Issue 290  22nd April 2023

Barrister and legal aid advocate Alex Chalk KC has been appointed lord chancellor following the resignation of Dominic Raab. Raab left the post this morning following the report from Adam Tolley KC on allegations of bullying from civil servants. Within hours, Downing Street had announced Chalk, MP for Cheltenham, as his replacement. He is the eighth lord chancellor in the past seven years (Raab had the job twice).

Chalk’s appointment will give heart to those campaigning for improvements to the justice system as he comes with a track record of legal aid work and being relatively outspoken on access to justice issues. Chalk practised as a barrister for 14 years before his election to parliament in 2015 and is a regular speaker on legal aid at practitioner events and at the annual Conservative Party conference. In 2018, he wrote on the ConservativeHome website that the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act, which reduced the eligibility of legal aid, had gone further than originally intended. Calling for legal aid to be restored for early advice, the MP said that ‘relatively simple problems’ were left to escalate which cost more money to fix...

Dominic Raab’s personal ‘abrasive’ style was unintentionally intimidating or insulting to individuals working at the Ministry of Justice, the report from Adam Tolley KC found. The MoJ complaints concerned the period from September 2021 to September 2022, during Raab’s first spell as lord chancellor. A group complaint was communicated within the department in March 2022, drafted by a ‘committee’ of civil servants with multiple contributors. Once treated as a formal complaint, it led directly to the making of additional complaints from other departments where he had worked...

Tolley found that on a number of occasions in meetings with policy officials, Raab ‘acted in a manner that was intimidating’, going further than necessary or appropriate to deliver feedback, and ‘insulting’ through unconstructive critical comments about the quality of work. Raab would complain in meetings about the absence of ‘basic information’ and believed he met ‘cultural resistance’ within the MoJ. Tolley found – although this was disputed by Raab – that it was likely he described one piece of work as ‘utterly useless’ and ‘woeful’...

The Bar Council has welcomed confirmation from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that the fee increases for prosecution work will take apply to hearings in existing and new cases from 2 May 2023. In a letter to Bar leaders from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and the Interim Chief Executive of the CPS, the following changes were outlined:

• 15% increase for all CPS fee rates, including the Graduated Fee Scheme (GFS), the Very High Cost Case (VHCC) fee scheme, and magistrates’ court and Youth court fee arrangements
• Introduction of a 10% case uplift for sentence hearings where multiple cases are sentenced on the same day
• Introduction of a new fixed fee of £670 ex. VAT for section 28 cases – equivalent to that now paid under the Advocate Graduated Fee Scheme (SI 2023 No. 97)
• Increase to VHCC Led Junior rates to pay the equivalent of the revised VHCC Junior Alone rates
• Streamlined Forensic Reports included within the GFS page count

Encrypted messaging services have jointly called for changes to parts of the UK Online Safety Bill (OSB). WhatsApp, Session, Signal, Element, Threema, Viber and Wire have all signed a letter asking the government to "urgently rethink" the proposed law. Critics say the bill could undermine end-to-end encryption - the privacy technology these companies provide. Ministers wants the regulator to be able to ask the platforms to monitor users, to root out child abuse images. But the government says it is possible to have both privacy and child safety...

The bill would enable Ofcom to make companies scan messages - text, images, videos and files - with "approved technology" in order to identify child sexual abuse material. However, the communications regulator told Politico it would do so only if there was an "urgent need" and "would need a high bar of evidence in order to be able to require that a technology went into an encrypted environment". It is widely assumed this will mean messages are scanned by software on a phone or other device before they are encrypted - a technique called client-side scanning. But many services say this would mean re-engineering their products just for the UK...