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Oral evidence Taken before the Committee on the Lord Chancellor's Department on Tuesday 15 July 2003 Members present: Mr A J Beith, in the Chair __________ Witnesses: SIR HAYDEN PHILLIPS GCB, Permanent Secretary, MR IAN MAGEE, MR SIMON BALL, MR JONATHAN SPENCER and MR JOHN LYON, Executive Management Board Members, Department for Constitutional Affairs, examined. Q1 Chairman: Good morning, Sir Hayden, and colleagues. You had already explained that you would bring your various departmental heads in today and we welcome that. Perhaps I could start and let you get the matters which the Permanent Secretary has to deal with over at the beginning by asking you how you expect the change in the Department's responsibilities and character to affect its work on its existing targets? A pretty major upheaval is going on and we, on a recent Thursday afternoon, discovered you were the head of a completely different department. I have serious doubts as to how far you were consulted about that beforehand, though you do not need to answer that, but the immediate consequences in terms of departmental organisation were considerable. Are they not a major distraction of management time? Sir Hayden Phillips: I have some experience of this, Chairman, from having created the Department of National Heritage in 1992. A lot of energy can be taken up in structural change. I do not think the amount of structural change this time will preoccupy us. I think that there are three or four key things: first of all, a major set of constitutional changes, which we no doubt will go on to talk about a bit more, which gives a new focus to the Department, I think, and we will have in the next session, I am sure, the largest legislative programme that the old Lord Chancellor's Department could ever have contemplated; secondly, a very clear focus on delivery in the criminal justice area, and if I can give you two examples, the creation of a unified administration and a step change in fine enforcement, which I think we have to be much better and sharper at doing than we have been; thirdly, we have absorbed, but keeping their distinct identity, the Wales Office and the Scotland Office and UK-wide responsibilities for devolution which fills out the range of constitutional issues. I think the change in some ways is the culmination of what had been happening to the old Department over a number of years; indeed with the creation, for example, of this Select Committee, a sort of coming of age in Whitehall of the Department. Finally, I think it underlines more than I had thought would be the case the importance of the change programme we had instituted at the beginning of this year in order to deliver what we need now to do. Q2 Chairman: You say you have had to absorb the Scotland and Wales offices, yet we are constantly told that they are only with you for pay and rations purposes, not for policy purposes, so what does this absorption consist of? Sir Hayden Phillips: I was speaking in the Permanent Secretary accounting officer sense, I suppose. I have absorbed them, but my Secretary of State has not in the sense that they are a part of my Department for administrative purposes, personnel services and so on, and they keep their distinct identity within it, but they report to their own parliamentary secretaries and their own secretaries of state. Q3 Chairman: How are you going to make sure that the Department does not take its eye off the ball in relation to the criminal justice system when you are going to have this massive legislative programme which you have just referred to as well as the process of change which you have described? Sir Hayden Phillips: I think the key thing here is to make sure that you have the right leadership on each of those strands of work, and I might ask Ian if he would like to comment on that because Ian, as the Chief Executive of Operations, has the overall responsibility for ensuring that the focus on the real world out there and delivering services is not lost during the next 18 months when so many of us will be focused on Westminster and legislation and constitutional change. Q4 Chairman: Perhaps we can bring Mr Magee in a bit later when we come to some of the detail of the system. I was just thinking of the general way in which the Department is prioritising its work. Can I just put to you two things, first, about targets. Will there be new targets announced shortly because of the Department's new range of responsibilities and will there be any change in the existing targets consequent on what has happened? Sir Hayden Phillips: In terms of targets, by which I mean Public Service Agreement targets, the answers to the questions are no and no. No in the sense that I think it is very important that we stick consistently, particularly in the criminal justice and asylum fields, to the targets which have been set, announced and which we share with the Home Office in delivering. However, having said that, it clearly is a very important objective of the Department to deliver the constitutional changes that were unveiled yesterday in the consultation papers to time in terms of legislation and so on. They, however, I do not think should be mixed up with the service delivery targets that we have, so I think a new objective for the Department in terms of constitutional change, but no change to the targets. Q5 Chairman: There is one more point to clear up. We were told that family law was transferring to the Department for Education and CAFCASS, which we are just about to complete a report on of course, goes as a consequence of that, but this now seems less clear than at the beginning. Is matrimonial law not going to the new Department? What is happening? Sir Hayden Phillips: No, and this is where I need help because Jonathan, I think, has been working with the detail of this. CAFCASS goes across and much of our children work, but the precise delineation, if I may, Chairman, I would like to ask Jonathan to mention. Mr Spencer: It is not finally settled. There is some discussion still going on between our ministers as just to exactly what, at the final print, moves. I think it is likely, but not certain, that divorce law will stay with DCA, while the bulk of children law work will transfer to the new children function in DfES, but it is not quite settled yet. Q6 Chairman: How do you separate divorce law from the welfare of children? Mr Spencer: Well, there is obviously a connection, but divorces are between adults and a lot of the cases are about money, whereas the question of the custody of children follows on from the act of divorce. Ross Cranston: I would have thought that they were eminently separable actually and there is a good case for matrimonial law to stay with DCA. Q7 Chairman: We will call Mr Cranston as a witness one of these days! I am still puzzled as to how, for example, the private law responsibilities of CAFCASS would fit into a division along those lines and maybe you would like to let us know more details. Mr Spencer: I think probably the better course is that once there is a final decision, we will let you know what the outcome is. Q8 Chairman: And the world outside as well. Sir Hayden Phillips: And, Chairman, we will give you the rationale for it. Chairman: Even better, when you have worked it out of course! Let's turn to legal aid. Q9 Ross Cranston: First of all, could I ask about the attrition and the number of people providing legal aid, which has been quite considerable in terms of the Community Legal Service and a lesser attrition with the Criminal Defence Service. First of all, why? Mr Spencer: I think a fundamental reason why is that when the Legal Services Commission switched over to the present contracting basis a few years ago, they awarded more contracts than the demand for the publicly funded legal service really required, so a number of people with those contracts have actually not done huge volumes of business under them both on the criminal and the civil sides. I think that, taken particularly on the civil and family side with the position of the balance of remuneration between the publicly funded and the privately funded work, has caused some firms to withdraw from the publicly funded market. At present the assessment is that the supply in general remains adequate to meet the requirements of the service. Q10 Ross Cranston: I think you have got to do some consultancy. You are saying that this does not have implications for access to justice, as it were? Mr Spencer: Not at present, but obviously this is something that we and, more particularly, the Legal Services Commission have to monitor closely to make sure that a fall in the number of contracted firms does not lead to that result, and clearly a general position that is satisfactory can mask particular spots, for example, in the middle-sized towns in southern England where the supply of family law services is under some pressure. As you say, we