No Mention of Probation?

From a contributor:-

"It's far greater & more complex than untrained coppers making a bad call:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8jnrk4xlvdo
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70g18vpwxvo

• Scotland Yard downgraded Levy's risk to women upon his release in 2024
• The Met took three years to investigate and charge Levy with the sexual assault of the prison officer
• British Transport Police's (BTP) investigation into Levy's sexual assaults meant he was not charged for more than six months, despite being filmed carrying out an attack
• The Met and BTP both gave Levy back a stolen travelcard which let him travel without paying and commit crimes, including the first murder
• The CPS has apologised for "shortcomings" in its attempts to have Levy remanded in custody.

I do sometimes feel a chill inside when I read tabloid-worthy, set-in-concrete statements from what I always thought was a non-judgemental profession:

"they down graded the high risker... a po would not have downgraded him."

Everything's a mess. The entirety of the justice system (police, courts, probation, prisons, victim work) has been severely maltreated for decades, eroded & corroded by financial & moral starvation, ridiculed by the political class, mismanaged by Whitehall & hung out to dry by the media. The culture & nature of justice has been distorted.

We now seem to have a model that, with the rapid expansion of social media, means victims & their advocates have direct access & influence over government policy. That might not be a bad thing in & of itself, of course, but it has meant that the new government has been doing embarassingly poor public cartwheels over the Sentencing Act.

Sadly the last twenty or so years have seen some of the most contentious & damaging changes imposed upon the justice system, with frontline staff in all departments having little to no say; indeed, saying "it's shit & won't work" but being ignored, only to be proved right some time later, time & time again.

Even more sadly, those who sat in remote offices in Whitehall doing the sums, drafting the spreadsheets & writing the glossy reports promoting pointless change have never & will never been held to account for their wilful vandalism to public services & the massive holes they made in public finances. £Billions have been wasted on any number of vanity projects.

But hold up a sign saying "Plastacine Action", sit in a road blocking weapons destined for a genocidal state or daub paint on a statue & you'll be remanded into custody for months on terrorism charges."

A Technological Fix?

There's been such a recent flurry of activity on here, it's taking a bit of time to pick out some of the gems for a closer look, but lets start here with this report from Civil Service World:-

. 
Human-centred service: MoJ's Kamal Bal on the department's trauma-informed approach

Giving the morning keynote at this year’s PublicTechnology Live conference, Kamal Bal told attendees how the Ministry of Justice is working to improve services by better supporting both users and colleagues

How do you make sure that you treat vulnerable service users with sensitivity and support?

The Ministry of Justice’s digital chief explored this topic at this year’s PublicTechnology Live in London, organised by CSW’s parent company Total Politics.

Kamal Bal told attendees that the services developed by the ministry are informed by the experiences and needs of users – who often “come to interact with us [when] they’re in a position of absolute vulnerability”.

“They’re at a real moment of need,” he added. “That is a common thread that sits across everything we do, and it is key that when they’re interacting with us, they feel supported by the experience they’re interacting with, but they also have trust in it as well.”

To enable these supportive services, Bal said that development of digital and data platforms is underpinned by “four tenets”: human-centred design; data-driven decision making; cross-agency collaboration; and continuous improvement.

To support the tenet of human-centred design, the MoJ has a particular focus on delivering services in a trauma-informed way.

Bal told PublicTechnology Live that the trauma-informed approach “really drives a lot of what we do” across the MoJ’s different types of service user and the agencies that serve them – which includes HM Prison and Probation Service, HM Courts and Tribunals Service, the Legal Aid Agency, the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority and the Office of the Public Guardian, which oversees the administration of the lasting power of attorney regime.

The MoJ digital chief said: “If you’ve been a victim of a violent crime, you’ve lived through the trauma of being a victim of that violent crime. You’ve then gone and reported it to the police and had to go through that journey again. Maybe you then get into a conversation with the Crown Prosecution Service and, again, you are presenting the same information. Then someone tells you about this compensation scheme, and you’re going through it again. We are just making people relive that trauma. But we are now consciously seeking to create experience to... avoid the need to do that. We put a lot of focus on user research, and we have a lot of people out and about in the field talking to people to understand: what is the outcome people are seeking?”

Supporting staff

Improving the outcomes for service users is often supported and amplified by making similar improvements for public service staff, according to Bal. Having spent much of his prior career in the consumer world – including stints at Marks and Spencer, Avon and Pizza Hut – the MoJ digital director arrived in government in 2023 with a track record of taking an “obsessive focus on the customer” and their experience.

“When multi-channel retailing came – and the ‘click and collect’ experience in particular at Marks and Spencer – that really highlighted to me that you can create a great customer experience by improving a colleague experience. You’d be amazed at how much work goes on behind the scenes at an M&S store, for example, to make it slick when a customer comes in. And that’s really influenced me because for a long time, I was very much [about] always focusing on the customer. Actually, you can focus on the customer – or the user, in our case – by focusing on your colleagues. The needs of both are really important.”

The MoJ has government’s largest workforce, with more than 100,000 such colleagues across the central ministry and its arm’s-length bodies. Bal cites the example of how digital can provide improvements for prison officers and other staff – and, by extension, help better support prisoners.

“We know, categorically, that if we want to create safe prison working environments, and if we want to help rehabilitate prisoners, it’s all about frontline officers being able to build relationships with them,” he said. “It’s all about being able to spend more time with people and less time on admin.”

For some years, this admin has been largely centred on the complex and unwieldy National Offender Management Information System. This legacy platform requires time-consuming inputs of information such as prisoners’ financial credits, disciplinary issues and alerts, and formal adjudications – data that staff cannot then see collated in one place.

“We’re seeking to transform that and we’ve created the Digital Prison Service… which is now rolling out,” Bal said. “All those key things that staff need to know are now there together in front of them, and that is saving hours a week… if someone is going to meet or have a conversation with [a prisoner], or if they need to try and decide something, all that information is front and centre, and is there for them.”

The digital chief added that, in delivering this service, there was also a “lovely undercurrent… of an intentional focus on replacing legacy” technology systems.

“I’ve been here two years and my quick observation is that there is no silver bullet to doing this, and there is no magical thing that means that in six months, you’re going to be able to go from legacy to something new,” he said. “You have to set an intentional course of action. My team set off on this journey about four years ago, and we’ve probably got about another two to three years to go to get this complete. But we’ve been resolute in our focus.”

--oo00oo--

The piece has already stimulated some caustic observations:-

The comments on this blog often castigate the unions or the probation institute etc. Finally someone has discovered one of those individuals within the MoJ who is very much part of the problem and a source of our pain. A young ambitious man in a hurry. Remember when reading his comments that he is employed by MoJ not HMPPS and has probably experienced prisons as part of a vip guided tour or watched a few documentaries on TV. He doesn’t really give two hoots about prison or probation staff as his empathy is simply and artificial construct but deludes himself that technology is the answer to the prison and probation crisis without really understanding the job or wanting to. He has just been given a wheelbarrow full of cash and is out to make a name for himself asap. Watch out prisons. Here he comes.

******

Are you traumatised by the lack of support, jfdi culture, pisspoor pay, impossible workloads, useless unions? Then give Kamal a call.

Prison Numbers To Rocket

With Labour deciding to enter into a Dutch auction with the Tories as to who is going to be tougher on criminals in the lead-up to the next general election, news comes in from the statisticians as to likely future incarceration rates. It has to be remembered that the Tories often like to portray any new prisons as 'job opportunities' for any intended location and increasingly are doing their best to keep more people inside and for longer as a way to 'protect the public'. This from Russell Webster neatly summarises the likely direction of travel:-   

Our Prison Population Could Be Over 100,000 by 2027

Projections

The latest official prison population projections published yesterday (23 February 2023) by the Ministry of Justice and the Office for National Statistics demonstrate the uncertainties at the heart of our criminal justice system. The headline figures are confusing, to say the least:

• The prison population is projected to increase, with a central estimate of 94,400 by March 2025

• The estimate for two years later, March 2027, is within a huge range of 93,100 to 106,300.

Complications

In the first few years of the projection period, the projected rise in the prison population is primarily due to an increase in receptions of determinate sentenced offenders. This is because courts are assumed to dispose of more cases than they receive in order to clear the additional trial backlog that arose during COVID-19 restrictions and the Criminal Bar Association strike action.

