Episódios
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Lawyers are sometimes failing to meet the ethical standards expected of them, according to the Legal Services Board.
The oversight body that regulates the legal regulators in England and Wales is launching a consultation today on upholding professional ethical duties. This sets out five “outcomes” that regulators would have to implement so that legal professionals would provide a better service to their clients and the wider public.
Why does the Legal Services Board think that yet more regulation is needed? What does it think that bodies such as the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority and the Bar Standards Board will make of its proposals? And what will this mean for legal professionals who must already pay for two levels of regulation?
These are among the questions I put to Richard Orpin (pictured above), director of regulation and policy at the Legal Service Board, in the latest edition of A Lawyer Talks.
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The body that advises the government on law reform in England and Wales is suggesting a new test for referring suspected miscarriages of justice to the Court of Appeal.
At present, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) cannot send a case to the appeal court unless it considers that there is a “real possibility” that the conviction will be quashed. In the absence of exceptional circumstances, there must be also be a new argument or fresh evidence.
In a 700-page consultation paper on criminal appeals, the Law Commission suggests that the CCRC should refer a case to the Court of Appeal if the review body thinks the conviction might be unsafe. Safety is the test currently used by the Court of Appeal itself.
In addition to the consultation paper and the press notice, the Law Commission has published a comprehensive summary of fewer than 40 pages. There is also an easy-read version.
The charity Appeal, which represented Andrew Malkinson in his successful attempt to have his wrongful conviction for rape quashed after he had spent more than 17 years in prison, said:
We welcome the Law Commission's provisional adoption of several reform proposals Appeal has called for, including changes which if implemented will boost the effectiveness and accountability of the CCRC, make it easier for wrongful conviction survivors to get the compensation and support they need and help ensure that vital evidence on cases is not prematurely destroyed.
However, we know from our work on behalf of Andrew Malkinson and many others that our country's failing appeals system needs a complete overhaul.
The government should implement the compensation test change recommended by the Law Commission right away as too many innocent people have been denied the means to rebuild their lives.
For this week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks, I’ve been discussing the commission’s provisional proposals with Professor Penney Lewis, the law commissioner responsible for criminal law. My weekly podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol above.
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The director general of MI5 told the independent commissioner who oversees his work that the security service had given false evidence in court shortly before the security service told the courts themselves.
As investigatory powers commissioner, Sir Brian Leveson oversees the use of covert powers by more than 600 public authorities, including the UK’s intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, police, local councils and prisons.
Last Wednesday, a High Court judge varied an injunction in a case involving a BBC investigation into an MI5 agent who is alleged to have terrorised his partner. Mr Justice Chamberlain said that MI5 evidence “was not just misleading, it was false. Whether or not it was deliberately false is the subject of an investigation.” That investigation was announced on the same day by the home secretary.
Leveson had agreed to talk to me a day later about how he and his team of retired judges decide whether to approve warrants signed by senior ministers and others that allow agencies including MI5 to interfere with the privacy of intelligence targets.
If the security service could lie to a court — as the BBC had alleged MI5 had done — then how could he be sure its officers were not lying to him?
“That’s a good question,” Leveson replied. The former senior appeal judge continued:
First of all, I have a very good relationship with the heads of each of the intelligence community and particularly in relation to MI5, who were concerned in this particular issue, with Sir Ken McCallum.
The relationship is based upon a comment that I made very early on and repeat all the time, which is: if you have a problem tell me about it. I will report on it, as appropriate, in the annual report but I will help you solve it. If you don’t tell me about it and I find out, then I am going to take a much more aggressive role in relation to its resolution.
I can’t obviously go into detail about this particular case. All I can say is that Sir Ken came himself to tell me what he was about to tell the court as soon as — he made it clear — he found out what the position was.
So how can I demonstrate they’re telling me the truth? Only by going in to check, which I can do. And if an error is reported, then I can send inspectors in to investigate that error.
And if that error has caused significant harm to an individual and it’s consistent with national security, I can tell the individual in rather opaque terms that they are entitled to apply to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal who have the power to award compensation in appropriate cases.
In a rare interview about his work, Leveson said the delay in getting his annual reports published was is one of his perennial problems. It was “not entirely fair” to say the government was stalling. But, in what appeared to be a sign of his frustration with the lengthy process of checking his reports for inadvertent security breaches, he disclosed the number of applications for warrants that he and his colleagues had rejected in 2023 and 2024 and explained what the figures told us about the effectiveness of the “double-lock” provisions. And we discussed some of his operational work.