have got a piece of consultancy work going on at present to look at the supply and demand of legal services in the publicly funded sector to ensure that both in the near term and in the longer term we sustain a sufficiently substantial and good quality base of firms able to provide the services that we need. Q11 Ross Cranston: When is that report going to be available? Mr Spencer: I think later this year. Q12 Ross Cranston: Because the suggestion, as you said in your answer, was that although this does not have major implications for, say, London, in some parts of the country it does have implications and, in particular, in the family area. Mr Spencer: It is clearly a challenge for the Legal Services Commission to ensure that if there are difficulties of a particular local kind, they take steps of a bespoke and local kind to deal with any problems that might arise. Q13 Ross Cranston: You have had additional monies for asylum and also for the Criminal Defence Service, I think, but have there been implications for the Community Legal Service and is that on track, as it were, in terms of the plans that were there when the CLS was launched two years ago or whenever that was? Mr Spencer: Yes, very broadly. As you will know, the intention in the access to justice legislation was to take a substantial volume of civil work out of legal aid and replace it by conditional fee arrangements in the private sector. That has taken some years to work through, so if you strip out asylum, the level of expenditure on the civil side, taking both representation and legal help together, has been falling and we have now pretty much reached the bottom, we think, and there will probably be some gradual pick-up from here on in the total aggregate level of expenditure, but within that, with a significant switch from representation to legal help plus the additional funding that has been made available for asylum, that pattern has occurred because of the access to justice reforms, not because of the increased volume of expenditure that we have necessarily incurred on the criminal side over the last year or two. Q14 Ross Cranston: Finally, you have got a consultation document out on criminal legal aid and how the changes might be introduced there. Have you got any preliminary views about what might be done to bring that under control? Mr Spencer: As you say, we are out to consultation on a range of measures on the criminal side. Subject to that consultation, we would expect to take the majority of those measures forward into implementation early next year or certainly next year in the main. In addition, we are introducing at long last the new scheme for expenditure on very high-cost cases which actually has the bigger impact and this is a major gain all round because, on the one hand, it provides for better control of expenditure in these extremely expensive criminal cases (in the crown court 1% of the cases account for nearly half of the legal aid expenditure), we get better control, we get better management of the cases out of the contracts that are awarded, the law firms get a benefit to cashflow because they get paid earlier in the case, they get paid for the preparatory work that is done and done to quality, and the Government gets a reduced level of overall expenditure, so it gets savings both this year and in the following two as it builds up to a higher level than the kind of savings that would arise from the consultation paper proposals if implemented, and obviously there is a bring-forward in cash expenditure in the current year. Sir Hayden Phillips: I would underline that that is the most important change, I think, getting a grip on these very expensive cases. I think the estimate is that over a three-year period we should manage to save about £190-200 million which is extremely good news. Q15 Mr Soley: Some concern has been expressed about the five-hour ruling on asylum preparation cases and I wonder, first of all, how confident are you that you have got that right because we do not want to penalise the good solicitor, and I recognise that there is the bad solicitor and I will come back to that? How confident are you that you have got that right and, secondly, are you prepared to keep it under review if there is evidence that it is the better solicitor who is dealing with the difficult case? Mr Spencer: I think this is fundamentally a matter of judgment, the proposal in the consultation paper of five hours for initial advice and four hours to prepare an actual appeal hearing. I think we will need to hear what representations are made on those precise numbers. I think the basic policy is sensible, that for these sorts of cases it ought to be possible to establish a benchmark for the amount of time it should be necessary to take to do a good job in preparing the advice in these cases. Whether it got the number exactly right, we will have to see. Q16 Peter Bottomley: The changes or the withdrawal of legal aid from certain cases has been going for a few years and in the very recent past I went to see a Home Office Minister about an old man in jail who should not be and the legal assistance he needs to make his case which again in the Court of Appeal it is difficult to get. Can I invite the Department to consider getting someone to do a research exercise with MPs, who tend to come across cases like this, to ask if we would like to feed in some of what we regard as injustice in the present system, some of which we may have misunderstood, to see whether there are gaps which might properly be considered for filling. The major change of the withdrawal of legal aid may in some parts have been worthwhile, but I would like to think that you were concerned to see whether there are proper ways of saying whether some parts have gone too far and whether there are some areas where some reconsideration is needed. Sir Hayden Phillips: I would be very prepared to support that. When there was concern among members of the Public Accounts Committee about immigration and asylum cases being passed to MPs when they really ought to have been dealt with in a different way, we then reached out through our ministers to Members of Parliament to do that and perhaps we could discuss separately the way in which perhaps, with the Committee's help, we could work to ask MPs the sort of questions you have in mind to build up that sort of evidence base. Q17 Dr Whitehead: Can I turn to the other side of the coin as far as legal aid is concerned and that is the rise of conditional fee agreements and the claim that was originally made by the Government that this, among other things, made justice affordable to all, it would discourage weak claims and so on and yet, in practice, what appears to have happened is that you could say that a number of rather greedy 'ambulance chasers' have been attracted to this field. Two major companies have collapsed and certainly the evidence from a number of lawyers is that now that claims which actually are taking a very long time are coming through, most of them appear to be quite worthless. Are you happy with the way the new system has developed in the light of those thoughts? Sir Hayden Phillips: I will ask Jonathan to come in or John, but I think my own judgment is that although we have had a couple of company collapses in this area, they have not, I think, affected the work of, if I may call them, the reputable part of the market. In other words, there is a market there which is reputable and can be used. I think our bigger concern was the amount of energy which was going into sort of satellite litigation arguments about costs which seemed to me a very worrying development. I think the court case, I think it was May, brought that to a conclusion and we have also put in place a number of steps now which should actually control that situation more, but perhaps I can ask John Lyon to add a word on that. Mr Lyon: I think it is fair to say that it is still early days and this has only been going, as you know, since April 2000 in the current form and the market as well as ourselves are still feeling our way. As you say rightly, there have been challenges to the way that the system is operated and frankly that has slowed down the system and the payments. As Sir Hayden was saying, those challenges, we believe, are now behind us. The court has clarified both the framework of the legislation and the degree to which conditional fee agreements, as written, can be unenforceable because of a slip and there the judgment is that the slip has to be material. Moving on from there, we have done quite a range of things, working very closely with the industry, to make sure that the system works in the way that it has the capacity and the capability to work which, as you say, is about ensuring that people can have due access to justice. We have done that, for example, with setting the fixed costs for road traffic accident claims pre-proceedings and that, I think, has helped to clear people's minds