BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4
TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4” – “CPS: PROSECUTORS ON TRIAL”
CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP
TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 15th September 2015 2000 – 2040 REPEAT: Sunday 20th September 2015 1700 - 1740
REPORTER: Danny Shaw PRODUCER: Ian Muir-Cochrane EDITOR: David Ross
PROGRAMME NUMBER: PMR537/15VQ5729 - 1 -
THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.
“FILE ON 4”
Transmission: Tuesday 15th September 2015 Repeat: Sunday 20th September 2015
Producer: Ian Muir-Cochrane Reporter: Danny Shaw Editor: David Ross
ACTUALITY IN CAR
NICK: We’re in the centre of Bristol at the moment. Now this is the Magistrates’ Court building here ….
SHAW: On File on 4, I take a journey through the legal system and spend a typical day at court to identify the problems which beset the Crown Prosecution Service.
NICK: You can be waiting till the afternoon to get your case on.
SHAW: Have things got worse?
NICK: Gradually got worse over the years. It’s often the CPS is the most delaying part of it.
- 2 -
SHAW: I speak to lawyers at the sharp end and hear from those who worked at the top of the CPS. They tell me frankly about the impact of budget cuts, their concerns about decision-making and the loss of experienced staff at Britain’s biggest prosecution agency.
AFZAL: The tipping point was reached in 2015 and it was one of the reasons why I decided that I didn’t want to be part of the service, because I felt it was asking too much of the people that I have so much respect for.
SIGNATURE TUNE
ACTUALITY IN BRISTOL
FANSON: We are at the Bristol Magistrates’ Court at the moment. The maximum courts that can sit on any day is about twelve. It is a busy court, which is by far the biggest in the area.
SHAW: It’s been a hectic morning for David Fanson, a partner in one of Bristol’s biggest law firms. For 27 years he’s been a duty solicitor, representing people accused of crimes, in cases brought by the Crown Prosecution Service. How would you describe the morning that you've had in the Magistrates’ Court today?
FANSON: Frustrating, quite a bit of delay. I had several cases today. Main one was a sentencing case, ready for it at ten o’clock. Didn’t get called on until about twenty past twelve.
SHAW: The case involves offences of harassment and criminal damage to which the defendant, with a long criminal record, indicated he’d plead guilty two months ago.
FANSON: It was quite apparent, even at that early stage, that the level of the charge put forward by the Crown was wrong. An alternative suggestion was made, then the case had to be adjourned for one week for that to be considered, to get approval from a higher grade prosecutor as there wasn't one in court. There was then a - 3 -
FANSON cont: second set of charges that came in, which again charge wrong and had to be amended. Case again adjourned for sentencing.
SHAW: Of the delays and difficulties that you see in the Magistrates’ Court, how much of it do you think is attributable to the Crown Prosecution Service?
FANSON: I would say probably about 70% of the delays. Other delays that we quite often get are because the Crown Prosecution Service maybe haven’t got all the papers they need to have on their digital system, so I frequently lend prosecutors my physical copy of the case papers, because they simply haven’t got what they need on their system.
SHAW: That’s extraordinary - so the Defence are actually helping the Crown out?
FANSON: Well, it’s either a question of I give them the papers that I’ve got or I could perhaps wait two or three hours while they try and track it down.
SHAW: Delays, confusion, frustration - it’s a familiar story in courts across England and Wales. Some problems are out of the Crown Prosecution Service’s control - poorly prepared police files, reluctant witnesses, a shortage of courts. But as the principal prosecuting authority, the CPS is increasingly being held responsible for the failings. In the twelve months to April, it prosecuted 664,000 defendants, reviewing the evidence, getting the cases ready, presenting them before magistrates and judges. The CPS also has extensive powers to determine, in all but the most minor cases, whether people should be charged with a crime, making 6,000 decisions every week. CPS lawyers are, in effect, the gatekeepers to the criminal courts.
MARY: The thing I really liked when I first started working for the CPS was ownership of my work file. I was allocated all of the files from a particular police station and I went to one court. If the police or the Defence wanted to contact me, offering a plea or because they got further evidence, they knew exactly who to contact. I did - 4 -
MARY cont: a variety of cases. I did everything from no insurance to murder, and there was a pride in my work.