The total prison population is projected to continue to increase over the full projection period. This is partly driven by rising police officer numbers which are expected to increase charge volumes and therefore increase the future prison population.

There are several sources of uncertainty for long-term prison population, particularly around future levels of demand entering the Criminal Justice System (CJS).

The publication presents three prison population projections to assess the impact of differing potential upstream demand scenarios. All three projections reflect what the statisticians call “plausible scenarios for future police and prosecutorial activity”. All three scenarios take account of expected increases in police officer numbers and project higher long-term prison demand, but vary factors such as charges per police officer, the crime mix entering the courts, and average custodial sentence lengths. You can see how the different projections unfold in the chart reproduced from the report below.

Scenarios

The scenarios are not intended to reflect the full range of demand risk for the CJS, but rather to estimate the plausible range of police and prosecutorial activity – a large driver of future prison demand over the mid to long-term. The statisticians are keen to emphasise that the projections do not represent the highest and lowest possible prison demand or the full range of uncertainty surrounding the projections.

There are several additional sources of uncertainty including the speed with which the CJS recovers from the pandemic – Crown Court backlogs remain very high. Other uncertainties relate to future crime types (in particular which types of crime police prioritise) and the volumes of crime and how many are processed through the CJS.

The plethora of recent policy changes (many of which relate to extending maximum sentence times and reducing the likelihood of parole) have not all yet been implemented and therefore make it hard for statisticians to model their impact on prison numbers.

The three scenarios which result in this very imprecise projection of the prison population being between 93,100 to 106,300 by March 2027 are:

High upstream demand – police and CPS crime mix and charges per officer start to return to pre-COVID (2019) levels, resulting in a large increase in the volume of cases coming into court. Additionally, Average Custodial Sentence Lengths (ACSL) return to 2019 levels.

Low upstream demand – police and CPS crime mix and charges per officer stay at lower levels observed in 2021 and do not return to pre-COVID behaviour. Similarly, ACSLs reflect 2021 levels.

Central upstream demand – crime mix remains as observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. While there are some increases in charges per officer, it remains below pre-pandemic levels. Additionally, ACSLs reflect levels observed from 2019 to 2021.

When trying to make sense of these very large rises in our prison population (there were 83,687 people in prison last Friday 17 February, itself a jump of 1149 people in the previous four week period), it is important to remember that, along with Scotland, England & Wales already incarcerates a large proportion of its citizens than any other Western European country.

Russell Webster

Crumbling Justice System

The new MoJ Permanent Secretary might feel there's much of a problem with her department, but a former Attorney General begs to differ. No doubt we all recall that one of the consequences of the Brexit shenanigans was a purging of decent 'one nation' Tories like Ken Clarke and Dominic Grieve. I notice the latter fired back at the weekend with a powerful piece in the Guardian:- 

I've seen how the UK justice system is crumbling. Why doesn't the government take action?

From decrepit court buildings to legal aid cuts, the service has been brought to its knees. And there’s little hope of change.

When I first started at the bar in the early 1980s, my practice was largely publicly funded by legal aid and much of it was crime and family work. I travelled across London and south-east England representing clients in crown, county and magistrates courts. Most of these buildings were Victorian and lacked the facilities to cope with the growing volume of criminal and civil cases.

But there were signs of change. At Maidstone, where I was a frequent visitor, the Queen came to open the new court centre. She spoke of how the provision of justice was the essential first “social service” provided by the state, and central to her coronation oath. The resident judge, John Streeter, had worked hard to get a building that could help deliver an effective justice system. There were many more courts; rooms for consultations with clients; and a bar mess, where, apart from being able to buy hot food, there was the privacy to get advice from colleagues and to resolve issues with one’s opponent. A couple of years after it opened, visiting officials of the Lord Chancellor’s Department were holding it up as an exemplar for the future, noting that it had a reputation for efficiency and high professional standards of delivery.

When I was attorney general from 2010 to 2014, I returned there on a visit to the Crown Prosecution Service and to see the judges. The contrast could not have been greater. The building looked tired and poorly maintained. There were water leaks. The facilities for advocates were largely gone, and with them much of the sense of purpose and camaraderie I remembered. The judges were no better off. Most had brought their lunch in plastic containers from home.

While it must be right that cuts in services have to start with things that will be seen as personal comforts, the state of that court and others I have seen since – and the general state of morale among judges, court staff, barristers and solicitors carrying out these areas of work – point to a major crisis in our justice system.

This can also be seen in the Prison Service, with its overcrowding and its inability to deliver effective rehabilitation regimes or control the spread of Covid. At its root are a series of decisions made by successive governments – going back over at least two decades – to either hold back on the increases enjoyed by other areas of public expenditure or, after the 2008 financial crisis, to cut the justice budget more deeply than anywhere else.

In real terms, the reduction in spending overall between 2010 and 2019 has been about 25%. Given that, in that time, the population of England and Wales has risen 7%, and the prison population has largely remained at over 80,000, any cuts to the criminal justice system were going to be hard to achieve. In the run-up to the 2010 election, the then justice secretary, Jack Straw, who I shadowed, could see the looming crisis and facilitated better pre-election briefings for me from civil servants than had been done before. They were sobering.

Yet at the time, much of the Conservative policy on prison reform, and trying to decrease prison numbers, was being diverted by the need to fight off a tabloid-inspired campaign to make us buy prison ships to cater for increasing prison numbers as a result of tougher sentencing. This policy was plainly incapable of delivering value for money. (I note that the new police, crime, sentencing and courts bill is about to pile more pressure on prison numbers.)

After 2010 the largest percentage of cuts fell on legal aid and the budget of the CPS, the latter of which came under my remit as attorney general. The CPS, under Keir Starmer’s leadership, responded very well in streamlining its operations and still maintaining conviction rates – helped by an unexpected downturn in the number of crown court trials.

But all efficiencies have their limits. When in 2013 we successfully persuaded the Treasury to impose a far smaller cut than what had been demanded, it was obvious that if this continued there would be problems, as became evident later with complaints about falling conviction rates and collapsing cases.

Yet the worst consequences come from the treatment of the legal aid paid to advocates and solicitors for their work. This was reduced from a total of almost £2.2bn in 2010 to £1.7bn by 2019. Despite trying to minimise the worst effects of these cuts, and a recent small budget increase, the blunt reality is that for most criminal and family related work, the earnings are now so low that any lawyer would think twice about choosing these fields as a career option.

I can think of no other professions where the remuneration rates have been almost static for 30 years. I was pleased as attorney general to champion pro bono (unpaid) work and schemes to deliver civil legal aid through law centres, but none of this can compensate for the cutbacks.

For the ordinary public who encounter the justice system, its growing inadequacies and delays – and the injustice that can flow from them – are real. Last month, the Secret Barrister spoke of a case of serious domestic violence first reported by his client, the alleged victim, in 2017. In large part because of cuts to the police, the CPS and the courts, and exacerbated by the pandemic, the case has still not been heard in court. In all this time the defendant – an allegedly violent, manipulative man – has remained free, and the complainant has been unable to move on with her life.

It is sometimes suggested that the cost of our common law justice system had become excessive by the standards of civil law western democracies. But this is not supported by the evidence: in 2016 the Netherlands was spending €689 (£585) per head on justice, and Denmark €338, compared with €150 here.

Most of the justice secretaries I have known have privately acknowledged that their department is systemically short of resources. But because of the way the Treasury and government operates, and the difficulty of showing financial effectiveness in an entirely demand-driven service with unpredictable fluctuations, those secretaries have resorted at best to damage limitation, and at worst to currying favour by volunteering cuts. There are seen to be few votes to gain for a successful justice system.

So I fear we are unlikely to see any significant change – though it is urgently needed to maintain the foundations of a civilised society. Far from being able to pride ourselves on the excellence of our system of justice, it is in danger of turning into a whited sepulchre: but as the external appearances are being maintained, few in government are noticing or appear bothered.

Meanwhile we should stop being surprised at the increasing stories about the failings of the system, because the reasons are obvious.