as to what the costs are and remove that area for argument. We have simplified it, so in June of this year we simplified the CFA by allowing - it is not a requirement - people to set aside the indemnity principle and that too has clarified for the industry and of course for the client what is possible and what is not possible. We have published a document which is talking about wider clarification and simplification of the CFA regime, and the key question there for us really is whether we need what is frankly quite an elaborate regulatory regime set out in regulations in order to run what is actually meant to be a simplified system. There is a view that we do not need all of that in regulation and that we can rely on solicitors' professional rules to make sure that people behave properly. On the other hand, we have got to keep a very close eye on the customer, the client and ensure that whatever is established is fair for the client as well as for the industry, and that is what the consultation at the moment is now doing. Finally, if I can just complete on this, we are looking with the industry, because a lot of this is only going to work if we have consultation with the industry and reach agreement with them, to see whether we can produce a matrix for personal injury success fees so that people have an idea of what the success fee should be depending on the stage at which it is reached and the complexity of the case and, as I say, we are hoping that that consultation which is going on at the moment will be concluded around the end of the year and then one of the big areas of difficulty of the system which is success fees will be clarified and simplified. Q18 Dr Whitehead: There is though also, which you have not mentioned, a rather more subtle effect and certainly that is reflected by some work from the Local Government Association and Zurich Municipal Insurance on the extent to which local authorities are finding that their legal bills are increasing as a result of CFA, particularly in terms of, as I mentioned before, weak or fraudulent claims which we then have to deal with and is it not the case that you could say that the, as it were, savings from the legal aid budget have been affected by transferring that cost to local authorities and, therefore, to the local taxpayer? Mr Lyon: I think we accept that the basis of the government policy is that those who are responsible for the injury should meet the costs and those costs should not be met by the state, and you know the arguments why that is so. Therefore, inevitably there will be costs falling upon local authorities where the finding is against them. Q19 Chairman: Surely in all cases it is the legal costs on the local authority in large numbers of cases? Mr Lyon: Where the finding is against them though. If they are successful, of course it would be a different matter. Q20 Dr Whitehead: The claim that is made by LGA and Zurich Municipal is not that it is not just a question of costs arising when they should properly pay them, but the whole question of administering the machinery of CFA and dealing with claims which often do not have a great deal of merits and the local authorities do not recover their costs to the extent that they might, ie, there is a built-in cost result of that whole system as applies to them. Mr Lyon: Yes, and I have seen the research and the opinions that have come from local authorities and we accept that some local authorities particularly are concerned about this and do have difficulties about it. There are a few things on that, I think. One is that what I said earlier should help to clarify and simplify the procedures, that what I said about the matrix and the work on simplification will actually enable them to handle things more easily. Secondly, as I said at the beginning, it is still in its early stages and local authorities are still on a learning stage of how they are going to manage these cases and the claims that they get. Thirdly, because, as I say, this is a thing where we do need to work very closely with local authorities and their insurers, we are talking to the LGA and to their big insurer which is, as you know, Zurich Municipal so that we have got a real understanding of their position and their concerns, so those conversations we are taking forward at the same time as we are working on simplifying the system to make sure that their concerns are taken into account as we produce the outcome of our work on simplification, so there is work to do there. Q21 Chairman: Just to go back for a second to the costs of legal aid, the Criminal Defence Service and the Community Legal Service, you have got extra money in the current year, but have you got a best estimate for what you will need for those services in 2003-04? Mr Ball: I think the figures that we are showing at the moment in the report unfortunately are less comparable than you would like between 2002-03 and 2003-04 for two reasons. Q22 Chairman: You mean they are not bigger? Mr Ball: I will answer the size question in a moment. The comparability is because there have been elements, in particular the creation of a single Asylum Fund which is now shared between the Home Office and the DCA, which were not concluded at the time of this publication. There has also been the transference from cash-based accounting to resource-based accounting for the Legal Services Commission. The underlying result, if one were to make those adjustments, is that our total legal aid spend for 2003-04 is expected to be marginally above our spend for 2002-03. Clearly that is subject to finalising discussions with the Treasury regarding both the allocation of the Asylum Fund and reconciliation of the resources in cash amounts, but that would give a fairer position than you see at the moment from the figures on page 20. Q23 Ross Cranston: I just want to come back very briefly to Alan Whitehead's point. It could be argued that all these cases are actually providing access to justice to people who otherwise could not have it. On the other hand of course, you have got the view of the Local Government Association representing those who say that these are unjustified. I think the point I would make is that we really need some research about the operation of the scheme. I think you are doing some research, but I would just encourage the Department, you have obviously got consultation now, but I would encourage the Department to do some detailed research on the operation of the CFA so that we can actually nail the issue. Mr Lyon: I think we sent the Committee the research that has already been done by Fenn Gray Rickman Carrier. Q24 Ross Cranston: Unfortunately that was before the system really came in. Mr Lyon: Indeed and what that says is that before the system was changed in April 2000 it establishes the baseline for the next piece of research which we have commissioned from fortunately the same people, so I will not need to repeat their name, and they are looking at the funding of personal injury litigation, both seeing what the impact is of success fees and looking at the handling of clinical negligence cases and then comparing it with other European jurisdictions, and we expect that research to be available in about a year's time, so in a year's time we will have, based first of all on that earlier research on the benchmark and now what has happened since April 2000, what the impact has been and how that compares with other European countries. Ross Cranston: Academics are always very slow, I know! Q25 Chairman: There speaks a lawyer! Sir Hayden Phillips: We would not comment on that! Q26 Mr Soley: Turning to complaints about solicitors, would you agree with me that the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors, although it has improved somewhat in recent times, is still seriously failing as a regulatory body? Mr Lyon: Well, my view is tempered, I think it is fair to say, by having read the annual report of the Legal Services Ombudsman which was published on 8 July and anyone reading that report would, I think, see that there was still considerable concern about the performance of the OSS and its ability actually to improve its performance in the way in which it has committed itself. Q27 Mr Soley: So if it is going to have some difficulty in proving itself, then I share that pessimism. Is it not time for it to go and is it not time to look at a more, if necessary, statutory system of regulating solicitors? There is a serious failure and it even makes the Press Complaints Commission look quite effective, which is quite an achievement. Mr Lyon: You will perhaps forgive me if I do not follow you on that. Q28 Mr Soley: But on the effectiveness, obviously it is bad. Mr Lyon: There are two things here which come out of the Manzoor report. The first is what you were talking about, Mr Soley, which is the longer-term issue and it would take the longer term to have a major change in the way that the legal profession is regulated. The