SHAW: We spoke to one former Crown Prosecutor who spent more than 20 years in the CPS. Towards the end of her time there, she became disillusioned with the volume of work and the way it was shared out. She agreed to be interviewed on condition we re-voiced what she said and used a different name: Mary.
MARY: They’ve divided the work up in a way that you would in a factory. You would review random files, you wouldn’t know the magistrates, the Defence would write in again and again and it would never get to a lawyer that had actually reviewed the case - it was a recipe for chaos.
SHAW: How did that that change make you feel as an employee of the CPS, who previously found the work stimulating and with lots of variety?
MARY: Demoralised and under pressure.
SHAW: The CPS denies its workforce is demoralised, but admits that partly due to a surge in sexual abuse, domestic violence and complex terrorism cases, staff are working under more pressure. Indeed, that’s the message we’ve had from people within the CPS. They’re not permitted to speak out, but their observations have been passed onto us. CPS staff comments.
READER 1 IN STUDIO: Office-based magistrates review team, seriously understaffed, with the endless monotony of a conveyor belt working system.
READER 2 IN STUDIO: People are just finding their workload unacceptable and they’re moving on, and even people on training contracts with the CPS are moving on as well.
ACTUALITY IN OFFICE
- 5 -
KELCEY: Going into the office now. Hopefully we’ll be let in.
SHAW: Back in Bristol, I meet Ian Kelcey at his office opposite the Crown Court.
KELCEY: We employ approximately 24 people ….
SHAW: He’s one of the country’s most experienced defence lawyers and sits on the Criminal Law Committee of the solicitors’ representative body, the Law Society.
KELCEY: There’s a case here where we’ve been waiting for the best part of eight weeks just to get a password ….
SHAW: He shows me a stack of folders stuffed full of documents, each file the size of an encyclopaedia. They’re recent cases he’s been dealing with that have been caught up in CPS bureaucracy. In one drink-driving case, repeated requests to prosecutors for an online password to view CCTV evidence went unanswered. In a forthcoming burglary trial, he tells me, the CPS ignored court instructions to disclose material to the Defence. And worst of all, says Ian Kelcey, there’s a man accused of sexual offences who wasn’t even informed when the CPS dropped the case.
KELCEY: He learned of his acquittal through the online newspaper for his area being phoned up by a neighbour, who said to him, ‘Oh, I’m pleased to hear you’ve been acquitted,’ and I had this guy in tears on the phone, saying, ‘What’s this all about?’ And I didn’t know what it was about. Nobody had had the courtesy or the intelligence to contact us to say, ‘This is the decision we’ve made,’ and he has to find out in that way, which is frankly an utter disgrace. But I’m afraid it shows again the dysfunctionality of the Crown Prosecution Service in failing to deal with things in a correct and proper way. One would hope that they wouldn’t treat witnesses and victims in that way, but I’m not sure. I really have to question how efficient they are. It’s the first time that this has happened to me, but I have heard of other instances subsequently where other people say they’ve had a similar example.
- 6 -
SHAW: The CPS wrote a letter to Ian Kelcey apologising for what it said was an oversight. He says that’s little comfort for the accused man, who spent nine months living in the shadow of the most damaging allegations.
KELCEY: He was charged with very serious offences, arguably should never have been prosecuted. Not just my view - I think it’s fair to say that’s a view that was subsequently shared by two independent barristers who the CPS went to and decided two weeks before trial that this man should not be prosecuted.
SHAW: The CPS says overall it’s happy with the prosecution decisions it makes, though it acknowledges the need for improvements. But when it gets decisions wrong, the impact is immense, especially on victims who expect justice.
ACTUALITY IN LONDON
SHAW: I’ve come to an area of North East London that used to be known as the Murder Mile because of a spate of gangland killings in the early 2000s. It’s calmer these days, there’s certainly no sense of menace standing here on the street corner. But there’s still an undercurrent of gang violence. And two years ago a young man was caught in the crossfire, here in Hindrey Road. His name was Joseph Burke-Monerville. He was 19 years old.
BURKE-MONERVILLE: Joseph was due to come and visit, so he called me and told me that they were at the gym but they would be coming out very soon, so I told him I would be home presently after him.
SHAW: John Burke-Monerville, Joseph’s father, recalls the night he received the worst possible news. Joseph, a forensic science student, had been out with his two brothers. Mr Burke-Monerville rushed to the scene in a state of panic.
