I Predict the Ministry of Justice’s Remarks For 7th March

Last Thursday the government issued its final plans for Legal Aid following two ‘consultations’.  As predicted these proposals, many of the changes will come into effect little more than a fortnight from now, and will mean a catastrophe not just for the legal profession but for the administration of justice in this country. 

In a demonstration of the strength of their feelings, on Friday 7^th 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 9^th 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.

The Great British Rake Off Part II or Fire Sale of the Century

The media astonish me sometimes, occasionally they latch on to a story and won’t let go until every possible aspect has been explored and exposed.  We can all think of examples; the Iraq war, MPs expenses, numerous Northern Ireland issues, child abuse by priests and Jimmy Saville.  But there another even more obvious scandal happening at present and most of the press seem to be treating it like a ‘dog bites man’ story and concentrating on things that happened years ago.  For example, however sensational and titillating gossip about what some of our prominent politicians may or may not have been doing in the 70s is; and it may indeed be interesting or worthwhile knowing about in the long term.  It is not as important as what they currently doing, things that govern our present and dictate our future that surely should be occupying their time and our minds.

This government is in the process of selling off our public services to the private sector at a rate never seen before.  They are making Thatcher's government look like a street corner barrowman by comparison.  They have no mandate to do what they are doing and yet the magnitude of their actions is breath-taking.  And much of what has been and is being done is irretrievable, in other words ‘When It’s Gone It’s Gone’.  We hear the words 'academy' but not private school, we hear 'foundation hospital' not private hospital; and yet that what we've got.  Some might think 'but surely that's okay isn't it?  Aren't private schools and hospitals operated to a higher standard than state run ones?'  Well if you imagine a private hospital run by a private healthcare company with patients funded by private health insurance that may be so.  Or perhaps if you imagine a private school funded by the wealthy parents of its pupils at thousands of pounds a term.  But don't imagine that that is what academies or foundation hospitals are like.  Many will be run by and for the profit of shareholders of enormous companies (many from overseas) whose sole raison d'etre is provide the lowest possible service level for the highest possible price and to make the greatest possible profit margin.

Why am I returning to this theme you might ask?  Well this is an extremely important time, this is a week where the government has revealed that ‘E-ACT, one of England’s biggest academy chains, is to be stripped of almost a third of its schools amid serious concerns over education standards’.  This piece of news reveals so much more than just what it says.  First of all E-ACT is only one of England’s academy chains!  My children have long since grown up and left home so I was more than a little surprised to learn that there was such a thing as a ‘chain’ of academies.  I imagined that the whole point of these so-called academies was that they were independent.  On its website, E-ACT proudly claims that they, ‘have a proven national record of developing schools into high attaining institutions and were delighted to celebrate a fourth year of improvements across all E-ACT academies in 2012’.  Well so much for the improvement and their national record then.  It was also interesting to read that they claim to be ‘sponsors’ of education.  I had always thought that a sponsor in this context was a person or organisation that contributes towards the costs of something, not an organisation that takes public money to provide a service.

This episode with academies is just the latest in a long list of privatisation adventures by the coalition.  The entirety of these policies is a scandal of monumental proportions.  Public money is routinely being given to private companies who cannot or will not provide the services they are paid to.  The welfare state in all its facets is being systematically dismantled by a government that has no mandate to do it.  They claim it is an ideological thing, as if that makes it okay to do it without seeking an electoral mandate to make such an enormous shift in public service policy.  They say that the ideology is that by moving things to the private sector it creates wealth that we all benefit from; however, the only wealth that is being created is for the shareholders and executives of huge corporate companies who mostly pay their taxes abroad.  It was recently revealed that at least two of the biggest of these companies paid zero corporation tax in the UK last year.  They claim that these changes will save money; that is not true either, mostly they only appear to save money by shifting additional costs into a different budget.  For example when making the changes to Legal Aid this will add enormous costs to court operating costs whilst appearing to make Legal Aid cheaper.

All this would be absolutely fine I suppose if we actually were saving money and/or being provided with the better services we have been promised, except of course we are not.  Time and time again we see examples of privatised services coming short of the standards expected, repeatedly we find service providers unable to fulfil the promises they made when taking the contract, some even having to relinquish the task, unable provide even the unexacting standards demanded by this government.  We even see examples of deliberate fraud where the government is billed for services never provided or asked for.  You could be forgiven for thinking that these failings are rare and or only of insignificant sums amounts because sometimes they barely get a mention in much of the press.  They disappear from the front pages to be replaced by news of Simon Cowles baby or other such trivial nonsense.

