Guest post by Joanna Hardy: We need to talk about lunchtime

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A few years ago, a poster was stuck up in the robing room at Snaresbrook Crown Court. There was to be a charity raffle.

The prize? “Win lunch with the Snaresbrook Judges!”.

This prompted much mirth. An unimpressed barrister scrawled beneath it “Second Prize: TWO Lunches”. Another quipped that they would rather eat their own wig. Counsel threatened to enter their opponents into the raffle for a laugh, hoping to inflict an hour of judicial caesar salad on those who had wronged them.

This was all light-hearted. Everyone knows the Snaresbrook judges are really rather nice and, importantly, they have a dining room. And actual cutlery. The dark days of 2012 are long behind us and we try not to mention them in polite company.

I thought about that raffle a lot yesterday. I was wrestling with a Crown Court vending machine to extract my own lunch. A Kinder Bueno and a carton of Ribena. This was my seventh day of Vending Machine Bingo at a court with no catering facilities save for a roaring trade in the rare and disgusting delicacy of refrigerated packets of crisps.

The slot swallowed my money, the machine rumbled into action, the metal coil jammed and my chocolate bar was stuck. I eyed the machine for size and wondered if shaking it might be considered professional misconduct. I recalled that more people are killed by vending machines falling on top of them than from shark attacks. I decided not to risk it and poured more money in. Two Kinder Bueno. Jackpot.

I glanced at the time. A quarter of lunchtime had passed. I needed to see my client in the cells, see my opponent to discuss some evidence, finalise a document for the jury, consider some recent disclosure, return a frantic call from my clerk and, time permitting, use the bathroom. Clock ticking, time tocking, I shoved the chocolate into my mouth. “A speed lunch! The finest tradition of the bar”, a senior barrister bellowed at me as he commenced his own futile battle with the evil vending machine.

It was then I realised – we need to talk about lunchtime.

If a speed lunch, or no lunch at all, are traditions of the bar then they are bad ones. Like all traditions, we ought to occasionally ask ourselves why we are still doing them.

If the Wellbeing initiative is to conquer anything then her first victim must be the macho work culture that led us here. The at-all-costs attitude that shames people for basic activities like having a cup of tea or gathering their thoughts. The creeping obsession with sitting statistics and an unquestioning devotion to the “effective use of court time” has a price. Are we, as counsel, willing to pay it?

Because one thing we do find time to swallow is the frustration of being asked to perform a lunchtime miracle at a court that has closed the canteen, hired no recorders, broken the boiler, locked all the conference rooms and sealed off half the toilets. It is our shoulders that bear the loss of lunch, rest, and wellbeing to keep the show on the road, to keep the statistics high and to not keep anyone waiting.

As part of our Wellbeing revolution, we ought to now consider how we realistically structure the court day in the scorched landscape of cuts, closures and reduced facilities. It should be widely acknowledged that there will be trials and times when a longer lunch break, or multiple short breaks, are appropriate. Not always and not often. But for those trials where time is short, pressure is high and facilities are lacking we must call it out. We should be bold enough to insist that heavy tasks are undertaken within court hours and brave enough to recognise there is no shame in needing a rest. Justice is not a race and it will not be achieved by a drained, exhausted profession. We ought to now insist that the “effective use of court time” includes provision for us to remain effective too.

Joanna Hardy is a criminal barrister at Red Lion Chambers. She tweets @joanna__hardy

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The justice system is failing to tackle our rape case scandal

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Something I’ve written about the scandalous delays in the criminal justice system has found its way into the Thunderer column in The Times today.

It can be read here (£).

Don’t fall for Boris Johnson’s criminal justice con tricks

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Yesterday morning, newly-appointed Justice Secretary Robert Buckland told Radio 4’s Today programme of his pleasure that the Prime Minister is taking an interest in the criminal justice system. And certainly, after three years of wilful abandonment under Theresa May, I would in principle gladly welcome some Downing Street-level political attention on the ruinous state of our criminal courts.

When this attention is coupled with more money for the criminal justice system, this sounds very much like the sort of thing those of us working within have been crying out for. So surely we should all join hands with Mr Buckland and celebrate that in Boris Johnson we finally have a leader taking criminal justice seriously?

Don’t believe a word of it. The entire project is a con.

Starting with the “new money”. Mr Johnson has announced that 20,000 new police officers will be recruited over the next three years. This is vital, certainly, but falls far short of what is required, given that that figure barely replaces the number of officers cut since 2010. Meanwhile, not only is crime increasing, but investigations are becoming ever-more complex, with digital evidence sucking resources and quadrupling the effort that would have been required a decade ago.

There’s £85m for the Crown Prosecution Service, which sounds like a healthy sum, until you realise that it’s a fixed payment over two years, and that the CPS budget for 2018/19 was a quarter of a billion pounds less in real terms than in 2009/10. The CPS has lost a quarter of its staff and a third of its lawyers since 2010. Two tranches of £42.5m will not begin to fix the problems that plague prosecutions up and down the country.

There’s a promise of 10,000 new prison places, when the previous promise of 10,000 places in 2015 fell short by 6,000, and another 9,000 places alone are required simply to address the present, longstanding overcrowding. There is £100m for technology to aid prison security, but no mention at all of the extra prison staff needed to safely manage the new offenders, given that even after a recruitment drive in 2017, numbers are 15 per cent down since 2010. There has been a huge drain of experience since 2010, as the most experienced officers were among the first to go when the government decided to slash prison staff by over a quarter, at a time when the prison population has climbed.

But the problem extends far beyond inadequate promises to redress chronic underfunding. The propaganda accompanying these announcements betrays not only the Prime Minister’s trademark opportunism and dearth of intellectual rigour but the sticky, putrid tar clogging the heart of the Johnson Crime Agenda.

Announcing his plans in a series of weekend puffs in tame newspapers, Boris Johnson declared, “Left wingers will howl. But it’s time to make criminals afraid – not the public.” Declaring his mission to ensure that criminals “get the sentence they deserve,” Johnson continued a theme begun in his Telegraph columns on the campaign trail, when he railed against “early release” from prison and inadequate prison sentences being passed. The solution to our criminal woes, the subtext screams, is to lock up more people for longer.