Dominic Grieve QC served as shadow home secretary from 2008 to 2009 and attorney general for England and Wales from 2010 to 2014

Another Chicken Roosted

You would think that politicians would learn from past behaviour that law introduced in order to gain political advantage, especially in the field of crime, nearly always ends badly, but sadly they don't. A whole number of chickens have been coming home to roost during this election campaign and through a number of tweets the Secret Barrister has rather neatly highlighted another:-

This is the scandal caused by RUI (Release Under Investigation): 

1. The govt tightened the use of police bail to score cheap headlines 

2. Thousands of suspected violent & sex offenders RUI’d with no conditions 

3. Under resourced police take years to investigate alleged offences
4. Under resourced Crown Prosecution Service take months to make a charging decision 

5. Defendants summonsed to court for a first appearance 6 months later 

6. Trial listed in the Crown Court a year later due to lack of open courtrooms 

7. Trial inevitably adjourned because of 6.
8. Three years down the line, witnesses lose heart and the case ends up being dropped on the fourth trial listing. No justice for anyone.

The story has been investigated by BBC Newsnight:-

'Scandal brewing' as thousands of suspects released

More than 93,000 suspected violent criminals and sex offenders have been released without restrictions by police in England and Wales since 2017, figures obtained by BBC Newsnight show. People suspected of offences including rape and murder have been among those "Released Under Investigation" (RUI).

Richard Miller of the Law Society said a "major scandal" was brewing over the way RUIs are being used. The Home Office said the cases must be regularly reviewed and managed.

In 2017, the rules on pre-charge bail changed, making it more difficult for police to keep suspects on bail beyond 28 days. The overuse of RUIs, Mr Miller said, is the unintended consequence of the changes. Unlike pre-charge bail, RUIs do not impose a limit on suspects' movements, stop them from contacting certain people or require them report to a police station. Earlier this month the government announced plans to review the 2017 changes.

In September 2018, Alan Martin, 53, was released under investigation by police in Sunderland, after his estranged wife Kay Richardson had gone to the police accusing him of rape. No conditions were imposed and the police gave Martin the keys back to the home he had shared with Ms Richardson. Martin let himself into the house and waited for Ms Richardson, 49, before attacking her with a hammer and strangling her.

"They might as well have gone and opened the door for him," said Audrey Richardson, Kay's mother. "He killed her," she said. "We've got to accept this and the police is not taking a little bit of responsibility... We are haunted by what happened."

Mr Martin had a history of domestic violence. But Northumbria Police said, because he had not been bailed, officers had no legal right to keep the keys from him. The force were cleared of misconduct by The Independent Office for Police Conduct.

Newsnight's data - obtained under the Freedom of Information Act - revealed there were 322,250 RUI cases between April 2017 to October this year. Of these, 93,098 related to violence against a person and sexual offences cases. The figures were provided by 20 of the 44 police forces in England and Wales - meaning the total number of RUIs since 2017 is likely to be much higher.

Caroline Goodwin QC, chairwoman of the Criminal Bar Association, said there were people being released without "any form of judicial control or indeed police bail control" which "can be dangerous" for victims.

Newsnight found 2,772 of the cases involving violent and sexual offences had been classed as RUI for more than 12 months. "It's unfair on defendants and complainants if these cases are not resolved quickly," said Mr Miller, head of justice at the Law Society. "It also means that the quality of the evidence is impacted as the longer a case is left the more memories fade."

Newsnight spoke to a man who was released under investigation for more than two years, after he was accused of rape. He agreed to speak to the BBC anonymously. "Your life is effectively put on hold. You're put into this limbo where everything starts falling apart around you, you've got no control of it whatsoever," he said. "I felt suicidal." He protested his innocence and was eventually told he would not be charged. "I would expect, with the nature of the crime I was accused of, to have been placed under specific instructions," he added. "But there were no restrictions at all."

The Home Office said the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) released guidance to frontline officers this year stressing the importance of using pre-charge bail where necessary and proportionate, including in high harm cases.

"We will always give the police and the criminal justice system the full support and powers they need to protect the public from harm," said Home Secretary Priti Patel. "We launched a review of pre-charge bail legislation to prioritise the safety of victims and empower the police investigating all types of offences, whilst continuing to make sure cases are dealt with as swiftly as possible."

Fake News and Fake Law

I never thought I'd be part of voicing any serious concern of our wonderful BBC because it seems heretical and akin to losing faith in the NHS, motherhood and apple pie, but there's clearly something bad going on and touched upon recently by Peter Oborne and his recent Guardian article. 

The thing is this. It's pretty clear to most of us that our current prime minister is completely unfit for office having consistently proved his credentials as a self-serving and compulsive liar with dubious morals and a clear inability to be trusted in pretty much any situation whether it be political, personal or social. 

Now the BBC have clearly taken the surprising decision that, not withstanding all the impartiality rules that cover elections, the public will lose confidence in politics if they were to witness an unvarnished Boris Johnson demonstrating what an utter knob he is, so things have to be 'sanitised', edited, polished or just fixed Korean propaganda-style. First we had the Remembrance Sunday film swap in order to hide the fact a dishevelled and hung-over prime minister had a wreath upside down and got his timing wrong; now we have Question Time audience laughter replaced with rapturous applause when Boris's name is linked to issues of trust. This from the Canary website:- 

Boris Johnson’s appearance on the BBC Question Time (BBCQT) Leaders Debate didn’t exactly go well. From having to sneak into the studio while Jeremy Corbyn was greeted by crowds of supporters to refusing to apologise for his previous racist and homophobic comments, the PM was on the back foot.

But it was on the issue of trust that the audience really showed how much they despise Johnson. And their reaction explicitly showed the contempt they have for him on this issue. This was, seemingly, too much for BBC News. Because it apparently edited the clip, removing the full audience response and editing it to only show applause for Johnson.

We also discover that a vociferous questioner of Jeremy Corbyn over treatment of female Labour MP's is a Tory activist from Hull who has appeared three times previously and successfully made contributions from the audience. This from the Daily Politik on Facebook:- 

Oh look! Wadda ya know? ‘White shirt guy’ who attacked Corbyn in last night’s BBC Leaders debate, is a conservative activist! Ryan Jacobsz. Earlier this year, he was also the conservatives candidate for the local council of Hessle in East Riding, Yorkshire.

Last night was Ryan’s FOURTH appearance on BBCQT. In his first, he attacked Emily Thornberry in chesterfield on 20.04.2018 over Intervention in Syria. In the second, he attacked Richard Burgon on Labour’s brexit position 31.01.2019.

Can BBCQT Audience Producer and UKIP enthusiast, Alison Fuller Pedley explain how conservative activists and candidates make it onto the BBC QuestionTime audience so frequently and why they’re also always conveniently given the opportunity to ask their staged anti-Labour Tory PR attack questions?

--oo00oo-- 

Having got that off my chest, this in the Independent was going to be today's subject, how at election time lying and making stuff up is just second nature to the Tory Party:-

Conservatives accused of ‘peddling fake law’ with pledge to jail child killers for life

A Conservative election pledge – to jail child killers for life – has been dismissed as “fake law” amid calls for all parties to tackle a worsening crisis in the justice system. Days after the number of people punished for crimes in England and Wales hit a new record low, the Tories unveiled a commitment to jail adults who murder children for life, without parole.

Robert Buckland, the justice secretary and lord chancellor, said: “Under a Conservative majority government, the law will be rewritten to be absolutely clear: any murderer who denies a young, innocent child the right to life surrenders their own right to liberty. They do so permanently, and they do so without exception.”

Anonymous campaigner and blogger the Secret Barrister accused Mr Buckland of “peddling fake law”, adding: “A lord chancellor with respect for the rule of law and integrity of the justice system would be on the airwaves correcting this nonsense”. Responding to a Conservative Party tweet claiming it would “make sure life means life for child killers”, the anonymous junior barrister called the claim “a lie”.

“It won’t apply to all (or even most) ‘child killers’ – only adults who commit murder,” the Secret Barrister added. “The law already provides for whole life tariffs for adults who murder children. The number of cases this will apply to is virtually nil. It is a distraction. It is a lie.”

A more detailed summary of the Tories’ proposal said only adults aged 21 and over – who commit the “premeditated” murder of under-16s – would be subject to whole life orders.

The Conservatives said they would make the change by amending the Criminal Justice Act 2003, but then misinterpreted the law. A press release claimed it was currently “too restrictive” and only made whole life terms the starting point for judges in cases if a murder was of multiple children, or involved sexual or sadistic conduct. But the law only says that the offence must be of an “exceptionally high seriousness” to meet the threshold, and gives those factors in a non-exhaustive list of examples.