Whenever some new titbit of public service comes up for sale the usual suspects are there slavering at the bit, waiting to get their greasy little fingers on another little piece of the action.  It matters not that these companies mostly have no history in providing that service; or that many do have a long and proven history of incompetence and/or fraud.  Indeed many of these companies can boast ministers and MPs as shareholders.

This week also marks a tragedy for Britain with the final nail in the coffin of our reputation for being a just and fair nation, and being considered a beacon for justice throughout the world.  Today the government have announced their final plans for Legal Aid.  These plans will inevitably, in the short term, lead to the closure of hundreds of small solicitors firms with all their highly qualified and support staff finding themselves out of work.  In the longer term the system will become unviable leaving the way clear for one of the usual suspects to move in and employ poorly qualified staff to represent accused people in court.  Or worse still, people forced to defend themselves in court.  The long established Criminal Bar which both defends and prosecutes people accused of criminal offences may actually not survive.  There will be many miscarriages of justice innocent people found guilty, perhaps even jailed for crimes they did not commit, and the guilty left to walk the streets and possibly re-offend.  If you were the victim of rape would you want to be cross-examined in court by the accused because he couldn’t get a lawyer?

The changes announced today will NOT save money but will indeed increase costs.  They have been condemned almost unanimously by every section of the legal profession, ie barristers, judges, magistrates, solicitors, legal executives and court interpreters.  Even the government’s own lawyers have criticised them.  And yet Chris Grayling the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice is pushing them through.  This is a man who has absolutely no training or experience in the law, has consistently used spurious statistics, misled parliament on a number of occasions and made defamatory remarks about the legal profession in order to support his arguments.  Has been found to have lied on several occasions.  A man who claimed thousands of pounds to decorate a second home yet lives only 16 miles from parliament; and who employs his wife as his secretary at £37,000 pa cost to the nation.

There are many aspects of the these changes that are wrong, and I have covered most of them in earlier postings of my blog, but suffice it to say that our Criminal Justice System is just the latest of our public services being sacrificed on the altar of profit.

For your information:

A list of some of the companies that are buying us up:

G4S, Serco, Capita, Atos, E-ACT

A list of some services that have been sold off or are about to be:

Court interpreting, disability assessments, schools, hospitals, legal aid lawyers (defence & prosecution), prisons, police back office functions, prisoner transport, fire service, pension payments, council office functions, many NHS services, probation services.

So Much For Enterprise and Ambition Then

So then the philosophy of this government is, if you work hard at school you can gain a place at university where you can pay £9000 per year for 9 - 15 hours per week tuition.  Once you graduate (with debts between £30 - 45,000) this will enable you to get a job (or probably not) with a salary barely above minimum wage, out of which you must:

·         Feed and clothe yourself (although your parents will probably have to do that until you’re at least 25;

·         House yourself (parents might do that for nothing until they are in their dotage).  If your parents are not completely without resources by now they may be able to give you the money for the 5% deposit on a house enabling you to try to buy a house with the government’s ‘Help To Buy Scheme’ (HTBS).; and if you have been particularly fortunate and your job pays significantly above minimum wage you might be able to afford the repayments in the quarter-million pound loan you have had to take out.
The HTBS is a government initiative designed to provide profits to builders that make large donations to party funds.  It has the unique advantages of pushing up the prices of houses making it look as if prosperity has returned to this bankrupt country so that you will be persuaded to vote for them at the next election.  Of course there is minor disadvantage that when interest rates start to rise, which they will inevitably have to, even a very tiny rise will have enormous consequences on mortgage borrowers as the size of their loans are so large.  This of course has the effect that many will not be able to afford them and will have their houses repossessed, leaving them in a position where they have to return to live with Mum and Dad or rent a house from one of the ever burgeoning role private landlords costing as much or more as their previous mortgage with the help (if they can get it) of welfare payments.  Alternatively they could just go on the streets, many already choose this option.
However we should not forget that the banks (who made the unsustainable loan in the first place) will then own what used to be their house which they can then sell and make a profit from the process.  Does any of this seem familiar?