BURKE-MONERVILLE: Started making our way to where we know that they were at the time. We were told that a young boy got shot, and then when I saw the police, he took me aside and told me that he believes that the person involved is my son.
- 7 -
EXTRACT FROM BBC CRIMEWATCH
SHAW: The shooting featured on the BBC’s Crimewatch programme.
CRIMEWATCH PRESENTER: On their way home, the three brothers stopped off at a nearby convenience store.
SHAW: Grainy CCTV images showed two hooded men approach the Burke-Monerville brothers’ parked car. Actors reconstructed what happened next.
EXTRACT FROM RECONSTRUCTION
MAN A: Are you Pembury?
BROTHER: These boys aren’t from round here. These boys have come from Nigeria.
MAN A: What do you reckon?
MAN B: Light ‘em up, innit [GUNSHOT]
SHAW: Three shots were fired. The eldest brother, David, was wounded; Joseph was killed.
BURKE-MONERVILLE: I can’t understand how something like that could happen. It has been a tremendous loss, displaced all the family. We’re all living in a separate world than what we used to know now, because we’ve lost wonderful, wonderful, wonderful son, and we wonder how long we can go on without him.
- 8 -
SHAW: Police believe the brothers were mistaken for gangsters who’d strayed onto rival territory. The investigation, despite the offer of a £20,000 reward for information, was long and difficult, but finally, last December, the Burke- Monerville family glimpsed justice when the Crown Prosecution Service charged three men.
ACTUALITY IN BETHNAL GREEN
SHAW: So what was the case put forward by the CPS against the three men accused of murdering Joseph Burke-Monerville? To find out I’ve come to a legal firm which represented one of the men in a busy high road in Bethnal Green, just a couple of miles from the murder scene.
ACTUALITY IN OFFICE
SHAW: Danny Shaw from BBC.
MAN: Hello Danny. Come through.
SHAW: Solicitor Tony Marshall, together with Richard Keogh, a barrister, acted for 21 year old Roshane Reid. He was suspected of pulling the trigger, but denied even being there. It was impossible to identify the perpetrators from the CCTV footage and, according to Mr Keogh, there was little else to go on.
KEOGH: There was such an absence of evidence in terms of forensic evidence, telephone type evidence to place people in certain locations, identification evidence, confession evidence, none of that was present here. It was a prosecution built upon the evidence of one person, and so it was a very weak prosecution from the outset.
SHAW: In spite of there being only one witness, an ex-gang member, the case progressed towards a trial at the Old Bailey, with the accused on remand at the high-security Belmarsh Prison in London. Then, five months later, events took a dramatic turn.
- 9 -
KEOGH: We were attending court for what we thought was a preparatory hearing, to be told that the Prosecution were dropping the case five days before the trial was due to start.
SHAW: The Prosecution dropped the case after it had to disclose crucial evidence to the Defence. The exact details of that evidence are unclear, but it was enough to raise serious doubts about the reliability of the witness, an informant with a criminal background, whose dealings with the police were open to question. According to Tony Marshall, the information had been readily available.
MARSHALL: The CPS were entitled to rely on the informant until they realised that there was evidence that was undermining him. Once they had that evidence, I think that was probably the time to really review the case and say, well, actually, look, this just isn’t enough, the evidence is inherently weak, and probably make a decision in particular because there were three people in custody. I think it was something that they should have made and reviewed earlier.
SHAW: It’s understood the Metropolitan Police accepts some of the blame for what went wrong. But what about the CPS, which was responsible for the disclosure process and the charging decision? Alison Saunders, who’s been Director of Public Prosecutions since 2013, agreed to meet me at her London office, just south of the Thames. Weren’t they issues that you should have known about before you made the decision to prosecute?
SAUNDERS: It’s very easy with hindsight to say that and I would certainly hope that in a case with a single witness that we’re asking all the right questions at the beginning. Certainly I think we have learnt that we should be more probing than perhaps we had been in that case. But as soon as we knew about them, we worked with the investigators to try and deal with them. When we realised we couldn’t, that’s when we stopped them, but certainly in other cases I would hope that we are asking those questions at a very early stage.
- 10 -
SHAW: But in this case there was only one witness. It wasn’t as though there was a multiplicity of evidence. So why weren’t your prosecutors completely across that witness to find out absolutely everything about them and the way they’d been handled by the police?
SAUNDERS: Well, of course that’s exactly what we did. It’s about when we did it and …
SHAW: You didn’t do it before you made the charging decision.
