18 November 2008
Mermaid Theatre, Blackfriars, London, 17 November 2008
Jack Straw has given a speech at the annual general meeting of the Magistrates' Association.
The Right Honourable Jack Straw MP, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice:
Introduction
Good afternoon.
I am delighted to be able to speak to you again this year.
I would like to express my personal thanks to Cindy Barnett for her hard work over many years as Chair, Vice Chair and as an active member of the Magistrates' Association and to wish her all the very best for the future. No one could have pursued the cause of magistrates with greater vigour than Cindy. And may I congratulate John Thornhill on his appointment as incoming Chairman. I look forward to working with you and all of your colleagues.
I also want to thank you for coming here today and to express my gratitude to the 28,000 magistrates across the country who carry out their duties with dedication, with integrity, and with a great commitment to their communities. So, personally and on behalf of the public, I thank you for the work that you do.
As magistrates, you are representatives of your communities - which was a rather central theme of Cindy's address - and ambassadors of local justice. The decisions you make are often the first and most visible symbol - to the public, to offenders and to victims - of justice being seen to be done.
This is both because you administer justice in the overwhelming majority, 95%, of criminal cases, and because you deal with issues of such significance to local communities - crime and anti-social behaviour, youth justice, childcare disputes and other family concerns.
If I think about the range of issues raised in my constituency surgeries and advice meetings to do with crime and justice, the overwhelming majority will end up at the door of Blackburn magistrates' court.
In the eyes of the many people who come into contact with the courts, you - the magistracy - are the face of our criminal justice system and the very barometer of its health.
And I know that everyone here appreciates how critical it is that you act in the interests of local communities. Cindy used the phrase, you are at the 'centre of society'. This means understanding the problems of the community. Responding to the needs of that community. Working as part of the community. And it means being representative of the community.
I would not speak on this subject without offering my thanks to the Magistrates' Association for the 'Magistrates in the Community' project. Your work in increasing public awareness of the role and to improve connections between magistrates and local people is very worthwhile, and greatly to be applauded.
What I want to look at this afternoon is how we can further transform the courts system into a service which is even more focused on working in the interests of communities. I am going to suggest that this can be achieved: first, by making sure courts do provide value for money; secondly, by improving the efficiency of processes; and thirdly, by continuing to make some cultural changes.
Value for money
As we've just heard, the funding of all courts - civil courts, the Crown Court and magistrates' courts - is a cause of concern, not least to the Magistrates' Association. So let me address this point directly.
By section 1 of the Courts Act 2003, I, as Lord Chancellor, have - and I quote directly:
'a duty to ensure that there is an efficient and effective system to support the carrying on of the business of … magistrates' courts …'
And this is reflected in the stated purpose of Her Majesty's Courts Service: 'to deliver justice effectively and efficiently to the public'.
I would be failing in my duty - all the more so in this time of economic uncertainty - if I did not ensure that the courts operated cost-effectively, with every pound and every penny of taxpayers' money being best spent. After all, when we talk of taxpayers, this is just a different way of talking about members of the community.
We, like all government departments, are already committed by decisions made in the summer of last year [under the Comprehensive Spending Review 2007] to delivering £1 billion in aggregate of savings by March 2011 across the Ministry of Justice. So the record levels we have invested in the justice system over the past decade are there to be enjoyed by the system, but will not be repeated in the near future.
We now have a responsibility to the public to look carefully at our financial position; to be clear about where our priorities lie, and honest about where and how the courts can work more effectively and efficiently. And contrary to media speculation, I have got no current plans to close any courts.
But equally, I would be failing in my duty if I were to allow the budget of the courts to be reduced to such an extent as to render them unable to perform their business.
So our first duty remains to focus relentlessly on front-line services. Our commitment is to continue to protect the public, to provide a justice system which is fair, open and accessible to all. And I have no intention whatever of reneging upon that.
Instead, we are going to concentrate on streamlining the service, reducing unnecessary overheads and non-essential projects. So to pick up on your point, we are cutting back - not just planning to cut back - on the use of expensive consultants, temporary and contract staff. We are reviewing our procurement processes to give us greater buying power to secure better deals. And ultimately, we will be looking afresh at the ways in which we work and identifying where further changes, improvements and efficiencies can be made to deliver more, with better value for money.