·         Oh yes you must not forget, you will need to start saving for a pension because by the time you need to retire you will need to be about 103 to be eligible for the State Pension even if your body gave up about 35 years earlier.

Well you shouldn’t feel too bad about it, you could always sit and read your degree certificate while you sit round a fire on a piece of waste ground somewhere and recall those halcyon days of academia.  Perhaps you could swap tales with those around who chose to take up law and burdened themselves with even greater debt by becoming criminal barristers or solicitors only to have their professions destroyed and handed to people who didn’t bother to go to university, and those whose small businesses were asset stripped by big firms prepared to do a sub-standard job for a pittance and who pay little more than the minimum wage to their employees.

You shouldn’t feel too down of course, out of every tale of woe there shines a little light.  There will be plenty of people to benefit from the wonderful policies of this government even when the economy goes tits up again as it inevitably will.  There are the millionaire politicians whose nests are well and truly lined the executives and shareholders of their party donors (such as big outsourcing companies and builders) and we must remember the bankers.

Money, Money, Money, It’s a Rich Man’s World Part II

Whoever wins the next election will have an almighty mess to clear up. There have been many reforming governments in the past but none have gone about their business with such reckless zeal.  None have set out on their mission without even a recognised objective let alone a fall back plan if it should all go wrong.  This administration will leave in its wake a set of public services in total disarray.  NHS, CJS, welfare payments, disability services, armed forces, social care etc. the ambition of these adventurers is almost boundless.  It would be nice to imagine that their plan was motivated purely by ideology, however on the basis that much of what is happening is not just a move to the private sector.  The fact that these many of these moves are targeted at small businesses (something the government has claimed they want to actively support) that leads one to suspect something altogether more sinister is happening.  For example Legal Aid lawyers are already in the private sector most in small practices and not a corporate multi-national.  Why would that make a difference?  They would have us believe it is to save money, but experience has proven that it could well cost a good deal more than tried, tested and successful existing arrangements.  Maybe because in a large budget the opportunity for maladministration is far greater it can be made to look like it is saving money.  However, there far more sinister interpretations that can be placed on their motives.

They have set out on a path to ruthlessly destroy public services by privatising practically everything that remained in the public sector when they came to power.  Amongst the things they have privatised is the court interpreter service (another small business).  The whole process has been an unmitigated disaster; court cases being delayed or failing altogether because the contractors have sent the wrong interpreter, the interpreter has been late or they have sent nobody at all, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds in wasted court time.  But apart from that most of the interpreters are unqualified which in itself can often lead to miscarriages of justice.  Interpreting for court purposes is a highly qualified profession not only do they have to be extremely well versed in each of the languages they are to express, but they need to be able to ensure that everything that is said by one party is clearly understood by the other including any nuances and colloquialisms.  To be able to do this takes knowledge, training and skill, there are specific qualifications required and those that undertake it do so under oath.  However at the moment many of those sent by contractors don’t always have these qualifications and often struggle to make themselves understood let alone interpret others.  The spin off effect of this change has been that hundreds of highly qualified interpreters have found themselves without work, and with all that entails. 

Proposed changes to Legal Aid provisions are inevitably going to have a similar effect with thousands of highly qualified professionals put out of work overnight and their work given to poorly qualified people.  Up and down the country barristers and solicitors with families, mortgages and business loans will find themselves out of a job.  Well, I know that lawyers don’t always attract a great deal of sympathy from some of us more modestly qualified people.  We read expressions such ‘fat-cat lawyers’ bandied about by the tabloid press, there are reports of barristers earning £400,000 pounds which may be true but it does not those who work in criminal law.  The average income of a barrister in criminal law (who is self-employed therefore a small business) is in the region of £35,000 out of which they have to pay VAT at 20% , chambers fees at 15-25%, practicing licence fees, professional body fees, pension and in many cases travel costs to courts which can be anywhere in the country.  It costs on average £60,000 to qualify to be a barrister and can take eight years during which time they have to live.  In the light of this their pay might easily be considered too low rather than too high (in comparison a train driver earns around £45,000). 

