Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 110)
TUESDAY 9 MAY 2000
MR DAVID
CALVERT-SMITH
QC AND MR
MARK ADDISON
100. Could it not be implemented straight away,
informing the victims?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) Our pilots, which are running at
different levels of detail, explanation and different systems,
have been running for some time. We are going to need the money
to do it properly. Our current intention is to have a system which
the public will accept and that we can live with by this time
next year. I hope we will be able to stick to that timetable but
it does involve training and it does involve, as you pointed out,
the need to make sure that the premises are suitable for the purpose
and so on because these can be very fraught and difficult occasions.
Mrs Dean
101. Director, what contribution is the CPS
expected to make to fulfilling the Public Service Agreement for
the criminal justice system as a whole? In answering, can you
say how far is it delivering on these expectations? What improvements
could still be made?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) That is a big question. Do you
want to start because you are one of the champions of it?
(Mr Addison) The criminal justice system as a whole
published for the first time a plan and some objectives for last
year and will be publishing shortly a revised plan for the current
financial year. These deal with what one might call generally
cross cutting issues. One good example of that is the requirement
to reduce the time taken to process persistent youth offenders.
The CPS is right in the middle of the criminal justice system.
It is the narrow neck, if you like, between the police and courts.
Therefore, how we perform, for better or for worse, has a huge
effect on the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the criminal
justice system as a whole. Certainly we want to play our full
part in delivering on all of those objectives, just as we want
to play our part in the specific one I have mentioned, persistent
youth offenders. David and I both keep a very careful eye on how
each area is doing in terms of its performance on those issues
and will intervene if we think it is necessary to do so. There
is to be a lot more work done across the whole system on how we
can develop that process and what sort of management arrangements
we need to make sure that across all of those objectives the system
works together as well as it should. There should be some news
on that in a couple of months' time when the spending review is
completed.
(Mr Calvert-Smith) Can I come in? We are, as Mark
says, the pivotal agency once the system has started to work in
a given case. If we do not do our job properly then we will let
down the police and victims on the one hand and we will let down
the courts and, indeed, the defendants on the other. So we are
right in the middle once the process starts. All the objectives
and performance measures, which are engaged once the system is
working and a person is within the system, we are working hard
to play a full part in. The earlier objectives, such as reducing
the level of actual crime and disorder, are really principally
outside our remit, the crime prevention methods. We are only engaged
when somebody is being prosecuted and the crime has been committed
although we do sit, without I hope compromising our independence,
on the community partnerships and partnerships under the Crime
and Disorder Act but really mainly as observers or to offer legal
advice because we cannot compromise our independence by saying
that we will, for instance, prosecute every single case or event,
a particular offence which is not liked or not prosecuted. But,
on reducing delay we have a key role to play and the CCPs are
under no illusion that the Government target on persistent youth
offenders is very high on their agenda. Improving the satisfaction
level of victims, what we have been discussing in the last few
minutes, and witnesses, making sure that the defendant's rights
are respected and the general promotion of confidence in the system
by, I hope, increasing the confidence in this very important bit
of the system, those are absolutely central to our thinking. We
are, I believe, on inter-agency groups pushing them all hard.
102. What difficulties does the CPS face in
providing statistical and performance data which are compatible
with data in the rest of the criminal justice system? This is
back to your computers.
(Mr Calvert-Smith) It is back, for instance, to Glidewell
who was frustrated by the fact that each agency seemed to collect
its statistics in a different way for understandable reasons because
they had different things to count. Work has gone on since Glidewell
and is continuing. As you rightly say, Mrs Dean, the nirvana,
if you like, is really sophisticated IT which will enable each
agency to count the way it needs to count for its own purposes
but for all the granules of information to be able to be listed
in any way which, for instance, this Committee would like them
to be listed. The preliminary progress we have made, which I think
is of some help although it has not finally been ratified by ministers,
is that the basic unit for counting is for most purposes now agreed,
that is to say a defendant in a set of proceedings. One could
go on for ages about the different ways one could count, individual
offences, individual defendants, individual cases and so on, but
that is what we have fixed on temporarily.
(Mr Addison) It is an immense waste of time and energy
when local groups are getting together to try to improve the performance
of the system and everybody turns out to be talking about different
measures which do not align. The objective of trying to achieve
a common set of measures across the whole of the system so that
we can all work on it productively is obviously essential and
it will be impossible to roll out a satisfactory IT system without
sorting that out first.
Mr Stinchcombe
103. Just a couple of questions about Higher
Court Advocates and rights of audience. Is it important to the
CPS that Higher Court Advocates get rights of audience to the
higher courts?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) There are two ways in which it
is important that they should. One is that it will enable local
chief crown prosecutors to have a wider choice as to how they
do their business in the Crown Court, whether it is going to be
cheaper and as good or better to field an inhouse advocate to
do particular types of work, or to get an independent advocate
to do it, so it increases the scope for savings and more efficient
ways of doing business. Secondly, of course, it improves the morale
of large swathes of CPS staff, some of whom until they joined
the CPS were able to appear in the high courts because of being
in an independent profession. They have the option of going for
higher court advocacy as an option, so that it makes the job more
attractive and more interesting, and therefore will raise morale.
