Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)
CROWN PROSECUTION
SERVICE
8 MARCH 2006
Q140 Mr Khan: How much time do you
want?
Mr Macdonald: I would hope that
within a couple of years, once we see the picture of police reform,
once we have our new structures, we should see significant changes.
I would hope so.
Q141 Chairman: Sir John, I think
we should do this more often within the life of a Parliament:
have short hearing towards the end of the Parliament. When we
are given all these promises by permanent secretaries, we should
have them back before the end of the Parliament.
Sir John Bourn: Right.
Q142 Greg Clark: I have been impressed
by your evidence. Your assessment of the situation and your plans
going forward seem obviously right, but the question that hangs
over the hearing is one that Sadiq Khan has alluded to: why has
it not happened and how can we be confident that it will happen?
We should like to think that it would. You mentioned the police
reforms and some things being the responsibility of the DCA, but
quite a few of these recommendations are within your own grasp.
Take the question that Mr Bacon was pursuing about the video recorders,
VHS versus DVD. It is certainly a matter for the courts, but it
is also clear from the NAO Report that your officers are still
relying on VHS, so that is something you can do something about.
The technology is quite cheap and even if it did not cover every
DVD/CCTV recording, it would cover a fair few. Why have you not,
in the two and a half years since you have been in post, managed
to make some progress on these points?
Mr Macdonald: You are right, we
can look at some of these recommendations and ask why this was
not done before and I accept that criticism. I can only say that
we have been doing an awful lot and the reforms that we have been
driving through have taken a huge amount of energy and focus.
We are changing very much for the better. We are modernising the
CPS and I can only say we cannot do everything at once. That is
not a very satisfactory answer and you will say this is a very
simple thing to do, but we are concentrating on some very complex
and very radical reforms at the moment and we have taken on as
much as a management team in terms of reform as we possibly could
take on over the last couple of years.
Q143 Greg Clark: In my brief period
on this Committee I have found that what has been impressive and
given me cause for hope is permanent secretaries and chief executives
appearing who seem to be able to cut through the tortuous tangle
of obstacles which delays progress and yet there are always reviews
going on; every part of Government is constantly being re-shuffled
around and I hope that you will not waiting for the police restructuring
to take place.
Mr Macdonald: No; no.
Q144 Greg Clark: I just hope that
some of these caveats—
Mr Macdonald: I do not want to
be misunderstood. No, no, no. Having done the work in November
and December, we are piloting these new structures in April across
four areas, West Cumbria, Coventry, Thames and Camberwell Green,
and thereafter across the whole country.
Q145 Greg Clark: You have already
had a pilot in Manchester, in Sale.
Mr Macdonald: No, these were systems
which they developed which are working well.
Q146 Greg Clark: If they are working
well, is that not a pilot if you have seen it working in a certain
place? It is written up very interestingly in the NAO Report which
contrasts the City of Manchester with Sale, so you have a pilot
there. Why do you need to have another one?
Mr Macdonald: We want to see it
in more extensive areas. I am really not trying to delay this.
Q147 Greg Clark: Why is it, when
you have evidence here that the NAO have at great expense gone
out to gather and we know that it works and it is obviously going
to work because it is common sense, we are delaying all the time?
Mr Macdonald: I do not think we
are. We are talking about looking at what we learned in November
and December, adding that to the experience of Cardiff and Manchester
and road-testing it. So far as the police reform programme is
concerned, the only thing that interests us about that is that
the BCU structures may change and these new structures that we
are developing have to be allied to BCUs. That is the only hesitation
that we have. We are not dragging our heels about this, this is
something which we can only do now that we have all of the new
roles in place, but we shall make pretty swift progress on it.
Q148 Greg Clark: Okay, but I should
have hoped that Manchester and Cardiff might have been pilots.
Is there something about the model that your operate under? We
have Mr Foster here as well as yourself. My understanding is that
the fact that we have a chief executive of the CPS came out of
an inquiry which suggested that there should be two roles, so
that the DPP would concentrate entirely on legal questions, whereas
during the evidence today actually you have fielded most of the
questions of process perfectly satisfactorily. Was the original
recommendation a wrong recommendation?
Mr Macdonald: It is a slight simplification.
The way the system works is that I am head of the prosecuting
authority and the Chief Crown Prosecutors account to me directly
for all legal issues and legal policy and so on. They also account
to me, but through the chief executive, for management issues.
I take final responsibility. Mr Foster could just as easily have
answered those questions.