And let’s make no mistake, punishment is a legitimate and important part of criminal sentencing. It is one of the five purposes of sentencing listed in statute, alongside the reduction of crime (including by deterrence), reform and rehabilitation, protection of the public and making reparations to victims. Few if anybody involved in criminal justice would disagree with the notion that people who commit crime should be punished in a way that reflects their culpability and the harm they have caused, and that for some people, notably the most serious violent offenders, lengthy prison sentences are inevitable.

However, the notion that longer prison sentences by themselves make any of us any safer is a fantasy. The notion in particular that knife crime will be solved if we simply lock up young men for years on end is a hoax. The public may well be protected from that particular individual for the duration of their incarceration, but the idea underpinning this rotten philosophy – that longer sentences have a deterrent effect on crime – has been shown to be bogus. What does act as a deterrent is not severity of sentence, but certainty. The likelihood of being caught and dealt with swiftly, in other words.

But crime reduction and prevention is not achieved solely by deterrence. Rehabilitation is a vital part of protecting the public. This is why, when dealing with complex, multi-causal offending intractably rooted in social and cultural problems, the courts may take the view that more can be done to protect the public by keeping a young man on the cusp of custody out of the prison warehouse estate, and offering focussed intervention in the community. Sending someone to prison usually means ripping them away from all and any stabilising factors they may have. They lose their job, their social housing and their relationship, and exit prison with no support network other than the new friends they’ve made inside. This is why the evidence suggests that reoffending rates are lower when offenders are kept in the community.

But the evidence is of no concern to the Prime Minister. This is why he is forced into infantile ad hominems as a pre-emptive rebuttal against the people who have read and studied the evidence, and might be minded to offer some as a counter to his claims that our system is soft.

We already have the highest incarceration rate in Western Europe. Prison sentences have on average got longer year-on-year. We have more prisoners detained on indefinite and life sentences than all the other countries in the Council of Europe.

The notion that our courts routinely hand out “soft sentences” is simply not true. When we do see “soft justice” stories in the headlines, they will either be an aberration, usually corrected on appeal, or they will be the product of inaccurate or dishonest reporting, removing context or omitting facts.

Which brings us to Johnson’s public statements. Because at the centre of his musings on criminal justice is a rich stuffing of bullshit. He has lied and lied and lied. He lied when he claimed that “a convicted rapist out on early release” had raped again (the man in question was neither a convicted rapist nor out on early release). He lied when he suggested that the notion of allowing some prisoners to be released on temporary licence was “criminally stupid” (the government’s own evidence shows that reintegrating prisoners into the community in this way cuts reoffending). When he told the Mail this weekend that there are “thousands of “super prolifics” – criminals with more than 50 convictions to their name – who are being spared jail altogether”, he did not tell you that one of the reasons they were spared jail might be that they were being sentenced for non-imprisonable offences. He is lying to you when he tells you that the solution to crime is More Police, More Prisons.

He is lying so that he can turn the volume up to 11 on his remix of “Prison Works” to ensure the oldies at the back of the conference hall can hear in the run-up to the inevitable autumn general election.

And while Mr Johnson is lying to you, the rest of the criminal justice system rots.

Courts are being closed down and sold off all over the country. Half of all magistrates’ courts have been closed, meaning that defendants, victims and witnesses are forced to travel for hours on ineffective public transport to their “local” court.

Of those courts remaining standing, many are unfit for purpose. Decaying, crumbling buildings with no working lifts, holes in the roofs, sewage leaking into public areas, no air conditioning in summer and no heating in winter. In some, the public cannot even get a glass of water.

Of the courts that remain unsold, all are now run at artificially low capacity due to Ministry of Justice restrictions on “court sitting days”. We have, in many large city Crown Courts, the farce of full-time, salaried judges being forced to sit at home taking “reading days” – their perfectly serviceable courtrooms sitting locked and empty – while trials are fixed for Summer 2020 due to an alleged “lack of court time”.

We still have the abominable system of “floating trials” and “warned lists” – where defendants, witnesses and lawyers are expected to give up days or weeks of their lives just sitting around at court on the off-chance that a courtroom suddenly becomes free to take their trial. When, inevitably, no courtroom becomes free (because the MoJ won’t pay for the sitting day, ibid), their case is adjourned for months, and the cycle begins again.

The one thing that does act as a deterrent to criminals – certainty – is being eroded by ensuring that justice is doled out literally years after the event, because the government will not pay for the courts to process cases clogging the pipeline.

Meanwhile legal aid is being stripped away from citizens, forcing them to self-represent in cases in which their liberty is on the line.

This is why I am angry. Not because I’m a “lefty” inherently resistant to Boris Johnson’s white hot public service reforms. I’m angry because as a prosecutor I am still having to sit down with crying witnesses week after week and explain that their torment is being prolonged for another six months because the government refuses to pay to keep courtrooms open. I’m angry because the Innocence Tax – the policy that forces the wrongly accused to pay privately for their legal representation and then denies them their costs, bankrupting them, when they are acquitted – is not even in the political peripheral vision. I’m angry because our Prime Minister is a man who looks at the record rates of death, violence, suicide, overcrowding and self-harm in our prisons and whose first question is, “How do we get more people in there?”. I’m angry because the notion that you “crack down on crime” by chucking a few more police officers onto the streets and shoving more and more people into our death-riven prisons is a con. It is a con to victims of crime, and it is a con to you, the public. I’m angry because we have the indignity of a dishonest, cowardly and exploitative Prime Minister fiddling with his Party’s g-spot while the criminal justice system burns.

Don’t fall for his con trick.

Boris Johnson and misconduct in public office: 8 things you should probably know

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On 7 June 2019, the High Court brought to a halt the attempted private prosecution of Boris Johnson for misconduct in public office. Today, the full judgment has been published. There has been a lot of commentary surrounding this case, not all of it based on a firm (or even rudimentary) grasp of the facts. So breaking it down, what exactly has gone on here? Eight (likely-to-be) FAQs spring to mind.