These two examples of the ridiculous overzealous policies of this government are both within the legal system although there are many, many more.  A fair robust criminal justice system, available to all is a cornerstone of any society wishing to call itself civilised, and the changes I have referred to will in themselves fatally flaw ours.  We do not want justice in our country administered by poorly qualified people; we want innocent people exonerated, guilty people punished and protection from injustice.  With the destruction of the Criminal Bar and solicitors who currently practice in criminal law put out of business, miscarriages of justice will become commonplace.

As can be seen, the victims of this government’s policies though are not only amongst those groups normally considered most vulnerable.  One is driven to conclude that destroying the professions is a deliberate tactic in their overall strategy.

If you want to employ someone to carry out a large difficult yet crucial job for you, say an extension on your house, how do you go about it?  Would you perhaps speak to people who have had done this sort of work before, maybe you might go to see similar works that have been completed elsewhere.  Certainly you would want to see evidence that any people you might consider for the job were competent, honest and reliable.  I doubt you would employ anybody you had used before who had been repeatedly incompetent, someone who had surreptitiously billed you for work they hadn’t done, and definitely not someone who had deliberately defrauded you.  You surely wouldn’t use someone that costs you huge amounts to rectify their mistakes so any savings that might have been made are nullified. 

Nonetheless this is what this government is repeatedly doing with its outsourcing programme.  There are numerous examples court interpreters, offender tagging, prisoner transportation, disability assessments, and police back-office services etcetera.  Some have argued that their ideology is explained that by putting work into the private sector contributes to the country's economy.  Well that may be so, but surely that only works if the companies involved actually pay tax in this country; also if those that are employed by them can earn a reasonable wage.  However, most of these multi-national companies pay very little tax here and some none at all and their employees often earn little more than the minimum wage and/or are on zero-hour contracts.  The actual logic behind large-scale privatisation was once described to me like this.  Hold your hand out to one side level with your shoulder; that represents the service you pay for.  Now hold your hand out to one side at waist level; that represents the service you actually get.  Everything in between is profit.

So if it's not for ideological reasons that the government do it, and it's not to save money it leaves only two possible reasons and they are, complete mind-numbing stupidity or corruption.  From that draw your own conclusions, but these politicians can be accused of a lot of things but not stupidity.

I gather that HM Coastguard and the fire service are now on the wish list for this treatment.  Nothing is sacred, the scale of this government’s aspirations has been made abundantly clear are from a speech made by Oliver Letwin, currently Minister of State in the cabinet office, in 2005 said, “There will be no NHS within five years of a Conservative election victory.”  In a television interview on Sunday George Osborne complimented himself and his party on how well they were doing all the while displaying a smug smile that competed to outshine even that of Ed Balls seated next to him.  He stated that the UK could no longer afford a welfare state, but gave no explanation how that could be true when we could afford to build a railway that nobody wants, and most people can’t use and couldn’t afford to use if they could.  Neither did he explain why the economy can afford to pay six-figure salaries and enormous bonuses to executives of outsourcing companies who do not achieve what they are paid to

Money, Money, Money, It’s a Rich Man’s World Part I

I’ve never believed in the politics of envy.  In my view to discriminate against someone because of their wealth is just as bad as victimising someone for their poverty.  But this government are making it increasingly difficult to maintain those views.

The aristocracy, the extremely wealthy and the socially advantaged have always been disproportionately represented in government and that can be said of all parties, even in modern day politics.  However, over the years that has not necessarily meant that they have all used their elevated status to better themselves, their kin or their contemporaries; especially not to the direct disadvantage of those less fortunate.  There are numerous examples of politicians who have used their privileged positions as the means to improve the lot of the disadvantaged or at least for the betterment of the nation such as Winston Churchill, William Wilberforce, Tony Benn or William Gladstone.  However now wherever you look along the front benches of parliament you see rows of millionaires and nary a face amongst them there for selfless reasons. 

The recent parliamentary expenses scandal exposed the level of greed and even dishonesty amongst those chosen to represent us and you would imagine that the publicity would have convinced the most avaricious ones to crawl chastened back into their hides.  That is clearly not the case with some resorting to any means to wring the very last possible drip out of the public purse.  For example, we read of a minister claiming pennies in expenses for a journey of a hundred yards.  Everybody knows that it must have been a fraudulent claim; not least of all because I doubt that any MP could park a car within a hundred yards of their workplace if they wanted and even if they could it would take longer to retrieve the vehicle than it would to walk to their destination.  As far as I am aware we have no disabled ministers at the moment, so one is left to conclude it was either a fraud or the minister involved is the laziest public representative on record or perhaps both. 

