HAMLYN - College of Social Sciences and International Studies ...

Criminal Justice
There has of course been a much longer running battle over
whether the CPS should be permitted to conduct cases in the
Crown Court. On this I support the view advanced by the Bar
and senior judges rather than that espoused by the solicitors'
branch. My reason for opposing extended rights of audience for
the CPS is not primarily worry about the quality of CPS
advocacy, though that is certainly a concern. My opposition is
mainly based on the fact that CPS lawyers are employees of an
organisation which unavoidably has a bureaucratic agenda. The
Lord Chancellor tried to meet the point by section 42 of the 1999
Act, which provides that the duty to the court takes precedence
over any other duty. But that does not deal with the point since,
regardless of his seniority and experience, no employee in an
organisation like the CPS can escape the pressures to conform
with what I have called the bureaucratic agenda. At present, if
the CPS and the barrister for the prosecution disagree about the
handling of a case, the independent barrister's voice is there to
challenge the CPS approach. When the CPS starts to use its new
right to conduct contested cases on its own, that will no longer
exist—to the potential detriment, I believe, of the quality of
justice.
Quality is one of the themes constantly mentioned by both
Ministers and the Legal Aid Board in referring to the plans for
legal services under the 1999 Access to Justice Act. A crucial
selling point of the new system of public funding of legal
services, it is claimed, is that only firms that can satisfy the
required quality of work standards to obtain contracts from the
Legal Services Commission will be permitted to do the work.
The auditing of standards through franchising by the Legal Aid
Board may have had some effect in raising standards of work at
least of some firms. But the danger, as a new study puts it, is
that the audit rather than the legal aid client assumes central
importance and that "managerialist concerns colonise legal
practice". 83 The Board becomes the real client and the main
83 H. Sommerlad and David Wall, Legally Aided Clients and their Solicitors: Quality
Perspectives on Quality and Legal Aid (Law Society Research Study No. 34,
1999), p. 42. For the details of the present franchise requirements see Legal
Aid Board, Legal Aid Franchise Quality Assurance Standard. For plans for the
Quality Mark to be introduced for funded providers both in the profit and the
not-for-profit sectors see Legal Aid Board, Community Legal Service Quality
Mark, (Consultation Paper, August 1999). See also Hilary Sommerlad, "Man-
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