  1. What the dickens is going on, legally speaking?

 On 29 May 2019, District Judge Coleman sitting at Westminster Magistrates’ Court granted an application by Marcus Ball and Brexit Justice Limited for a summons against Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the proposed defendant, in respect of a contemplated private prosecution seeking to charge the aforementioned Mr Johnson with three counts of misconduct in public office, contrary to common law. On 7 June 2019, the Administrative Division of the High Court granted permission in respect of a claim by Mr Johnson for judicial review of the District Judge’s decision and quashed the granting of the summons, having found that the District Judge erred in law in her findings.

 

  1. And for the English speakers among us?

 In 2016, Marcus Ball set up a crowdfunding website inviting donations to fund a private prosecution of Boris Johnson for misconduct in public office, arising out of statements made by Mr Johnson during the 2016 referendum campaign, at a time when he was Mayor of London and a Member of Parliament. The offending statements relate to the well-known “We send the EU £350 million a week, let’s fund our NHS instead” claim. The first step in a criminal prosecution is to apply for a summons, which compels an individual to appear before a magistrates’ court. The District Judge (DJ) sitting at Westminster Magistrates, having heard legal argument from lawyers for Mr Ball and Mr Johnson, granted a summons. Mr Johnson “appealed” by seeking a judicial review of the decision to grant a summons, arguing that the decision was wrong in law. The High Court agreed, and quashed the decision to grant the summons.

 

  1. Why is a summons so important?

Quite simply, in this context no summons means no prosecution. Summonses are routinely issued against defendants in criminal prosecutions, usually with absolutely no challenge. But this being a private prosecution, opposing the granting of the summons was a way of trying to derail the prosecution at the very earliest stage (and very successfully, as it turned out).

An application for a summons will be granted by a magistrate (or a District Judge) if the magistrate is satisfied that the allegation is an offence known to law, and if the essential ingredients of the offence are prima facie (on its face) present. The court is not deciding whether a person is in fact guilty of an offence; simply whether there is, on the face of the case, evidence of its core ingredients. The court must also consider whether there are compelling reasons not to issue a summons, including – importantly for our purposes – whether the application is vexatious (which may involve the presence of an improper ulterior purpose).

In most public prosecutions, these things are not even an issue: the case will have been investigated by the police, referred to the Crown Prosecution Service and reviewed by a lawyer to check that it meets the evidential and public interest tests for charging, and the threshold for issuing a summons will obviously be met. But the issue is less clear cut in cases where the law is being used for a novel purpose. And using the law of misconduct in public office to prosecute a politician for false or misleading statements made during a political campaign is certainly novel. Hence things got a little sticky.

 

  1. What is “misconduct in public office”?

Misconduct in public office is a centuries-old common law offence (so developed by the courts rather than set out in legislation), which has been used to prosecute such varied allegations as MEPs claiming irregular expenses, police officers selling stories to journalists, healthcare professionals engaging in relationships with prisoners, the false statement given by a police officer in the “Plebgate” affair, and the Bishop of Gloucester entering into relationships with trainee priests.

If you think this sounds somewhat wide-ranging, you’d be right. And this – the vague and ill-defined scope of the offence – is one of the reasons that misconduct in public office is currently the subject of a consultation by the Law Commission, which is considering recommendations for how it might be reformed. Nevertheless, there has been a steady rise in the number of prosecutions for the offence, from 2 in 2005 up to 135 in 2014.

The test, as set out in a 2005 judgment of the Court of Appeal, has four key elements. Misconduct in public office arises where:

i. A public officer acting as such

ii. wilfully neglects to perform his duty and/or wilfully misconducts himself

iii. to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder

i.v without reasonable excuse or justification

 

  1. How was it said that misconduct in public office applies in this case?

The argument of Mr Ball was quite simple: at the time of knowingly making plainly misleading statements, Boris Johnson was a holder of public office. There was little argument that the statements were misleading. Lying to or misleading the public amounts to an abuse of public trust in that office, hence there is, on its face, evidence to meet the ingredients of the offence. The District Judge broadly agreed.

 

  1. Why did the High Court disagree?

Firstly, a word about judicial review. An application to the High Court for judicial review is not simply a rerun of the case before a different court; it is a claim that there has been an error of law in the way the judge in the court below approached the case. If the High Court feels that it would have reached a different decision to the magistrates, but is not satisfied that the magistrates were wrong in law, it will not interfere.

In this case, Boris Johnson’s arguments were twofold: firstly, the District Judge made an error of law in finding that (i) and (ii) of the ingredients were prima facie made out. That error of law meant that the judge had no power to grant a summons. Secondly, the District Judge’s finding that Mr Ball’s application was not vexatious (which if found would afford a ground for not granting a summons) was “Wednesbury unreasonable”. “Wednesbury unreasonableness” is a legal concept wearily familiar to law undergrads, but for the lay person is perhaps best summarised as “batshit cray cray”. If the High Court finds that a decision of a court was “so unreasonable that no judge properly directing itself could reasonably have reached that decision”, it can quash it.

So, taking the contested elements in turn:

While Boris Johnson undoubtedly held public office (times two), the key three words are “acting as such”. It is not enough that someone be a public official; they must be acting as such in committing the alleged misconduct. As the High Court made clear:

“It was not sufficient to say that he made the statements when in office as a MP and/or Mayor of London, and that “the public office held by Mr Johnson provides status but with that status comes influence and authority”. That does no more than conclude that he occupied an office which carried influence. This ingredient requires a finding that as he discharged the duties of the office he made the claims impugned. If, as here, he simply held the office and whilst holding it expressed a view contentious and widely challenged, the ingredient of “acting as such” is not made out.”

 As for whether he had “wilfully neglected to perform his public duty or wilfully misconducted himself”, the High Court was scathing of the way in which the District Judge had approached this question. The notion of false political statements falling within the ambit of “wilful misconduct” has no precedent. The High Court observed that certain types of false statement made during election campaigns are offences, having been specified as “illegal practices” by Parliament (for instance publishing a false statement about a candidate). Parliament had not chosen to specify generally false claims about, say, statistics, as illegal practices; for the courts to extend the ambit of “misconduct in public office” to encompass such things would be a significant and far-reaching decision. The law requires that people know clearly what conduct is and isn’t criminal; common law offences like this therefore should not be enlarged by the courts “with one large leap”. None of this, the High Court found, had been given proper consideration by the District Judge.

