TUESDAY 9 FEBRUARY 1999

THE RT HON JACK STRAW

166  Home Secretary, the Commission started in April 1997 and already it has a backlog of cases some two years long. Why do you think that has happened?

  (Mr Straw) There is bound to be a backlog in an operation like this. They inherited a substantial number of cases from the Home Office and they obviously have to develop their own working methods, so you are going to get a backlog. That is no different from many other areas of public administration and private administration. In your previous life, Mr Stinchcombe, the law, there were what could be described as backlogs because processes take time. This is no different.

167  But the backlog is getting longer every day, is it not? They are receiving over four applications a day and turning out less than two.

  (Mr Straw) I have not got the graph in front of me but it is not quite as dire as that. You may be aware, following detailed discussions with them, I have agreed to increase their budget by a very substantial amount, around 30 per cent. I cannot think of any other area of the Home Office which has had a 30 per cent increase in their budget. They started with a budget which was twice as much as the Northern Ireland Office and the Home Office were spending in this area. There were reasons for that, in that the current remit is wider than that of the Home Office and the NIO, and because they were independent they were likely to attract a greater number of cases, but I think the allocation I have made is reasonable in all the circumstances and they now have to look very closely at their own methods of working, weeding out hopeless cases and dealing as fast as possible with the other cases consistent with their obligations under the law.

168  If we go back to their initial funding, as I understand it that was effectively calculated by looking at the amount of case work of the old Home Office division which dealt with potential miscarriages of justice?

  (Mr Straw) It was done by the previous administration, but I do not particularly argue with it. It is twice as much as was being spent by the NIO and the Home Office on the best estimates. So they started off with a benchmark of twice, they said it was not enough, money is tight but also it is my duty as the holder of this public purse to check on how money is going to be spent, I spent some time doing so, and I have made this allocation and what I think the CCRC must now do is spend that money as efficiently and as effectively as they can.

169  In making that new allocation, were you correcting an under-funding position which was there at the outset?

  (Mr Straw) I doubt it, is the answer. This is a new service. This is not like the Crown Prosecution Service which was unquestionably under-funded when it started in the middle 1980s; there is no question about that and it has suffered really ever since. Anyway, it is a smaller operation. My guess is that if I had been in office in 1996-97, I would have set a similar baseline. We are dealing with all sorts of imponderables but we made these decisions and I think they have been reasonably well received by the CCRC.

170  Originally they asked for this extra funding in January 1998, I believe, and you rejected it on that occasion.

  (Mr Straw) There was not the money then. We were working to the previous Government's baselines and money was very short and I do not think there was a case made out at that stage. This money is coming in for 1999-2000. I did find some extra money for them this year, £386,000 for the current year to restore funding for its IT project. It is a relatively small amount of money in the long march of history. If you are dealing with a new organisation, you have people who are enthusiastic, they are highly skilled, which is commendable but also it is very difficult to measure what they are doing and part of the function of the Home Office ministers is to act as a downward pressure on their unit costs. In the nature of a job like this, people will want to do it to the highest possible standards, and that is commendable, but it will not necessarily follow they are doing it in the most efficient way. Part of the job of ministers in the central Home office is to check on that.

171  You rejected their application in October 1998 and changed your mind in January 1999. What happened in those interim two or three months?

  (Mr Straw) I went into it in much greater detail with them about the nature of their case and also insisted on various efficiency and performance measures. I also wanted personally to examine the case, so I waited until I had seen the chairman, Sir Frederick Crawford, and the chief executive, Glenys Stacey, before coming to my final decision. I also took account of the views of this Committee. If you had come to a different view, I might have come to a different view.

172  The backlog has got longer over that period of time when they applied for extra money and it was not made available, does that mean that they actually need more money now than they applied for in order to clear that backlog?

  (Mr Straw) I cannot say that. What I can say is that this is what has been allocated and I think it is fair in all the circumstances. We are dealing with some very great imponderables here. There are some serious miscarriages of justice which your Chairman is better versed on than anybody else in this room, and they need to be reviewed. There are also a large number of people in prison who have pleaded not guilty—in some cases pleaded guilty—who are guilty but who do not like being in prison, who have got loads of time on their hands, loads and loads of time, and who convince themselves they are innocent even though they are palpably guilty, and they write to their MPs and they write to the CCRC. These have to be investigated carefully because every so often one turns out to have the germ of a miscarriage of justice there. There are some fine balances to be achieved here. The CCRC was not set up as a third Court of Appeal, they have been set up to deal with miscarriages of justice which have not been properly flushed out in the course of the initial trial or the appeal to the Court of Appeal Criminal Division. They have to take account of that but to some extent the demand from those guilty prisoners in jails who have convinced themselves they are innocent is pretty wide.