Can I just pick up one of Cindy's points about the fact that there should be no more pilots, programmes or initiatives? I am anxious that we cut down on the use of expensive consultants. Sometimes consultants can come up with new and innovative ideas to improve the system. But we should also be challenging our own staff to think about where and how changes need to be made and to use their initiative to make those changes happen.
I am not going to be apologetic about our use of initiatives. There cannot be a full stop in terms of initiatives, if by that we mean doing something for the first time. It cannot be claimed that our courts system has reached such a state of grace that it cannot be improved. We know that there are similar courts doing similar work with similar resources, but in very different ways. We need to learn lessons from the very best courts and apply them to others - to take ideas and see whether they can be applied across the country.
But in order to do that, we first need to test the ideas, to make sure they work.
CJSSS [Criminal Justice: Simple, Speedy, Summary] is an excellent example of this
An efficient, streamlined system
CJSSS has produced very significant benefits in terms of the delivery of justice as well as in terms of efficiency. The transformation it has brought about has been extraordinary.
The aim of CJSSS has been to reduce the number of enormous case files and mountains of paperwork for the simplest of hearings; of unnecessary pre-trial hearings and endless adjournments.
The truth is, criminals are now being brought to justice more quickly and spending less time on bail. Victims and witnesses are being spared the ordeal of returning routinely to court time and time again. The bench is more often given the information it needs to conduct the case. And less police time is being wasted, leaving more time for proper policing.
This progress is borne out in our latest statistics. The estimated average time from charge to disposal [for completed indictable and triable either way cases] is now just 45 days, down from 62 last year - an achievement hugely to the credit of you and your members. The proportion of cases completed at first hearing rose by more than 10 percentage points over the same period, as did the proportion of adult guilty pleas at first hearing. And the average number of adjournments fell [from 2.2] to just 1.4, which is in itself a very significant drop.
This is an indication of what can be achieved when all criminal justice agencies work together - and with the judiciary - in a quicker, more focused way, with clearer, more defined procedures.
And the triumph of the scheme lies not only in creating better processes and procedures; it lies in the fact that it has dramatically, in my view, changed the culture of the courts. There is much less of each agency being out for themselves, working in isolation; much more of agencies working as partners, depending on one another and actively cooperating with each other.
Magistrates have been instrumental to the success of CJSSS, as has the support of Cindy and John and the Magistrates' Association. Everybody here can justifiably be proud of what has been accomplished.
Cultural change
My third point is about cultural change. Courts need to operate efficiently and effectively if they are to act as a public service. But they must also be clear about who they are there to serve, and in whose interests they work. This requires continued cultural change in at least two areas: openness and sentencing.
Openness
For courts to work in the interests of communities, the justice they dispense must be open and visible.
I have been committed as Home Secretary and now as Justice Secretary to improving the visibility of justice in this country. To lifting the veil which can keep justice from view. To making sure - in the words of the familiar aphorism - that justice is not only done, but is seen to be done.
It has long been a fundamental feature of the administration of justice in the United Kingdom that proceedings are conducted in full view of the public. The principled merits of open justice are manifold, and find succinct expression in the words of Jeremy Bentham:
'Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion and the surest of all guards against improbity. It keeps the judge, while trying, under trial.'
Open, visible justice, is therefore a means of ensuring judicial accountability through professional and public scrutiny. It gives legitimacy to public institutions; increasing understanding and dispelling myths about the ways in which they operate. As a result, it has a great potential significantly to increase public confidence in the justice system as a whole. As one Chief Justice of the United States [Warren Burger] put it:
'People in an open society do not demand infallibility from their institutions, but it is difficult for them to accept what they are prohibited from observing.'
That is why, in the realm of criminal justice, I am seeking to make more information about court proceedings easily accessible.
As a first step, I recently gave newspapers and other media access to court registers free of charge, reversing a policy which had operated for nearly 20 years whereby some courts where charging newspapers for court registers. Building on this, I want to go much further, and to make courts' decisions available online, so people can see for themselves what happens in the dock. I am also actively considering how to shed more light on the workings of family courts without jeopardising the safety and privacy of the parties and children involved.