Government, as you know, are committed to a review of regulation and we would hope shortly to be able to announce how we are going to conduct that review, but that is inevitably going to take some time, perhaps back to what Mr Cranston was saying earlier. Meanwhile, what the Ombudsman has raised is the issue of whether the Lord Chancellor should be implementing his statutory powers that he has at the moment in appointing a legal services complaints commissioner and the Ombudsman has said that she would want to be discussing that with the Lord Chancellor, particularly when she produces her interim report on the current performance of the OSS, which is promised later this year and I know that the Lord Chancellor is very interested in that and will be himself considering that very carefully with her and others. Q29 Mr Soley: I am not sure how long we can wait on this because we have been waiting for years. I have seen some appalling cases and I cannot be the only MP who keeps a list of solicitors whom I would pay not to defend me. I am not sure we should not actually turn that into a league table of solicitors who have had complaints about them or a league table of bad practice. Is that not a good idea for the short term? Mr Lyon: It is certainly something that we could look at with the Ombudsman. Let's be absolutely clear, that anyone reading that report could not be complacent about the current performance, nor does it set out in the report the history of the attempts by the OSS to improve its performance. As you well know, that has been going on for some years and there is very grave concern by the Lord Chancellor that, as you say, this really ought not to continue and that the performance does need to be improved and it needs to be improved quickly. The challenge both for the OSS, for ourselves and for the Ombudsman is to make sure that we can deliver improvements within a reasonable timescale. Otherwise, as you say, we will have great ideas, but that will take some time to implement. Meanwhile, we need to show an improvement in the services that solicitors are currently providing and, as I say, that is one of the things that we are considering. Q30 Chairman: Is the Department developing an alternative model? Is this really the last chance saloon, in the over-used phrase, and are you actually working on what you might have to do if the Lord Chancellor turned around and said, "We're not getting anywhere. What can we do?"? Mr Lyon: Well, as I said, there is a model already there which is the LSCC which would allow a change in the sense that the Commission then would be able to audit the work, it would be able to require plans and if those plans were not implemented, it would be able to fine the body which was responsible, so there is a whole range of powers already there which the Lord Chancellor could take. In the longer term, as I said and as Mr Soley has noted, much more fundamental issues about the way the profession is regulated need to be raised and are going to be examined. Q31 Mr Soley: Can I pursue the message in a sense. Because I had so many examples of bad practice in asylum and immigration, I invited the Law Society to go through my worst cases and they did so and they made recommendations to solicitors about how they approach these cases. I am not quite sure why they are doing that and having no impact on the office for complaints. In other words, why is it that a body like the Law Society relates to me in terms of what was a generalised complaint, and I am not protesting that they did it, that they took that action, but what I am protesting at is that the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors did not even appear on the horizon, on anybody's radar screen about the failure and consistent failure and at times taking very large sums of money off people for doing virtually nothing? Why is it that the professional bodies, like the Law Society, have actually taken a more active involvement in informing the OSS? Mr Lyon: Well, the Law Society has taken a series of actions. They have appointed the independent commissioner, they have made available £20 million to be spent over three years to improve the performance of the OSS and they have brought in 60 new staff to get some more work done. Earlier this year they outsourced some of the more straightforward cases to solicitors. They have got a model office, a case management system, a customer assistance unit and a client's charter, so they have done a lot, but the truth is, as comes out in the report, that it does not appear to be working and the challenge for the Law Society which, as I say, has done all of those actions, is in the next few months they can show that they can actually improve the performance and reduce the weight of the caseload, which is one of the things which is particularly worrying at the moment, that the caseload of the OSS is increasing and, as Zahida Manzoor says in her report, she does not believe that is sustainable. Q32 Mr Soley: Am I right in my impression that solicitors' companies that have a practice manager tend to make less mistakes and have a better structure for dealing with them than ones that do not? Mr Lyon: I do not know the answer to that, I am afraid. Q33 Mr Soley: The thing I am really saying is that that ought to be looked at because there is a lot of impressionistic evidence which suggests that a practice manager will actually stop complaints before they happen. Sir Hayden Phillips: I would like to make three comments. First of all, I am sure it is right that we should thoroughly review this whole field; it is far too complicated. Secondly, we do have the opportunity, if the Secretary of State wants to take it, to appoint a Legal Services Complaints Commissioner and that might be necessary. Thirdly, the more I looked at this I think there is a cultural problem in the sense that when complaints are initially made, at that crucial moment when they first arise, they are not handled, it seems to me, sufficiently well in terms of handling the customer. There is too much focus on process and not enough on trying to give a result to the customer. This makes the complaints much more long and drawn out and I think there is a real cultural issue in the solicitor profession. Q34 Keith Vaz: Could I put it to you, Sir Hayden, that the cultural problem is with your Department. Mr Lyon is demonstrating a most complacent attitude to the complaints against solicitors. In fact he was repeating exactly the same words that were put to me when I was a Minister in the Department four years ago, which is that we must give them a further opportunity to improve. Only last year when the question was put to you by the Home Affairs Committee and you were asked, "Were you very happy with the operation of the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors and its performance so far?", you replied, "I think I was saying precisely the opposite". Twelve months have now passed and what are you going to do because this is the same stuff that you have been saying for four years and there has been no change? Sir Hayden Phillips: Well, what has happened is that the satisfaction of the LSO with the performance of the OSS has increased by 10% over the last year. Now, we have, as you know, tried to set some fairly tough targets and to give the Law Society and the OSS time to make demonstrable improvements. They have made some, but what we are saying is that they have not made enough and that is why I think we are in a position now where further action will have to be taken. Q35 Mr Soley: During our evidence taken on CAFCASS, we heard that they spent £5.9 million on a computer system which did not provide any greater casework management system, and they stopped it because if they had gone on, they would have been accused of wasting public money. Well, as it does not work, one is tempted to say that a waste of £5.9 million would be not an insignificant amount of public money. Mr Magee: I think I should take this one. I do not think you can necessarily conclude that stopping what they were doing was wasting all of the money. I am not close to CAFCASS and to their IT system, but, as I understand it, some significant improvements in infrastructure were provided for that money and some installation of PCs, terminals and desktops, were also provided for that money as well. It is true, and you obviously know this anyway, that the full system that they wanted to get was not procured in the way that they had originally intended, but I can empathise with the Chief Executive and the Board of CAFCASS because in this area of government, you are damned if you do and you are damned if you do not. If you take a measured business decision that says at a point, "We are not going to realise the full benefits of the system" and stop, then you are subjected to the sort of questions that you ask. If, on the other hand, you carry on throwing good money after bad, you are in danger of compounding