The Conservatives admitted that even if the law were changed, the “sentencing decision in any given case would continue to rest with the judge” and the “policy will be subject to the usual judicial discretion” – meaning the term could be lowered for mitigating circumstances.

Ellie Cumbo, the Law Society’s head of public law, said “premeditation” was not clearly defined in law and many child murders may not reach the bar. She told The Independent that judges already take pre-planning into account, and that only a “small number” of cases would be affected. “The whole life order already exists in law, and is imposed exactly where you would expect – in cases of this extremely rare and serious type,” Ms Cumbo added.

Other legal experts questioned how premeditation would be defined, and whether judges or juries would decide on the issue. Barrister and author Andrew Keogh said the proposals would “impact very few cases”. “Will a single offender actually serve a single day longer in prison as a result?” he said. “I await the impact assessment when or if the legislation is published, but I strongly suspect it will not. Sounds tough, but probably of no real effect at all.”

Experts also voiced doubt over a separate Conservative election pledge to get anyone illegally carrying a knife “charged within 24 hours and in court within a week – three times faster than the current average”. Boris Johnson said: “We are speeding up prosecutions to make sure the threat of being caught is always an effective deterrent.” But the Conservatives gave no indication of how the process would be “sped up”, amid staff shortages in the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and a backlog of criminal cases waiting to be heard.

Half the magistrates’ courts in England and Wales have been closed as part of austerity measures since 2010, and the number of sitting days has also been reduced to cut costs. “There’s not only a question there about how the courts would accommodate that, but about how the CPS would make a charging decision in 24 hours,” Ms Cumbo said. She pointed out that the courts themselves are responsible for deciding when cases are heard, and are working with “very limited resources”.

“Listing is a mess because the courts are completely overburdened with cases, so it’s difficult to see how another fixed requirement will be accommodated when they’re already groaning under the weight of cases,” the lawyer said. “There’s a question about how you can accomplish a pledge like that without increasing resources to the CPS and courts.”

The Law Society is among organisations campaigning for the government to increase funding across the criminal justice system, as prosecutions plummet. Statistics released by the Ministry of Justice last week showed the number of people punished for crimes in England and Wales hit a new record low in the year to June, while recorded crime rose by 6 per cent. The rate of people jailed has fallen to 6.5 per cent, and the number given immediate prison sentences is at its lowest in a decade.

Separate statistics show that prosecutions are dropping for every type of crime, down to just 7.4 per cent of all recorded offences – a fall of 41,700 in a year. The number of criminal trials being held in England and Wales has plummeted to a record low, falling by 67,000 in the past 10 years. Legal organisations have largely blamed the change on severe cuts made by the Conservative Party to the Ministry of Justice and police budgets, causing fewer cases to be solved or brought to court.

While Mr Johnson has made a promise to hire 20,000 new police officers in three years a key pledge, the Public Accounts Committee said the system may not be able to cope with the consequences of a rise in demand.

A Return to 'Proper' Punishment?

Having already comprehensively screwed the system up, we once again have the spectacle of politicians using crime and punishment as a political football in order to win popularity at the polls. The Secret Barrister writing in the Guardian puts the position rather well I think:-  

The Tories' tough talk on crime is shameless and cynical

In the spirit of the party conference season, let me start with a platitude: everybody wants dangerous criminals to be dealt with properly.

But what “properly” actually means depends heavily on someone’s political perspective. The law sets out five purposes of criminal sentencing: rehabilitation; crime reduction (including by deterrence); reparation; protection of the public; and punishment. The problem with our current system, in the eyes of Boris Johnson’s government, is that there isn’t enough emphasis on punishment. So it was that justice secretary Robert Buckland QC trailed his conference speech by announcing in an interview with the Daily Mail that he was introducing “proper punishment” for “the most serious violent and sexual offenders”.

This will apparently be achieved by “stopping the release of the most serious violent and sexual offenders at the halfway point of their sentence”. The statutory regime that has been in place since 2005, under which any prisoner serving a standard determinate sentence is automatically released on licence upon serving half of their sentence, is a popular bugbear, not only among the general public but as featured in Johnson’s un-fact-checked columns in the Daily Telegraph, which took aim at “our cock-eyed, crook-coddling criminal justice system”.

The reasons in favour of early release on licence are mixed. Some are noble and based on evidence, including the government’s own research that early reintegration into society reduces reoffending; some are cynical and attributable to the political desire to generate tabloid headlines of long prison sentences without having to actually fund those prison places in full. And I have every sympathy with public anger at feeling misled by 10-year sentences that translate to five years minus time served on remand awaiting trial or sentence.

But the fundamental flaw in Buckland’s new policy is that the “most serious violent and sexual offenders” are, under the current law, not automatically released at the halfway point of their sentences. The most serious offenders, those deemed to present a significant risk of serious harm to the public, will usually receive either a life sentence or an extended determinate sentence (EDS). With a life sentence, a prisoner will serve a minimum term set by the court before being eligible for parole, and will remain in prison indefinitely until they can convince the parole board that they no longer pose a risk to the public.

With an EDS, a prisoner is given a notional determinate term – say nine years – and has to serve two-thirds before being eligible to apply to the parole board for release. If they are not safe for release, they may have to serve the full term. Those convicted of sexual offences against children and terrorism offences who do not receive a life sentence or EDS are deemed an “offender of particular concern”, and must satisfy the parole board they are not a risk to the public before they are released at the halfway point of their sentence.

So who is this policy actually targeting? The answer is a tiny percentage of defendants in the criminal justice system who are convicted of (as yet unspecified) serious violent or sexual offences, but who don’t receive a life sentence or an EDS. So people who are, by definition, not “the most serious offenders”. They will now have to serve two-thirds, rather than half, of their sentence before being automatically released.

The government has offered no evidence that this will in any way make the public any safer. The purpose is purely punitive; red meat tossed on the Conservative party’s buffet table for the salivating hang-’em-and-flog-’em brigade, with a beady eye on a nakedly populist election campaign and an increasingly authoritarian tabloid press. It’s cynicism bordering on nihilism; shamelessly undermining public confidence in sentencing by spreading misinformation about how the justice system actually works.

Meanwhile, as the home secretary, Priti Patel, stands at her podium and smirks: “To the criminals, I simply say this: we are coming after you,” our criminal justice system is in meltdown. It is taking years to investigate and charge offences, as the under-resourced police and Crown Prosecution Service drown in digital data. Cases I have been briefed on this week involve incidents that happened in 2018 and are listed for trial in the summer of 2020. This is because the government has taken what the senior presiding judge, Lady Justice Macur, described as a “political decision” to slash even further the number of crown court sitting days to save on the costs of running courts. This falsest of economies means that perfectly usable courtrooms sit locked and empty and judges twiddle their thumbs at home, on full pay, while the backlog of crown court cases rises to more than 32,000.

The courts themselves are literally crumbling: burst pipes and leaking sewage are par for the course. And we haven’t even started on legal aid: the injustice of innocent people of modest means who are forced to pay for their own defence, and being refused their reasonable legal costs when they are acquitted, forcing them to sell their homes.

As for victims of serious crime, rape crisis centres are in desperate need of funding, and the government has only offered £5m of the £195m needed to properly support victims of sexual violence. Meanwhile, the government estimates that our already grossly overcrowded and understaffed prisons – hellholes of death, violence and self-harm – will have to find another 3,000 places a year, at an annual cost of £110m.

It bears repetition: the government can find £110m for an ineffective, macho prison policy, but only £5m for victims of rape. Any government that is serious about criminal justice would make the real problems in the criminal justice system a priority. But this announcement confirms that we do not have a serious government, just a gaggle of cheap opportunists charting policy based not on evidence, but on the fact-free demagoguery of Boris Johnson’s Telegraph columns.

The Secret Barrister

The writer is a junior barrister who writes anonymously about the English and Welsh legal system, and is the author of The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken

PM Issues Orders!

We now know the criminal justice system will be part of the election campaign and the MoJ statement on Monday has set the ball rolling:-

Sentencing review to look at most dangerous and prolific offenders

The Ministry of Justice will conduct an urgent review ordered by the Prime Minister, to ensure the public are properly protected from the most dangerous criminals.

The work, which begins immediately, will focus on whether violent and sexual offenders are serving sentences that truly reflect the severity of their crimes.

It will consider whether changes in legislation are needed to lock criminals up for longer – by not letting them out automatically part-way through a sentence. It will also look at how to break the cycle of repeat offending.

