Issue 217  30th October 2021

The Ministry of Justice will be handed an extra £900m in the next year in the effort to reduce the backlog of cases in the courts, the chancellor of the exchequer announced today...

In real terms, chancellor Rishi Sunak has pledged a 4.1% real terms increase by 2025 in Ministry of Justice day-to-day resources, which will increase from £8.4bn this year to £10.1bn in 2024/25. Taking into account a freeze in capital spending, which will be £1.4bn in 2024/25, the overall real terms departmental increase is 3.3% over that period... Over the next year, the MoJ will be handed £477m to fund the criminal justice system’s recovery from Covid-19, although it is not clear whether this is an extension of the pandemic investment announced this time last year.

Rape victims will be given a legal right to refuse to hand over their phones to police under new laws to end “digital strip searches” that have been blamed for plummeting conviction rates.

Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, and Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary, on Monday put forward amendments to their policing Bill that any victim must be informed that refusal to hand over their phones will not automatically lead to a police investigation being dropped. 

The amendments will also make it illegal for police to place “undue pressure” on a victim to agree to their phone being searched. Victims must also be told what information is being sought and what line of “reasonable” inquiry officers are pursuing.

More than half of the promised 20,000 additional police officers have now been recruited, the Home Office announced today (Wednesday 27 October), with an increasing number of women signing up to join forces across England and Wales.

An extra 11,053 officers have been hired across England and Wales as part of the Police Uplift Programme to help bring crime down and keep neighbourhoods safer, meaning that the government is now 55% of the way to meeting its recruitment target of 20,000 additional officers by March 2023. Forces saw more women joining the ranks to tackle criminals and protect the public from harm between July and September 2021 – with female officers accounting for 45% (1,451) of all new joiners during that time.

Hundreds of crimes are to be dealt with by computer under government plans to speed up justice. Ministers are proposing that people accused of minor offences should be able to indicate a plea online, with an option to have their conviction confirmed and punishment decided by computer.

The plans, to be debated on Tuesday by MPs, will allow for a series of minor crimes, including fare dodging, to be dealt with by a computer without human involvement. If successful, it could be extended to hundreds of summary crimes, including television licence evasion, careless driving, and failing to send a child to school, which carry fines of up to £2,500. More serious offenders, including children accused of burglary, assault and drug possession will also be able to plead guilty online and have their cases heard remotely, although they will have to appear in court for sentencing.

Sarah Everard’s murderer is appealing against the whole-life sentence he was given at the Old Bailey last month, it has emerged. On 30 September, Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens was sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars for the kidnap, rape and murder of the 33-year-old marketing executive. He had pleaded guilty to the charges of kidnap and rape in June, before confessing to her murder the following month...

fresh attempt to assess the advocacy standards of solicitors is one of the stand-out features of the business plan for the coming year published by the Solicitors Regulation Authority today. The regulator said that standards of representation within the criminal and civil justice system continue to be a key issue, brought into sharper focus following the pandemic.

The SRA has grappled in recent years with how to monitor advocacy standards and has announced a number of initiatives for ensuring that assessment of the higher rights of audience is ‘consistent and robust’. They include:

• Evaluating a sample of training records of solicitors working in youth courts
• Carrying out a random sample of solicitors’ standards in magistrates and higher courts
• Developing resources to help members of the public understand what good advocacy looks like
• Establishing competences to outline standard of advocacy expected from solicitors.