the problem. Now, clearly I generalise, but one generalises from experience of other systems, some of which have gone well and some less well. Q36 Mr Soley: I understand that and I accept that there are certain limited advantages to what they had planned. They have actually, as far as I can tell from talking to them and others, developed quite a good word processing system which is comfortable to work with, but that is not good enough given that the basic need was to develop an integrated case management system. I suppose my question really might go beyond your Department, but there has to be something wrong with our procurement policy if we cannot give a clear instruction and/or get it responded to by an appropriate company to produce a greater casework management system and it seems to me that given the nature of the Department's work, you are going to need other systems where there is integrated casework management. Mr Magee: Absolutely, and it is indeed a more general point, a more general point than for the Department for Constitutional Affairs, but I would not want to belittle what CAFCASS has achieved, to come back to the CAFCASS issue. It does not seem to me that the roll-out of 1,500 PCs, that the fact that they have only 20 sites that still have to be surveyed, or that the availability to all office-based employed guardians of IT and other CAFCASS employees on the whole represents a failure. It represents a significant step in the right direction. It is true that it does not go as far as the ambitious plans that were set out, as I understand it, at the beginning of the period when CAFCASS was set up. Q37 Mr Soley: But the core failure, remembering that this is about dealing with children who are in very considerable need, the core failure is the inability to update the records within the system so that the system can move fast. All the evidence we have had was that there were too many delays anyway in allocating cases to caseworkers and getting cases back to court again and all of this means more emotional distress for children, so the core need on the computer side, and it is not all about computers by any means, but the core need was to develop a system which enabled you to pass information securely and effectively between the various parts of the system and that is not there and that is a central issue. Mr Magee: I do understand that point and one of course accepts that their business will be much better dealt with when they have reached that point. I think that the feature perhaps to emphasise here is that they do have plans during this financial year, as I understand it, to develop that case management potential. They now at least have the infrastructure on which to base the case management system and, without re-rehearsing all of the very well documented points about the problems that CAFCASS had when it started, the fact that they did have the problems on start-up could not, I imagine, have helped them as far as the development of their IT system was concerned. Q38 Mr Soley: I would actually invite the Department to look hard at the procurement system they have for information technology because if CAFCASS is anything to go by, it is not working and it may not be working in other departments, so you need to look at that procurement system. That must be right, must it not? Mr Magee: As you know, Mr Soley, CAFCASS is a non-departmental public body, indeed one whose parents' departmental responsibility is transferring, but perhaps I could reassure the Committee as far as the Department for Constitutional Affairs is concerned. We do indeed have not only plans, but actions in place to look hard at the way in which we procure IT. I think we have learnt from our mistakes, we have brought responsibility for IT into one place, we have brought responsibility for procurement into one place, and we ensure that the IT and procurement arms of the Department work very closely together. We have for all departmental systems an information system strategy now that spells out how it is that we intend to move forward. We are carrying out across the range of our operations an IT audit which will enable us to take stock relatively of the position across the Department. We do not particularly want to mention the "L" word here, but thinking about the Libra system in the magistrates' courts, we have learnt lessons about the way that that was procured in the first instance which we intend to implement or are indeed already implementing for the good of the Department as a whole. Q39 Chairman: Libra has cost £557 million and was a running disaster story. The Public Guardianship Office system is still, as far as I know, not fully up and running, all of that in addition to CAFCASS. Is there an IT project on a major scale within the LCD's area which is actually working properly? Mr Magee: Yes, there are several things, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity to tell you about the things that are working well. I think in the case of Libra, if we could just start there, the roll-out to 41 magistrates' courts committees in infrastructure seems to me to represent a considerable step forward. The plans now in place for a case management system are a step forward themselves. When Sir Hayden and I appeared before the Public Accounts Committee on Libra, we freely admitted that mistakes were made in the initial procurement, to come back to one of Mr Soley's points, in the way that that was set up on both sides, on the supplier side and on our side. If I can turn, as your question invited me to, to the success of the Department, it may not be the case everywhere in government, but we have a long-running four-year-plus contract with Electronic Data Services and on the whole of course you always have your ups and downs with IT systems, but those systems are supplied and are running effectively. We have two very exciting initiatives, one of which is fully rolled out and another which is in pilot stage and about to be rolled out which I think puts DCA at the forefront of electronic government. One is money claims on-line which enables anybody who wants to take action against somebody whom they wish to claim money against up to £100,000 to do so from their computer, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and defence can be entered there too. In a very short space of time, because this system was introduced only in February of last year, it has become the second biggest, albeit virtual, county court that we have got and this has had excellent feedback from users. I went myself to Northampton where the core system is based a couple of weeks ago to see what had contributed to the success there and to gain an understanding of it. The second thing which is critical to the criminal justice system and ensuring that witnesses, in particular, are better looked after is something called Exhibit, which is the exchange of hearing information through information technology. That has been up and running in three courts in Essex for a year now and will be introduced into Snaresbrook Crown Court, one of the largest crown courts in London, later on this year. So the answer to your question is that I think there is reason to be confident about the way that we are moving forward as far as systems are concerned. The final part to this answer is that we have ensured that our three major IT contracts, the big ones that we have got, come to an end coterminously around 2006 and we are making plans as of now to recompete those systems across government and the word "competition" is very important in that respect. Sir Hayden Phillips: Can I just add two comments, Chairman. On the general procurement point, I think one of the things we have learnt and other government departments is not to put all of your eggs in one basket. You look very carefully at the suppliers and you decide what they are best at and they are not all best at everything. I think the mistakes which have been made in Libra, that was the case, and certainly in other government departments, and that lesson has been well learned. Secondly, a marketing point, Chairman. We are very proud of this Exhibit project which is central in the criminal justice system. It is a real first and if the Select Committee or members of it would like to ----- Q40 Chairman: I have seen it. Sir Hayden Phillips: I think you will see that its potential for time-saving for police officers, victims, witnesses is very powerful indeed and I think that is going very well. Q41 Mr Cunningham: Moving on to the magistrates' courts, there have been about 98 closures since 1998. What is the driving force behind this? Mr Magee: Well, magistrates' courts and their operation, as you know, are matters for the individual magistrates' courts committees at the moment, 42 of them, and that situation will change in less than two years' time probably when the current Courts Bill is through and when the new unified service is introduced. The driver for changes