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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