Leveson also gave me a brief update on the report he is preparing for the justice secretary on reforming the criminal justice system of England and Wales. He is working in parallel with David Gauke, who calls for a reset of sentencing in a report published today. Legislation on both sets of recommendations is expected in the summer.
* Although my weekly podcasts are normally reserved for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes, I have agreed with the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office that there will be no paywall on this interview. You can listen to it in full by clicking the ► symbol above.
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Does it matter who our judges are? Yes, says an academic lawyer who has just published the fruits of his empirical research.
Different judges exercise their power in different ways, according to a new book by Dr Lewis Graham, fellow in law at Christ’s College Cambridge. Some judges are more comfortable with pushing boundaries whilst others are more restrained. Some grant the state a lot of leeway whilst others apply heavy scrutiny, he writes in his book Judicial Individuality on the UK Supreme Court.
Some are, as Lord Denning suggested, bold spirits — whilst others are timorous souls.
Graham (pictured) discussed these issues with me yesterday for the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. My weekly podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol above.
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A judge who agreed that the schoolgirl Sara Sharif could live with her father and stepmother was “deeply upset” when they murdered her, I was told last week.
Sir Rupert Jackson, a retired appeal judge who has known Alison Raeside for many years, said she was “as upset about this as everyone else and all your listeners”.
In an interview for my podcast A Lawyer Talks, the former lord justice of appeal (pictured above) said that a consent order Judge Raeside had made in 2019 could not be criticised. But she was “fearful” of the likely publicity after an anonymity order was lifted by the Court of Appeal last Friday. Raeside had twice been the victim of serious stalking and harassment.
Jackson thought the Court of Appeal had been right to allow reporters to name Raeside — as well as Peter Nathan and Sally Williams, retired circuit judges who had earlier, limited involvement in the Sharif case. But the former appeal judge said it would have been helpful if his successors had acknowledged that Mr Justice Williams — the judge who banned publication of the names in December — was drawing attention to real risks facing members of the judiciary.
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Eyebrows were raised just before Christmas when a serving judge was apparently nominated as a new political peer. But although the Downing Street statement was not entirely clear, Her Honour Judge Levitt KC had very properly resigned from the judiciary just a few hours before the announcement of her appointment as a legislator. This week, Alison Levitt will be introduced into the House of Lords as Baroness Levitt KC.
Levitt, 61, was called to the bar in 1988 and took silk 20 years later. She then joined the Crown Prosecution Service as principal legal advisor to the director of public prosecutions, one Keir Starmer. In 2014, Levitt became a partner at the law firm Mishcon de Reya, working there until she returned to the bar in 2018. She served as a circuit judge from 2021 to 2024 and has now rejoined her old chambers, though she won’t be appearing in court as an advocate.
In her first interview as a Labour politician, Levitt told me about the challenges facing the circuit bench and what she hopes to achieve in her latest incarnation. New to the role she may be, but — as you’ll hear — she gave as good as she got.
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Court challenges to major building projects will be limited under plans announced by the prime minister yesterday. In a press release, Downing Street said:
Data shows that over half – 58% – of all decisions on major infrastructure were taken to court, getting in the way of the government’s central mission to grow the economy, and put more money in hardworking people’s pockets.
The government today confirms this will be overhauled, with just one attempt at legal challenge for cynical cases lodged purely to cause delay rather than three.
What effect will this have on the process of judicial review? Would we be losing an important check on the powers of government? Should judges in the High Court block appeals if the law is changed?
These are among the questions addressed by two guests on the latest edition of my podcast, A Lawyer Talks. Nigel Pleming KC and Stephanie David are among the editors of a new book called The Law of Net Zero and Nature Positive, to be launched at 39 Essex Chambers on 18 February. The book — believed to be the first of its kind anywhere in the world — is available from the publishers, London Publishing Partnership, at a remarkably modest price for a legal textbook of some 1,200 pages.
It covers cases that were decided as recently as two months ago. When I dropped in to see the two co-editors yesterday, we discussed the most recent developments in environmental law, including the groundbreaking KlimaSeniorinnen ruling from the European Court of Human Rights that I reported here last April.
