Issue 220  20th November 2021

The lord chief justice has told advocates that they should not expect preliminary hearings in the criminal courts to be remote as a default measure. Lord Burnett of Maldon even implied some lawyers are not acting ‘in the interests of justice’ by wanting all remote hearings so they can squeeze more into their day.

Speaking to the House of Commons justice committee on Tuesday, Lord Burnett responded to chair Sir Bob Neill’s suggestion that listing decisions in different courts were ‘idiosyncratic’. Burnett accepted there were some areas of the country where preliminary hearings are more likely to be listed in person but said there are good reasons in those cases for such a decision. He added: ‘Sometimes the advocates are very keen to attend remotely even if the interests of justice, frankly, should have them present, because you can do a 10 o’clock hearing in Sheffield, an 11 o’clock hearing in Liverpool and a two o’clock hearing in Exeter and so on. The law on this is quite clear. The legislation put in place immediately following the Covid lockdown is that in the criminal courts judges are obliged to allow remote attendance unless it is in the interests of justice to so. That is a test I believe they are consciously applying.’

The inability to find barristers to represent criminal defendants is an example of ‘chickens coming home to roost’, the lord chief justice has said. Speaking at the Bar Council’s annual conference on Wednesday, Lord Burnett said the pandemic revealed that there is ‘no fat in the system’. He said that he had been concerned about 'legal aid solicitors being unable to absorb the sudden increase in work, but I did not foresee that in some parts of the country the Bar would be unable to absorb that sudden increase in work'.

In an apparent reference to the revelation this month that a legal advice clinic had to contact 15 law firms before it found a legal aid provider who could represent a client, Burnett said: ‘There are parts of the country where, at 4 o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, there is a brief in the Crown court the following morning and 15 telephone calls might be made around all the local chambers and nobody can be found to do it and this is chickens coming home to roost. 'The criminal legal profession, the Bar for sure but also criminal legal aid solicitors, [have] been subject to attrition as a result of, in part, very substantially as a result of the reduction in the real rates of remuneration available and so there was no fat there,’ he added. ‘The first priority of 2022 is to strain every sinew to reduce the outstanding case load in every jurisdiction’, he also said. The criminal courts need to run 'at least 25% higher capacity than we were doing two years ago’.

A new criminal offence to crack down on dog theft and put people who steal these much loved pets behind bars for up to five years has been set out in the Government’s Kept Animals Bill today. The dog abduction offence, announced in September by Defra, will be added by the Government to the Kept Animals Bill, bolstering the raft of measures it already includes to further protect pets, livestock and kept wild animals.

Prior to this new offence, pet theft was treated as a loss of property to the owner. This new offence will take into account the emotional distress caused to both the owner and the dog and will help judges’ ability to hand down more targeted penalties and sentences for pet thieves. A provision will also be made in the Bill to extend the offence to other pets in the future, should evidence support this.

Offenders released from prison face being banned from drinking from today (17 November 2021) under world-first plans to curb alcohol-fuelled crime.

For the first time, serious and prolific offenders will be tagged with devices which monitor alcohol levels in sweat if their probation officer thinks they will be more likely to reoffend when drinking. The tag will help probation officers keep a closer eye on offenders’ behaviour and support them to turn their backs on crime. It will also provide offenders with the incentive to break bad habits as breaching the ban could see them back in prison. Alcohol plays a part in 39 per cent of all violent crime in the UK and roughly 20 per cent of offenders supervised by the Probation Service are classed as having an alcohol problem. Around 12,000 offenders will wear such a tag over the next 3 years. Offenders with an alcohol ban on community sentences have stayed sober on 97 percent of the days they were tagged and it is expected to have a significant impact on prison leavers’ drinking habits.

New innovative technology to help stop the spread of child sexual abuse material on end-to-end encrypted social media and online messaging platforms will be developed thanks to UK government funding...

The winners will each receive an initial £85,000 from the Fund, which is administered by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Home Office, to help them bring their technical proposals for new digital tools and applications to combat online child abuse to the market. Projects include new AI plug-ins that can be run in the background of existing encrypted messaging services to identify images of child abuse and flag them to moderators. Others will use age estimation and facial recognition technology to scan for and detect child abuse images before they are uploaded. Another project will look specifically at how to prevent livestreaming of violence and child sexual abuse material.