On 24 May 2011 the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) was made responsible for determining MPs' pay and setting the level of any increase in their salary; and since May 2010 IPSA has been responsible for the regulation and payment of expenses to Members of the House of Commons.  That we were assured would put an end to unreasonable salary increases and unfair or fraudulent expenses claims and yet that is clearly not the case.  Still we’ve an MP claiming expenses for before he was elected and who now serves as a minister in the Department of Justice and several others claiming for fuel bills of two houses.  When IPSA recently announced the next round of pay increases for MPs at 10-11% (in spite of many having had their pay frozen or even cut over recent years), many parliamentary incumbents insisted that they deserved it.  Some even claim that they have no choice but to accept it.  All that is common knowledge of course as is the Salary of the Justice Secretary £220,000 and the £40,000 per year he pays his wife to act as his secretary (not bad for a bit of diary management, opening letters and answering the phone).

Whilst the avarice of these people is disgusting and enough to make you scream; it somehow seems so much worse when seen in contrast to what they are doing to the very people who they are employed to represent.  The extraordinary arrogance of these people who smile into cameras and compliment themselves about what a good job they are doing.  They do this whilst completely ignoring the hardships being caused not just by the prevailing economic circumstances but by the actions they say they are taking to remedy the problems.  ‘We are all in this together’, they told us when they were elected.  How does that pan out when we have a front bench that looks like a Who’s Who of millionaires with second and third homes awarding themselves above-inflation pay rises and expenses for things that the rest of us have to pay for ourselves.  With several of them claiming fuel cost for two homes, last time I looked it was not possible to be in two places at the same time so how they justify that is beyond me.  All the while they are developing policies that further impoverish and/or oppress those who they might regard as at the bottom of the food chain and unworthy of their compassion. 

The Spare Room Subsidy otherwise known as the ‘Bedroom Tax’ is forcing people to leave homes they may have lived in for decades; as many are already barely managing to keep their heads above water the alternatives are to run up debts or go without food or heating.  This would be bad enough but as there is a shortage of smaller homes for these people to rent and therefore have no available remedy to their problem.  Needless to say the private landlords are laughing all the way to the bank because the additional pressure on the small home market pushes rent up so even if they do find a smaller home then the rent will be as much if not more than where they came from.  If the victims of this vicious policy go to councils or housing associations for help they are told they are not entitled to help as they are regarded as ‘intentionally homeless’. 

Disability Living Allowance has been withdrawn along with other welfare payments and replaced with something called ‘Universal Credit’.  Former DLA claimants have all been reassessed to re-evaluate their need and eligibility for assistance.  The government outsourced the £400m medical assessment contract to a company called Atos Healthcare, their doctors’ role was to advise DWP ‘decision-makers’ about the level of disability of claimants.  Needless to say the whole process went wrong from the outset with hundreds tales of bizarre assessment results such as; amputees being told their condition may improve or people who are able to walk 20 metres must be able to walk 100 metres and therefore are fit to work.  Atos is now routinely described as ‘a disability denial factory’, although they have now withdrawn from large parts of the contract and now only advise the DWP on terminally ill claimants leaving the medically untrained ‘decision-makers’ to make their own minds up on all the others.  It is superfluous to say that this whole process is causing very real hardship and no small amount of stress to disabled people.

There are many more examples of how this government is surreptitiously destroying the welfare state without any mandate from the electorate.  They do it of course in the guise of saving the economy.  However, many of these changes have actually ended up costing more which begs the question, ‘why do they do it?’  I will address this question in Part II, coming to my blog shortly.

Power Behind the Throne (or who's pulling the strings?)