Therefore, while the threshold for granting a summons is low compared to, say, the threshold for convicting a Defendant (where the evidence has to make the magistrates or jury sure of guilt), a magistrate is still required to conduct a rigorous analysis of the legal framework and whether there is on the face of the evidence enough to satisfy the ingredients of the offence. The District Judge had not conducted such an analysis, and her conclusions were, in the High Court’s view, wrong in law.

 

  1. What did the High Court say about the political motivations of the private prosecution?

 Boris Johnson’s lawyers argued that Mr Ball’s application was politically motivated and vexatious, and that this provided another reason as to why it was wrong in law for the District Judge to issue a summons. The District Judge’s findings on this argument left something to be desired:

“I accept the defence submission that when the applicant commenced his consideration of whether to bring a private prosecution against the proposed defendant three years ago, there may have been a political purpose to these proceedings. However the information for the summons was laid on the 28th February 2019 and that argument, in my view, is no longer pertinent.”

The apparent suggestion that a political motive conceived in 2016 arising out of the EU Referendum has dissipated now in 2019 is, with respect to the judge, a curious reading of the current political temperature. When one considers the catalogue of public statements made by Marcus Ball about the proposed prosecution between 2016 and 2019, it is troubling that the District Judge’s certainty in dismissing the presence of political motivation isn’t supported by any meaningful reasoning. The High Court described the DJ’s finding as “flawed” because of the absence of reasoning, and said that it would have quashed the decision to issue a summons on this ground alone. (Because of this, the High Court said it was unnecessary for them to go on to consider whether, as well as being flawed for lack of reasoning, the finding was also “Wednesbury unreasonable”).

 

  1. So this is a moral victory for the future Prime Minister, surely? He has been found to have acted entirely properly.

No, no, no, no and no. No. Just no. And no again. No. The judgment can absolutely not be interpreted as any sort of vindication of Boris Johnson’s character. Indeed, the High Court judgment reads very much as if the judges were proceeding on the assumption that he certainly had lied, or misled, and the challenges to the District Judge’s decision by Boris Johnson’s own lawyers were not concerned with a defence of his character or conduct. Rather his case succeeded on the basis that he may well be a liar or a rotter or a charlatan, but such conduct does not of itself meet the legal criteria for misconduct in public office. So a victory, certainly. But hardly the glowing character reference his supporters might suggest.

Guest blogpost: Why we should accept the deal

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I am pleased to host this guest post from a junior member of the criminal Bar, who argues why we should vote to accept the deal arising out of the Criminal Bar Association’s negotiations with the government.

I’m a junior criminal barrister. I’m not a member of the CBA Executive, nor associated with them. This post was drafted to help me decide how to vote; perhaps it will be useful to you too.

I am deeply concerned that we are not looking at the whole picture. There are so many other concerns intimately wrapped up in how and how much we are paid for a case; ultimately a sense that justice, despite our best and most valiant efforts, is not being done.

We must look more broadly when we consider this deal, and so I publish this anonymous piece in the hope that my colleagues will also consider all the issues.

I am deeply concerned by what we already agree upon:

  1. Money for legal aid is not a vote winner. The public, parliament, and papers laud us as fat cats, leaving politicians to cut deeply the budgets of the MoJ and CPS. No department has lost so much, with so little uproar, that affects so many people. Just today, we see stories of the families of the London Bridge terror denied legal aid, and Sir Brian Leveson warning that the Justice system is on the brink of collapse. Yet there are no protests, no angry marches – no public backing at all. Compare this to the doctors strikes of 2015. If there is a PR battle over legal aid, we are in full retreat; our villages burning, and our castles broken.
  2. Cuts have consequences. Courts are closed, Recorders are told there is “not enough work”, and cases are now being listed well into 2020 – at the same time, fewer criminal are caught and prosecuted, and police numbers are at record lows. We know that the impact is that there are both miscarriages of justice, and that prosecutions are not brought while crime rises. Without cases being brought to court, there is no work for barristers to do. Without cases being brought to court, the guilty walk free.
  3. The CPS has ignored our complaints for too long. We are not paid for key parts of our jobs – the hours of preparation required, the endless chasing for disclosure, and reviewing unused. These are vital – not just to prosecute and defend effectively, but to uphold our ethical duties to ourselves, our profession, and the administration of justice.
  4. The only promise we have is a review of AGFS. No new money has been promised. No new principles have been published. The only promise we have is a review.
  5. Fees are not being paid when honestly earned. The CBA’s Monday message has regularly highlighted appalling conduct from the CPS, with civil servants deliberately setting out to deny fees and ongoing work.
  6. Fees have not increased for 20 years. While we are not mathematicians, even a cursory knowledge of numbers will tell you that 20 years of static fees is a massive real term pay cut. Far from being wealthy, most juniors 0 – 2 years’ Call would be better off on benefits or working at McDonalds. Many leave the profession with back-breaking debt, their loans, credit cards, and parental patience finally exhausted. Those outside London fare better, it is true. But it is the future of the Bar who are leaving. Already we hear of the decrease in quality of advocacy – how will we sustain ourselves for the next 20 years? The next 50?

Here, our paths diverge. I believe there are 6 compelling reasons to vote for this deal, right now, as a tiny, incremental, step to safeguarding the future of the Criminal Bar.