It forms part of a government overhaul of the criminal justice system to further protect the public – by cracking down on crime, raising prison standards, rehabilitating offenders and cutting the vicious cycle of re-offending.

The government review team will report back directly to the Prime Minister with recommendations this autumn.

Specifically, the review will look at:

• Sentencing for the most serious violent and sexual offenders;
• The rules governing when and how these offenders are released; and
• Sentencing of the most prolific offenders.

Today (12 August 2019) also sees a further £85 million awarded to the Crown Prosecution Service to build capacity and manage caseloads over the next 2 years.

Justice Secretary, Rt Hon Robert Buckland QC MP, said:

"Too often the public and victims feel that violent and sexual offenders are being released early and without a proper deterrent to stop their offending. We must ensure that there is confidence in the system, which is why my department will undertake an urgent review of how and when these offenders are released – to better protect the public and end the cycle of reoffending. This work is a priority for the Government and will report back to the Prime Minister with recommendations to ensure punishments properly reflect the severity of their crimes."

In addition, today the Prime Minister and Justice Secretary are meeting leaders from the police, probation and prison sectors to discuss how to cut crime and improve the criminal justice system.

It comes as an extra £2.5 billion investment has been announced to create 10,000 extra prison places, starting with the new Full Sutton prison.

This follows announcements to recruit 20,000 new police officers over the next three years and the Home Secretary’s confirmation that all 43 police forces in England and Wales can use enhanced stop and search powers.

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This response from Napo:-

PM orders urgent review of Sentencing Policy

Prime Minister, Boris Johnson’s, call today for an urgent review of prison sentencing policy – which would see 10,000 extra prison places - has been all over the news today. Napo General Secretary, Ian Lawrence, spoke to Sky News’ lunchtime programme about the proposals.

Ian told Sky News that there were already too many people in prison; people who should not be there like those with mental health issues. What was really needed in terms of sentencing policy, he said, was a return to ‘what works’, and proper rehabilitative work from more, skilled, probation officers in the community.

Grayling’s TR reforms were an acknowledged disaster, he told the programme. The part-privatisation of the probation service had failed on all counts and resulted in the government U-turn and the return of ‘offender supervision’ into the National Probation Service. Napo welcomed this and was committed to working with the MoJ to deliver but, he told Sky, the proposed changes were not enough: we need all probation work brought back into under public accountability. He also said that we needed more resources and more skilled probation staff. There were currently over 1,000 vacancies across the country – HMPPS needed to motivate and recruit staff as a matter of urgency and the current, two-tier pay system that was the result of the TR system was not the way.

Was Boris Johnson listening? Ian said he hoped so. Napo had a good working relationship with Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland, and we believe he understands the situation. But, Ian stressed, the way forward is properly resourced supervision in the community, to deliver rehabilitation and to keep communities safe: and this was only possible if probation was in the hands of skilled professional practitioners not private companies interested only in profit.

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Here we have what the Secret Barrister thinks, and they're angry! 

Don’t fall for Boris Johnson’s criminal justice con tricks

Starting with the “new money”. Mr Johnson has announced that 20,000 new police officers will be recruited over the next three years. This is vital, certainly, but falls far short of what is required, given that that figure barely replaces the number of officers cut since 2010. Meanwhile, not only is crime increasing, but investigations are becoming ever-more complex, with digital evidence sucking resources and quadrupling the effort that would have been required a decade ago.

There’s £85m for the Crown Prosecution Service, which sounds like a healthy sum, until you realise that it’s a fixed payment over two years, and that the CPS budget for 2018/19 was a quarter of a billion pounds less in real terms than in 2009/10. The CPS has lost a quarter of its staff and a third of its lawyers since 2010. Two tranches of £42.5m will not begin to fix the problems that plague prosecutions up and down the country.

There’s a promise of 10,000 new prison places, when the previous promise of 10,000 places in 2015 fell short by 6,000, and another 9,000 places alone are required simply to address the present, longstanding overcrowding. There is £100m for technology to aid prison security, but no mention at all of the extra prison staff needed to safely manage the new offenders, given that even after a recruitment drive in 2017, numbers are 15 per cent down since 2010. There has been a huge drain of experience since 2010, as the most experienced officers were among the first to go when the government decided to slash prison staff by over a quarter, at a time when the prison population has climbed.

But the problem extends far beyond inadequate promises to redress chronic underfunding. The propaganda accompanying these announcements betrays not only the Prime Minister’s trademark opportunism and dearth of intellectual rigour but the sticky, putrid tar clogging the heart of the Johnson Crime Agenda.

Announcing his plans in a series of weekend puffs in tame newspapers, Boris Johnson declared, “Left wingers will howl. But it’s time to make criminals afraid – not the public.” Declaring his mission to ensure that criminals “get the sentence they deserve,” Johnson continued a theme begun in his Telegraph columns on the campaign trail, when he railed against “early release” from prison and inadequate prison sentences being passed. The solution to our criminal woes, the subtext screams, is to lock up more people for longer.

And let’s make no mistake, punishment is a legitimate and important part of criminal sentencing. It is one of the five purposes of sentencing listed in statute, alongside the reduction of crime (including by deterrence), reform and rehabilitation, protection of the public and making reparations to victims. Few if anybody involved in criminal justice would disagree with the notion that people who commit crime should be punished in a way that reflects their culpability and the harm they have caused, and that for some people, notably the most serious violent offenders, lengthy prison sentences are inevitable.

However, the notion that longer prison sentences by themselves make any of us any safer is a fantasy. The notion in particular that knife crime will be solved if we simply lock up young men for years on end is a hoax. The public may well be protected from that particular individual for the duration of their incarceration, but the idea underpinning this rotten philosophy – that longer sentences have a deterrent effect on crime – has been shown to be bogus. What does act as a deterrent is not severity of sentence, but certainty. The likelihood of being caught and dealt with swiftly, in other words.

But crime reduction and prevention is not achieved solely by deterrence. Rehabilitation is a vital part of protecting the public. This is why, when dealing with complex, multi-causal offending intractably rooted in social and cultural problems, the courts may take the view that more can be done to protect the public by keeping a young man on the cusp of custody out of the prison warehouse estate, and offering focussed intervention in the community. Sending someone to prison usually means ripping them away from all and any stabilising factors they may have. They lose their job, their social housing and their relationship, and exit prison with no support network other than the new friends they’ve made inside. This is why the evidence suggests that reoffending rates are lower when offenders are kept in the community.

But the evidence is of no concern to the Prime Minister. This is why he is forced into infantile ad hominems as a pre-emptive rebuttal against the people who have read and studied the evidence, and might be minded to offer some as a counter to his claims that our system is soft.

We already have the highest incarceration rate in Western Europe. Prison sentences have on average got longer year-on-year. We have more prisoners detained on indefinite and life sentences than all the other countries in the Council of Europe.

The notion that our courts routinely hand out “soft sentences” is simply not true. When we do see “soft justice” stories in the headlines, they will either be an aberration, usually corrected on appeal, or they will be the product of inaccurate or dishonest reporting, removing context or omitting facts.

Which brings us to Johnson’s public statements. Because at the centre of his musings on criminal justice is a rich stuffing of bullshit. He has lied and lied and lied. He lied when he claimed that “a convicted rapist out on early release” had raped again (the man in question was neither a convicted rapist nor out on early release). He lied when he suggested that the notion of allowing some prisoners to be released on temporary licence was “criminally stupid” (the government’s own evidence shows that reintegrating prisoners into the community in this way cuts reoffending). When he told the Mail this weekend that there are “thousands of “super prolifics” – criminals with more than 50 convictions to their name – who are being spared jail altogether”, he did not tell you that one of the reasons they were spared jail might be that they were being sentenced for non-imprisonable offences. He is lying to you when he tells you that the solution to crime is More Police, More Prisons.

He is lying so that he can turn the volume up to 11 on his remix of “Prison Works” to ensure the oldies at the back of the conference hall can hear in the run-up to the inevitable autumn general election.

And while Mr Johnson is lying to you, the rest of the criminal justice system rots.

Courts are being closed down and sold off all over the country. Half of all magistrates’ courts have been closed, meaning that defendants, victims and witnesses are forced to travel for hours on ineffective public transport to their “local” court.