Q149 Greg Clark: I understand you
have final responsibility, but clearly in your head is a large
concern for the process of this sort of thing, whereas the reforms
that set up the structure, I cannot remember which inquiry it
was . . .
Mr Macdonald: Glidewell.
Q150 Greg Clark: That recommended
precisely that you should be free from troubling yourself with
some of these administrative things and you should just be concentrating
entirely on the legal things. Clearly that has not worked in practice:
you are thinking a lot about administration.
Mr Macdonald: No, it has; it has
actually. I know about all of this because I feel I need to know
about it, but Mr Foster is responsible for these day-to-day management
issues. I could not feel at all comfortable, as head of the CPS,
not understanding these issues and not understanding how it is
working and having a view about it, but he is responsible. As
we move to this restructuring he will be responsible with our
director of business development for pushing these reforms through
and will Report to me about how it is going. There is a pretty
clear division.
Q151 Greg Clark: Is it not the case
that the legal members of staff report directly to you, whereas
the administrative members of staff report to the Chief Executive?
Mr Macdonald: It is not quite
that clear-cut. Some performance management of lawyers is a purely
managerial function. Putting these lawyers into new combined units
is not really a legal issue, although it is dealing with lawyers
and the way they work. I am responsible for all the legal decisions
which are made.
Q152 Greg Clark: But what we hear
in practice is that actually, in terms of joint working between
the administrative side and the legal side, there are two quite
distinct streams and it is difficult to combine them and at various
points in the Report, on page 34 for example paragraph 3.11, it
says "In some offices this can be a significant barrier to
the development of close working relationships between legal and
non-legal staff". Given that you need to work well with outside
organisations, it slightly concerns me that your internal structure
does not promote close working. I wonder whether this should not
be part of your review as to whether this dual-stream structure
is the right one to have.
Mr Macdonald: Mr Clark, you have
identified something which is important, which is that there is
far too much of a division inside the CPS between administrators
and lawyers and part of this new unit structure would be that
administrators, caseworkers and lawyers would work more closely
together. This is a legacy from the early days of the CPS when
the lawyers saw themselves as being a completely different animal
to everybody else. We are struggling quite hard to break that
down. You are right: it is not a helpful form of apartheid actually.
Q153 Greg Clark: So you will look
at that.
Mr Macdonald: We have been actively
looking at it for some time.
Q154 Greg Clark: There are cultural
aspects to that. As I understand it, the keeping of time sheets,
time records, is something which is resisted by lawyers whereas
it is something that is broadly accepted by other industries.
Mr Macdonald: Lawyers are peculiarly
difficult people to manage. It is very challenging to manage lawyers.
They feel that they ought to be in control of their own time and
their own space and make decisions in their own good time and
should not be told what to do by anybody.
Q155 Chairman: Not like other people.
Mr Macdonald: Not like other people.
I am making a serious point here that it is quite challenging
to manage lawyers.
Q156 Greg Clark: Yet in commercial
practice that also happens between professional and administrative
staff and the private sector firms have now almost universally
found ways to make that work. It does echo a bit of the point
that Mr Davidson made: perhaps the CPS is still, relatively speaking
at least, unreformed compared with some of the other organisations.
Mr Macdonald: We are the biggest
law firm in the country and we need to be run as a law practice;
I agreed that point. We are addressing these cultural issues with
our staff.
Q157 Greg Clark: Is the report not
because of a concern for the quality of justice? It is not just
an efficiency issue. If a crime has been committed and someone
has been charged with it and actually they get away scot-free,
then for the victims, for society and probably even for the defendants
themselves if they think that they can commit these things with
impunity, that is a disaster. It is very important that all of
these individual parts of the system that are not working are
put right quite apart from the value for money.
Mr Macdonald: I could not agree
with you more. It is a constitutional position. One thing I should
add to that is that not everybody who is charged with a criminal
offence is guilty, so it is absolutely important to factor in
the defendant's rights in all of this. We acknowledge that not
everyone we prosecute is guilty.
Q158 Greg Clark: So when it is the
case that only 15% of prosecutions have the same prosecutor throughout
the case that is actually very worrying for the quality of justice.
You want the same defence lawyer.
Mr Macdonald: Yes; I agree.
Q159 Greg Clark: May I just ask a
final question since this is about value for money and organisation?
You have signed up to savings under the Gershon Review of £34
million by 2007-08, is that correct?
Mr Macdonald: Yes; I think so.
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