Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
TUESDAY 9 MAY 2000
MR DAVID
CALVERT-SMITH
QC AND MR
MARK ADDISON
20. A 42-area structure should make it easier,
should it not? Not more difficult.
(Mr Calvert-Smith) It is simply a question of time
and hands to do the work. My lawyers are extremely busy doing
the day job. With cases which are totally out of proportion to
the normal run of the mill case, together with the quite serious
cases they do, it is very difficult for areas to rally round and
cope.
21. Lastly, there was a judicial review over
the failure to prosecute anyone in relation to the death of Simon
Jones, the building worker who died at Shoreham Docks. I just
wanted to ask, really, what changes have been made in this area?
Particularly, there have been increasing demands for prosecutions
of employers or people for industrial injuries and accidents and,
indeed, in connection with rail crashes. Can we see some prospect
that there will be more prosecutions in this area?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) Can I get away from the Simon Jones
case, which is still under consideration and I do not wish to
prejudice either a potential defendant or the victims' feelings
now. We are under instruction from the Court to re-review the
decision and we are doing so. However, in general terms, I am
entirely in favour of an offence, properly drafted, of corporate
killing, which will enable the criminal courts to bear down on
negligent treatment of employees in a workplace. The common law
has done its best to keep pace with the demands of the new working
environment, and I think that in a case which the Attorney General
was good enough to take on a reference recently, concerning the
Southall Rail Crash, the common law seems to have reached the
buffers in terms of developing itself through the judges. We attempted,
in that case, to convince the court that the common law had now
developed to an extent that one could reach the company by aggregating
various failures within the company's system and making one charge
against a company which owed a duty to its passengers—in
that case—and its staff because of recent developments in
the law of gross negligence and manslaughter, but we failed because
of the requirement of a human defendant—a single, human
defendant—who was, him or herself, guilty of the offence
rather than a whole collection of people whose various failings
combined to cause death. The process was started—and I was
there—I think, with the Herald of Free Enterprise case,
where at least we established the principle that manslaughter
does lie, in such circumstances, against a corporation and a director
of such a company. Since then, gradually, cases have been coming
on stream, but, at the moment, the law is in our view insufficient
to deal with what is culpable conduct sufficiently.
22. What should be done to correct that deficiency
in the law?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) I would hope that the recommendations
of the Law Commission of an offence of corporate killing would
be enacted.
Chairman
23. Mr Calvert-Smith, can I take you back to
that Derby case? What you are really saying is that the investigation
grew to such a size that the then area was overwhelmed and thought
it could do nothing. Would you not have expected the responsible
manager of that area to get on the `phone to Ludgate Hill and
say "Help"?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) I may have unintentionally misled
you. This case was always part of the safeguard arrangements,
as I understand it, and, therefore, did, almost at once, come
to Ludgate Hill. So that what I was saying applies to the present
rather than then. When the safeguard arrangements were in place
all cases involving injury to a member of the public came to headquarters
and special case work lawyers were effectively drafted in from
the areas to deal with them as headquarters cases, although physically
they were still wherever their main workplace was. The whole investigation
took a very long time. I am sorry to say, I have not come prepared
with the exact dates and facts and figures.
24. You have said that was not entirely your
fault. Not entirely.
(Mr Calvert-Smith) However, I do remember reading
the case at the time, and, indeed, I read the papers in that particular
case because I needed to ratify what I then believed to be the
right decision on the various incidents which did or did not merit
prosecution. It took an awfully long time to come to us, and I
agree it took a long time to decide. Treasury Counsel are extremely
busy, they are prosecuting cases in court day after day and we
are, as a service, under great strain. We have to keep the cases
going on the day-to-day job, as it were.
25. One other thing, coming back to deaths in
custody, as you are one of the three people now responsible for
taking decisions in these matters. I am sure this is the case
but I want to check it with you. If it was a case of an apparent
suicide in a prison cell, you would not automatically say "That
is the end of it".
(Mr Calvert-Smith) Not any more. Of course, we do
have to get a report from the police. We are not the investigating
authority, but we have to get a report from the police. There
have been too many cases recently where, as we all know, what
appeared to somebody at the time to be suicide clearly was not,
for our not to be tending, I hope, to be reasonably sensitive
now.