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As I reported in some detail yesterday afternoon, the chair of the Criminal Cases Review Commission has decided to leave her job after an independent panel concluded by a majority that she should no longer head the body that reviews suspected miscarriages of justice. Successive justice secretaries had lost confidence in Helen Pitcher because of her handling of the Andrew Malkinson case.
Pitcher made some pretty punchy comments in the resignation letter I published yesterday. And the panel that advised the King to sack her didn’t mince its words either. In this exclusive interview for A Lawyer Talks, Pitcher reveals why she stayed, why she went and why she is resisting calls to step down from her role at the Judicial Appointments Commission.
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A proposed new duty requiring barristers to advance and promote equality, diversity and inclusion would be “unlawful and misguided”, the incoming chair of the Bar Council said last night.
Barbara Mills KC, who took over this month as leader of the 18,000 barristers in England and Wales, said she was concerned that the bar’s regulator was seeking to use the barristers’ code of conduct “as the vehicle to attempt to change our culture”.
Last September, the Bar Standards Board launched a consultation on replacing a core duty in its handbook that requires barristers not to “discriminate unlawfully against any person” with a pro-active duty to “act in a way that advances equality, diversity and inclusion”.
Barristers’ leaders were concerned that the proposals would hinder progress towards a more diverse profession, “given what we believe to be ambiguity and potential ineffectiveness of the regulations as proposed”.
Mills said:
The consultation has generated more heat than light and is a great reminder of the care we must take that any attempt to improve equality, diversity and inclusion does not create unhelpful division.
The road to hell, it is often said, is paved with good intentions.
In her first interview as incoming chair of the barristers’ representative body, Mills told me last month she had been encouraged by remarks made to me in September by Mark Neale, director-general of the Bar Standards Board. “It’s a very genuine consultation,” he assured me in response to criticism I had published. “We absolutely want to hear what the profession and individual barristers have to say.”
You can hear my interview with Mills by clicking on the ► symbol at the top of this page. There is no paywall this week and the podcast can also be heard on the Counsel magazine website and other platforms. I have written it up for publication in Counsel and you can now read it online. And the full text of Mills’s inaugural address is published here.
Mills said last night she was keen to work with the regulator and “to open meaningful dialogue”. She also encouraged individual barristers to come and talk to her if they disagreed with her position on equality, diversity and inclusion.
Unlawful
Although Mills was concerned that the framing of the proposed new duty to deliver a more diverse profession was unlawful and misguided, she said nothing more about the laws it might breach.
However, the Free Speech Union — which describes itself as a non-partisan, mass membership public interest body that stands up for the speech rights of its members and campaigns for free speech more widely — has commissioned legal advice on the issues Mills raised.
In a 23-page opinion dated 29 November 2024 which the Free Speech Union have kindly allowed me to publish, Jason Coppel KC and Tom Cross say that adopting the proposed core duty and the proposed equality rules to meet stated equality outcomes would be unlawful and therefore liable to be quashed on a claim for judicial review.
That, they add, would be because:
* the rules would be directly discriminatory against at least some barristers;
* alternatively, they would constitute indirect discrimination against some barristers;
* they would be incompatible with barristers’ rights under articles 9 and 10 of the human rights convention and thus breach section 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998; and
* they may require barristers to commit unlawful discrimination in offering pupillages or tenancies, contrary to the Equality Act 2010.
Violence against women and girls
As the first family practitioner to chair the Bar Council since 1988, Mills said that another of her priorities was to raise the profile of the family bar and help the government in its mission to halve violence against women and girls.
This could be prevented in some cases through early intervention. It also required a clear definition — “one that encompasses all forms of violence and harmful practices specifically aimed at women and girls”.
The family courts were ideally placed to tackle this work but they needed effective and sustained investment.
“At the very least,” she said, “every complainant and every alleged perpetrator should have access to legal advice and representation in the family court.”
Wellbeing and harassment
Wellbeing was another priority, she said:
Whilst much is said about wellbeing now, the emphasis remains centred around crisis management.
What I would like to see in the profession is wellbeing losing its stigma as a sign of weakness and elevated to the same non-negotiable level as having an accountant or having insurance.
Baroness Harman KC, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, had been commissioned by Mills’s predecessor Sam Townend KC to conduct an independent review of bullying and harassment at the bar. That followed a Bar Council report which found that 44% of respondents had experienced or witnessed bullying, harassment or discrimination in the previous two years — an increase on previous survey results.
“The review provides an important opportunity to reset our culture and improve the working lives of all in our profession and I intend to give it the priority it deserves,” Mills said last night.