Sentencing
Let me come now to sentencing.
Lord Devlin once remarked that the judiciary should be 'the spokesman for the ordinary citizen … [and] should judge as the ordinary man judges.' I am sure if he was writing today he would have made it man and woman. In sentencing, magistrates should take into account - within the parameters set by the law - the needs and circumstances of local communities.
I am unapologetic about that too. If you look at the evidence, you will see the different practices between different courts and the fact that there is very little correlation between crime trends and sentencing. I think it is entirely appropriate that there should be systems for the public to provide input into sentencing policy - although by that I do not mean individual sentencing decisions.
This is part of the thinking behind our new Dedicated Drug Courts. Here, an emphasis is placed on understanding the local context of drug offending, as well as the needs and motivations of offenders.
There may be colleagues here from Leeds and West London. The West London Dedicated Drugs Court is led by a District Judge in cooperation with magistrates. In Leeds, the court is run entirely by magistrates. Both indicate that this sentencing practice results in better outcomes - lower levels of reoffending and breach.
A critical part of this approach has been the continuity and enthusiasm of the judiciary - who have built relationships with offenders, acting as a source of motivation; rewarding progress, but also reprimanding offenders where appropriate, dealing firmly with breaches.
As a result we recently announced four new Dedicated Drug Courts in Salford, Barnsley, Bristol and Cardiff.
I am extremely grateful to John Thornhill for representing the Magistrates' Association on the project's Steering Group and for his invaluable advice throughout.
You will also be familiar with the work of the Salford and North Liverpool community courts. We now have 11 of these courts, and they have been a great success.
I am now looking more generally at how we can make better use of section 178.
But it is not enough for the sentencing process to serve the interests of communities; sentences themselves should reflect communities' interests and carry their support. So, prisons should punish offenders and make them take responsibility for their actions; but they should also give offenders the chance to reform, to turn their lives around. And community punishments should be intensive, arduous and visible; giving local people a say in, and an opportunity to see, the work carried out by offenders.
Cindy was robust about two issues, the first being early release. She very kindly did not mention the end of custody license scheme. I share everyone's concern about this. No one has suggested that this is a satisfactory arrangement. It was introduced in what amounted to an emergency, a crisis of prison places.
We have already provided more prison places. And we are still trying to expand the number of places as quickly as possible - to 96,000 net - to give us some headroom immediately. Once we have this headroom, our first priority will be to end the end of custody license scheme immediately.
Another point Cindy made related to the effectiveness of community penalties. There is understandable anxiety about resources for probation. I cannot promise that there will be more money in the future and actually there will be less in the current economic climate. Just as you see variation between different courts, you see a wide range of performance within the Probation Service. Although it is difficult, we have to use our imagination to improve performance. As the Policy Exchange has reported, we are now spending more on law and order than any other OECD country. Some of this money needs to be used to make sure all parts of the Probation Service reach a common standard.
Conclusion
May I conclude by saying that when we emphasise the important social and civic function of the justice system we are doing nothing distinctively new - we are continuing with a most profound purpose. As early as 458 BC, Aeschylus wrote in The Eumenides [thought, incidentally, to be the oldest surviving courtroom drama]:
'Fair trial, fair judgment …
Evidence which issued clear as day …
… [Q]uench your anger; let not indignation reign
Pestilence on our soil, corroding every seed
'Til the whole land is sterile desert …
… [C]alm this black and swelling wrath.'
Justice - as Aeschylus here paints it - is not an abstract force, hovering above society, issuing forth judgments. Rather, it performs a vital practical role as protector - indeed servant - of the public and the community.
It is precisely this perspective which underlies our goal of transforming the criminal justice system into a responsive, engaged criminal justice service.
And it is a critical part of this transformation that both our magistrates and our courts serve the interests of local communities, as I know all of you accept.
It is a thread which now runs through the whole of the justice system. It is neighbourhood policing teams acting as a visible presence in local communities. It is courts working more efficiently and effectively. It is offenders being sentenced in a way which is fitting to the crime and to local circumstances. And it is punishment either in the community or in prison which works in the community's interest - by being visible and tough; punishing as well as reforming.
Thank you very much indeed and thank you for all of your work.