Issue 218  6th November 2021

Controversial plans to shut down more than 70 courthouses in the next four years have been quietly shelved by the Ministry of Justice. About 300 courts have been closed and sold-off since 2010, in a bid to dispose of under-used buildings and bankroll a £1 billion reform programme.

In September 2019, HM Courts and Tribunals Service was still harbouring ambitions to shut down a further 77 courthouses around England and Wales by 2025, but Covid prompted a rethink. “HM Courts has confirmed it does not plan to dispose of any more court buildings as it needs to maximise courtroom capacity to support recovery,” the National Audit Office revealed in a report on the state of the justice system. The MoJ said its estate of courthouses and tribunal centres remains under “continual review” but confirmed to the Standard: “There are no plans to consult on further closures.”

A specialist law firm and animal rights charity may have been engaged in 'systemic fraud' and 'perverting the course of justice', by bringing abusive and unfounded private prosecutions, a judge has said.

The honorary recorder of Manchester, Judge Nicholas Dean QC, this week stayed proceedings against Alex-Kaye Carrigan and Elisha Brown, who were separately charged with unlawfully selling pets, stating that the prosecutions were an abuse of the court’s process.

In a damning ruling, the judge said the prosecutions brought by the charity Animal Protection Services (APS) and Liverpool law firm Parry & Welch, had been brought and pursued 'with no evidential basis' and 'for wholly improper reasons and purposes'. The charity and law firm had used a 'perverse interpretation' of the law to bring charges in cases where 'no one could properly conclude that there were realistic prospects for conviction'. The decisions to charge Carrigan and Brown, said the judge, 'were profoundly flawed, so flawed that it requires me to consider why the decisions were taken'.

Defence lawyers have warned the court system in England and Wales is at breaking point as figures reveal a rising number of cases collapsing because of police and prosecution failures to disclose key evidence.

In the year to 30 June 2021, 1,648 cases collapsed over disclosure failures – more than double the number in 2015/16, according to Crown Prosecution Service figures. Experts say the official figure may be the tip of the iceberg because of concerns that disclosure failures are not always properly recorded. A CPS spokesperson said: “We reject any suggestion that the published figures vastly underestimate the scale of the issue. Our method of recording incidents has improved and we are confident that it is reliable. We work with investigators, defence teams and courts across England and Wales to ensure we get disclosure right.”

Barristers from ethnic minority backgrounds, especially black and Asian women, ‘face systemic obstacles to building and progressing a sustainable and rewarding career at the bar’, according to a report by the representative body. Candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds are less likely to obtain pupillage, underrepresented in becoming QCs and less successful than white candidates in achieving judicial appointments, the report by the Bar Council’s Race Working Group found. It recommends that chambers set targets for the recruitment and retention of barristers from different ethnic minority backgrounds, monitor barristers’ income by ethnicity and improve diversity among clerks as ‘a priority’. It also suggests that the bar should campaign for targets to be considered for the appointment of QCs and judges, as well as calling for the profession to adopt a ‘zero tolerance approach to bullying, harassment or discrimination with effective sanctions’.