25th October 2021
Another weekend gone, and another proposed ministry of justice policy reported in the Sunday press.
The last one, if you recall, came from an interview given by the new justice secretary and Lord Chancellor (and deputy prime minister) Dominic Raab to the political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
There he spoke of a ‘mechanism’ for ministers to ‘correct’ judgments which they happened to disagree with.
And not just any judgments, of course, but those where the courts had found that the state had interfered with fundamental rights and freedoms.
One would have thought that, if the effect of such judgments needed to be overturned, this would be a matter for parliament.
But no: ministers should be able to do this, it would seem, at a whim.
As this blog averred, the fact that such a thing was his ministerial priority when the criminal justice system is in crisis was enough to make any sensible person weep.
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We now have another proposal, given to another political editor at another Sunday paper (though this was not an on-the-record interview but from a ‘source’, so it may have come from special advisors as opposed to from the justice secretary directly).
Scorecards.
This new proposal is as follows:
– Raab ‘wants people to be able to look up their local court online and check how quickly cases are dealt with’;
– the new national register ‘will give scores on the speed cases go through the system, and on the ‘quality’ of justice served, measured by the percentage of guilty pleas before cases come to court, as well as the number of cases rearranged because of problems with the prosecution’;
– the register will also score ‘victim engagement’, described as ‘how many crime victims give up and drop out of the process’
– the justice secretary has said ‘he wants ‘granular data’ on how courts are performing across the justice system’;
– the scorecards will be ‘introduced by the end of this year and data will be updated twice a year to monitor progress’; and
– it ‘is understood the Justice Secretary is keen on introducing scorecards on a regional level, so that in future members of the public would be able to look at the performance of local courts’.
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One response to this proposal is to point out (which the ministry of justice ‘source’ either did not know or kept hidden) that much of this data is already published.
That statement of the should-be obvious fell to the main opposition spokesperson on justice:
.@DominicRaab wake up, your Dept already releases this data on a quarterly basis. Using a 'scorecard' to deflect blame for Tory cuts won't fix the crisis in our courts https://t.co/nWjonkLCj2 pic.twitter.com/kPkgHNOLEw
— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) October 24, 2021
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And Lammy is right in another respect: the intention between this policy seems not for data to be published, but for court users to be misdirected.
The notion appears to be that court users will use the scorecards to put pressure on courts to perform better, and for courts to feel under pressure to show court users that they are performing better.
Court users will thereby be (mis-)directed into thinking that poor court performance is a matter for the individual courts.
But.
The problem about the court system is not micro, but macro.
The system is structurally under-resourced, and it needs leadership.
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Here, let us turn our attention from the Sunday press to the National Audit Office:
The NAO published a major report just before the weekend.
The NAO did not propose scorecards.
Instead the NAO said: “if sustainable recovery in criminal courts is to be effective, the Ministry will need to improve its leadership of the system”.
Leadership.
Yes, the NAO used the ‘L’ word: Leadership.
But instead of leadership and solid policy, we get another weekend-special gimmick.
And not only just a gimmick – but one which appears to have the intention of misdirecting court users.
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As this blog has previously averred: it does not have to be like this.
The justice secretary is a senior cabinet minister with the title ‘deputy prime minister’, as well as an experienced lawyer.
As such he is better placed than most recent justice secretaries to obtain better funding from the treasury, and to win the prize of serious reform.
But yet another weekend goes by where we are served trivial trinkets, instead of such a prize.
It is still enough to make any sensible person weep.
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I agree that this is a ridiculous diversion, when the problems are largely caused by the process having been starved of resources over the last decade. But it’s also disturbing that persuading defendants to plead guilty rather than being tried in court is thought to enhance the quality of justice.
Too slow to ask whether having King Charles on the throne will make getting legislation on the books any more or less fraught.
I suppose we might ask whether or not the UK justice system costs more or less to run than say the German or French systems. Then we might consider asking the accused ‘do you want the quick & cheap rough justice system or the slow and double stretch refined justice system’.