“I am committed to working with Baroness Harman and providing her with the support she needs to finalise her review. I look forward to working with her and the profession to consider the findings and her recommendations for action.”
Equality and diversity
With Kirsty Brimelow KC as vice-chair and Lucinda Orr as treasurer, Mills said it was the first time in the Bar Council’s 131-year history that all three of its office holders were women.
Mills is also the first person of colour to lead the bar. Calling on others to join her in representing their profession, she recalled an expression she had learned while growing up in Ghana: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
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Ariel, the magician’s “trusty spirit”, speaks with Prospero in The Tempest about magic bringing about a “sea change”, a transformative power creating something “rich and strange”.
As befits a lawyer who read English at Oxford, Jonathan Kewley drew on Shakespeare to describe artificial intelligence in a lecture earlier this month. The solicitor, who was awarded the title of partner of the year at the British Legal Awards last month, is co-head of the Clifford Chance tech group, a cross-disciplinary team of more than 600 lawyers advising on tech risk and opportunity.
“When I use AI in my daily life,” said Kewley, “its power and potential often leaves me in a state of shock and awe. Be in no doubt: we are currently witnessing something quite extraordinary. We’ve evolved through the Stone Age, the Iron Age. We now find ourselves in the Intelligence Age.”
But Kewley had a warning for us all. “This modern magic can turn dark,” he said:
At the end of The Tempest, Prospero relinquishes his magic and releases his spirit assistant Ariel. “I’ll break my staff,” he says. “I’ll drown my book.” But we cannot walk away from AI now.
Let’s not sleep-walk into this. Let’s shape the future of AI by putting humans at the centre. Wake up, embrace the opportunity with our eyes wide open. The real magic rests in getting the balance right.
Kewley had been invited to speak at the Central Criminal Court by Alderman Gregory Jones, the first practising KC to serve as one of the City of London’s two sheriffs. His lecture and the discussion that followed were part of the City and Legal programme of events chosen to promote the Old Bailey as an international forum for exploring the rule of law and the interaction between the law and business.
I must declare an interest: Jones has invited me to speak at the court in February about freedom of speech and transparency. Other discussions in the new year will cover crypto-assets, smarter financial regulation, infrastructure and climate change.
As Kewley said, AI can also be dangerous — just as the first motor cars were created without safety in mind. It is leading to errors in hiring and firing staff in the workplace. It could cause a flash crash in the financial markets. It can even lead to deaths. But, as a solicitor, Kewley deeply believed in the power of law to keep this magic in check.
That’s what we discussed in a fascinating episode of A Lawyer Talks. My regular podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol above.
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How can we reduce trial delays of two or even three years in the Crown Court?
Yesterday, I reported a suggestion from the director of public prosecutions Stephen Parkinson that was promptly skewered in the comments section by Ian Kelcey and Tom Crowther.
Parkinson had also suggested that we might explore some ideas that had recently been backed by Alex Chalk KC, the former Conservative justice secretary. These would involve limiting the right to jury trial — a radical move, but one that might find favour with no less a figure than the lady chief justice of England and Wales, Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill.
We know from the National Audit Office report yesterday that the Conservative government’s prison building programme will not produce the prison places that are said to be needed. One solution offered by the Ministry of Justice is a sentencing review that’s intended to ensure prisons do not run out of space again. But that review has a fundamental flaw, as Chalk told me when I went to see him at the chambers from which he now practises.
You can hear my interview with the former justice secretary — and a brief comment from Parkinson — in the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks.
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A bill that would make it illegal to create or solicit sexually explicit or intimate images without the consent of the people in them will be considered by the House of Lords next week.
The bill would cover deepfake content, where photos or video are digitally manipulated to make a person appear to be in an intimate situation.
Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge, who was the youngest member of the House of Lords when she was nominated in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list in July last year, has sponsored the Non-Consensual Sexually Explicit Images and Videos (Offences) Bill as a private member’s bill. Its second reading debate is scheduled for 13 December.
Owen explained the purpose of her bill in a note to House of Lords library:
The problem of sexually explicit deepfakes is one that is inherently sexist and rapidly proliferating. They have been described as the new frontier of violence against women. The content is created using generative AI and can be made in a matter of seconds with easily downloadable nudification apps or online platforms. Whilst it is illegal to non-consensually share sexually explicit deepfakes online, it is still not illegal to create them in the first place.