Of those courts remaining standing, many are unfit for purpose. Decaying, crumbling buildings with no working lifts, holes in the roofs, sewage leaking into public areas, no air conditioning in summer and no heating in winter. In some, the public cannot even get a glass of water.

Of the courts that remain unsold, all are now run at artificially low capacity due to Ministry of Justice restrictions on “court sitting days”. We have, in many large city Crown Courts, the farce of full-time, salaried judges being forced to sit at home taking “reading days” – their perfectly serviceable courtrooms sitting locked and empty – while trials are fixed for Summer 2020 due to an alleged “lack of court time”.

We still have the abominable system of “floating trials” and “warned lists” – where defendants, witnesses and lawyers are expected to give up days or weeks of their lives just sitting around at court on the off-chance that a courtroom suddenly becomes free to take their trial. When, inevitably, no courtroom becomes free (because the MoJ won’t pay for the sitting day, ibid), their case is adjourned for months, and the cycle begins again.

The one thing that does act as a deterrent to criminals – certainty – is being eroded by ensuring that justice is doled out literally years after the event, because the government will not pay for the courts to process cases clogging the pipeline.

Meanwhile legal aid is being stripped away from citizens, forcing them to self-represent in cases in which their liberty is on the line.

This is why I am angry. Not because I’m a “lefty” inherently resistant to Boris Johnson’s white hot public service reforms. I’m angry because as a prosecutor I am still having to sit down with crying witnesses week after week and explain that their torment is being prolonged for another six months because the government refuses to pay to keep courtrooms open. I’m angry because the Innocence Tax – the policy that forces the wrongly accused to pay privately for their legal representation and then denies them their costs, bankrupting them, when they are acquitted – is not even in the political peripheral vision. I’m angry because our Prime Minister is a man who looks at the record rates of death, violence, suicide, overcrowding and self-harm in our prisons and whose first question is, “How do we get more people in there?” I’m angry because the notion that you “crack down on crime” by chucking a few more police officers onto the streets and shoving more and more people into our death-riven prisons is a con. It is a con to victims of crime, and it is a con to you, the public. I’m angry because we have the indignity of a dishonest, cowardly and exploitative Prime Minister fiddling with his Party’s g-spot while the criminal justice system burns.

Don’t fall for his con trick.

Secret Barrister

Yes It's More Prisons Folks!

According to this article from the Times yesterday, it might be summertime but we are now in full election mode and the 'nasty' party are reverting to type with 'tough on crime' featuring as one of three key campaign messages:- 

Boris Johnson to boost jails in law and order election pledge

Boris Johnson will unveil plans next week to increase the number of prison places in an effort to reclaim the Conservatives’ reputation as the party of law and order before a possible election.

The prime minister is expected to announce a renewed prison-building programme after concerns that previous plans to increase capacity by 10,000 places before 2020 have stalled. One of many expected moves on crime and justice, it will be seen as part of Mr Johnson’s efforts to prepare the Tories for a general election after Brexit.

Mr Johnson is expected to argue in a speech this week that overcrowded prisons in England and Wales are increasing violence and hampering efforts to rehabilitate offenders. Prosecutions for rape have fallen by a third in a year, to a record low, after rows about the disclosure of evidence.

Mr Johnson has already indicated that he will take a harder line than Theresa May’s government on crime and justice. Allies have said that he will scrap plans made by David Gauke, the former justice secretary, to abolish jail sentences of six months or less for all but the most serious criminals.

During the Tory leadership campaign Mr Johnson also committed to keeping serious sexual and violent offenders behind bars for longer, calling it wrong that they were routinely released after half of their sentence.

Britain’s prisons are operating at 97 per cent of capacity and there are fears that overcrowding is fuelling record violence. The number of assaults in prisons in the year to March, the most recent data available, reached 34,425, the highest recorded, and there were 10,311 assaults on staff.

The prison population is expected to grow from 83,007 at present to 86,400 by March 2023. In 2016 the Conservative Party announced plans to create 10,000 new “modern prison places” by the end of the decade. It subsequently planned six new prisons, of which only three have been approved. Construction work has begun on only one.

A government source told The Times: “Boris wants to put rocket boosters under the prison-building programme. He’s talking about a new mega-prison, he’s trying to release cash. Prisons are overcrowded. We need better facilities and a better environment where prisoners can do more purposeful activity. It’s all part of making prisons more purposeful.”

The Times has also been told that the Crown Prosecution Service will make an announcement about increasing the number of rape prosecutions, which have fallen to their lowest for more than five years. The number fell from 11,311 in 2017 to 7,594 last year despite a huge increase in recorded sex offences. Prosecutions for all offences have also hit a 50-year low despite rises in the crime rate.

The Home Office has announced a review of how rape cases are handled by police and prosecutors after warnings that victims’ privacy was being violated by intrusive disclosure practices.

Mr Johnson has promised to focus on three central themes in his domestic agenda: the NHS, crime and immigration. Several announcements on health were made last week, including measures to resolve the doctors’ pensions crisis and a £250 million investment in artificial intelligence for the NHS.

Labour is expected to table a confidence motion in Mr Johnson’s government when MPs return from recess in September in an attempt to stop a no-deal Brexit. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, has written to Sir Mark Sedwill, head of the civil service, urging him to rule on whether Mr Johnson can force through a no-deal Brexit during a general election campaign.

If Mr Johnson loses a confidence vote and is forced into an early election, Downing Street is considering plans to schedule polling day after October 31 so that Britain will leave the EU regardless of the election outcome. In a letter to Sir Mark, Mr Corbyn said that this would be unprecedented and unconstitutional.

He said that the Cabinet Office’s purdah rules during elections made clear that policy decisions on which a new government “might be expected to want to take a different view” should be postponed until after polling day.

Latest From Napo 189

According to Napo, the centralised civil service-controlled HR and payroll arrangements are still not working properly, which doesn't bode well for further changes coming down the line:-  

Another SSCL screw up

Napo members have been contacting HQ worried after receiving demands from NPS payroll for historic overpayments to be returned. These overpayments range from a few hundred to several thousand pounds and date as far back as the creation of the NPS in 2014.

Napo is of course challenging this latest systematic failure of the computerised HR and payroll system. Given recent announcements about the future of probation, Napo are in the process of preparing a comprehensive case to present to ministers arguing zero confidence in SSCL and the NPS being able to cope with any of the many complexities that arise from the proposed transfer of CRC staff into the NPS at the ending of CRC contracts.

Given the scale of this issue, Napo have issued guidance on what to do if you receive an overpayment demand.

If you are not yet a member of Napo but encounter this problem we are willing, as part of the collective nature of the dispute, to be flexible around our usual rules about not representing someone who joins with an existing problem.

If someone fills in the questionnaire and joins Napo then we will progress their case alongside others in the same position. However, you must join Napo immediately for us to progress a questionnaire and we will review the level of legal support we can afford to support for members who had not taken out our “employment insurance” by joining Napo prior to the overpayment demand arriving.

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Advice to members regarding overpayments made by the NPS

Over the last weeks many members have informed us that they have received demands from the National Probation Service, via their SSCL HR service provider, for monies relating to alleged historical overpayments. These overpayments range from a few hundred to several thousand pounds and arise from a period stretching back to the creation of the NPS in 2014.

Napo is challenging this latest systematic failure of the computerised HR and payroll system. Being able to pay your staff properly is the most basic requirement for any employer and it is both incredibly frustrating and worrying that the National Probation Service still cannot provide a stable, safe payroll service. Given recent announcements, Napo are in the process of preparing a comprehensive case to present to Ministers arguing that no-one can have any confidence in SSCL and the NPS being able to cope with any of the many complexities that arise from the proposed transfer of CRC staff into the NPS at the ending of CRC contracts.

The scale of the problem is still emerging but is clearly significant. Accordingly, we will be asking Ministers for an amnesty on overpayments. The NPS have resisted such suggestions citing arguments about public money needing to be recovered – taking no account of the public money being wasted managing the fallout from this failing system.

However, whilst we argue for this and for a safe and stable future service we are acutely aware that members need Napo’s advice and support in responding to the failures in the existing provision. The following advice aims to do so.