SAUNDERS: No. And sometimes there are very good reasons why we can’t, because of course some of these cases, if people are in custody or it’s a sort of, you know, dealt with very quickly then we can’t do that, we have to take the evidence as it is, and often it’s about knowing what the issues are and then looking into them. But, you know, it’s a really good lesson for us to learn and it is something that we ordinarily are all over.
SHAW: Do you, as the Director of Public Prosecutions, as the head of the CPS, accept responsibility for what went wrong in that case?
SAUNDERS: Absolutely, it’s my role. That’s what I’m here for.
BURKE-MONERVILLE: We believed that we would have some type of justice. It did not happen on that day, because a lot of mistakes were made. I’m very, very, very sad. The whole family is sad, but what can we do?
SHAW: Your hopes had been raised that there was going to be a trial process, three people who’d been accused were going to go on trial, and then suddenly they were dashed.
BURKE-MONERVILLE: Yes, that is very true. Everything that we expected had crumbled at that time.
SHAW: The CPS staff comments. - 11 -
READER 1 IN STUDIO: There’ll be miscarriages of justice down the road from here, because there are some cases that are going through the system and people haven’t looked at disclosure properly and haven’t looked at what’s going on behind the scenes. Things we simply wouldn’t have had ten years ago.
READER 2 IN STUDIO: What I really object to, though, is the way senior management insist that everything’s fine when it clearly isn’t.
SHAW: When the CPS is asked how it’s performing, it often cites figures on the number of convictions. In the Magistrates’ Courts, 84% of prosecutions result in a defendant pleading guilty or being found guilty, up from 80% ten years ago. And although the Crown Court conviction rate is slightly lower at 79%, it has also gone up. But the proportion of cases dropped by the CPS at the Magistrates’ Court or ordered by judges to be stopped at the Crown Court is rising, and there are other statistics which present a far from positive picture.
ROBSON: The important things to look at in assessing data is not so much the conviction rate after trial, although that is important, because it’s very difficult to understand exactly why a jury has reached the decision it did. It may well be that it was due to the quality of the advocacy, it may not be. But perhaps more importantly is the data that relates to the number of trials that have been ineffective due to the fault of the CPS.
SHAW: Jeremy Robson, barrister and lecturer in advocacy at Nottingham Trent University. He says the key performance measure is the number of trials that don’t go ahead when they’re meant to – classed as ineffective cases - and those that end unexpectedly, known as cracked trials.
ROBSON: The common reason for it not going ahead is because a defendant pleads guilty, but sometimes it’s because the CPS offer no evidence. It may be because something’s happened that’s out of the control of the CPS, like a witness no longer cooperating. But it’s still commonly the case that it’s because the CPS have looked at the case again and decided that the original charges weren’t correct or that the evidence isn’t as - 12 -
ROBSON cont: strong as they initially thought. And if that is the case, then that is a failure in the review process and time and money is being wasted, and that’s something that’s more in the control of the CPS then success, conviction or acquittal at trial, and certainly a high cracked trial rate caused by the Prosecution offering no evidence due to a re-review of the case is indicative of failures taking place at the initial stage.
SHAW: Last year, 35,000 cases were classed as ineffective or cracked because of issues linked to the Prosecution. That’s 18% of all listed trials, the highest rate for at least five years. The Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, and Lord Justice Leveson, who conducted an efficiency review, have both emphasised the importance of getting those numbers down. So what's the DPP, Alison Saunders, doing about it?
SAUNDERS: The largest single reason for cracked trials is Defence pleas entered which haven’t been offered before. So we’re working very hard on a number of things with our police colleagues, with others in the criminal justice system to encourage earlier guilty pleas.
SHAW: But in the year to April, 18% of all trials don’t take place because of CPS problems – one in five almost.
SAUNDERS: For us it’s a waste of resources, it’s a waste of resources for the court. But we do look at how many cases are down to CPS failures.
SHAW: Have you got a target about how much you want to reduce them by?
SAUNDERS: We have set certainly aims for areas to reduce the number of cases where we have witness issues. That’s not all within our gift. But we are making sure that we work with partners and we can work as much as we can to reduce that. In some places we will produce sort of really strong cases and people will still decide to plead at the last opportunity, but what we can do is make sure we provide the right evidence and produce it up front as early as we can.