The bill was prepared with the help of Clare McGlynn KC (hon), a solicitor and professor of law at Durham University (pictured in the graphic above) who specialises in the legal regulation of sexual violence, pornography and online abuse.
For the latest episode in my podcast A Lawyer Talks, McGlynn spoke to me about Owen’s bill and the chances that it might attract government support.
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We are used to the idea of the criminal law penalising us when we do bad things. But there’s an increasing tendency for the state to punish large organisations for doing nothing at all.
The latest example of this is the new offence of failure to prevent fraud, which takes effect next autumn. Statutory guidance was issued by the government earlier this month. But it was not as helpful as businesses might have hoped.
For the latest episode of my podcast A Lawyer Talks, I have been discussing the legislation — and the guidance — with Nick Vamos, head of business crime at the long-established criminal defence solicitors Peters & Peters.
A former head of special crime and head of extradition at the Crown Prosecution Service, Vamos represented Boris Johnson when the former prime minister was accused of misleading parliament over “Partygate” and represented the Post Office in the appeals it faced by former postmasters who were convicted on flawed evidence.
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The death of George Carman QC at the age of 71 meant — as I told readers of the Daily Telegraph at the beginning of 2001 — that the age of the great advocate was at an end:
Until now. The 25 pages Carman managed to complete before his death form the starting point of a new book called Get Carman, which records his casework during the 1980s and 1990s. All the big names of the period are there: Jeremy Thorpe, Geoffrey Prime, Ken Dodd, Sonia Sutcliffe, Elton John, Gillian Taylforth, Jonathan Aitken, Neil Hamilton and Mohamed Al Fayed.
The book is written by Karen Phillipps, a fellow barrister who was Carman’s confidante and companion after his three marriages ended in divorce.
For the latest episode of my podcast A Lawyer Talks, Phillipps told me about the man she knew and the cases he won. She also answered the question I asked in 2001.
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What retired senior judges choose to say about major issues of the day is of real interest and importance — particularly when they are discussing legal issues — a former head of civil justice said last night.
Lord Dyson, who retired as master of the rolls in 2016 and then rejoined the chambers he used to head as a barrister, was delivering a lecture at Gray’s Inn called “Judicial after-life: should it be subject to any limits?”
His starting point was an open letter published in April and signed by Lady Hale, former president of the Supreme Court, as well as 600 other former judges and lawyers. The letter asserted that the International Court of Justice had “concluded that there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza”.
As Dyson kindly mentioned in his lecture, I then pointed out that this was not what the court had said. It was the Palestinians’ rights that were found to be plausible, not the risk they might face.
This prompted Dyson to sign a counter-letter correcting the error, something he told me he had never done before.
A final attempt to put right widespread misreporting of the court’s ruling was made some weeks later by the judge who had delivered it. “The court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide,” Joan Donoghue told the BBC. “It didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”
Meanwhile, Dyson had been struck by a paragraph in the Guardian’s report of the letter Hale had signed:
The letter’s significance lies not just in the number of signatories but the fact that it has been signed by senior retired judges, who normally shy away from commenting publicly on issues that are politically sensitive.
That was the catalyst for his Birkenhead lecture at Gray’s Inn, he said in an interview this week.
I asked Dyson whether it was appropriate for retired judges to give legal advice. If so, should they be regulated in the same way as lawyers?
We discussed whether Lord Neuberger, Hale’s predecessor as president of the Supreme Court, should have advised the Post Office on the civil claims against it — and whether its counsel, Lord Grabiner KC, had been right to hint at Neuberger’s involvement when addressing a court.
Arguing that Mr Justice Fraser should withdraw from the case, Grabiner had told the judge:
I am not the only judicial figure or barrister that has looked at this with a view to reaching that conclusion. It has also been looked at by another very senior person before the decision was taken to make this application.
I also pressed Dyson on whether he thought Neuberger and Lord Hoffmann should continue to sit in the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal.
You can hear our conversation in the latest edition of A Lawyer Talks. My podcast is reserved for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes but, as an experiment, I am offering this brief taster to all readers:
It’s an amusing example of how intimidating it may be for judges to find someone who has served at a higher level in the judiciary appearing before them in court.
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Spare a thought for Robert Jenrick. A few hours after being appointed shadow justice secretary — with Kieran Mullan alongside him as the shadow justice minister — Jenrick was bounced back onto his bench by the formidable Alex Davies-Jones. His questions may read well in Hansard but the two minutes of video that I have posted above show how badly the defeated leadership candidate misjudged the position he now finds himself in.