  • Voting for this deal gives juniors an immediate financial boost from September 2019.Fees are not what they once were, nor does accepting this allow us to forget what rates used to be, but a 25-40% improvement will sustain junior juniors for a little longer. For senior juniors, this ameliorates the cash flow problems that many CC trials run into, with payment now made when a case ends but is adjourned for sentence. Day 2 of trial will be paid, and the start of trial will now be defined correctly, as the day the trial actually starts. It’s important to note that this is new money from the Treasury, not from the CPS budget. That money can, and will, be reallocated if we do not take it.
  • Voting for this deal results in a promise to review AGFS by November 2019. This review will focus on three areas: PPE, cracks, and unused material. Banking this deal now does not take away from the need to advocate, persuade, and push forward with the AGFS changes we need. Further, the AGFS review separates the money for AGFS from the overarching Criminal Legal Aid Fees review – rather than fighting over one giant pot, we can have a separate, focussed review of AGFS alone.
  • Voting for this deal acknowledges its interim nature and retains our power to strike. This is not the final chapter, the last word, or the end of the conversation. We were given 50% of what we asked for. The remaining 50% is constrained by the Parliamentary timetable, something that not even the most fearless of us would contend with. Banking this offer does not prevent us from taking future strike action, if the government’s promises are not kept.
  • Voting for this deal gives us time to get the public onside.This deal is portrayed as a doubling of fees– if we reject it, we will lose credibility and what little public support our most high-profile advocates have gained for us. As a profession, we have done a shockingly awful job of explaining why justice is the vital thread that holds the fabric of society together. While the UK’s highest circulation paper blasts legal aid, and another perpetuates the myth that all lawyers earn vast sums, we are losing the PR battle. We have been losing the PR battle for so long that we have to clamber out of the ravine, schlep across vast fields, and slog through the forests before we finally reach the behemothian mountain we have to climb.
  • Voting for this deal demonstrates political acumen. Changes to AGFS require parliamentary time. Where are those parliamentarians? On holiday. Until September. We cannot ignore the fact that who we are negotiating with matters; if, as is likely, there is a change of government and a change of leadership at the CPS and MoJ. We cannot guarantee that a future justice secretary (perhaps Mr Raab?) will be particularly endeared to the Criminal Bar. Taking this deal results in progress, and still leaves us our most powerful option – a full-throated strike – when or if future promises are not kept. Further, it allows us to plan strikes more carefully. We need a proper PR strategy. We need a hardship fund for juniors. We need a detailed protocol for the unavoidable ethical dilemmas. We need the backing of the regional chambers to not break the strike. We need the backing of senior juniors, of Silks, and of the entire Bar. This takes time to build.
  • Voting for this deal allow us to be united for the first time. We all have competing interests, we all are fiercely independent, and we all cannot own up to that – until we do, we will not succeed, either for ourselves or society. Those competing interests broadly split into 5 categories: pupils, junior juniors, juniors, senior juniors, and Silks. Many of those now calling for action are those who stood by last time, and the time before that, and the time before that. We have long been content to pull the ladder up after ourselves, caring little for the most junior. You cannot claim unity while ignoring the issues of the most junior. You cannot claim unity when the future of the Bar are leaving.

 

We are not united

As a profession, we do not care that the most junior are struggling. For the last 10 years, low junior fees were seen as the “price to be paid” to ensure that work was brought into chambers for the most senior. Junior juniors were expected to be grateful to be thrown scraps of work, and told never to complain if you want to rise up the ranks.

Cash flow is a raging, pulsating anxiety in the minds of all juniors. Many have aged debts of £20,000, or more, on top of student loans. Rent does not wait. Bills do not wait. Travel must be paid. Those with 20 years’ experience forget that fees are the very same amount right now, while housing costs have increased by 400%. In 1998, the average UK monthly rent was £199.75– now, it stands at £934(and £1,602 for London). Those figures are typed correctly; we, the most junior, are expected to survive on the junior wages of 20 years ago, with today’s costs. Those who continue to expect the “price to be paid” will likely find that the price is the collapse of the Criminal Bar.

Making it to 10 years’ Call does not smooth the road ahead. With fee cuts taking hold in complex trials, many juniors have diversified their practice or taken secondments to stay afloat. Did those Silks and senior juniors need to diversify to pay the mortgage? Opportunities to be a junior on a serious trial are few and far between – some who manage it must do so for free, while still paying huge rents and bills. Being a junior on a trial is essential to grow and learn; without those juniors, who will prosecute or defend the alleged criminals of the future?

What of life at the Bar? The world outside has changed; look at Google’s luxurious officesor the 32-weeks maternity pay at Accentureto recognise how seriously the rest of the world takes wellbeing. At the criminal Bar, we expect women to choose between family and career. At the criminal Bar, we expect you to be in court or in hospital.At the criminal Bar, we expect you to witness the full uncensored horror of humanity, with no counselling, therapy, or support. Would anyone in the commercial world accept this? The grinding hours? The unpredictable commutes?

Finally, we arrive at the peak of the issue. We so often work for free. So much of our time and effort is unpaid. The juniors work for free to benefit the seniors. The juniors work evenings and weekends – unpaid – to prepare cases. We cannot build a career, a justice system, or a life on thin air. Until everyone, everyone, agrees that this is unacceptable, we cannot fight this properly.

What we, the most junior, are asking for is simple:

  1. To be properly, and quickly, remunerated in line with our skills and the complexity of the case.
  2. To talk honestly and openly about unpaid work, work paid months late, work not paid at all, and the demands it places on us and our families.
  3. To agree on how the system should reflect the frankly skewed nature of London living. Does the Bar even have a future in London?

 

The path lies ahead, yet untrodden

Those who path calls differently, for action – what are your goals? Your objectives? What will action result in? How much money is enough? What plans do you have to protect juniors who will inevitably struggle? How many of your solicitors have you persuaded to buy in to action?

Those who yearn for action have no business going on strike without being clear, and realistic, about what you want for your livelihood and profession. Otherwise, you will repeat the vicious circle of the past – brief action followed by swift and total capitulation. Again, the most junior will lose.

The brutal, broken reality is that we do not, right now, have the strength to fight. Our junior juniors will crack under the financial pressure and break the strike or leave entirely. Our reputation and public image will sink lower. Our chambers and colleagues are not prepared for sustained action.  To make a mistake now will compel even more to leave.

Those that leave are the Bar’s future. They are the Judges that will never judge, the Silks that will never take it. They are the advocates who are not being fiercely advocated for, by those who have already made it.