in the magistrates' courts world, as I understand it, is the effective provision of service. They have issues about accessibility that they have to deal with and they have issues about provision of better facilities and better services. Some of the premises do not lend themselves very readily to the second of those two points and hitherto the magistrates' courts committees have had to make a judgment - you asked what was the driver for the closures - as to how they can best discharge those services in the courts for which they are responsible. There is, it may be worth adding, an appeal mechanism, as you will know, to the Department and that appeal mechanism is exercised effectively, I believe, in eight cases which have come before the Department over recent months and four appeals by elements of the local community against the closure of particular courts have been upheld by the Department. Q42 Mr Cunningham: What influence can your Department have in relation to court closures? Do you advise? Do you set targets? What advice do you actually give them? Mr Magee: Not in that particular respect. As I said, the magistrates' court committee is responsible for running the service and running its budget and for providing effective access to justice locally. However, with the movement towards the unified service, we are already working very closely with the magistrates' courts community, I think, to the advantage of both services. For example, several county courts which might otherwise have had to close for economic or other reasons in recent months have been able to maintain a presence in the area by sharing accommodation with the magistrates' court in that area. Just coming back to an IT point that was made beforehand, that gives several advantages in that there is at least now an infrastructure in those magistrates' courts which is capable of common usage, so I think we are moving forward by looking at the estate as a whole rather than the separation into magistrates' courts and other courts. Q43 Mr Cunningham: One of the things, you see, which certainly concerns us is that it looks as though some of these closures, with five closures in Suffolk, but next door there have only been two in Norfolk, then you have got eight in Devon and one in Dorset, it seems very, very patchy to us. Mr Magee: Well, I think there have been many views expressed as the Bill has gone through Parliament about the merits and demerits of the final administration. One of the merits that we will get in terms of provision of access to justice is that we will be looking at a national service and any patchiness, and I cannot really comment on the particular examples that you give, but any patchiness of service, which there may be in any area of the country, is capable of being eradicated because it will be tied to a business plan for the provision of justice services across the country as a whole. Q44 Mr Cunningham: What is going to happen in the interim period pending consideration and the enactment of the Courts Bill? Mr Magee: What is happening already is that we are working very closely with the magistrates' courts community and there are two objectives in mind there. The first is to ensure that business continues as usual. Right at the beginning the Chairman spoke of the need to ensure that the criminal justice system working was carried forward effectively while the changes that have happened recently occurred. That applies too as far as the introduction of the unified service is concerned. The people who are responsible for accommodation currently in the court service are working very closely with magistrates' courts' counterparts to try to ensure that we prepare for a situation that is likely to arise in 21 months' time. Q45 Mr Cunningham: Have you considered a moratorium until the new arrangements are actually in place? Mr Magee: I do not think in any world we can freeze the world absolutely as we move forward. What we would certainly consider and what it would be very surprising if magistrates' courts committees did in the interim was not to take account of the overall provision of services in the area for which they are responsible. Q46 Mr Cunningham: Sometimes when you bring about changes you sometimes may want to pause and think about the changes you are going to implement. I am not talking about the freezing the world over. Mr Magee: I understand the point that is being made. I think it is very important to proceed cautiously in the interim period, I would not go as far as to say moratorium, but to proceed cautiously. Q47 Mrs Cryer: Mrs Rachel Lipscomb who is the Chairman of the Magistrates' Association said in an article in the Times in May that the number of magistrates there should be at the moment is 30,000, apparently, but according to your figures we only have 24,419 in post and 1,489 vacancies. Is Rachel Lipscomb right or is she over-egging the pudding and we really do not need 30,000 Magistrates? Mr Lyon: I will deal with that, if I may. I certainly would not accuse Rachel Lipscomb of over-egging the pudding. I do understand that the Magistrates' Association have a real concern to ensure there is a proper number of magistrates appointed in each of the areas. The position has improved considerably over the last year, in 2001/2002 there was a shortfall against what they asked for of some 25% and I can well understand the magistrates' concern about that. This year out of the 1,489 that were sought, that is 2002/2003, we recruited 1,410 magistrates, which leaves a shortfall of just over 5%. It was very close to the target that we had set for providing more magistrates. We have done better over the last year but we recognise that we need to keep on the case, which is why we are looking at a national recruitment strategy to ensure that we can both continue that performance and frankly do a lot better in the diversity of the bench as well. Q48 Mrs Cryer: What sort of lines will you follow? It is in the autumn you are going to start this strategy of recruitment, what are your thoughts on it? What are you going to do? Mr Lyon: There are four broad aspects to it, first of all we are engaging the advisory committees, because we recognise this is not a central process, it is very much ensuring that the local community is providing magistrates from its local community, so the role of the advisory committees is central to that. We need to engage them. We have had conferences with them, not us telling them how to do it better but identifying advisory committees who are doing it well and sharing best practice. The second thing is, as well as encouraging them we are supporting them specifically, and we are doing that particularly with advertising which is regionally focused, targeted advertising, particularly in the areas where there is a shortfall or where there is a particular imbalance in the bench. That is the second aspect of it. The third aspect of it is encouraging applicants to come forward. I suppose the work that we have been doing there in particular with the shadowing scheme with people of black and minority ethnic backgrounds is a very important part of encouraging applicants, so far that is showing dividends and people that go through that scheme are applying to become magistrates. The fourth aspect of that is encouraging employers, particularly local employers, to see this as a really valuable public service, both in the interests of the community but also in their own interests in developing their own staff. We have a range of ideas there, we work with the Magistrates' Association, who you referred to earlier, in producing a leaflet which will explain the case and the proposition to employers. We are looking at whether we can spend some money on when employers do well, giving them and ensuring they get some favourable local publicity for the work they have done. Another idea we are working on is can we give some sort of recognition, something like a plaque, to those employers who have done particularly well for their communities. Those are the four aspects of the strategy. Sir Hayden Phillips: On the numbers, I have been reminded there may be a technical point, I do not know whether Rachel Lipscomb was including the Duchy of Lancaster in her figures or not, there are about 4,000 magistrates appointed there, that would make a substantial difference to the figures. I will check that and let you know.