26. Can we move on now to the reform of the
CPS area structure. Thirteen areas and 93 branches have now been
replaced by a unitary structure of 42 areas co-terminous with
existing police boundaries. It makes one wonder why that was not
done at the start. This is the second re-organisation, with earlier
ones in 1987 and 1993. Have we got it right this time, Director?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) I hope so. I think that the idea
of 42 areas where virtually all the agencies are co-terminous
is a very good one. I believe that on the ground all agencies
would say that this new structure works better for them, therefore
it is more local justice than the old system where the people
who were taking the decisions were remote. There are, of course,
however, problems with a service like mine. Mark Addison and I,
effectively, line-manage 42 people, and, therefore, the degree
of management control that it is feasible to impose, as it were,
is bound to be less than it is in a 13-area structure. I cannot
be speaking to all 42 on more than a reasonably irregular basis.
Likewise, Mark. So, so far, I believe, it is working well. It
does mean that I place heavy reliance on the CPS Inspectorate
as an eye, as it were, to constantly go round the country checking
that everything is working well, and I do rely greatly on feedback
not only from my own people but from other CJ agencies in the
area for any sign that we are not performing well in such-and-such
an area. So that, to come back to your question, I think the answer
is yes, we have got it right.
27. You lead me on to my next question nicely.
You may have seen the Express on Sunday accusing the CPS
of this junket on the taxpayer. It makes the point about the difficulty,
in that organisational structure, of all of those concerned responsible
within their areas, and you, nationally, for what is going on
in the context of trying to ensure consistency right across the
system. Do you want to comment on that report in the Express
on Sunday?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) I am grateful. The junket, so-called,
is the only occasion in the year in which we actually have all
42 CCPs and area business managers in one place at one time. It
is the only time in which we can sit down, all together. Therefore,
in my view, it is an absolutely essential part of running a national
service with 42 areas. A great deal of work was done over the
two days and the cost per head was £65 per day, which, these
days, with all meals, accommodation and conference facilities
thrown in, was, we thought, a good deal.
28. How, in practice, Mr Calvert-Smith, do you
keep regularly in touch with those 42 areas? You can spend your
time getting on the trains, I suppose, going round the country,
but there must be more effective ways of doing that. Is there
some regional grouping as well for management purposes?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) I will try and explain the various
ways. I hope Mark Addison will chip in if I miss some out. Mark
Addison and I, roughly once a fortnight, do in fact visit an area
of the CPS and have, pretty well, in-depth discussions, not only
with senior management but with the staff individually and collectively.
Last week we went to Birmingham—
29. A very fine place to go.
(Mr Calvert-Smith) Exactly, and next week we are going
to Yorkshire, and so on. So that we do visit the areas. I speak,
on a regular basis, on the telephone with a rough agenda to the
CCPs, say for an hour or so, on a regular basis to get an update.
The Directors' Board (now renamed the CPS Board) has a CCP from
each of the government regions on it. So there are ten CCPs on
the Board. Each representative on the Board has a family group,
as we have christened them, of the other areas within the government
region. They meet in advance of the CPS Board meeting and, hopefully,
the concerns and contributions of the other CCPs are brought to
us.
(Mr Addison) It might be worth adding that one of
the concerns we have had from the outset is that we need to make
sure that communication flows around the organisation, both between
the different areas, to ensure that each knows what the other
is doing, and up and down the line work well. We have invested
in new IT networks which enable all the different areas to talk
to each other, which is proving to be a very important bit of
the jigsaw. We have also constructed a mechanism of consultative
groups, which involve cross-cuts of all the staff at different
levels—I chair the national one and there are equivalent
groups locally—to make sure that messages do move around
the system and that we are kept in touch with concerns, both of
a managerial sort but, also, of a case work sort, that may develop
at local level. With a 42-area structure and no middle tier, unless
we spend time in actually talking to each other and making sure
we are in touch, it is not going to work.
30. Tell me, as with any national organisation
like that, how do you manage the allocation of resources between
42 areas? Is it, as it were, depending on case load and staffing,
or is it a little more refined?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) Can I ask the Chief Executive to
explain, but there is a system.