Guest Blogpost by Greg Powell: A brief history of legal aid

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I am delighted to publish this guest blogpost by Greg Powell of the London Criminal Courts Solicitors’ Association (LCCSA). There is presently a lot of discussion in the media about legal aid, and in particular the rates paid to lawyers under legal aid. This analysis is vital to understanding how we have arrived where we are, and is essential reading for anybody reporting or commenting on the dispute between criminal justice professionals and the government concerning legal aid.

 

  1. The Expansion of Legal Aid

1.1      In the 1970s and 80s there was a large expansion of Legal Aid which was at that time essentially an adjunct to the other work of solicitors firms, there being some 7000 suppliers, Legal Aid work sitting alongside normal commercial work like conveyancing, probate and contract.

1.2      Administered by the Law Society the hourly rates were not as high as those prevailing in the private client and commercial world but nevertheless were related to the cost of time.

1.3      The cost of time was calculated by assigning a target for chargeable hours for each fee earner, usually 1200 hours per annum, a notional salary for solicitors and partners and dividing overheads by the numbers of fee earners to find out applicable hourly rates.

1.4      Provision was made for lower hourly rates for travel and waiting, a problem that has always been apparent in legal aid work which is often not office based but court based, and in the case of crime, prison and police station based, with the consequence that large parts of chargeable hours were consumed in lower paid hourly rates. Fixed fee schemes containing ‘rolled up’ time spent travelling and waiting ‘hide’ the true costs of cases within their simplicity.

1.5      However, in terms of cost benefit it is also to be noted that the organisation of courts and the interaction of advocates and the tribunal and particularly the flow of work provided by ushers in Magistrates Courts is highly efficient; face to face interactions provide courts with good quality information upon which to base decisions.

 

  1. A Changing Supplier Base

2.1      As Legal Aid expanded the Law Society administration was unable to cope. Delay in payment became a well-known public fact and eventually the decision was made to move the administration of Legal Aid away from the Law Society into the hands of an independent Legal Aid Board. This was at inception essentially a cashier organisation but it also had within it a desire to promote and implement policy.

2.2      What had also happened is that a number of more specialist Legal Aid suppliers had come into being whose main purpose was to provide Legal Aid services in the community, usually both civil and crime covering the full range of civil, family law, welfare benefits, housing, mental health and immigration. In essence a numerous and independent “legally aided” sector was a by-product of the expansion of funding and scope.

2.3      It had been, and remains, a major component of this system that the supplier base provides its own capital in order to set up organisations, provide premises and employ people.  In this sense it is a free market where entrepreneurs have invested their own capital identifying gaps in the market and establishing businesses.

2.4      There were parallel changes in the private solicitor marketplace as conveyancing lost its fixed fee structures and in the more successful private client firms partners often became dissatisfied with low hourly rates of return in legal aid work and began shedding that work, a process accelerated from the 1990s as Legal Aid rates became frozen and eroded by inflation. Lord MacKay decided to abolish his Legal Aid Advisory Committee.  The current panel constituted to assist in the review of criminal Legal Aid is a distant echo of that forerunner.

 

  1. The Rise of Contracting

3.1      The Legal Aid Board brought forward the idea that suppliers would be contracted to supply Legal Aid services coupled to the idea of a quality mark. This had some basis in academic research (see the book, Standing Accused by McConville and Others which lamented poor standards in criminal work).

3.2      Other major structural developments were the establishing of the Crown Prosecution Service following major public scandals involving forced confessions by police officers and also the technological development of tape recording which allowed a new mode for conducting interviews.  The 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act also introduced the idea of the delivery of rights by independent Custody Officers whilst extending police powers.  One particularly significant development was the decision to allow the police 24 hours in which to detain a person before charge.  This was fiercely debated with 12 hours as a viable alternative but this was rejected and 24 hours underpins the subsequent development of a lackadaisical approach to the investigation whilst the person is in custody. Providing access to legal advice in the Police Station was a major costs driver.

3.3      Initially contracting was to be voluntary and was expressly said not to be a policy which would become compulsory.  Of course it did and very unfortunately contracting become a major dividing factor, there being separate crime and civil contracts.  This rupture of services had profound consequences on the market causing firms to choose between spheres and although many continue to operate both there was also a large bureaucratic burden.  That burden was another factor in private client firms continuing to abandon Legal Aid services.

 

  1. A Rich Ecology

4.1      What the entrepreneurial activity had created, in the context of the expansion of Legal Aid to meet need, was a rich fabric of firms and services. We have sometimes likened this to the ecology of a rainforest, diverse, valuable and especially establishing in local communities a variety of client choice and a feeling amongst clients, usually poorer and working class, that they had access to justice through “their” solicitor.

 

  1. Reform and the Market

5.1      The foundation of reform was a myth, that Legal Aid expenditure was “out of control” accompanied by a sinister subtext that the forces driving expenditure were the supplier base improperly exploiting Legal Aid. Academic research showed that the driving factor was in fact the rise in need and volume of cases and a tsunami of legislation, especially in crime.  Nevertheless this myth took hold.

5.2      The Paradox in the early 2000s was that the government was substantially investing in workers compensation schemes and rightly so, but whilst it spent billions on the one hand in those schemes it sought to cut Legal Aid expenditure by millions on the other.

5.3      Lord Carter proposed a crude simplistic trade off of volume for price a theme that has bedevilled so called “reform” ever since and dominated proposals for change.

5.4      The proposals that came forward were administratively complex and essentially foundered as they were unable to resolve contradictions between rewarding incumbent suppliers with market share and providing opportunities for new entrants, whilst also hopelessly confusing the nature of the market with other markets where there are multiple opportunities for suppliers to bid for work.

5.5      This is worth spelling out.  The Ministry of Justice is a single purchaser of Legal Aid services.  It sets prices.  The suppliers when they bid for work (however defined) face an existential crisis.  If their bid fails then they are out of business.  There is no alternative place for them to bid.

5.6      In other words this Legal Aid market for services is not like, for example, the NHS, which procures across a vast organisation for multiple services offering bidders the opportunities to bid for difference sizes of contract in different geographical areas in circumstances where, therefore, the failure of a bid is not terminal to their business.