For both those reasons it is important that higher court rights
are more widely spread.
104. When do you expect them to be given full
rights of audience?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) We are waiting upon agreement between
the Lord Chancellor and the professions as to the precise rules
under which the Access to Justice Act will come in full force.
We had hoped it would have already happened on 1 April of this
year but because there has been a delay in agreeing the precise
rules under which Access to Justice will operate we are still
waiting, the Bar is still waiting that is to say. Solicitors within
the Crown Prosecution Service have already exercised limited higher
court rights under the terms of the Courts and Legal Services
Act provision and the Lord Chancellor's decision. They have been
doing a mixture of pleas in the Crown Court, committals for sentence,
some appeals against conviction and sentence from the magistrates'
court, pleas and directions hearings, and on two occasions of
which I am aware acting as junior counsel to a QC in a contested
trial.
105. That is fairly limited coverage, is it
not?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) Yes, but in case volume terms it
is potentially huge because the majority of defendants in the
Crown Court do plead guilty or are committed there for sentence
by magistrates under the plea before venue provisions. In terms
of actual cases it is a very substantial potential proportion
of them.
106. How much savings could be generated?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) We are still working on the numbers.
There are an awful lot of numbers that have to be thrown into
the pot for a true comparison to be made. If one is talking about
redeploying the existing staff of the CPS, it is probably easy
enough to compare the cost of half a day of employing that lawyer
with the cost of sending an independent person to court. The current
savings on the limited classes of work, the most obvious ones
are savings to be made, are in the region of 30?
(Mr Addison) About a third.
(Mr Calvert-Smith) Yes, about a third. When one starts
talking of perhaps hiring in new staff with all the consequences
of having to pay them effectively for life as opposed to paying
the barrister for the duration of the case and then getting rid
of him or her if you do not like him or her—holidays, sick
pay, the whole paraphernalia of new employees—then the comparisons
get rather more difficult. How much more is it going to cost and
how much is the quality going to be affected by redesigning the
CPS in that way? The costs so far on the limited work that the
CPS are doing in house clearly benefit the CPS and, therefore,
the taxpayer by the redeployment of lawyers already within the
service.
107. Is it right to conclude from what you have
just said that this decision, for which we are waiting, could
have very significant implications for the CPS, for its costs,
for its savings and for the way it deploys its staff?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) I think they will be significant.
I do not want to be too dramatic about it. It will be in the end,
as I said, for the individual chief crown prosecutor to decide
how most economically and without sacrificing the quality to do
his or her Crown court business. It may be more cost effective
to do more work in-house in area A and less in area B. Mark, I
do not know whether you want to add anything?
(Mr Addison) I was just going to add the point in
any case that the cost comparisons are always complicated because,
as David has rightly pointed out, the headline savings look like
about a third, if you just compare the fee you would pay to the
Bar with the salary costs of the individual if we were undertaking
the work in-house. Really you need to add on a number of additional
costs to cover things like accommodation and training and all
the rest of it to get a genuine cost comparison. We are not in
a position to do that yet, we are still in the fairly early stages
of the initiative. We are pretty clear there will be some savings
but they have yet to be precisely quantified. They will be less
than that figure of a third but we think they will still be positive.
There will be some savings there. There is then the complication
of the fact that the savings accrue on a separate budget, we actually
have two budgets, one for counsel fees and the other for our own
running costs. There is a whole series of complicated mechanisms
that we need to look at alongside the development of our Higher
Court Advocates to make sure we get the best possible deal for
the criminal justice system as a whole.
108. Are there any training implications for
the CPS?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) Oh, yes.
109. What are those training implications, briefly?
(Mr Calvert-Smith) We have considered it right that
no-one embark on higher court advocacy without the CPS being clear
and without reservation that the person concerned is capable of
representing the CPS properly. An intensive training course is
currently available under the supervision of Nottingham Law School
for our Higher Court Advocates. I believe that it is right that
because there are concerns within the judiciary, for instance,
about the whole concept of the CPS and higher court rights, that
we make sure that those who do go to court are well capable of
performing the function and inspire confidence rather than reduce
it so that currently the training implications are quite extensive.
Chairman
110. Thank you. We do have three questions touching
on the Human Rights Act, I wonder if it might be convenient if
we give those to you to drop us a line about them?
Chairman: I do want to thank you, Mr Calvert-Smith
and Mr Addison. It was always going to be a very difficult job
to canter over such an extensive area but I hope you feel that
it has been worthwhile, we certainly do. Thank you very much indeed.
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