Davies-Jones, MP for Pontypridd since 2019, may be no more than a junior minister at the Ministry of Justice but she dominated her department’s Commons questions yesterday, showing full mastery of the justice brief.
Her secretary of state didn’t get a look-in for half an hour — literally so, as this image shows:
While Davies-Jones was at the despatch box, just about all that could be seen of Shabana Mahmood was a sliver of light-blue fabric behind the junior minister’s right elbow.
Separation of powers
Many of MPs who asked questions yesterday were new to their jobs. But inexperience is no excuse for a failure to understand the proper limits of parliament. Here are a couple of examples:
Peter Bedford (Conservative): A lady from Northampton was recently given a 31-month sentence for a tweet, whereas an individual who incited physical violence on the streets of Birmingham as part of a pro-Palestinian protest received a far lesser sentence. Does the secretary of state agree that such inconsistencies create the perception, at least, that we have a two-tier justice system?
Shabana Mahmood: It is incumbent on members to ensure that such a perception does not take hold and not to inappropriately compare sentences handed out in different types of cases. As the hon gentleman well knows and every member of this house should know, sentences in individual cases are a matter for the independent judges who hear those cases; the trials unfold in front of them…
Robert Jenrick (shadow justice secretary): While of course respecting the judicial process and not commenting on the individual facts of the case, can the secretary of state explain the reported two-week delay between the Crown Prosecution Service making a charging decision with respect to the alleged Southport attacker and it being announced to the general public?
Shabana Mahmood: As the right hon member is now the shadow lord chancellor, may I remind him that we do not comment on cases that are sub judice? That includes commentary that everyone is aware relates to cases currently going through our legal processes. What I will say is that those are independent decisions for the Crown Prosecution Service, which ultimately decides what charges to bring. In live police investigations into complex cases, it is appropriate that those investigations, the charging decisions and, ultimately, the cases are done by the independent parts of the process and that there is no interference from government.
Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons speaker, made it clear that ministers would indeed have to answer the concerns raised by Jenrick — but not until the case he was referring to had been concluded.
Single justice procedure
As usual, not much emerged from ministers’ answers. But there was an announcement about the much criticised single justice procedure, under which a lone magistrate processes a long list of undefended prosecutions with the assistance of a legal adviser. The list of defendants and the penalties they receive is available to reporters but the cases are not dealt with in open court.
“I have listened carefully to concerns raised about the single justice procedure,” said Heidi Alexander, the minister of state.
She continued:
As a first step, I have asked the Courts and Tribunals Service to redesign the single justice procedure and make it clearer. I will also call in single justice procedure prosecutors to discuss ways in which we can ensure that they consider the public interest in advance of making prosecutions…
I am clear that the single justice procedure is vital for the efficient running of the magistrates court. However, it must operate fairly and effectively. I will not tolerate poor practice and I will not hesitate to fundamentally reform the system if that is required.
Alexander’s announcement was welcomed by the chief executive of the Magistrates’ Association, Tom Franklin.
He said:
In March, we called for single justice procedure reform and published 12 recommendations to improve its operation, transparency and fairness. Our recommendations included making it a requirement that prosecutors see all pleas and mitigations from defendants before the cases are heard by the magistrate and improving communication, through a review of the paperwork sent to defendants, to make it simpler and easier to understand.
However, reform needs to go further. We are also urging the government to boost transparency by making provision for single justice procedure sittings to be observable by accredited journalists and by publishing more data on the single justice procedure — such as how many defendants plead guilty, how many make no pleas and how many ask to come to court — nationally and broken down by region.
Shadow cabinet
Who’s missing from this picture?
I can see no sign of Sir Jeremy Wright KC MP, shadow attorney general in Rishi Sunak’s caretaker opposition.
Who, then, will replace him? Will it be an MP to shadow the solicitor general Sarah Sackman KC MP in the Commons or a peer to question her boss Lord Hermer KC in the Lords? We should know soon.
Update 1640: the shadow attorney general will be Lord Wolfson of Tredegar KC, who resigned as a justice minister in Boris Johnson’s government over the “scale, context and nature” of breaches of the criminal law in Downing Street.
He will remain in practice at the bar.
Update 1800: Helen Grant MP, a solicitor and former justice minister, will be shadow solicitor general.
