By Sheila Mckenzie
The Crown Prosecution Service’s disclosure of evidence is still sub-standard despite ‘early signs of improvement’, according to an inspectors report today.
HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate (HMCPSI), a watchdog for the CPS and the Serious Fraud Office, assessed how well the CPS is complying with its duty to disclose unused material (i.e evidence gathered but not replied upon by the prosecution).
The watchdog concluded that while aspects of the CPS’s performance ‘show continuous improvement’, in some areas the baseline performance was ‘very low, and although there was progress there is still a long way to go before an acceptable standard is reached’.
The inspection also found that the CPS has not improved about advising the police about reasonable lines of enquiry and has improved its compliance with prosecutors’ post-charge duty of initial disclosure.
INCOMPETENCE
However, the report says that in more than half of the criminal cases that were sampled the CPS’s charging advice did not properly deal with unused material. Meanwhile, in just 16% of cases where police performance was sub-standard did prosecutors identify the failing and feed this back at the charging stage.
Caroline Goodwin QC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association, said there is still cause for ‘serious concern’.
‘If this report had given the equivalent of an Ofsted grading for a school it would still, tragically, not move out of the bottom ranked “failing”,’ Goodwin said. ‘Criminal defence barristers are still not paid for the many hours spent examining unused material…It is this task, within what the inspectorate reveals as a still failing system due to starved and inadequately trained professionals at both police and CPS, that is often the difference between liberty and imprisonment.’
The report stressed the importance of resourcing, stating: ‘Over the past few years HMCPSI has… found fault with the CPS and identified areas where it could improve. Almost without exception, those faults have been caused or exacerbated by the problem of too few legal staff being spread too thinly over a volume of work of ever increasing complexity.’