Q49 Mrs Cryer: Are the shortfalls occurring persistently in certain areas or is it fairly widespread? Is it just virtually every area which has a few short or are there certain areas you could identify as being hot spots for under representation of magistrates? Mr Lyon: I think we gave you some information on that. We have looked at something like 19 advisory committee areas that have shortfalls. In Berkshire, for example, we appointed 33 out of 34, so the vacancy is one, which is not very great. In Middlesex there is a shortfall of 22, they wanted 80 and we appointed 58. That is a much larger proportion. In Walmley there were ten vacancies and only five were appointed. I think the presumption that we have is there are likely to be greater problems in urban areas. When you look at those tables that I have just been drawing from I do not think it is fair to say it is only an issue in urban areas. Principally throughout the country the numbers, as I have given from the earlier figures, this does exclude the Duchy of Lancaster, are not that great at the moment. Q50 Mrs Cryer: It has been suggested that the introduction of a Criminal Justice Bill may mean that we could do with 3,000 more magistrates, I am just wondering if we are going to be able to achieve this? I will tell what you has occurred to me, there is a certain pool of people, retired people or people who can take time off work easily, who seem to be being used by an ever-increasing group of organisations, quangos, and that group may well be recruited to health trusts and to tribunals. So far as tribunals are concerned I understand that the only tribunal that does not pay an attendance allowance is the Social Security one. All of the other organisations who are fishing from the same pool are all giving some sort of financial reward to those who are being recruited. I am just wondering if we may not reach a point where the magistrates - I know with lay magistrates the tradition has been that they do not get any money except reimbursement for loss of earnings or expenses - should be paid a small amount per session, perhaps £10 or something. Have you thought of that? Mr Lyon: I have heard it suggested. I am not looking at it at the moment. I have heard that being discussed. I know there is a variety of views among magistrates about whether that is a good idea or not. The voluntary principle is enormously powerful among lay magistrates. I agree with you that we will need to look at and not rule out a range of options because I think the challenge that we have discussed for recruiting magistrates is going to become, as you mentioned, much greater in the years ahead. Mrs Cryer: Thank you. Q51 Keith Vaz: Sir Hayden, when you came before the Committee on 22 April with the Lord Chancellor, he said, and presumably you agreed because you were sitting next to him and you did not say anything, the system for appointing judges then was perfectly in order and by 13 June it had changed. Is your position still the same as it was on 22 April or do now accept Government policy on this? Sir Hayden Phillips: That is a very good question, I have never had it put to me that way before. I draw a distinction, as the Secretary of State did yesterday, between the quality of the appointments that have been and are being made, about which no one is raising criticism, and the issue of principle as to whether the way in which it is done should be changed. It is the second of those the Government have announced a change on, it is not criticising the first. Q52 Keith Vaz: In today's Times there is a job advert, have you seen it? It not yours! It is the appointment of a high court judge. If you look at eligibility and criteria it sets out clearly what a person applying to be a high court judge at the moment should have as far as eligibility and criteria is concerned. When we have the new Judicial Appointments Commission is that criteria going to change? Sir Hayden Phillips: I think the central criteria are likely to remain the same. I think I am right in saying that the Secretary of State said yesterday that he thought that the criteria that was set for the qualities required are essentially matters for Government and Government policy and should continue to run in that area. Q53 Keith Vaz: The criteria is going to remain the same. The eligibility is going to remain the same, "a circuit judge of two years standing" as it says in there. What is going to change is that different people are going to select the judges and therefore we hope there is going to be a different result, a better result, a more diverse judiciary. Is that what we are after? Sir Hayden Phillips: There are two points here. The first is that the Government's view is that you have to appoint where it is very important for public confidence, that is the perception of confidence, that you introduce a very powerful, independent element, not just leave it to ministers. That is point one. The second point is, if you have an appointments commission of that sort it is possible, particularly if you make a very determined effort, to try to increase the catchment area of candidates but, as we have also made it clear, we do not think that in itself will be enough, therefore that is why we are going to look at different career paths. Q54 Keith Vaz: I will come on to that in one moment. On the question of the appointments now, somebody applying for that job will not feel as legitimate as somebody who applies when the Judicial Appointments Commission gets going because this is still going to be done by one man, Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor. Is that right? Sir Hayden Phillips: There is, as you know, a process of consultation and analysis, it is not just one person sitting alone in a tent, as it were. Q55 Keith Vaz: I understand that. Sir Hayden Phillips: I do not believe that any of the people appointed between now and the coming into force of the Commission will feel any less legitimate than those who have been appointed up to now. Keith Vaz: What I cannot understand is if we accept that the present system has to be improved between now and the establishment of the Judicial Appointments Commission why has the Lord Chancellor not put in place interim arrangements, transitional arrangements that will pass the decision-making process to a wider group of people than the group that is not acceptable at the moment, because it is only one person, despite the process that you talked about. Chairman: That is in essence what was done in Scotland because the Justice Minister decided to take advice from a group he set up on a long statutory basis in the interim for bringing forward statute. Q56 Keith Vaz: Clearly that would be a much better system. Sir Hayden Phillips: We are dealing with quite large numbers here. We are looking at a position in which we do not believe it should take that long, we hope, to be able to have a judicial Appointments Commission up and running. I would not for a moment rule out thinking of some interim support mechanism, if you like. We have not thought that was necessary up to now on the grounds --- Q57 Keith Vaz: When you say "we" this is the Lord Chancellor, or is it advice from the Department? Sir Hayden Phillips: When I say "we" I am talking about the Lord Chancellor, the Secretary of State and the advice we have given him. We have not thought up to now that we needed that interim transitional phase, but it is certainly something that in the course of the consultation process will be put to us and he will obviously consider that. Q58 Keith Vaz: Many people would be with you on this idea of diversity. The Lord Chancellor's statement on the last occasion was there is no women sitting in the final court of the land. Lord Falconer can do something about it, can he not, he can appoint while he is Lord Chancellor in the interim period a women to the House of Lords, he can appoint a black or Asian person on to the bench, this is something that he can do in the next 18 month, is this not right? Sir Hayden Phillips: He answered that question yesterday and he said he could and he would do it on merits, if a candidate came forward on merits he would be very pleased able to be able to appoint people in those categories. Q59 Keith Vaz: Therefore the person appointed to those positions would feel perfectly legitimate. Therefore there is no need to change the system. If the criteria is going to remain the same and the same officials are going to be involved in making the recommendations what is the point in changing it? Sir Hayden Phillips: No, they are not. The people who would be involved under the Judicial Appointments Commission will be a different group of people. Q60 Keith Vaz: There is going to be no transfer from the old LCD of the judicial appointments section to the new Commission, there will be no secondment, as there is in Scotland? Sir Hayden Phillips: I was talking there of the Commission itself. Q61 Keith Vaz: Who are the officials who make the recommendations? Sir Hayden Phillips: There is an issue there. It does seem to me we have a position in which you have a group of expert people and there has to be a sensible view taken about the transfer of that knowledge and whether the people themselves transfer to the Commission or not. That is a judgment that has to be made. Q62 Keith Vaz: What is your judgment? You are giving evidence today, you have been there for six years, what is your judgment, should we just transfer it lock, stock and barrel or should we have secondments as they do in Scotland? Sir