Anyone who knows me or has read some of the things I’ve previously written will know that I’m no fan of MPs or the government (this one or its predecessor).  But it occurred to me the other day that maybe I’ve been a little harsh on them.  Don’t get me wrong, I have experienced some sort of epiphany, I still think that a far too great a proportion of them are mendacious, ego-centric, venal wasters with little or no talent to do anything in the real world.  There is little doubt in my mind that their motivations all fit into one or more of these categories; greed, power or dogma. 
But perhaps they are not the only ones to blame when things go wrong.  I’ve often been intrigued how it is that a government member who has perhaps on one day been in charge of railways or maybe the environment and then overnight after a cabinet re-shuffle find themselves able to talk with absolute authority about childcare or justice.  Well of course this could always be the result of a waving of the Prime Ministerial magic wand that PM imagine they've got, but more likely it is because the apparent polymath is just another ‘rentamouth’ who has been briefed moments before stepping in front of the camera. 

So who is it then who does the briefing you might ask?  Well as most of you probably know that this task falls to the highly paid civil servants that populate the corridors of Whitehall, the ‘Sir Humphrey Applebys’ of this world.  Progressing this thought begged the question, what is it that happens when the day after the election, the whole ideology of the government has changed and the entire direction of the department in which these mandarins might have been ensconced for years starts plodding in a completely new direction?  I somehow could not convince myself that these individuals and their immediate subordinates suddenly about face and begin to think about things completely differently.  If they did that it would often mean abandoning policies and work that they had spent years maybe even a career developing.  My own experience of public service support staff didn’t extend to national level but my time with a county council and London Fire Authority gives me strong grounds for inference.  I have observed close-hand exercises in sycophancy and duplicity that would put Basil Fawlty to shame, and seen policies unashamedly manipulated by backroom staff.  Policies that I had worked on from an operational standpoint found themselves being ‘steered’.  Little changes in sentences and paragraphs, small nudges by a department head following a ‘meeting’ with a senior non-operational manager etc.  All these things managing to take the teeth out if not derail the thing altogether (there’s a lovely metaphoric mixture for you).

So what does happen?  Well anybody who watched ‘Yes Minister’ will have seen Sir Humphrey manoeuvre things so that he almost always got his own way and somehow the minister was left believing that he had won the day.  ‘But that’s just fiction’ I hear you say; and of course you would be right.  However, maybe there might be an ounce or two of fact in there somewhere.  As children we all laughed at and enjoyed the tales of Hans Christian Anderson and most of them were allegorical in one way or another.  It seems to me that an apt one to consider in this context would be the tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes where two weavers manage to convince an emperor that their non-existent cloth is invisible to stupid people or those unfit to hold their position.  Given that MPs don’t always demonstrate the highest level of intellect…..?

I think it’s an issue worth consideration, not to take the heat off the ministers, after all they accepted the job so if they don’t like it they know what they can do.  But perhaps we should be trying to find out who else is to blame for the succession of inept administrations that appear to destroying this country.  But for the immediate future the pressing issue is, ‘Is the Lord Chancellor wearing any clothes?’  What do you think?

A Bleak Future for Justice

I am not a member of the legal profession nor have I ever had the need to use a lawyer in court, but I have been closely following recent developments.  As a citizen of this country I consider that I have as big a stake in the outcome of the changes to our criminal justice system as anyone else; and I believe, as I’m sure most people do, that a robust criminal justice system (CJS) available to all regardless of financial situation, position in society, race or religion is the very bedrock of a civilised country. 

I know that on the face of things this may be a subject that does not directly affect most law abiding people, some I know believe that Legal Aid is predominantly something given to criminals to defend themselves against a justifiable prosecution.  It should be remembered that any one of us can be vulnerable to arrest in many unforeseeable circumstances.  A driving accident where someone has been injured or killed; or perhaps walking home from the cinema a group of drunks spill out of a pub and start a fight in which you defend yourself and once again a person is hurt; maybe a neighbour falsely accusing you of damaging his property; the possibilities are almost limitless.  The need for a lawyer begins from the time of first arrest and what happens over the few hours following your arrest may determine in the first instance whether you are charged and if you are charged whether you are found guilty in any subsequent prosecution.  The advice and support of an independent fully qualified lawyer at that stage is crucial.  Many lawyers say that up to 50% of times they are called to advise a client at a police station the police do not proceed with a charge; a very high percentage of those charged either never reach court or are found not guilty at an early stage.  It is difficult to imagine how many of these cases may turn out differently if the defendants are unrepresented or their advocate is either poorly qualified or not fully committed to proving the client’s innocence.  One must never lose sight of the fact that the police have no mandate nor incentive to gather evidence that might indicate innocence, only that which might point toward guilt. 