5.7      It was an historic strength of the system that it was open. In other words there were no limits on the number of contractors and sufficient prices allowed a degree of entrepreneurial activity to fill in gaps in the market place. As prices have declined so has that activity.  However there are two other benefits from the way in which this market has operated.

5.8      A key element to successful entrepreneurial activity has been establishing reputation and this has been driven by the other key element of client choice.  The introduction of the Duty Solicitor Schemes enabled firms to source a more “captive” work stream and gain clients through duty solicitor activity in courts and police stations. Nevertheless it still remained and remains an important element for all firms that the quality of what they do is sufficient to draw that client back to them or achieve word of mouth referrals. In this way client choice drives quality.

5.9      Unfortunately restrictions on the ability to transfer Representation Orders have led to a decline in consumer/client choice.  There is a consumer paradox for people who are initially arrested, represented by a duty solicitor and bailed or released under investigation.  At that stage, pre-charge, there is no Legal Aid available and they are actually free to make enquiries in the marketplace to find out if the solicitor they have accessed accidentally as the duty solicitor is the person best placed to represent them or whether they could find an alternative with better reputation. In this way consumers are free to move around within the market.

5.10    However, if for example, a person is arrestedfor murder, has a duty solicitor and is remanded in custodythey then find it very difficult to change due to the rules which to this degree undermine an aspect of client choice.

5.11    Contracting has also restricted the market by restricting the opportunities for new entrants to the start of each contract cycle as well as being a system which has severed civil and criminal services. The most startling reform that could be contemplated would be ending contracting completely.  This would be a return to a pre-contracting era where all firms needed to do was to keep within the rules in respect of claims and payments.  In other words that the work was properly done and claimed.  Such a more open system would certainly allow new entrants and with other incentives and structural changes, allow firms to re-establish mixed practices of civil and crime and provide more local integrated services needed to meet the vast unmet need.

5.12    It is not difficult to be imaginative about what is possible in the Legal Aid market.  The Legal Services Commission as the successor to the Legal Aid Board had a worthwhile initiative through which firms took on trainees who were subsidised directly by the LSC in return for a contractual commitment to stay in Legal Aid work for a period of time.

5.13    Legal Aid as a bespoke subject ought to be an option within law school courses and participation can be leveraged through grant, the relief of debt and payments to suppliers to provide subsequent training contracts.

 

  1. AFundamental Problem

6.1      Underpinning access to justice are the rights to a fair trial and equality of arms between the parties.  Crucial is the adversarial system working properly to ensure that the court has before it all admissible evidence in order that the fundamental objective, which is the pursuit of truth, is achieved.

6.2      No one is facing up to the work, time and costs issues posed by the explosion of electronic material.   It simply means that in cases where it is relevant (and there is often a contest about what is and what is not properly served as evidence or unused material) the evidence has got be examined and deployed by prosecution and defence.  These are tasks which have made the process of litigation more time intensive and more costly.  This is for the police as investigators, the prosecution as an independent prosecutorial body assessing the evidence and for the defendants. All require extra resources in the long term in a degree of magnitude to properly cope with the technological development.  There is no shortcut and it simply requires more money and acceptance that this will be a demand led system that cannot be contained with fixed “envelopes” of cost.

 

  1. The Erosion of Value

7.1      The above argument in relation to the explosion of electronic material forms a context for the major other issue which has been the erosion of value.  It is not possible for solicitors and counsel to continue negotiating around the same envelope of money being deployed for cases in new ways.  Inventing other proxies for value or combining proxies with time or combining other structures of payment such as standard fees, non-standard fees, higher-standard fees still has to account for both the explosion in evidence and the fact that current values have been eroded to a degree where the work is unsustainable.

7.2      That unsustainability is evidenced by the recruitment and retention crisis within solicitors firms conducting criminal work.  It is also evidenced by the almost complete separation of private client work and Legal Aid work within the solicitor’s profession and by the advancing age of the cohort of duty solicitors.

7.3      Research might also reveal a very similar pattern in relation to the ages of partners or directors of firms within the supplier base which is also similarly advancing. Career opportunities have been truncated by the short horizon of business, the uncertainty of profits and the lack of career paths.

7.4      One way of exiting is to the Crown Prosecution Service which now offers substantially better terms than are available generally within the defence community.  Another way of exiting is to simply abandon the work and take up different careers. For students with vast debt Legal Aid is deeply unattractive.

 

  1. Access toJustice

8.1      It was a by-product of the expansion of Legal Aid and the availability of firms within communities providing a range of legally aided services that many millions of people could buy into the ideathat there was a degree of access to justice.

8.2      Much is written about alienation, voices not being heard, and the unrepresentative nature of politics, inequality and the socially excluded. Legal Aid cuts, in particular LASPO, have formed a backdrop which has accentuated exclusion.

8.3      Exclusion also has direct economic consequences.  A family with less income because they are unable to challenge welfare benefit decisions live in greater poverty.  Children in greater poverty   are more likely to fail in the education system, often being excluded, more vulnerable to drift into gangs, crime and county lines drug dealing. Similarly challenging are living in conditions of disrepair, losing housing and the gross disruption of family life where there are cycles of imprisonment, alcohol and drug abuse and devastating adverse immigration decisions and deportation.  Many live and are brought up in deeply hostile environments and too often the inability of fathers to access contact and maintain parenting has potentially disastrous consequences.

8.4      Add to these other factors such as loss of youth clubs, social workers, and the pressure of schools to exclude pupils.  It is no wonder that the world of gang affiliation with its sense of identity and drug dealing giving access to otherwise unattainable riches is such a lure to young people and indeed older people involved in organised crime.

8.5      The extent of organised crime has been highlighted by the National Crime Agency in its bid for between £2-3billion to combat what it describes as a major threat to security and wellbeing.  Will that funding and these initiatives drive more cases into the Criminal Justice System?  The idea that more cases will arise which demand more resources stands in stark contrast to falling volume as a result of the debacle of the RUI stance adopted by many police forces in relation to the many thousands of people arrested.