Hayden Phillips: My judgment is that what you should avoid doing, it seems to me, is starting up absolutely from scratch. My own personal view would be I would offer people who are working on this now the opportunity to go on secondment initially and if that is what they want or if they wanted to transfer and it was selected they could transfer. I think to lose all the expertise that has been built up in the initial two or three years could well be a great mistake. Q63 Keith Vaz: You mentioned the fact that you felt that people from outside the judiciary, people not on the traditional career paths could end up sitting on the bench, the Lord Chancellor was looking at a wider pool of people to sit on the bench. Is that still the view of the Department? When we questioned the Lord Chancellor we talked about the need to look beyond the current list of QCs. Sir Hayden Phillips: For example Government lawyers Q64 Keith Vaz: Perhaps working mothers on career breaks in law. Frances Gibb might take a day off from the Times and serve on the bench, for example. Sir Hayden Phillips: Absolutely. Keith Vaz: Was that "absolutely" to Frances Gibb? Q65 Chairman: I do not think we should personalise this. Sir Hayden Phillips: We must not do that. There is a concern about encouraging more solicitors to come forward, academic lawyers, a whole range of people who are legally qualified at different stages in their career, we would like to see the doors opening to them in a way that does into appear to have been the case in the past. Q66 Keith Vaz: How many cases of racial discrimination has the LCD had to face by people who had not been appointed to a judicial appointment or felt they were unfairly treated by a panel? Sir Hayden Phillips: Off the top of my head I cannot answer that question. Q67 Keith Vaz: That is sex discrimination or race discrimination? Sir Hayden Phillips: We have had certainly one complaint of racial and sexual discrimination which has not amounted to going to court. I think I am right in saying this, and we will have to check it, during my five years I cannot recall a case that went in to litigation. I will check the number of complaints but they have been very small in number. Keith Vaz: Thank you very much. Q68 Peter Bottomley: Can I turn to satisfaction in courts and start with one quick suggestion, if someone goes to the public entrance of the Central Criminal Court and sees the information outside and they go up the stairs they find they cannot proceed if they carry SHPs (some hand-held phones, pagers or personal computers) and then discover they have to go to the café across the road where they can park them. Also, where is there information on access for people with disabilities, who find the steps difficult. I am not suggesting you change the Old Bailey but it is one of those things that anybody who does go there will find a number of surprises which are, at the very least, inconvenient. Will the Department go on doing surveys of waiting times for witnesses and juror satisfaction and will they publish the results against targets? Sir Hayden Phillips: Yes. Q69 Keith Vaz: I want to ask a quick question about the targets for the criminal justice system, the Lord Chancellor has talked about the need to get these case through as quickly as possible, are you satisfied that enough progress has been made on the pledge by the Government that it made in its first term to make sure that young offenders get through the court system as quickly as possible? Sir Hayden Phillips: Yes.
Q70 Keith Vaz: Is the relationship with the Home Office now working well so that cases are not delayed, they are sent to the court, dealt with quickly and sentencing has improved in terms of the time it takes? Sir Hayden Phillips: I think the PYO Project has been remarkably successful. Q71 Peter Bottomley: Moving on from that, are we likely to see this closing of the gap with what is called the attrition rate, meaning more and more young black and Asian people ending up in the criminal justice system and convicted, as has been the predominant increase in relative terms in the increase in the jail population from 43,000 to 73,000 in the last ten years? Sir Hayden Phillips: I do not think I can make that prediction with confidence. If the pattern remains the same then your conclusion must be right. I do not know how the mix will change. Q72 Peter Bottomley: There is a problem, I do not want to discuss it now, but if people are going to say, "we want to meet the target" and if you then sweep up the easy cases into court which will get a fairly easy conviction you will go for the easy stuff and criminalise people who frankly should not be criminalised, I think that is a perverse outcome from targets. I leave the point to be looked at. Switching to the Public Guardianship Office, could you tell us how the review is getting on on planning expenditure initiatives and what preliminary findings are available? Mr Magee: There are not any preliminary findings available if I have the review that you are asking about correct. I would like to say something a little bit wider about the Public Guardianship Office. We have done a couple of things and on the one hand the Public Guardianship Office is to be commended for what happened last year, they have reduced significantly from about this period last year the number of arrears cases that they had. The Report mentions nearly 3,400 down from 22,000 by the end of January. In fact that showed further improvement because by the end of the financial year they were just about ready to breakthrough the 3,000 barrier and all of the cases had shown a commensurate reduction as well. As a result of the programme we introduced this year we have also moved the focus of the operational units, the Court Service and the Public Guardianship Office more on to the people that they serve and less on to the creation of individual finance, IT and procurement support. We are bringing all of those functions into the Department and allowing the agencies to concentrate on the delivery of their business. Q73 Peter Bottomley: It is good news. Mr Magee: Up to a point it is good news, yes. Q74 Ross Cranston: Can I quickly take you back to attrition, this was a very important target to bring more people to justice, as is described. I appreciate fully that your Department comes at the end of the process so you cannot do a great deal, you are doing certain things in terms of changing the way that criminal defence lawyers are going to be paid. Looking at the figures there is still a big gap and there has not been any major turnaround. Can you say what the Department might do? Mr Magee: First of all we are working closely with the other players in the system. We are not seeking to rest on being somehow a separate part of the system. We are working closely since April of this year and more effectively through the local criminal justice boards, which had their launch in April this year, and it is for the local boards themselves to meet the targets on attrition that they have to meet. That will mean a pretty significant improvement, something like 17% increase of cases over the spending period. Local boards are setting their own delivery plans, setting their targets for approval by the centre, ultimately for the National Criminal Justice Board, on which three of us on this platform sit. In most cases that improvement will be about 5% that we will be expecting through this particular year. If they achieve five per cent year-on-year-on-year they will get to something round a 17% gap. Sir Hayden Phillips: The particular thing we in our own area with direct responsibility must try to do is to reduce the number of ineffective trials. We have very clear and quite demanding targets for that. We can only do that by, it seems to me, really effective case preparation, which means you have to draw the prosecution, the defence and the police together in a way that has not happened before. The signs of us really trying to crack on with that over the next year are really quite good. Q75 Chairman: I must say the prospect of league tables for criminal courts puzzles me, if there is a league table for hospitals at least I can consult my GP about where to send me. If there is a league table for criminal courts if I am a criminal out on bail do I insist on staying in the area which has the worst record for delay or if I am innocent do I demand to go somewhere which has a quicker turnaround. Sir Hayden Phillips: We were not envisaging forum shopping being allowed. Mr Magee: I do understand what is being said there. What we do need to get at, and what we have not been able to get at, is examining the reasons why performance in one area is significantly better or significantly worse from performance in another area. It seems to me to be absolutely right that we should be able to discount for local factors to do those comparisons. Chairman: Sir Hayden and gentlemen, can I thank you very much indeed. |