Why you should
care? Well because fair trial, robust and rigorous defence and prosecution are central
to the Rule of Law but because of the localised mess you may have to
clear up. The “so stupid it beggars belief” MOJ plan to restructure the market,
or “savage it” as their own barrister bizarrely, though accurately, described
it in the High Court the other week, relies on a contracting plan so ill
thought out that according to the MOJ’s own expert report the areas where the
omnishambles will have the most deleterious impact are London, Greater
Manchester, West Midlands and West Yorkshire. Your heartlands for now.
Yours etc xxx
Message to the Profession (both parts)
The Labour
Party’s lukewarm approach to legal aid demonstrates further it is essential
that practitioners join either the London Criminal Courts Solicitors’ Association or the
Criminal Law Solicitors’ Association. Both these organisations have led the
campaign against the cuts and barmy restructuring for over 18 months. The Associations
have taken the fight to the Government and on occasions to The Law Society and
the Bar. They have fought a hearts and minds campaign so that for the first
time there is a media understanding of the issues at stake and yes they have
brought you a giant puppet of the Lord Chancellor fusing 60’s style agitprop
with public street art.
The Associations
now call upon everyone across the profession; solicitors, legal executives,
barristers, clerks, District Judges and Judges to respond to the Consultation
forced by their Judicial Review. Point scoring was attempted by the MOJ because
of the fall off in responses to Consultation 2 even though in excess of 2,000
responses was still an impressive number. The first Consultation garnered
16,000 responses because client choice was to be eradicated in the post PCT
world. We all won that fight but make no mistake client choice will exist in
name only under the existing proposals.
In the Monday
Message this week, the Chair of the CBA referred to both the successful
judicial review brought by solicitors, holding the government to account, and
the new consultation. We are grateful to individual barristers and chambers who
contributed to the JR fund. We welcome
the Chair’s encouragement that barristers respond to the consultation and
see absolutely no reason why individual barristers, barristers’ chambers, the
Criminal Bar Association and the Bar Council cannot publicly denounce the two
tier plan and individually and by cohort respond to the Consultation and speak
out on behalf of this assault on the Criminal Justice System. This is currently
the most vital way to demonstrate common ground and unity.