8.6      What all of this means, including the review itself, is an extremely unstable environment for Legal Aid practitioners. Low margins make firms highly vulnerable to changes in case volume and case mix.  A two year “review” is irrelevant to the immediate crisis.    What is required is at least a short term injection of funds, the making good of the last 8.75% cut which was predicated on the manipulation of the supplier base producing fewer suppliers with higher volumes, which never took place, and which was in itself arbitrary and unfair.  What is also needed however are not only higher levels of remuneration, but an imaginative reworking of incentives and structure to support an independent legal profession and a degree of stability which would allow businesses to flourish whilst meeting need.

 

  1. London and its Hinterland

9.1      At over 650 square miles with the largest concentration of population in the country London poses particular problems for Legal Aid lawyers.

9.1      It is an area of higher cost. Those costs relate to the costs of business premises, higher wages and higher costs for employees for accommodation and travel.  In a recent Reed Business Support Salary Guide for 2019 an Office Manager in London is said to command a wage of £40,100.  In the East Midlands the figure £23,700 and the North East £29,200 and the North West £23,900.  In the South West and Wales the figure falls to £22,300.

9.3      Traditionally the particular costs base of London were recognised by additional London Weighting supplements on hourly rates.  There is a powerful case for the reintroduction of London Weighting within any newly devised scheme.

9.4      Another myth is that there was an oversupply of firms in London. This is not true and the number of firms is proportionate to the population.  This was established in passing by the KPMG report in the failed debacle of tendering Duty Solicitor Schemes.

9.5      London is the centre of political protest and government and inevitably public protest type crime tends to arise more often and so does financial crime attached to London being the centre of financial services.

9.6      A fundamental problems for practitioners has been the complete absence of planning.  There is no court near a police station which is near a prison, they are spread haphazardly. The system has developed without the slightest regard for efficiencies that might arise from locating services together.  Indeed plans to relocate remand prisoners only in Wandsworth, Belmarsh and Highdown, which is actually outside London in Sutton, would only exacerbate the problems.

9.7      Very large distances must now be traversed across London for defendants, ‘victims’ and witnesses and indeed all the participants in the court process.

9.8      The idea has been advanced frequently by the LCCSA for over a decade that there ought to be reform of the Duty Solicitor Scheme.  At present solicitors join two courtschemes plus associated youth court schemes but are allocated to as many as eight or nine 24 hour police station schemes depending on the location of their office.  This thins volume in any particular court.  Bringing the schemes into line so that solicitors are allocated two or three police stations schemes most contiguous to their office and the court schemes ought to produce a greater volume of work for firms in their local courts.

9.9      Incidentally scheme inflation, by which many more people joined each individual scheme, was a product of a policy decision by the LSC to automatically allocate all qualifying solicitors, depending on the whereabouts of their office to every scheme that was available.

 

  1. Opportunity or Threat? The Criminal Legal Aid Fee Review

10.1    The immediate impulse for the review was the promise to the Bar to review the AGFS arrangements.  That promise was then conflated with the existing idea of a review of the LGFS (no doubt more urgent from the perspective of the MOJ after the successful JR of their plan to cut £30M or so from the LGFS Scheme) and then in turn extended to encompass all fee schemes, police stations, magistrates’ courts and the VHCC scheme.

10.2    Three elements dominate legal aid fees for the last twenty five years. The erosion of fee structures by inflation.  The endless cuts to EVERY fee scheme. The hugely bureaucratic, unmanageable and failed ‘reform’ proposals encompassing Best Value Tendering, Price Competitive Tendering and 2 tier contracting of duty solicitors schemes and other similar debacles including VHCC and family contracts. The 2 Tier debacle was accompanied by a completely arbitrary 17.5% cut in fees.  What is extraordinary is the sheer scale of that cut; 17.5%, not 1.5 or 2% but this huge figure.  Subsequently 8.75% was restored after the failure of the scheme, still leaving practitioners with a completely arbitrary 8.75% cut.

10.3    The common theme has been an approach to Legal Aid as a ‘market’ (fundamentally misunderstood, see para 5.) to be manipulated with the sole objective of driving down price (cuts) encouraged by overtures from a handful of ‘larger’ suppliers who sought greater volume and market share.  In civil the hatchet of LASPO simply removed access to justice for millions of people and further disrupted and eroded the supplier base. .

10.4    What has been absent is any coherent view of Legal Aid based on principles of fair trial, equality of arms or access to justice through increasing the resource that enables people to believe they have the means (legally aided lawyers) to pursue their rights, that their stake in society and belief in its fairness, in the application of the rule of law to them, has meaning because they can rebalance the unfair advantage of ‘others’ who have the power (landlords, Councils, the DWP, insurance companies, the Home Office, Police) by instructing ‘their’ lawyer. This is the real context of rearranging fee structures; it is not an end in itself but only one component of policy that ought to have this enabling outcome. This Review perpetuates the division of crime and civil being confined to criminal Legal Aid fees when the reality is that legal aid services are accessed across lifetimes in multiple ways as need overlaps the civil and criminal boundaries.

10.5    That vision is entirely absent from this Review which is framed as the ‘right time to think more widely about the future of criminal legal aid schemes’, without any commitment to any funding increase, only to the ‘right level’ of legal aid provision. It is most likely to be a missed opportunity and actually another ‘cut’.  The ravaging of value by inflation will not be addressed by a permanent compensatory mechanism, and any ‘ambitious’  attempt to manipulate the market will yet again misread its reality and lead to JR and debacle.  Is this to be a moment (actually a year or two with continuing ministerial reshuffles) for reinvigorating access to justice (restoring the £1 billion about 1/800thof government expenditure) or another episode in the erosion of Legal Aid and its supplier base?

10.6    In the period 2004/2005 to 2019 Government Expenditure rose from around £400 billion to over £800 billion.  In that period removing £1 billion from Legal Aid was a political choice.  The courageous and correct political choice would be to restore access to justice by expanding the Legal Aid spend by £1 billion.

10.7    The complete absence of a commitment to restore funding levels and the absence of vision are depressing.  There is little to indicate that the trajectory of the history of Legal Aid will change.  Rather that the reality that will emerge will remain one of cuts, loss of services and more people who believe that justice is not to be found within the society in which they live.