Friday 27 May 2016. The day on which the following events were deemed worthy of historical record on the front pages of the English press:
It is also the day, you may be interested to know, that the criminal justice system was officially declared “close to breaking point”. Not by me or my kindred professional complainers, but by Parliament. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee today published a report, “Efficiency in the Criminal Justice System”, in which the very first line is:
“The criminal justice system is close to breaking point.”
Easy pickings, one might think, for magpie subs struggling to summon a splash on a topic of public interest beyond facile comments by a fame-chasing wannabe TV bimbo, or something that happened on Britain’s Got Talent. [If that sentence had been pasted closer to the first two front pages above, that joke might have worked. As it is, we’ll move on and pretend nothing happened. But just so you know, that could have been something really special.]
But no-one took the bait. Notwithstanding that the facts of the report would have been available, and known, prior to last night’s print deadlines, the tumbling of justice was apparently considered not of general interest. Let alone worthy of usurping Johnny Depp’s divorce.
In truth, much of what’s in the PAC report is drawn from other non-reported reports, and there is nothing new to surprise those stuck festering in the system. The procession of complaints can be recited rote by anyone involved with criminal justice, like a contestant trapped in a Groundhog Day version of the Generation Game conveyor belt:
- Unacceptable delays – months, years – in cases getting to trial;
- A consequent enormous backlog of serious criminal cases;
- Gross inefficiencies in preparing and reviewing prosecutions;
- An overall system that is both underfunded and overstretched;
- A lack of accountability;
- “Cost savings” which simply shunt costs from one part of the system to another;
- Callous treatment of witnesses and victims;
- Insufficient judges, CPS staff and court sitting days to manage the caseload;
- No credible plan by the Ministry of Justice to use its court buildings efficiently – e.g. £100,000 was recently spent on installing new windows at Torquay magistrates’ court even though the MoJ intended to close the building down;
- No thought given to how defendants, jurors and witnesses might physically get to court once the MoJ has closed down all the smaller rural courts, and they have to travel 100 miles without access to regular public transport.
Those familiar friends all feature for express criticism in the report, to which I might add, for completeness, the mischief caused by interpreters not turning up, prisoners not being brought to court, legal aid being removed from middle-class defendants, the disastrous privatisation of the Probation Service and the omnipresent shadow of CPS disclosure failings. And of course many, many other prizes, none of which present as novelty to lawyers, defendants, victims or witnesses.
But to those fortunate enough to currently find themselves outside the criminal process, who may one day, through the vagaries of fate or circumstance find themselves dragged screaming into the system, either as the victim of a crime or accused of one, this surely has to be big news? It cannot be a story that peaks at item 3 on the Today programme 7am bulletin, before being folded and put away in a drawer until the next revolution of this relentless cycle of despair.
It deserves more. It deserves anger. Passion. Rage. Frustration. Umbrage. Indignation. Shock, awe, outrage, hysteria – everything that social media is accused of being, and often is, our entire society should be right now. Because a functioning justice system is vital to a functioning society. It is as crucial as health. Education. Economic policy. Because without proper justice, the social contract by which we all live crumbles. I cringe as I write this because of its sixth-form general studies simplicity, but plainly somewhere in our society there is a blockage. And people have stopped caring, beguiled by an implicit cocksure certainty that the courts – and crime in particular – is something that only affects Other People.
Early on in my career, due to CPS failings, a defendant got bail. He went on to kill. I have seen – we have all seen – provably guilty people walk free, and not-guilty people locked up. There’s no use in squealing for extra bobbies on the beat if nearly 40% of the wrong-uns they catch don’t have their cases reviewed by the CPS, and as a consequence don’t get justice. There’s no point in reporting an assault where you’re going to be cross-examined on the minutiae of that day two years after the event, with the inevitable gaps and inconsistencies in your truthful account providing the key to your tormentor’s acquittal. And if you are accused of something you didn’t do, for which you could lose your job, your home and your liberty, it’s too late at that point bemoaning the delay in your case being heard, the failure of the CPS to disclose crucial material that would secure your acquittal, or the injustice of a third, fourth or fifth adjournment of your trial because the MoJ refuses to keep open enough courtrooms.
Criminal justice matters. If the House of Commons had published a report that opened with the conclusion, “The NHS is close to breaking point”, that would be headline news. Editorials would be screaming for ministerial accountability. If the report concluded that the Department for Health had “overstretched” hospitals and “exhausted the scope to make further cuts” – and yet the DoH insisted that a further 15% would be cut from the budget by 2019/20, no-one would believe it. The injustice – the human casualties of this macabre, sadistic approach to administering a fundamental pillar of developed nationhood – would be the headlines. Their stories, their misery, their pain.
Not Alesha f**king Dixon.