(Mr Addison) There is a system which is one that we
are constantly trying to improve and will never be perfect, but
which is based on case load. It divides the cases up into different
sorts and it attempts to associate a particular packet of resources
with a particular sort of case.
31. Forgive me, is this by mode of trial or
by actual offence?
(Mr Addison) By mode of trial and by outcome. It is
a national system and, therefore, it produces resource allocations
based on national averages, which is one of the difficulties with
it, and we are trying to develop it so that it can be based on
local figures as well as national figures. It is also, inevitably,
a system which is going to be subject to a lot of pressure when
you are dividing up resources around 42 areas, some of which are
very big, like London, one-sixth of the country, and some of which
are tiny, like Warwickshire, with about 25 people in it. It is
going to come under a lot of strain, and it is indeed one of the
things we do keep a careful watch on and put some time and effort
into updating. It has worked reasonably well. We do not follow
it absolutely slavishly; we do try to adjust allocations in the
light of what we know are local circumstances. It has not worked
badly and we are anxious to develop it and improve it. It can
only, of course, allocate the resource we have, so it tries to
get relativities right. It will always be subject to the criticism—
32. One of my colleagues will be asking you
some questions about that in a moment.
(Mr Addison) I shall wait.
33. We have had these 42 areas up and running
for just over a year. Is it your judgment that they are all working
effectively, or are there some things in some areas which remain
to be done?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) I think there are a number of areas
where we are still developing. First of all, we are still negotiating,
area by area, the final structure of the Criminal Justice Units
for the magistrates' court work, which will work much more closely
with the police than hitherto, and Trial Units, which will, it
is hoped, mean that we focus more of our lawyers' attention on
the serious cases and more of the designated case-workers' (as
they are called) attention on the very, very low level crime in
the magistrates' court. So that that is still being worked out,
and areas, because of geography, because of resources, because
of courts' structures—listing practices and the like—are
negotiating their own arrangements subject to national and, indeed,
ministerial approval in due course of the exact way in which that
is going. So that we are still only halfway through the 42-area
structure reorganisation to that extent. Secondly, I think that
there are a number of particular areas in which the new structure
is still learning, so to speak; not least, the relationship between
the Chief Executive equivalent in the area and the legal boss,
as to exact spheres of responsibility. Training is something which
has taken too much of a back seat, perhaps, partly as a result
of this big reorganisation. That is, I hope, now going to be gathered
up under a new training manager and improved. Equality is a matter
in some parts of the country, and perhaps structurally as well,
in which we have still got a lot of ground to cover. So there
is an awful lot to do, and I suspect that even were we here a
year hence there would still be quite a bit to do.
34. Can you put a figure on the cost of the
reorganisation?
(Mr Addison) We allowed for, in the first two years
(that is last year and this year) an extra cost, transitional
cost, of £3 million a year. That covered things like some
changes to premises in the estate, the introduction of the IT
system I have just mentioned and some severance pay costs for
those who left us as a result of the restructuring. Those were
one-off costs of transition. The cost of actually running on a
permanent basis, with the new structure of 42, is something that
we are anxious to get a better handle on. There are clearly some
additional costs that are associated with the sort of things we
have been talking about—on extra investment in communication,
and so on. However, in general, the specific transfer costs amounted
to about £6 million over two years.
Chairman: Which brings us nicely on to aspects
of this.
