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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, that it is essential for people fulfilling these duties to be subject to behaving in accordance with how a prosecutor ought. To my mind, it does not matter whether that will in fact lead to prison since, in many cases, being convicted may be very serious for a person who has never been in trouble before even if he is not to be imprisoned for it. I do not quite understand the difficulty, since these people can be authorised to carry out any legal activity. They can presumably be told that they can do some activities and not others. Again, however, if such an authorisation is given by a designated body it must be able to remove it. Therefore, there must be a power to deal with people whose conduct is not appropriate for a responsible prosecutor. One must remember that it is actually much more difficult to behave correctly when one is prosecuting at very short notice, on a relatively minor offence, a man who is not adequately defended. There is a much greater danger of malpractice there—not deliberate, but inadvertent—with keeping him in than there is in a full-scale trial in front of a puisne judge with representation on all sides and everyone objecting if one strays from the straight and narrow. One must also remember, although this is not by way of any criticism, that these people who will prosecute will in fact be employees of the prosecuting authority. There will therefore be an inevitable temptation for them to stray a little to try and achieve the result that they have been sent there to achieve. Again, I am not saying that they will be fraudulent, but it is easy to overstep the mark a little—particularly if, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, pointed out, there is probably nobody in court who is able to say ““You can’t do that””, because they are not legally qualified to do so. Therefore, it seems essential that anybody entrusted with a prosecution is subject not to professional regulation in the sense that is normally meant but to proper regulation whereby if he strays from the straight and narrow he can either be reprimanded or suspended—or whatever is appropriate. I would like some enlightenment from the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, on the point about not prosecuting in criminal cases. His proposed subsection (1A) says that a person can, "““only be permitted to carry out any legal activity … if he has been authorised so to do””." Surely, that means that it is open to the regulator to say, ““You’re very green; you can only do very minor cases””, or ““You have done a lot and are doing it rather well; you can be advanced to a higher level””. It would not enter everybody qualified to do anything of which he is capable under this subsection. If I thought that it would be working that way, I would be less worried about the qualification point. I take on board what the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, said about the degree of training, which he contrasted with what a barrister has to do. However, a barrister has to be trained to perform in any part of the law, while these people only have to know the relatively narrow procedure for dealing with magistrates’ court criminal cases, and so on. Therefore, their training will obviously not be comparable. I have to confess that what the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, read out seemed to stray a little too far in the opposite direction. Again, however, the regulator can surely set how much training there is to be; the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, spoke as though that amount was to be fixed for all time and all types of cases. If it is, that would be bad, but I would have thought one could have different levels of training and degrees of experience for varying case types, and be regulated according to your knowledge and experience.