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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment. I am very grateful to the noble and learned Baroness the Attorney-General for keeping me in the loop with copies of letters written to noble Lords and also for a letter of last week from her to me. I retain some concerns. We are dealing with the administration of justice in a criminal court. As the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, has pointed out the training of a designated case worker, even with the pack, will not be sufficient in some cases. One has to bear in mind that in the magistrates’ court now, magistrates are laymen, the defendant may or may not be represented—probably not by a lawyer—the clerk need not necessarily be a lawyer in the criminal courts these days and is quite often a layman and if the prosecutor has no real experience of the law and a point of law is raised, there will be real difficulty. We also need to be sure that the prosecutor has the ability to cope with the unexpected. Two things put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, are particularly important. One relates to offences that are not subject to imprisonment. Although the purists among us might prefer a lawyer to conduct the case, as a matter of reality, in the old days a warrant officer sometimes did the case so there is a real precedent for that. But that was not the kind of case where someone might go to prison. Without the absolute assurance that those who have had the pack, a few days’ training and the experience of going into court will have someone at their elbow to tell them what to do when the unexpected arises means that they might find themselves not sufficiently independent and certainly not sufficiently clued up about the unexpected. There will be a danger of a miscarriage of justice as a result of which someone might go to prison, particularly a defendant who is unrepresented as so frequently happens in magistrates’ courts. Therefore, I very strongly support the fact that the matter should be up front and that those without legal training should not be able to prosecute where imprisonment is a possibility. I am also very concerned about the regulation of the designated case worker. I listened with a degree of dismay to what is apparently the present position. Although I, too, respect the ILEX training, I do not believe that its code of conduct begins to be adequate for the importance of the work that it does. The noble and learned Baroness the Attorney-General says that it is working towards a code of conduct similar to that of the Bar and the Law Society. I am absolutely delighted to hear that, but I would prefer designated case workers not to be able to undertake the work until they are actually regulated by that code of conduct. Bearing in mind not just the hours but the days and days spent on the Legal Services Act last year, where everyone was regulated up hill and down dale, particularly for the Bar and solicitors, it is ironic that a group who are not legally trained are able to carry out prosecutions which might involve imprisonment on the creep system, about which we have been told, without the matter coming back to your Lordships' House and the other place. It seems to me that such people should not be able to creep into imprisonment cases, admirable though I am sure they are. If the Minister tells us that some of them are legally qualified, that is fine. However, she will also have to tell us that a great many of them would like to be legally qualified but that they have not yet got to that point. It seems to me that until they get to that point, they need regulation as good as barristers and solicitors and that they should not be able to prosecute cases where someone might go to prison. I am very supportive of the amendment.