Mr Stinchcombe
35. As I understand it, within each of these
areas there will be certain reforms following Glidewell, including
implementation of recommendations to do with Criminal Justice
Units and, also, Trial Units. Just by way of background, so that
I know what those units are meant to be doing, what are their
functions, and how would you differentiate those functions from
the way in which the previous areas used to undertake similar
jobs?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) Some years ago the service went
from a structure which did divide crown court work from magistrates'
court work (in that there were crown court sections within areas)
to a structure whereby a team took all cases within a particular
geographical remit and dealt with them whether they were magistrates'
court or crown court cases. One of the results of that was that
because the priority is always the next day's work in the magistrates'
court and a lawyer was always required to present the work in
the magistrates' court, that, obviously occupied first place in
any priority; you have simply got to get somebody to court for
tomorrow morning's session. There was a perception within the
service, and without it, that that meant that once a case had
been committed for trial, the lawyers were so busy running around
in the magistrates' court that they lost ownership, so to speak,
of the crown court work at just the moment when it really needed
a lawyer's hand, as it were, on the tiller up to the point of
trial. So that, in one sense, what we are doing is reversing a
change which only happened in the early 1990s—that is, so
far as the crown court is concerned. That has meant that areas
have—many of them—already moved, in advance of official
blessing and the official appointment of a head of the trial unit
and so on, to a system of working which is very similar to the
system of working that applied before, where the crown court unit
contained lawyers whose principal function was to prepare crown
court cases for trial and, indeed, were much more active instructing
counsel and coming to conferences and so on. The new part of it,
which is the magistrates' court part, (which is, for those with
very long memories, not dissimilar to things that apparently happened
before the foundation of the CPS) is this much closer working
in Criminal Justice Units recommended by Glidewell on magistrates'
court work. That is taking a good deal longer because, obviously,
it requires the co-operation of the police and, to some extent,
the co-operation of the magistrates' courts themselves, so that
units can be set up which are fully staffed to provide a proper
service to the magistrates. There are estate problems—who
has got the room to accommodate such an area, and so on. Plans
are at an advanced stage and some are ready to roll almost at
once. They will typically involve police and CPS staff working,
more often than not, in a police premises somewhere, whether a
station or an office, sometimes in a CPS premises. The real gain
will, we hope, be the creation of a single file rather than, as
at present, two sets of paper which is wasteful duplication of
effort and work. It is also hoped that the process of being in
the same premises will be an educative one for both sides, so
that the culture of blame which seemed to have grown up between
the CPS and the police—which did not help anybody and certainly
not the cause of justice or victims—will lessen because
of the much closer working arrangements. So the really big change
is the CJU change. The Trial Unit is, really, a reversion, in
many respects, to what we had before.
36. To what extent are these changes subject
to constraints of existing resources?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) Quite considerable in some areas,
not so much in others. It is often a matter of chance as to whether
there is convenient accommodation for such a unit in a police
station. I should have mentioned that in a Trial Unit instead
we are getting good co-operation from crown court centres in parts
of the country, who themselves are proposing to allow the Trial
Unit to operate from within the crown court itself. However, resources
are a constraint, and ideal solutions sometimes are not going
to be possible because they cost too much.
37. There are particular constraints in certain
areas?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) Yes.
38. What kind of additional support can be introduced
into those areas where there are constraint and resource problems?
(Mr Addison) It may just be worth noting that in some
areas, even in a relatively resource-unconstrained world, it would
be quite hard to make new arrangements for co-location in some
of the rural areas where the police forces are highly dispersed.
We are going to have to rely, in effect, on a virtual CJU, of
using information technology to bring people together rather than
physically bringing them together. The areas where there is the
potential for co-location but where resources are holding it back
will be eased a little bit by the success we have had in our bid
to the Capital Modernisation Fund, where we have £5 million
across the country to lubricate that process. Even that will not
enable us to vacate a building, for instance, which would otherwise
sit empty and take on another one. Those costs would be enormous
and I do not think would represent good value for money, from
any point of view. So the fundamental restraint is the estate
constraint, and many of our staff are in buildings with quite
long leases and long break clauses. So those constraints are going
to be with us for some time and would require such huge injections
of resource to resolve that I do not think that is realistic.
We do think there is the possibility, when the new linked-up IT
system comes through, for resolving a good many of those problems,
but wherever we can we shall move quickly to CJUs and Trial Units,
where the estate permits, which will be helped by the £5
million.
39. When do you expect to be able to come before
us and say "We have got CJUs and Trial Units in all 42 areas"?
(Mr Addison) In all the 42 will be some years off,
particularly in an area, I think, like London, where the prospects
of moving quickly to CJUs and Trial Units within, say, a matter
of three years, are quite remote. However, within a couple of
years, I think, we could give you some detailed figures, but the
majority of the country will be covered. For instance, in the
next year we would expect 20 Trial Units to be set up and 10 CJUs—I
speak from memory, but I think those are the right figures—with
the first ones, as David says, coming into action very soon.
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