- 13 -
SHAW: Making the correct decision about whether evidence in a case can sustain a prosecution is key to cutting unnecessary costs and reducing the risk of injustice. Earlier this year, the CPS Inspectorate, the official watchdog for the Service, said too many CPS charging decisions failed to address all the necessary issues, which was having an adverse impact further down the line in not guilty cases. Alison Levitt QC was the Principal Legal Adviser at the CPS for five years. In her first interview since leaving, she’s spoken to File on 4 about the variable quality of decision-making that she encountered.
LEVITT: I saw the decisions that came through and some of them were just fantastic and some of them were just wrong, and they were wrong, and they were wrong in quite fundamental respects, and the lawyers who were making them plainly either didn’t understand what they were meant to be doing or weren’t applying what it was that they did understand.
SHAW: So you saw some poor quality decisions and that led you to believe that there was something sort of deeper than just one or two people who were just out of their depth?
LEVITT: It’s not just my perception, but there are quite a lot of complaints from judges, for example, and the Defence community and private sector who complain about the decisions being made, and frankly even one wrong decision is really bad for that victim and bad for the perception of the organisation, which is why, as I say, my view of the CPS, that has to be its primary function, is getting every single one of those decisions right.
SHAW: Alison Levitt believes CPS lawyers make better decisions when they’ve had more courtroom experience. But a drive to increase the use of in-house CPS lawyers in court has stalled. The vast majority of Crown Court trials are conducted by external barristers who are hired in. Alison Levitt, who now works in a private law firm and is a part-time judge, says the more the CPS uses its own lawyers for Crown Court trials, the better they’ll become at assessing evidence and the likelihood of conviction.
- 14 -
LEVITT: It’s quite difficult to make really high quality legal decisions if you have no experience of how these things play out at trial. So if you’re having to make a decision about admissibility of evidence and you’ve not never actually taken part in a trial where you’ve seen the judge make the decision about it, your decision making, I think, is probably going to be slightly different from the person who is simply sitting in an office and doing it on a wholly theoretical basis. Equally, when you’re wondering how a jury is going to react to a particular piece of evidence, supposing you’re watching a video of a witness’s evidence to the police, you’ve got a much better chance of making a really firm, rigorous decision about it if you’ve actually been in court and seen how juries do things.
SHAW: So it’s important that the CPS has its own stock of advocates, but they have to be given the full breadth of experience in all sorts of cases, including more trials?
LEVITT: I would suggest that that’s right.
SHAW: Over the past few years, the CPS has publicly admitted that in one area in particular - sexual offending - it has made a series of flawed decisions. It missed opportunities to prosecute high profile individuals, including Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith. It failed to give enough weight to the evidence of child victims of sexual grooming and exploitation, and most recently the DPP was forced to reverse a decision not to bring proceedings against the former Labour MP, Lord Greville Janner. Now File on 4 has learned about another sexual abuse case in which the CPS stands accused of a serious miscalculation.
AUDIO EXTRACT FROM WEBSITE
MAN: India wants this 66 year old.
SHAW: It was a case that made big headlines for the Times of India.
EXTRACT FROM INDIAN TELEVISION - 15 -
PRESENTER: Raymond Varley is one of the most wanted criminals in India, charged with paedophilia, when a child sex abuse racket was busted in Goa in 1996.
SHAW: Raymond Varley, the British man sought by the Indian authorities, is a convicted sex offender from Halifax in West Yorkshire. He served prison terms in the UK in the 1970s and 80s for offences against young boys, before moving abroad and changing his name to Martin Ashley. Christine Beddoe, a campaigner against child sex tourism and trafficking, takes up the story.
BEDDOE: Raymond Varley’s name first emerges in the 1990s with the case of Freddie Peats, and Freddie Peats was a prolific sex offender in India, operating out of Goa. Raymond Varley was named as part of the network of paedophiles active at that time. There was a raid on Freddie Peats’ flat, where thousands of images were found and Varley was identified through that, but also was named as the photographer.
SHAW: And what efforts did the Indian authorities take to bring this ring of suspects to justice?
BEDDOE: There were a number of extraditions and successful convictions of foreigners, including from Australia and New Zealand. And Raymond Varley is the only one who still was on the loose.