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Dawn Sturgess was fatally poisoned in 2018 after spraying herself with what she believed to be perfume. In fact, it was the military-grade nerve agent Novichok. It’s believed that the perfume bottle had been thrown away by Russian agents who had used it in an unsuccessful attempt to murder the former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia earlier in the year.
An unexpected death must be referred to the coroner and in circumstances such as this there would normally be an inquest. But Baroness Hallett, who had been appointed to conduct this inquest, advised the government to convert it into a public inquiry.
She told the home secretary in 2021:
A statutory inquiry would permit me to allow some evidence to be heard in closed session from which members of the public and core participants may be excluded. Although such a closed hearing would, in usual circumstances, be undesirable, the national security concerns in this case mean that the sensitive evidence is likely only be able to be examined and tested in a closed hearing, or not at all.
Lord Hughes of Ombersley, a former justice of the Supreme Court, was appointed to chair the Dawn Sturgess inquiry after Hallett was asked to conduct the public inquiry into Covid-19. Baroness May, who was prime minister at the time of the poisoning, told a BBC podcast last week she hoped Sturgess’s family would “take some comfort” from the proceedings.
When Hughes opens the inquiry into Sturgess’s death in Salisbury this morning, a great deal of information will remain secret on grounds of national security. But there’s one fact that I can disclose today. Witnesses and families will be helped by the Coroners’ Courts Support Service, an independent voluntary organisation that provides much-needed emotional support and practical assistance to bereaved families, witnesses and others attending inquests.
The support service was launched in 2003 and now has 375 fully-trained volunteers working in 44 of the 77 coronial areas in England and Wales. It has assisted at several recent public inquiries, including the current Thirlwall inquiry set up after the murders committed or attempted by Lucy Letby. At yet it is struggling the raise the funds it needs for its running costs.
For the latest episode of my podcast A Lawyer Talks, I went to see Roey Burden OBE, the founder and driving force behind the Coroners’ Courts Support Service. We discussed the challenges facing not just witnesses and bereaved families, who never imagined they would be called to attend an inquest, but also coroners, whose jurisdiction has been largely unreformed for 800 years.
To listen to this episode, click on the ► symbol above.
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Next week, Gregory Jones KC will take up residence at the most famous criminal court in the world. I don’t mean he’ll be the resident judge; Alderman Jones will actually be living over the cells at the Old Bailey — or, to be more precise, a few floors up. His fellow sheriff David Chalk will also move into a flat at the Central Criminal Court.
What do the sheriffs do? And why would they spend a year of their lives living at the Old Bailey? The first KC to be appointed sheriff in some 900 years has been telling me how his new responsibilities as the judges’ social secretary will help buttress the rule of law. You can hear what he has to say in the inaugural episode of my new podcast, A Lawyer Talks.
You’ll also hear from Fiona Adler, former sheriff and now honorary secondary of London. She takes us into Court 1, which we view from the judges’ bench. And she tells me just what was passed round the jury box in a soup bowl when Dr Crippen — notorious as the first criminal to be arrested with the help of wireless telegraphy — was tried here in 1910 for murdering his wife.
This image, taken from the dock where Crippen once sat, shows the jury seats to the left, the witness box (with curtain), the judges’ bench (with sword), and counsel’s benches below the public gallery.
On the left here is the backsheet of the prosecution brief endorsed by Travers Humphreys with the verdicts on Crippen and his lover Ethel Le Neve. On the right is a standard Home Office letter upholding the death sentence on Crippen.
This is a closer view of the judges’ bench, with the lord mayor’s seat in the centre.
And here is the ceremonial sword.
Finally, we visit the Great Hall with its mural of the great lawgiver.
You can listen to my interviews with the sheriff and the secondary by clicking on the ► symbol above. Alternatively, you can download the podcast to hear later by clicking the download symbol in the graphic. And you should also be able to find A Lawyer Talks on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and other podcast platforms.
* This podcast is available to all. It was published on 16 September at 6am. I am celebrating the formal launch of A Lawyer Talks by releasing a new episode just an hour later, at 7am. To listen to my second podcast and all future episodes, you will need a paid subscription to A Lawyer Writes. Details are here. Once you subscribe, you will be notified by email of each new podcast and all of my written work. You will also be able to read subscriber-only content and add comments. And you will have full access to an archive of all my pieces published here since the summer of 2020. Subscribers to A Lawyer Writes can also listen on Spotify.