Over the centuries this country’s CJS has justifiably gained a reputation as being one of the best in the world; and until recently I have considered that whilst not being faultless ours was pretty good.  However, during the last decade or so a number of changes, made by various UK governments have nibbled away at the edges of the foundations of that system, but none so severe as those now being proposed by the current Justice Secretary.

In May Mr Grayling produced a consultation paper principally saying he wished to save £220m from the Legal Aid budget by cutting a minimum of 17.5% to lawyers.  He also proposed many things that were alien to the general understanding of what the British CJS was all about and quite understandably his proposals were universally  condemned from both within and outside the legal profession and attracted over 16,000 responses most of which were hostile.  Yet in spite of that hostility from the most qualified and experienced members of the profession, including members of his own legal team, Mr Grayling and his deputy, both without qualifications or experience in law, vigorously defended the original proposals using inaccurate statistics, spurious arguments and defamatory remarks about lawyers.  Mr Grayling claims that the bill for Legal Aid is £2b and spiralling out of control, when the actual cost of criminal defence is in fact less than £1b and falling and only £275m of that was for advocacy.  He says we have the most costly Legal Aid system in the world without mentioning that he makes his comparison with systems that are completely different and therefore not comparable.  He talks of lawyers earning huge sums of money and getting rich at the public’s expense, when the reality is that criminal defence work is the lowest paid area of law and many solicitor firms and barrister chambers working in criminal law are already going out of business even before any further cuts.  There have been no rises in Legal Aid fees since 1997 and indeed several severe cuts during the intervening time.  He fails to mention that the figures he quotes include VAT and expenses such expert witness fees, that lawyers are not paid for much of the time they spend preparing for a case, travelling time, time spent waiting for a case to be called in court or days wasted because a case was moved to another day or court; and he conveniently forgets the other costs of running a business such as support staff and rent or leases etc.

Why should most of us worry about cuts to lawyers pay you might ask?  Well, an initial consultation paper called for a reduction in the number of firms contracted to provide Legal Aid cover from the existing 1600 to a maximum of 400, and this would be achieved by a process called Price Competitive Tendering (PCT); in effect awarding the contracts to the lowest bidders.  There have been a number of big companies that have expressed an interest most of whom have no history in providing legal services, and some of which already hold huge government contracts and have been discredited for over-charging, incompetence, and fraud.  Other aspects of the proposals were that clients would lose the right to choose their solicitor and have one randomly allocated; and that lawyers would get a single fee regardless how long or complicated a case turned out to be.  The combined effect of these proposals would be that a client could be represented by a lawyer they have never met and perhaps have no confidence in, and one who has a financial incentive to persuade them to plead guilty to an offence they might not have committed.  I know that people may think, ‘well I would never plead guilty to something I hadn’t done’; but if you are being told by someone that, ‘if you plead not guilty and are later convicted you may end up in prison’, you may think differently.

So what do the government’s proposals for Legal Aid Joe Public, to you and me, the man and woman in the street?

Many people would be surprised to learn that the current cost of training to be a barrister is in the region £60,000 with no guarantee in criminal law that once qualified an income of over £16,000pa is a realistic prospect; and the situation for trainee solicitors is much the same.  If you reduce that salary by 17.5% (as proposed by our Justice Secretary) it doesn’t take a genius to realise that people will look elsewhere for a career. 

Not so widely known but at the same time as these proposals are made, the regulatory bodies that govern the legal profession the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) and the Bar Standards Board (BSB) have been developing something called the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (QASA).  The stated purpose is of QASA is to ‘assure the quality of all criminal advocates appearing in courts in England and Wales’.  Currently to act as an advocate solicitors, barristers and legal executives have to pass a whole raft of stringent examinations including written, oral, and practical in front of senior judge.  They have to present a portfolio of cases where they have acted as advocate under supervision and without intervention which have to be periodically renewed and reviewed.  Given this existing level of quality assurance, it is difficult to understand what is to be achieved by QASA if it is not to lower the standard and make it easier for people with a lower academic background and level of achievement to act as advocates. 

After his original proposals were roundly condemned almost everyone in the legal profession (including his own Attorney General) Grayling issued a second consultation paper but as far as I am able to see there is very little in the overall effect from the original.  Let me demonstrate what I mean, how I foresee things will pan out in a post-Grayling world and what the domino effect of making these changes will be. 

