Oral Answers to Questions

Chris Evans Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Attorney-General]

It is worth bearing in mind that, so far as international corruption is concerned, the benchmark legislation is the legislation passed in 2011. As the hon. Lady will appreciate, for reasons that are obvious, that legislation is not retrospective. Therefore, although investigations are now under way into offences that have taken place from that time on, not many cases—or no cases—will have come to court. It is therefore a bit difficult at the moment to make an assessment of how successful this work will be. What I can tell the hon. Lady, however, is that between 40% and 50% of the Serious Fraud Office’s investigatory case load relates to bribery and corruption.

[Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)]

2. What assessment the Crown Prosecution Service has made of the effect of its Transforming through Technology programme on small firms of solicitors.

[The Solicitor-General (Mr Edward Garnier)]

The impact on defence firms of working digitally is discussed every fortnight when the chief executive of the Crown Prosecution Service, Mr Peter Lewis, meets the Law Society and other defence representatives to discuss progress on the programme.

[Chris Evans]

The criminal justice system goes digital next week. However, with less than half of publicly funded criminal defence firms able to receive CPS e-mails, with defence firms having no money to print evidence, and with the Government not even knowing how many sockets there are in courts to plug in the computers, is the Minister fearful that some problems may develop in the system?

[The Solicitor-General]

The hon. Gentleman paints a pretty gloomy picture—but then, he is in opposition, so I can fully understand it. The short point is that this is a rolling programme: it will be introduced incrementally. I can assure him that defence firms in his constituency and mine will come to terms with it and meet the challenges that they need to face.