* I plan to publish my third podcast in a day or so. After that, there will normally be no more than one podcast each week. During holiday periods, there may be none. There won’t be a fixed day of the week for podcasts: each episode will be uploaded when it is ready.
A Lawyer Writes is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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The Ministry of Justice has been ordered to pay more than £900 in damages and costs to a motorist after his car was wrongly clamped by an enforcement agent who had been instructed to collect an unpaid fine.
Michael Burton, 49, who lives near Hull, had bought the car on hire-purchase — which meant it belonged to a finance company until all the payments had been made.
He says it was clamped by Craig Edward Allen, a self-employed agent acting for an enforcement company, even though Burton showed Allen a copy of his hire-purchase agreement.
In an attempt to avoid liability, the Ministry of Justice argued that it was not liable for the actions of the enforcement agent. That’s contrary to guidance published by the Ministry of Justice itself. When Burton’s barrister Daniel Kessler pointed this out in the Court of Appeal, the government’s lawyer argued that its own guidance was wrong and should not be relied on.
That argument was rejected by the Court of Appeal in a ruling last month. Burton was awarded £905 plus interest.
Last week, a call for evidence was issued by a working group on enforcement set up by the Civil Justice Council, which advises the Ministry of Justice and the judiciary on civil justice issues.
Not many people with outstanding debts can afford to take on the Ministry of Justice. Burton’s success in the courts has established a precedent that will support others in a similar position. I have been speaking to him and his solicitor Sarah Hougie for the my new podcast, A Lawyer Talks.
You can listen to it by clicking the ► symbol in the graphic at the top of this page (and then clicking ► again if you are reading this on email). It is also available on other podcast platforms.
The podcast is another on-air pilot, ahead of the series I plan to launch in September. It begins with a roundup of other stories in the news. Do let me know what you think of it by leaving a comment on the website.
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Harry Dunn’s parents are no longer seeking to appeal against a High Court ruling that the US intelligence analyst who caused the teenage motorcyclist’s death by careless driving nearly five years ago was entitled to diplomatic immunity, their lawyers have told me.
The finding that Anne Sacoolas enjoyed immunity from UK criminal jurisdiction at the time of Harry’s death was not reached “with any enthusiasm for the result”, Lord Justice Flaux and Mr Justice Saini had said in 2020. But that conclusion, they added, was “compelled by the operation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations”.
Until now, it was thought that Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn might still have been hoping to overturn that decision in the Court of Appeal. But lawyers from the newly merged global law firm A&O Shearman confirmed last week that the appeal “wasn’t pursued in the end because of the way that the criminal proceedings panned out”.
In addition, the law had been changed so that anyone in Sacoolas’s position would not have been entitled to immunity in future.
This month, a coroner found that the motorcyclist’s death was caused by a collision with a car driven by Sacoolas. She had emerged from RAF Croughton, a US communications centre in Northamptonshire, and then driven instinctively on the wrong side of the road.
In response to the inquest verdict, the Foreign Office made a statement about road safety.
Andrew Denny, head of UK public law at A&O Shearman, and Frances Beddow, an associate at the firm’s London disputes team, were speaking for the first time about the thousands of hours of unpaid work done by lawyers and support staff at Allen & Overy, which merged with Shearman & Sterling last month. The two lawyers were able to speak to me because the inquest into Dunn’s death has now concluded.
You can listen to my interview with them by clicking on the ► symbol above. It’s the second “on-air pilot” for my new podcast, called A Lawyer Talks. The podcast will be launched in the autumn and in the meantime I am trying out various formats on an occasional basis. Comments are welcome.
The legal proceedings, with their unique complications, were particularly difficult to report over the years because none of the lawyers involved was willing to explain what was going on.
Even so, I secured the only interview on the case ever given by Sacoolas’s US lawyer. Amy Jeffress told me in 2021 that her client would never return to the United Kingdom. Although some of those working on the case believed otherwise, that proved to be true.
Some of the background was outlined by Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb in December 2022 when she gave Sacoolas a suspended sentence of eight months’ imprisonment.
* Once a podcast episode appears on my Substack blog A Lawyer Writes, it is automatically distributed to other podcast platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. My first podcast was published last Thursday and there is also an archive of other full-length audio recordings that I’ve made over the past four years. All podcasts can be downloaded for future listening. This episode, like the previous one released last Thursday, was produced by Neil Koenig.
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