SHAW: In 2012, however, Varley was finally tracked down and expectations were high that he’d soon be on a plane to India, with the extradition handled by a specialist unit at the CPS. During the protracted legal proceedings, Varley maintained he was a reformed character who’d had no involvement in the abuse of children in Goa. Then, late on in the process, came an unexpected development. Varley’s lawyers argued he was suffering from dementia and it would be unjust to send him for trial. Christine Beddoe:
BEDDOE: This was completely out of the blue. I think there was a collective gasp in court, and Varley himself had been in court on many of the hearings and I’d seen him and there was certainly no mention of dementia earlier and certainly no evidence of serious mental illness. Hearings were adjourned for him to obtain further evidence, and he
- 16 -
BEDDOE cont: submitted a report eventually from a psychologist that he himself instructed. She sat with him for two hours and based her opinion on that two hour visit.
SHAW: The Indian authorities didn’t believe Raymond Varley had dementia. But the CPS, acting for them in court, refused to commission its own expert to examine him. Instead, the CPS relied on cross-examination of the psychologist Varley had appointed, trusting the claims of dementia would fall apart. They did not. Although the District Judge hearing the matter said he was firmly of the view there was a prima facie case against Varley, he blocked the extradition on medical grounds. He acknowledged the evidence about Varley’s mental health was limited but, in the absence of any other experts, he found the psychologist’s testimony about dementia compelling. According to a source with knowledge of the case, Indian prosecutors were furious with the CPS – but the CPS says it’s received no complaints from them. Alison Saunders:
SAUNDERS: In this case we took the view, as the QC did, that the expert’s report was so fundamentally flawed, we didn’t need to produce an expert to say that, that we could do that under cross-examination. That’s quite routine and had happened on many occasions, both in extradition cases and indeed in other cases. Obviously we’re responsible for public money so we need to make sure that we are spending it wisely, and in that particular case we did not think we needed to, because the flaws were so obvious.
SHAW: That was a misjudgement, wasn’t it, in hindsight?
SAUNDERS: Well, the court disagreed with us and we obviously took that into account when we now consider any other cases.
SHAW: But this wasn’t just a bit of shoplifting or, you know, a minor criminal damage case; this is a man accused of indecent assault, serious sexual assaults on boys as young as five - potentially very, very serious offences.
SAUNDERS: And it’s not just … I mean, don’t get me wrong, we don’t just look at experts and decide not to call them if it’s a sort of shoplifting or, you know, - 17 -
SAUNDERS cont: if it’s a less serious case, we will look at them and we have looked at them in extradition cases previously, where we had decided that we didn’t need to.
BEDDOE: The moment that the judgment came down, he was effectively a free man. He cannot be convicted for those offences in the UK because it predates our legislation. The Indian authorities now really have found legally there is nowhere else they can go with this case, so Raymond Varley has walked away scot free all because of a failure to extradite.
SHAW: CPS staff comments:
READER IN STUDIO: It all boils down to over-centralisation, kit that’s not fit for purpose, senior managers and business managers that don’t know what the coalface job entails. No joined-up thinking with other agencies and bureaucracy being used as a smokescreen to cover up the blatant flaws. Of course, the underlying difficulty is lack of resources.
SHAW: As Alison Saunders said, the CPS has to watch carefully what it spends. Its budget – half a billion pounds – has fallen substantially over the past five years and is set to decline further. It’s funded by the Attorney General’s Office, which is not a department protected from cuts. Office space has been reduced, IT systems modernised, but the bulk of the savings has come through job cuts: 2,400 posts have gone since 2010. One of those to depart, after 24 years at the CPS, was Nazir Afzal, formerly North West England’s Chief Crown Prosecutor. He fears for the future.
AFZAL: Some cases will not be prosecuted that should have been, some cases will fail because they haven’t been prepared as well as they could have been. Deals will be done in a backroom – ie I will take a plea to three cases of whatever theft when there’s seven others I could have prosecuted if the evidence had been provided to us. More and more people will have to wait and wait and wait for their cases.
SHAW: Do you think there is a point at which the CPS can say no more cuts? Do you think the tipping point has been reached? - 18 -
AFZAL: The tipping point was reached in 2015 and it was one of the reasons why I decided that I didn’t want to be part of the Service, because I felt it was asking too much of the people that I have so much respect for, the people I work with and work for to carry on doing what they’re doing without the recognition and with constantly getting it in the neck for the decisions they take and for the work they put in. I mean, I reduced the budget in the North West by 27%. That’s 27% fewer staff, and at the same time you’re not just reducing junior staff, because they’re your least expensive staff in terms of salaries, so you’re losing experienced staff, I mean people who have been there twenty, thirty years in some cases, and you’re losing their corporate knowledge as well. So you’re asking more junior staff, less experienced staff to do more with substantially less in a climate where they’re constantly under scrutiny.