As well as following the advice below, any member with an overpayment demand are also asked to fill in the attached short questionnaire to help Napo make sure the NPS have your case and are progressing it.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU RECEIVE AN OVERPAYMENT DEMAND

 A. Ask SSCL to prove the money is owed

The overpayments seemingly arise from past payroll errors. However, no-one can be confident that SSCL’s calculations and records are now correct. We have seen examples where they have been unable to present a consistent account of what someone was paid; why it was wrong; and how they have calculated the overpayment. You are entitled to an explanation before you can agree to any monies being taken. This is a legal right.

Therefore, we advise that you:

• Acknowledge receipt of the request but ask for a full breakdown of how the overpayments were accrued with an explanation for each variation to your normal wages;
• Ask for copies of your actual wage slips from these periods (to cross reference against the ones available at the time if you still have them) to double check that what they say they paid you was correct;
• Challenge any discrepancies; payroll errors or changes they do not explain clearly;
• Keep doing so until there is a clear record that looks safe and factually correct.

Notify your line manager of the problem and ask if they will support you if you need assistance. Keep a copy of both this request and their reply.

B. Ask about any errors or correction that maybe needed before any safe and final amount for any overpayment can be confirmed

In some cases it is clear that SSCL have not recorded important information. For example, if a line manager had exercised their discretion to waive sick-pay reductions these may not have always been recognised by SSCL and could account for the alleged overpayment. They may have wrongly calculated your sick pay, as we know the SSCL computer has struggled with NPS staff having a different sick leave calculation period than other HMPPS staff. Any questions you may have relating to such possibilities should be raised and answered before any alleged overpayments are recovered.

Further, all members impacted should ask for written confirmation that all deductions taken from pay at the time are also correct and/or identified before any overpayment plan is finalised. This will include potential adjustments to PAYE tax and NI contributions. You should ask if your employer will, as part of their contractual obligations under PAYE resolve any necessary adjustments with HMRC prior to any alleged overpayment recovery, so that you can know your full financial position prior to reaching any agreement with the SSCL.You should also specifically ask them to confirm that both your employer and employee pension contributions are correct and if not that any rectification has been made – again before any overpayments are recovered. In most cases, your pension should not be impacted as the employer is under a legal obligation to make up full contributions whenever someone is on reduced salary due to illness, maternity leave, etc. However, if you opted for part-time work and continued to be paid at full pay this could be an issue. Asking will force the employer to check – and we are aware of errors that have taken place in recent months.

Anyone who by being overpaid thinks that SSCL will have recovered more Student loan repayments than was necessary can also appeal to the Student Loans company – and can inform the SSCL of the need to do this before beginning any repayments so that you know your full financial position before agreeing to a repayment plan.

C. Consider the reasonableness of the proposed repayment and challenge this if needed.

The SSCL will propose how much they want to recover from you over what period to make up for any alleged overpayment. Once you have gone through A and B and can be sure the alleged overpayment was made you can still challenge the fairness of any recovery and/or the reasonableness of their proposed recovery schedule.

They cannot take any monies off you until you have specifically agreed for them to do so. If they do so this would be a potential illegal deduction of wages and you should immediately contact Napo so we can help members challenge this in the courts if necessary.

There are several examples we have already identified where we have challenged the reasonableness of any recovery. This is especially relevant where someone has retired since the alleged overpayment and have no income other than their pension to make a repayment.

Likewise, if the case relates to an alleged overpayment that is now more than three years old we would argue it is not reasonable to ask for a recovery now.

Equally, if you were aware of a potential overpayment at the time and can evidence that you raised a concern with the SSCL / your line manager / HR and they offered reassurance or said that payments were correct you should use this now as evidence of a lack of confidence in the current claims; as well as evidence of your employer frustrating your contract by not paying you properly and fairly. Napo can advise in these specific cases directly.

In cases where a member was on maternity leave when the alleged overpayment took place and/or has reduced hours the legitimacy and reasonableness of the alleged overpayment can also be challenged.

In all of these cases, Napo cannot guarantee that a challenge would be successful in removing the alleged overpayment but by presenting such challenges members can delay the repayment process and increase the potential of the NPS changing their collective position whilst the challenges take place.

D. Challenge to make sure the alleged overpayment recovery plan is fair and affordable

Napo believes that no repayment, even if fully explained and legally justifiable, should be more than 5% of disposable income. Nor do we believe that it is reasonable to seek to recover money for an excessive period of time as members should not have the consequences of their employers errors impacting upon them for a prolonged period.

These two benchmarks may not however be compatible. For example, in one recent case the overpayment for someone who had significantly reduced their hours was several thousand pounds and using the 5% rule could have taken almost a decade to pay back. The threat was that any amount unpaid if and when they left would have to be recovered in full – meaning they could be tied to the NPS which of course is itself potentially illegal. In that case the alleged overpayment was greatly reduced, after Napo’s input, to accommodate some fair and reasonable recovery.

You are entitled to negotiate a reasonable recovery plan and one must be agreed before any monies are taken. The evidence you are asked to provide to support your case in negotiations should also not be intrusive or compromise your own data protection rights.

Any costs incurred in relation to addressing the alleged overpayments can also be accounted for and set against the claim as it should not cost you anything to help them rectify their error. This will include all mobile phone calls to the SSCL (charged at premium rate so use work phones and time where at all possible) and potentially compensation if you have had to use your own time (e.g. you’ve retired or are on sick or maternity leave).

NON-MEMBERS

If you are not yet a member of Napo but encounter this problem we are willing, as part of the collective nature of the dispute, to be flexible around our usual rules about not representing someone who joins with an existing problem.

If someone fills in the questionnaire and joins Napo then we will progress their case alongside others in the same position. However, you must join Napo immediately for us to progress a questionnaire and we will review the level of legal support we can afford to support for members who had not taken out our “employment insurance” by joining Napo prior to the overpayment demand arriving.

Food for Thought

As we have previously mentioned, Rory Stewart signalled a few weeks ago that the government is minded to effectively outlaw imprisonment of less than six months, a policy he expanded upon in a recent interview with Erwin James. It prompted the following letter:-

Rory Stewart is correct that short sentences are largely ineffective in reducing reoffending and should be used as rarely as possible. Sentencing guidelines used by magistrates are, however, already clear that custody must be only be used when there is no appropriate alternative. The proposed “presumption against” short prison sentences would therefore be unlikely to make any significant difference. Indeed, this has been demonstrated in Scotland, where a government evaluation of the impact of their recently introduced presumption against short prison sentences found that in practice it has had a minimal impact on sentencing decisions.

If the Ministry of Justice wants to see fewer short sentences, its focus should instead be on ensuring that effective community sentences, including appropriate options for women and treatment for people with mental health, drug or alcohol problems, are available in every area of the country. Magistrates should also be given the power to review the progress made by an offender serving a community sentence. This would enable us to impose community sentences with confidence, knowing that they will help offenders to turn their lives around.

John Bache
National chair, Magistrates Association

But lets look at the context. This from the Guardian:-

Rise in recorded crime is accelerating in England and Wales

The rise in crime in England and Wales is accelerating, according to police figures, which show a 14% year-on-year increase in offences recorded by forces across England and Wales. Knife crime has gone up even more steeply, by 21% in the 12 months to September, and gun crime has risen by 20%, according to quarterly figures released on Thursday.

Police chiefs said the increases – including a 32% rise in domestic burglary to 261,965 offences and an 18% rise in vehicle-related crimes (443,577 offences) alongside the sharp rises in violent crime – marked a turning point after more than 20 years of sustained falls in these categories.

“Today’s police officers are dealing with more complex crime, more safeguarding and protecting vulnerable people and an unprecedented terror threat, as well as tackling some of the genuine rises in knife and gun crime, robbery, burglary and vehicle-related crime – crimes which turn the trend on many years of reductions,” said chief constable Bill Skelly, of the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

Meanwhile, official figures show that the number of police officers in England and Wales has fallen by 930 in the past 12 months, to 121,929, the lowest level since comparable records began in 1996. Police officer numbers are now 22,424 below their peak in 2009, when there were 144,353 officers.

Then there's this from the Independent:-

Justice system in ‘crisis’ as only 8% of crimes prosecuted in England and Wales

Tens of thousands more crimes are not being prosecuted amid warnings of a worsening “crisis” in Britain’s criminal justice system. Almost 92 per cent of offences do not result in perpetrators being charged or summonsed in England and Wales, with the number of offences taken to court dropping by almost 30,000 in a year.