One thing to query here: is Raab really an “experienced” lawyer?
If Wikipedia is to be believed, he did his training contract at Linklaters. He then left.
From my knowledge of city law firms, this is often code for “trained here, but not good enough to be given a permanent job after qualification”.
Newly qualified city lawyers usually only have six months of experience in their chosen practice area and can barely be left unsupervised.
He was then an FCO lawyer for possibly six years before doing political jobs.
So, certainly *some* experience. And undoubtedly more than other key legal members of this government (yes, I’m looking at you, Attorney General!). But I doubt he has much, if any, idea about criminal law, and I don’t think that I would want to get his legal advice on anything!
Yes, Raab “really” is an experienced lawyer, as this blog has previously set out in detail.
He may not have been a senior one: but 6 years PQE means a lawyer is experienced, even if not senior.
So I am afraid your comment misses its target.
I don’t understand why more people don’t do more to address this problem: this protracted underfunding of the courts service actually amounts to systemic abuse of our rights under Article Six of the European Convention of Human Rights.
That says we must have a fair hearing *within a reasonable time*, and that “Reasonable” is on an absolute scale, it is not “Reasonable considering the courts are so badly underfunded.” or “Reasonable considering that the courts are chock full of spurious cases.” (I’m thinking of benefit appeals as the best example of that).
It isn’t hard to put in a claim at the European Court of Human Rights, the hardest part is exhausting the domestic remedies, but since there is no mechanism for taking the court sevice to court, there simply are no domestic remedies.
If everybody who has been affected put in a claim, they would be forced to deal with it, and possibly to deal with it properly, though of course the risk is that they’ll deal with it by withdrawing from the convention.
Not just an abuse of human rights (of the accused, and the complainant, and everyone else involved), the state of the courts is also profoundly corrosive to the rule of law, and to law and order. Why bother reporting a rape if there is a vanishingly small probability it will be prosecuted, and even if it is, the hearing will be years away and the process may be actively harmful to your recovery. Why bother reporting a burglary or many other minor crimes, if the police won’t even come out and just dispense a crime number.
The only effective remedy is political – elect a government that actually cares about this sort of thing, rather than just giving it lip service.
I was also going to ask how much experience he had. Certainly more than someone who is just qualified, but of limited experience. In most professional jobs people are only just properly getting into their stride after five years or so.
The other thought I had was that the whole idea reminded me of Major’s Cones hotline. However, I would prefer to have Major back in charge than this bunch of spivs and lightweights.
Oh good. Scorecards and league tables. What could possibly go wrong in a justice system prioritises speed and guilty pleas.
Would things be so much better if the CPS just dropped all the slow and difficult cases: the ones which require an arbiter of fact to weigh up the contested evidence?
Perhaps they are doing that already (look at the woeful statistics for prosecuting allegations of rape).
This is the culture of look away and find someone to blame. How fqr we have travelled though the social systems – scroungers – the name given to the poor who need help, estate agents, teachers, social workers, doctors, immigrants, and many more until now we have lawyers. It is destructive of the fabric of community and society. It is destabilising and revengeful. It pollutes the wellbeing of all of us. Government needs to go to a moral hygienist and discover a more intelligent way of dealing with crises.
Hmmmnnn. May i add that army dentists spring to mind? (from back in the olden days of course).
Local Courts?
Many large and medium sized towns have had their local Civil and Criminal Courts closed and replaced by Regional Centres.
If customers want to go online time will better be spent checking bus and train timetables.
The days of local Magistrates administering justice in over 90% of cases to local people in local Courts has been ended and in itself created a divide and alienation in society.
Spending a few nights in a police custody suite would be an eye opener for some politicians.
I used to work in telephone polling. I fondly remember working on the Witness and Victim Experience Survey (WAVES), which was used to measure experience of many aspects of the justice system. I believe it ended in 2010-11ish, and I believe austerity was cited in its downfall, alongside much govt-funded social research at the time.
I am sure there are many better things to spend money on in the court system right now. I sometimes wonder how the courts of today would fare against that old scorecard.