In a demonstration of the strength of their feelings, on
Friday 7th March 2014, all barristers and most solicitors practicing
in criminal law will stay away from court bringing most courts including
(magistrates’ courts) to a standstill for the whole day. This will be only the second time in 500
years that this is happened, the last was on the 9th January this
year when the action lasted only half a day.
This dignified and essential profession feel they have no choice because
they believe that the changes proposed by a Justice Secretary without
qualifications or experience in the law is making will have disastrous effects
on the administration of justice.
In layman’s terms these will be the effects if these
changes come into effect:
·
Most people, when accused of a crime will not
be able to get a lawyer without paying for one to assist in their defence. Their choice will be to either represent
themselves or maybe to sell their house to pay a lawyer.
·
In the short term, a very large number of
small specialist and highly qualified solicitor firms that have been giving
expert advice to accused people in police stations and courts for many years
will go out of business.
·
In the long term, most of the remaining
existing solicitor firms giving advice to accused people will cease to do
so. This will leave the way clear for
these services for whole country to be provided by four or five multi-national
companies after having tendered down to the lowest possible price. The ‘lawyers’ employed by these companies
will a great deal less qualified and will have a financial incentive to
persuade their client to plead guilty (i.e. the same fee for a guilty plea as
for a trial). This will happen in spite
of the fact that the government accepted that it would be contrary to justice
if clients had no choice of lawyer to represent them and especially in those
terms. But of course this is exactly
what the government has wanted all along.
·
The Criminal Bar will be destroyed meaning
that it will practically impossible to viably operate as a barrister practicing
criminal law. As barristers both
prosecute and defend in criminal cases, these tasks will fall to people a great
deal less qualified and many may choose to represent themselves.
·
There be a huge increase in the number of
miscarriages of justice caused by people being poorly or unrepresented in
court. Innocent people will be fined or
imprisoned for crimes they did not commit and the guilty left to walk the
streets.
·
Victims of crime cross-examined by the person
they have accused (imagine that in a rape case or if the alleged victim were a
child)
·
If people act for themselves the amount of
court time spent on the case, and therefore court operating costs will increase
exponentially.
·
If people are wrongly convicted or acquitted
then retrials, appeals and imprisonment costs will increase enormously.
This is what I predict the government spin will claim on
or about Friday:
·
They will claim, “At about £2 billion pa this
country has the most expensive Legal Aid system in the world.” The government has trotted this statistic out
like some sort of religious mantra at every opportunity since these proposals
were first made in the early part of 2013.
It is not true of course and has been indisputably established to be a
myth by people from within and outside the legal profession. Of the top seventeen developed nations our
expenditure on legal aid per capita stands about tenth. Many other countries have a completely different
legal systems, in France and Italy for example their systems are
‘inquisitorial’, where as ours is ‘adversarial’ and defence costs appear in
different budgets and therefore cannot be readily compared. And in any event the cost of criminal legal
aid in this country is actually less than £1 billion and falling and has been
falling for a number of years.
·
They will say that everybody with a
disposable assets of less than £37,000 will still be entitled to Legal
Aid. That is completely misleading
because that figure is to include any equity in your home and any savings you
might have.
·
The government will imply one way or another
that lawyers in general and barristers in particular are overpaid ‘fat-cats’,
and will issue yet another set of spurious statistics to support their
assertion. These claims have all been
made before and have been completely disproven.
They will release a table of statistics showing that a handful of
barristers were paid huge sums of money over a selected period of time; lost in
the accompanying small print will be explanations that barristers are not paid
until the conclusion of a case and that could be up to 2 years after the
event. Complicated cases can themselves
go on for two or more years. The sums of
money paid out will include VAT at 20%.
They will probably not mention that barristers are self-employed and
they have considerable operating costs such as chambers fees (possibly 20-25%),
professional body fees amounting to hundreds of pounds and travelling
costs. They won’t mention that rather
than just turning up at court on the day of the trial there will be many hours
of research and preparation in advance, nor will they refer to the junior
counsel or expert witnesses that have to be paid. I anticipate that they won’t mention the
average debt of a newly qualified barrister (about £60,000). The average pay of a barrister is somewhere
in the region of about £34,000 per year, £11,000 less than a train driver and
broadly comparable with a London bobby.
Many earn a great deal less.
·
The government will also claim that in the
current economic climate they have little choice but to make savings and that Legal
Aid should not be immune. This is wrong
on just about every level. Legal Aid
fees have already been reduced many times meaning that they are already up to
47% less than they were more than 10 years ago.
This year the budget is already £56 million underspent. The Criminal Bar has shown that the so-called
‘required’ savings could easily be made by making the Ministry of Justice
operate more efficiently; they have demonstrated where these savings can be
made but their suggestions have fallen on stony ground.
·
The government will claim that it has
listened to what the representative bodies have had to say and made changes to
their plans accordingly. This is not
completely true either, they have consistently refused to meet with
representatives of the Criminal Bar, except under restrictive reporting
conditions (What do they want to keep secret I wonder). It is true that they have one or two cosmetic
changes to their original proposals but none that will prevent the inevitable
outcome.
There is a popular opinion around that lawyers are
massively overpaid, and who are only in it for the money. This myth is perpetuated by some TV dramatic
interpretations of lawyers. However,
contrary to that widespread view, lawyers working in criminal law are the
lowest paid and in a particularly specialised branch of the profession. Much of the work they do is unpaid and their
working week far exceeds that which is commonplace elsewhere, duty solicitors
are often called out in the middle of the night to drive to police stations
many miles away and attend the interview of an accused person. If these so-called fat cats were only in it
for the money they would not have chosen to work in criminal law in the first
place, there are a lot of other more lucrative areas of law.
The reality is that the administration of justice is an
expensive business and to cut costs just to save money to the point where it
cannot operate and/or is not available to all is not justice at all. To quote a former Justice Secretary, "I genuinely believe access to justice is the
hallmark of a civilised society."
I hope then, that having read these few remarks, people
might take the spin that the Ministry of Justice and the Justice Secretary (a
man with a history of telling lies and misleading Parliament) put on things on
Friday and view them in a different light.
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