·         If you reduce the rates lawyers get paid to the rates proposed (i.e. a minimum reduction of 17.5%) most current providers will go to the wall or be subsumed into larger companies.

·         Because the rates paid to successful bidders for contracts will be so low the successful companies will be unlikely to be able to pay professional salaries to their advocates.  This will mean the most qualified and capable criminal advocates will look elsewhere for.  How does that pan out for client choice if the only choice you have is one huge company or another?

·         These changes combined with QASA will mean that the high standards currently imposed by the professional bodies will become a things of the past, allowing people with very few qualifications and little experience to act as advocates.

·         Removing the right to Legal Aid for many will, amongst other things, lead to people acting for themselves in court which will add to court time wastage, produce miscarriages of justice and possibly even perpetrators of crime cross-examining their victims in the witness box.  Lower standards of advocacy (It must be borne in mind that advocates prosecute as well as defend) will inevitably also lead to more miscarriages of justice which would have huge and undesirable consequences.  Innocent people being punished maybe even imprisoned for crimes they did not commit whilst the actual criminal is left to walk the streets.  Prosecutions failing, allowing the guilty to walk free.  Guilty people being given inappropriate sentences because mitigation wasn’t argued correctly.  Apart from the huge impact these have on the wrongly convicted and on the victims of crime, all of these can lead to appeals costing huge amounts of court time and therefore public money.  Because of new Legal Aid rules many people may not be entitled to a lawyer no matter how just their cause and may find themselves arguing an appeal armed only with a copy of ‘A Dummies Guide to Advocacy’.

·         Because profit margins will be too low, survivors of existing firms will find themselves on a very low bough and ripe for the picking by the likes of G4S, Eddie Stobart, the Co-op and Tesco (I kid you not, they have all expressed an interest)

·         By this time, if anybody needs a publicly funded lawyer they may find themselves with an 18 year-old grammar school leaver with an A Level in law and a certificate gained from a self-funded 12 hour weekend course in advocacy, employed on a zero hour contract with G4S, and being paid a flat rate for guilty plea or trial creating a financial incentive to persuade the client to plead guilty.  It won’t matter at that stage if you are an immigrant or a trafficked woman, neither will it matter if you suffer from mental health issues, from alcohol or drug addiction problems, nor will it matter if you’re a prisoner, or even if you’re just a bog standard member of the public; it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, if you want to defend a prosecution or argue an appeal, your Buy One Get One Free lawyer is probably all you will be entitled to.  And as for a judicial review against an unjust government decision or a new law forget it, they will be only for the very wealthy.

·         This country’s judiciary is amongst the finest in the world, its criminal branch relies on the ablest of advocates, barristers or solicitors, taking their accumulated knowledge and judgment onto the bench.  Where will the criminal court judges of the future to be found?

Another proposal, possibly popular to some, is to deny access to Legal Aid for prisoners.  A recent interesting calculation from the Howard League for Prison Reform said that if every prisoner currently serving a life sentence served only one additional year in prison as a result of not having a lawyer to argue their case then for a saving of £4m from the Legal Aid bill, the cost to the taxpayer at today’s prices would be £480m.

I have written several times to my MP on this subject and to the Justice Secretary pleading with them to reconsider these proposals, the answers I get consist largely of the re-iteration of the same inaccurate statistics and discredited arguments whilst completely ignoring the consequences.  And yet, for somebody who seems to be rarely out of the public eye lately speaking on just about any subject you can think of, Grayling seems to be strangely absent when the subject of Legal Aid is mentioned.  He refused to meet with Michael Turner QC the then President of the CBA, and he failed to attend either of two debates in Westminster and left them to junior ministers who rather ineptly attempted to fight his corner 

Victims of these changes, apart from thousands of lawyers from all branches of the profession and many ordinary members of the public caught up in the law with no previous criminal record, will include trafficked women, victims of domestic abuse, and anybody falsely accused of a sexual offence even if there is little no evidence against them, to name but a few.

‘British justice’ and our reputation for fairness have long been regarded as the gold standard for even-handedness, and a hallmark of what is best about this country, but if these changes go ahead we will have a criminal justice system reminiscent of a third world country.