173  Nonetheless, it is imperative, is it not, to try and get that backlog down. If people are waiting two years—

  (Mr Straw) They are working on dealing with that. My recollection is that the time is less than the Home Office used to take. They are doing it in a more systematic way, they are spending twice as much money on doing it. I also say that in other areas of investigation you may get delays of a quite substantial kind and that is inevitable.

174  If the Commission is going to tackle that backlog, there are a number of options which would be available to it, it could seek to persuade you to conclude that if it had more resources it could have more case review managers; it could seek to streamline some of its administration and become more efficient; it could deal with cases less thoroughly; it could refer more easily cases to the Court of Appeal; or it could prioritise its cases in a different way. Which of those options do you think it should most actively pursue?

  (Mr Straw) I think they are decisions which they have to make. I am not involved in the day-to-day administration of the CCRC, indeed if you set up a body like this by statute you give them responsibility to get on with it and I am not going to secondguess how they manage the service. What I am going to do is check very carefully indeed the claims they make. Since you raise the matter, what happened between when they bid in October and when I made a decision last month is that I pared down their bid by getting on for half a million pounds for next year and 300,000 for the subsequent years, because I thought they had slightly over-egged their claim. That is not a crime, everybody does it, but you have to go into the detail and then say that we expect better data on outputs and performance and things like that and will monitor that. We are going to look at what they have done; how they achieve it is their responsibility.

175  Just one final question, when we visited the Commission a week or so ago, amongst other information given to us was information by a case review manager who suggested she spends up to 25 per cent of her time doing menial tasks such as photocopying. In the light of that kind of information, is there room to increase capacity by efficiency savings, do you think?

  (Mr Straw) There may be, I do not know, but it depends how you define menial tasks. I spend a large amount of my time doing menial tasks, so do most Members of Parliament. These days we expect quite senior officials to type their own letters because it is cheaper than employing people whose only task is the boring one of photocopying. Anyway, I find when I use my photocopier that I have got time to think. You can do more than one thing at a time, in my opinion.

176  I once had to show a previous Foreign Secretary how to use the photocopier.

  (Mr Straw) I am up to speed on that.

177  Just a quick couple of follow-up questions. In one way you have dealt with my first question by saying it is a matter for them, but can I just say that the impression might be drawn that they are giving such a Rolls Royce service to each case that comes in and with their name getting better known, they are going to face insuperable problems, and there is some argument or some suggestion that they might be examining their cases in too much detail and they ought to punch in on one or two crucial points in a case rather than get a perfect file in perfect shape. That was a feeling some of us had. What do you say, Home Secretary? Is that really a matter for them?

  (Mr Straw) I have not, and I am sorry this is the case, been able to visit them yet. I intend to do so. So I am not in a position to judge. I am interested that from your position, both as a parliamentarian and as a lawyer, that is your perspective, and that is certainly one of the issues I have discussed with them. Their worry is that there will be 1:100, 1:1000, 1:X cases, which appears to come from one of my chaps who everybody thinks is palpably guilty but turns out not to be, and that could get through the net and they will not pick it up, and they were set up to provide a more thorough checking of miscarriages than the previous systems. So it is a difficult balance. What I hope is that over time case workers will develop skills for being able to sift the cases. This will still not be a perfect system but we have to do this. Where they have a case where the issue has been tested before a jury and there has been a recent appeal and there is not significant new evidence, then they have to turn it round and say, "Sorry, we are not a third Court of Appeal", they will have to turn those round quickly and say there is finality at the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal, unless things emerge which were not raised at the trial or at the appeal.

178  Finally, when they take the cases to the court I think they squash the conviction or sentence in nine out of ten cases they refer to the Court of Appeal. I think that is the right sort of figure, it is very high anyway. So there is a kind of statutory test of real possibility that the conviction would not be upheld. We were talking about this ourselves, do you have in mind a kind of strike rate which you think would be about right? We were thinking of 40, 50, 30 per cent. Do you have anything in mind?

  (Mr Straw) No, I do not. What they said to me was that it was quite likely some early cases would be upheld by the Court of Appeal because of the nature of the backlog. From Bentley onwards.

179  I believe the Home Office has agreed in principle the representation they received from the CCRC about bringing within their remit cases where the verdict was guilty but insane. There is a couple of cases which cannot be dealt with unless their remit is changed. It is a minor and uncontroversial point but it needs legislation once again.

  (Mr Straw) Yes, I am very sympathetic to that proposal but it will require legislation. We will have to see whether there is a way of introducing it. I would be very happy for this Committee to say there should be a Criminal Justice (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill. I have just been told that Lord Ackner is going to introduce a Private Peers' Bill to this effect, so we will give that God speed. That will certainly help. If this Committee wanted to say there should be a Criminal Justice (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill, that would always be very welcome in my discussions with business managers, who will come back and say this is a Christmas tree.

  Chairman:Yes, you will find there are lots of things which suddenly appear. Home Secretary, Miss Loudon, Mr Hermitage, thank you very much for coming. That concludes the session.