RSPCA (Prosecutions)
Debate between Lord Garnier and Angela Smith(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Sir Edward Garnier
Of course the RSPCA as presently constituted was within its rights to do whatever it thought appropriate in that particular case. Whether it was wise to do so is another matter. It seems to me that if it continues to prosecute at such huge expense in such a disproportionate way, it will be open to public criticism. It cannot do something of that nature in public—that is, prosecute suspected criminals—without expecting to be criticised either by the judge, as it was, or by Members of Parliament, or by contributors to The Daily Telegraph or even The Guardian, or by ordinary members of the public.
Angela Smith
Will the hon. and learned Gentleman not acknowledge, however, that the prosecution costs in the case that he referred to were so large mainly because those prosecuted resisted the charges for so long before deciding in the end to plead guilty? Could the costs not have been reduced significantly if those prosecuted had done the right thing?
Sir Edward Garnier
The hon. Lady was in court and clearly knows more about the detail of the case than I do, but it strikes me that anybody who manages to run up prosecution costs of more than £300,000 on a summary case in a magistrates court is rightly subject to criticism for being responsible for a disproportionate piece of activity.
My simple point is that if the RSPCA does so, it cannot expect to escape public criticism, either in this Chamber or elsewhere, and I am entitled to make that criticism. Were such a prosecution brought by the Crown Prosecution Service, whether on the evidence or the public interest test, as it could well have been, there would have been a far greater grip on the management of that case. I do not imagine that, when the cost of prosecutions in magistrates courts are in the low thousands of pounds, rather than the low hundreds of thousands, the CPS would have gone about it in quite that way.
We need dispassionate intervention from the CPS in such cases. This is not to say that the RSPCA should not or may not investigate but, like the police, it should hand the evidence to the CPS for it to make a dispassionate judgment.