Given all that has happened and continues to happen the contents of his reply have particularly enraged me so I thought I would share my responding letter with you.
Dear
Mr Grayling
LEGAL AID REFORM
I
am responding to your letter of the 29th May 2014 to John Hayes MP
which was in itself a response to a letter I had written to him on this
subject. Your letter was quite long and
includes a number of matters with which I have to take issue and I shall deal
with them in order that they arise in your letter.
1.
It was entirely unnecessary to explain to me that,
“The justice system in England and Wales has a world class reputation for impartiality
and fairness and is a model for many other systems the world over.” Especially in view of the fact it was me that has
reminded you and Mr Hayes of that fact in several of my earlier correspondences,
I find it more than a little patronising.
I think you will find that the damage that your policies have done is
more than likely to discredit our criminal justice system in the eyes of
the world.
It
is particularly infuriating to see you state that “publicly funded legal
services must be provided in as efficient a way as possible” when it obvious to
all but those that do not want to see that the whole way that services are
provided have been and continue to be neither efficient nor effective; and very
little of that is to do with the lawyers themselves who you seem to want to
punish for it. The (LAA) Legal Aid
Authority and (CPS) Crown Prosecution services are without doubt amongst the
most incompetent of all government services and none of your ‘transformations’
have even started to address that. In
fact tales that I regularly hear tell of LAA behaviour that would not be at all
out of place in an episode of ‘Rogue Traders’; and the regularity of CPS failure to disclose documents to the defence seem like deliberate attempts to
pervert the course of justice.
Furthermore
to claim that any of the actions that you have taken will make the system in
any way ‘fairer’ is without doubt an outrageous falsehood when it is quite
obvious the reverse is true.
2.
Once again you reiterate the roundly discredited
soundbite about Legal Aid costing £2bn per year with around £1bn on criminal
legal aid. This figure has been falling
steadily over the last decade or so and continues to do so. Constant repetition of an inaccurate
statement will never make it true.
3.
You talk about maintaining the credibility of
legal aid. I fail to see how you can
possibly achieve this by making it inaccessible to those who most need it; and protesting
as much as you like about it still being available to those who have little or
no resources would also be disingenuous as the reality regularly proves that
not to be the case. In your letter you
say, “Access to justice and access to taxpayer-funded legal aid must not be
confused”; which of course would be true if you were only referring to wealthy
people accused of crime, however that is not the case in point here. Already people accused of crimes who are
unable to fund representation are regularly coming before courts as litigants
in person, their ineptitude is understandably causing massive wastes of court
time and God knows how many miscarriages of justice. In previous times many of these accused would on the advice of their lawyer
have plead guilty at the first opportunity thereby saving hours of court and prosecutors’
time.
It is a well-known fact that a very large
proportion of people charged with a crime either never reach trial or are found
not guilty at trial and your changes to legal aid mean that someone on even a
modest income may have to use their life-savings or even sell their homes in
order to fund a defence against a publicly-funded prosecution for an offence
they may not have committed.
4.
Your letter refers to the government’s
undertaking in 2010 to carry out a fundamental review of the legal aid scheme
to make it work more efficiently. It
appears though, that what was really intended to just unilaterally cut costs
across the board without regard to the consequences. The evidence suggests that you have paid
little or any attention at all to the warnings or opinions of the professional
bodies and other than a few cosmetic changes following tens of thousands of
responses to your ‘consultations’ you have just ploughed ahead regardless
totally ignoring very workable suggestions that could save the amount of money
you say need to.. The consequences of
the various legislative and regulatory changes to the legal aid system amount
to little less than a catastrophic erosion in both criminal and civil justice
systems.
5.
The embarkation on your next step of ‘reform’ outlined
in the document Transforming Legal Aid’
delivering a more credible and efficient system, which can hardly have been
more inappropriately named, has continued to wreak havoc upon our once great (CJS)
criminal justice system. Although one
could hardly argue with its claim to have transformed legal aid, however the resulting
chimera that has emerged is a hideous representation that in name only is
similar to what has gone before. Once
again you insult my intelligence by providing a link to it, as if by following
it. it was going expose some sort of Rosetta Stone providing the legend to explain
some kind of sense in your methods. Did
you really imagine that I would not have already have read the ridiculous
document?
6.
You conclude by saying that ‘we cannot ignore
the financial situation we face’; and yet in all your actions you appear to be
doing exactly that. The courts, prisons and
probation services are in chaos, the court interpreter system is in meltdown
the prison transport and tagging arrangements have been brought into disrepute;
and this is all as a direct result of your policies. Your relentless privatisation strategy which
you have explained as being ‘ideological’ have not saved any money and in actual
fact have cost a great deal more which you will no doubt deny by not revealing
additional costs appearing in different budgets. Your actions have resulted in such pandemonium
in the courts that you have been forced into a massive expansion of the (PDS) Public
Defender Service, paying publicly employed barristers almost double what you would
have to pay them in private practice to do the same thing. It seems to me to be an extraordinary state
of affairs when we hear of a Conservative led government conducting the nationalisation
of a private service. You have appointed
whole lists of outsourcing companies to provide services formerly in public
control and the catalogue of ineptitude, fraud and mismanagement that resulted
is there for all to see. Not least the
court interpreter services costing double what they had under previous
arrangements. One can only guess at what
the motives are behind this ‘ideological’ shift. I can only think of two and neither are very
flattering.
Destroying
the criminal bar and bankrupting thousands of solicitors in order to clear the
way for outsourcing companies without experience or knowledge in the practice
of criminal advocacy will not provide ‘a more credible and efficient system’ but
will no doubt have precisely the opposite effect.
All
of these matters are extremely serious but none as serious as for the victims
of crimes where the perpetrators have gone unpunished; nor for the wrongly
convicted who may have lost their homes, livelihoods or even liberty as a result
of your government’s woeful mismanagement of the justice system.
Numerous
experts who have lived and worked in the CJS all their lives from all sections
of the profession, the bar, solicitors, CILEX, ACPI, NAPO, the judiciary and
even lawyers within the Treasury Department have all condemned the
changes. Knowledgeable commentators from
the quality press have seen through the rhetoric and misinformation that issues
forth from your little citadel in Petty France.
The continued denial of these consequences by you and others at the MoJ by
maintaining the charade that all is okay insults the nation in every possible
way.
Over
the last couple of years, at every given opportunity you and your underlings at
the Ministry of Justice have attempted to justify your actions by trotting out
some tired old cliché or other about the country’s financial situation. So if we are to take you at your word then
basically what you are saying is that justice is okay if the country is doing
quite well, but as it stands we are currently so broke it’s a luxury we can’t
afford, it’s a shame but there it is.
Well Sir, I have news for you, it is the duty of every government to
insure and protect the basic rights of all persons to life, a decent standard
of living, security, dignity, identity, freedom, truth, due process of law, and
justice. Justice is not optional and in
your position as Lord Chancellor you should know that before anything or anyone
else.
Yours
Sincerely,
CR Mardell