SHAW: And the spotlight has been on those at the top of the organisation for failing to mount a successful prosecution for the offence of female genital mutilation; for pursuing, then suddenly abandoning, ten Operation Elveden cases, involving allegations of illegal payments by journalists; and for the controversy over Lord Janner. The former DPP, Sir Ken Macdonald, who’s now a Liberal Democrat peer, suggests the cuts have prompted a legal brain drain away from CPS headquarters.
MACDONALD: One of the things that’s had to be cut in the CPS, as a result of the Government cuts, has been the policy directorate. That was the part of the CPS which developed prosecution policy for the DPP. That was an extremely important function which I used to rely on very, very heavily. I think it is inevitable, when you’re going through a process of serious cuts, in an organisation which is expected to retain the highest quality frontline service that some of the headquarters functions, the policy functions, the legal advice functions are going to suffer and I think that’s a dangerous situation
SHAW: Dangerous - what do you mean by that?
MACDONALD: Well, I mean dangerous in the sense that, you know, it’s important that the CPS is making the right decisions. Those posts need to be funded, and if they’re not, then I think decision-making is bound to suffer.
- 19 -
SHAW: But Alison Saunders dismisses criticism that the cuts have left her exposed.
SAUNDERS: We’ve made very difficult decisions around some of the cuts, as you have to, and looking at what we have been very keen and careful to do is preserve the front line.
SHAW: But was that a good move, to cut your policy directorate?
SAUNDERS: Well, you have to make choices. Do you want prosecutors preparing cases and prosecuting them in court or do you want policy advisors?
SHAW: But doesn’t everything flow from good policy, good practice?
SAUNDERS: Absolutely, absolutely and we still have that, so we’re not for one moment saying we haven’t got that. What we have done is reorganised it so that we have a smaller and, some might say, more nimble and flexible policy division.
SHAW: Do you have the best quality legal advice for you personally when you’re going through some of these really difficult decisions?
SAUNDERS: I think so and I think it’s quite insulting to those staff who remain in the CPS and who work in those divisions to suggest that they’re not good quality - I think they’re very good quality.
SHAW: People say you couldn’t cope with any more cuts, that it’s already overstretched, already under pressure – on the brink of collapse is what one solicitor said to us. Could you really cope with another round of 20%, 25%?
SAUNDERS: That’s why we’re talking to the Treasury about the pressures that we’re under. I’m not saying we’re not under pressure and we are talking to the - 20 -
SAUNDERS cont: Treasury about that. We have already made it clear where we think we need more resources and we will see what the Treasury decide.
ACTUALITY IN BRISTOL
SHAW: It’s mid-afternoon in the centre of Bristol. I’ve just come out of the Crown Court, where five men have appeared, accused of murder. It wasn’t a trial, simply a preliminary hearing, usually a straightforward affair, all over in a few minutes. But, symptomatic of the problems we’ve been told about, there was delay and confusion. Defence lawyer Ian Kelcey was in court, representing one of the men.
KELCEY: As you will gather, the CPS didn’t seem to have instructed counsel until about five or ten minutes before the hearing. There were no case papers for court, they hadn’t arrived. To be frank, it was a bit of a shambles and it’s a sad reflection, I think, on the state of the justice system in the most serious of cases we have that that is happening.
SHAW: So the Crown Prosecution Service didn’t really seem to have instructed anyone to represent the Crown in this murder case with a number of defendants involved?
KELCEY: Well Counsel told me that he’d been instructed about ten minutes previously. He didn’t know much about it at all – didn’t know who was representing who, the court didn’t have a list of the names of the defendants because those hadn’t been supplied by the Magistrates’ Court or the CPS.
SHAW: That seems to be an extraordinary state of affairs. We’re talking about a murder case here.
KELCEY: We are talking, we are talking about the most serious case in the criminal calendar. Unfortunately the system is creaking and I feel very sorry for the lawyers on the ground in the CPS, who are trying to keep the system together, but actually not succeeding.
- 21 -
SIGNATURE TUNE