Lawyers, police officers and victim support workers interviewed by The Independent blamed a perfect storm of police cuts, rising crime, rows over disclosure, falling confidence and the backlash to a series of collapsed rape cases. Figures published by the Home Office show in the year ending September 2018 only 8.2 per cent of 5 million recorded crimes were prosecuted, down from 9.5 per cent the previous year. The lowest figures were for sexual offences (4 per cent), with only 1.9 per cent of recorded rapes prosecuted – down from 2.4 per cent the previous year. Nick Thomas-Symonds, Labour’s shadow solicitor general, said the statistics made “very worrying reading”. 

“This is, sadly, no surprise given the swingeing government cuts to both police and Crown Prosecution Service budgets,” he added. “The government has to step up to the plate and provide the resources needed to properly support victims and ensure that no stone is left unturned in bringing people to justice."

The reason for closing almost half of investigations was that no suspect had been identified, but almost a third were listed as “evidential difficulties”. There was a sharp rise in the proportion of cases recorded as “victim does not support action”, increasing to 42 per cent for violence, 35 per cent with rapes and 29 per cent of sexual offences. The victims’ commissioner, Baroness Newlove, raised concern that lengthy delays, poor conviction rates, demands for phones and personal records, and the prospect of cross-examination were making women drop claims. 

“The very low percentage of rape and sexual violence cases that result in a trial is a huge concern, as are the increasing number of victims who do not want to endure the criminal justice process,” she said. “I am often hearing from victims of sexual crime that their criminal justice journey is as harrowing as the crime itself. This is just not acceptable. I fear we are letting these victims down badly.”

Finally, there's David Fraser who I notice has been plugging his latest contrarian book on the Conservative Woman website:- 

The inescapable fact – growing leniency equals rising crime

From the late 1950s Britain’s official attitude towards crime began to change. Instead of being viewed as bad behaviour that needed to be punished and controlled, it was increasingly judged to be a symptom of a social or psychological malaise. The offender was seen as being forced into crime by poverty, inequality or other forces beyond his control which society could, and should, alleviate. Greed, laziness and the wish to dominate others were no longer recognised as the motives for violent crime. Persistent violent and dangerous criminals, who spurned hard work and thrift as the route to a comfortable standard of living, were rewarded with state protection from prosecution whenever possible, and the guarantee of their human rights, even in the face of their violence and law breaking. What was required, our ruling elites argued, was the application, wherever possible, of non-custodial sentences (even for violent offenders), such as the supervision of offenders in the community, to identify and alleviate the ‘underlying causes of crime’.

This has never worked, either to reform offenders or to protect the public. The re-offending rates of supervised criminals have steadily worsened. Forty years ago they were 41 per cent measured over two years. They are now at least 56 per cent measured over one year. This equates to millions of offences committed against the public every year by offenders trusted with their freedom. Further, between 1998 and 2014 there were at least 6,300 of the most serious violent and sex crimes, such as murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, committed by criminals on the probation service’s books.

Eighteen-year-old Opemipo Jaji, a violent sex offender, was convicted of making an indecent image of a child as well as robbing and sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl. Despite his obvious dangerousness, he was given 18 months probation supervision in the community. A few months later, Jaji, having made a routine visit to his supervisor, left the probation office at about 4 pm.

After about five minutes, he fell in behind an 11-year-old girl walking home from school. He followed her, chose his moment and dragged her into a park and subjected her to a violent three-hour assault. While this attack was taking place, his supervising officer would have been putting the finishing touches to his record entry covering the interview. Probably, at the very moment that he closed the file and sat contemplating how well Jaji was doing and the wisdom the courts had shown in not sending him to prison, Jaji was repeatedly raping the terrified child.

During the 1990s the probation service embraced the idea that ‘thinking skills’ programmes, designed by psychologists, could identify faults in the way offenders made decisions and so help them avoid crime. They were hopeful that years of failure could at last be reversed. But four years later the published results showed that not only had they had failed to reform the offenders on these programmes, but that in many cases their offending had increased.

What probation and other officials will not admit is that crimes are not committed because of faulty thinking skills, nor because of some pressing social or psychological need, nor because of problems associated with poverty and inequality, but because the offender chooses to commit them.

Although it is true that many criminals emerge from the poorer or less well-off sections of the community, it is wrong to interpret these conditions as factors which ‘cause’ crime. (An analysis carried out in 2011 found, contrary to what many believed, that countries with greater degrees of inequality and poverty had less crime than those which were wealthier and with more equality). Most people who choose to be violent and commit crime tend also to make life choices that generally keep them in the lower classes of our society. For example they refuse to work at school, are violent, ill-disciplined, demand instant gratification, and fail to plan for the future. This is not to say that they do not have access to money – crime and violence brings many of them a good income and their social station in life can be seen as an indicator of how they choose to live and spend their ill-gotten gains. The fact that the majority of children from poorer home backgrounds go on to live decent law-abiding lives bears out this truth. In 1926, when millions of working-class Britons lived in dire poverty, our violent offender rate was 4.4 per 100,000 of the population. It is now over 1,400.

Swathes of legislation have allowed courts to avoid using imprisonment for increasing numbers of convicted criminals. Yet we are told ‘we send too many offenders to jail’, and many now believe this is a truth written in stone. But it is a trick created by measuring the numbers in prison against our general population. When computed this way, it suggests that our imprisonment rate, per 100,000 of the population, has been rising.



But a moment’s reflection tells us that most of us do not commit crime and are not in that group of persons liable to be sent to jail. Therefore, this calculation tells us nothing about how lenient or severe we are in our use of prison for criminals. A more accurate imprisonment rate can be obtained by expressing the prison population against the number of crimes committed. The following graph shows that our imprisonment rate, when calculated in this way, has, since the 1950s, fallen not risen, and that we are not the ‘prison-obsessed nation’ that the anti-prison lobby would have us believe.



The opposite is the case. Only 28 per cent of offenders convicted of a serious crime are given a term of imprisonment. The public are left to rub shoulders with the remaining 72 per cent, except, of course, the justice elite, whose gated communities in cities and country retreats provide them with a level of security not available to the majority. Generally, they are not affected by crimes committed by those they campaign to keep out of jail. Many who are sentenced to imprisonment do not stay in long. The average sentence length for ‘violence against the person’ crimes is just 23 months, which in practice means 11 months, because almost all sentences are subject to 50 per cent remission.

We do not need psychologists to tell us that if you reward bad behaviour you will get more of it. We should not be surprised that violent crime is escalating. The offenders have taken their cue from us.

David Fraser

--oo00oo--

This about the book and author:-

Based on over 30 years research of government sentencing policy and work in the criminal justice system, David Fraser’s book demonstrates that the State’s increased reliance on alternatives to imprisonment has allowed all categories of violent crime to flourish in Britain; that, the homicide rate, for example, doubled between 1964 and the turn of the millennium; that the numbers of life threatening attacks have increased rapidly over the last 40 years, and that justice officials have hidden this development with a blizzard of deceptive statistics whose purpose is to mislead rather than inform the public.

Anti-prison groups and other apologists for offenders tell the public that violent offenders can be ‘managed’ in the community under supervision to the probation service, that prison doesn’t work because it makes offenders ‘worse’. The analysis presented here shows that none of this is true. Readers will be informed that contrary to the misleading propaganda regularly fed to the public, that parole is a cruel absurdity and should be abolished, that criminals under probation supervision as an alternative to imprisonment, commit hundreds of murders and other serious crimes every year, while the governments own figures, kept away from the public eye, makes it clear that long prison sentences are our best protection against violent (and other) crime, and are effective in encouraging criminals to reform.

The book demonstrates that the death penalty was an effective deterrent to homicide but its purpose is not to argue for its reintroduction. But by acknowledging its effectiveness, we can argue the case for a re-vamped sentencing system that is as effective as was the fear of the hangman’s noose. Evidence shows that the adoption of a 2 or 3 strike sentencing system resulting in mandatory long prison terms would provide the public with a much greater degree of protection. Other English speaking countries who have, in response to public demand, legislated this type of system have found that it discourages further violence and has produced startling reductions in crime.

David Fraser was a senior probation officer and criminal intelligence analyst with the former National Criminal Intelligence Service (now The National Crime Agency). He has had many articles published along with two well received books, the first of which was recommended for the George Orwell Prize in Literature. It provoked wide interest in this country and abroad and was commended to the House of Commons during a speech by an MP. David Fraser is married with two adult children and two grandchildren and lives in the South-West of England.