RSPCA (Prosecutions)

Lord Garnier Excerpts

Tuesday 29th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) on securing this debate. He has done the House a service in doing so. Of course there are different views about all sorts of underlying issues; the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) demonstrated that from the outset. He was outed by my hon. Friend as a member of the League Against Cruel Sports. I had not the slightest idea who he was or what his membership consisted of, but I am delighted that he called in to see how we get on. That said, we would be naive if we did not think that the underlying current of debate about hunting infects some of the views expressed in this debate, although it is specifically about the RSPCA’s role as a prosecutor, which is what I will do my best to concentrate on.

My hon. Friend also told us that the RSPCA is a prolific private prosecutor, and the statistics tend to support that allegation; more than 2,000 private prosecutions were brought in 2012. However, the problem that the RSPCA faces is the public perception, whether true or false, that it has become a political prosecutor.

[Paul Flynn]

Only amid Daily Telegraph readers.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

I suspect that the hon. Gentleman reads The Daily Telegraph more often than I do, but there we are; I am sure he enjoys doing so.

I want to make it clear that as a Member of Parliament, a private citizen and a former Law Officer, I have no objection in principle to private prosecutions. Equally, however, Parliament has controlled in one way or another private citizens’ ability to take private prosecutions. I think the most recent example—my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General will correct me—was the alteration in how prosecutions may be brought for the international reach of war crimes. I do not have the detail in my head right now, but I think that the situation has been altered to require that the Director of Public Prosecutions take over that sort of prosecution. We should not shy away from alterations to the rules relating to private prosecutions.

[Simon Danczuk]

The hon. and learned Gentleman will accept that the Law Commission considered the issue of private prosecutors in 1998 and found that adequate safeguards were in place. That was relatively recent. Does it not explain the situation? Everything is okay and should continue as it is.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

That is rather complacent. The whole point of being a Member of Parliament is to express one’s view on the basis of indirect or direct knowledge. Yes, the Law Commission considered the principle of private prosecutions not very long ago, but that does not prevent me from having a different view about particular types of private prosecution, and I am about to express it.

We must be watchful of the ability of the citizen—by “citizen” I mean either a corporate organisation, such as a charity, or an individual—to convert a legitimate public interest activity, namely the bringing of a prosecution in an appropriate case, into an arm of a political campaign. We all have different views about particular public issues—that is why we are elected for our separate parties—but we must be careful that the prosecuting system does not allow itself to become an arm of any one political campaign or a number of campaigns. That is the whole point of having a Crown Prosecution Service.

Certainly during my time in government, the Crown Prosecution Service subsumed the prosecuting wing of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Within DEFRA, there is a group of prosecutors who take on animal welfare cases, among other things, that were previously dealt with by Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food prosecutors. That subsection of DEFRA has now moved into the Crown Prosecution Service, which seems a sensible place for those people to carry out their work.

We must be careful. Although we do not wish all private prosecutions to be brought to an end, we are entitled to issue a warning to the RSPCA that if that sort of conduct—that is, the prosecutions referred to by the hon. Member for Derby North and others, in which the costs of £300,000-plus incurred were described by the judge as quite staggering—

[Chris Williamson]

I refer the hon. and learned Gentleman to a letter from the Charity Commission dated yesterday and stating that

“the Commission does not consider that the trustees have breached their duty of prudence in the case of this prosecution”—

that is, the Heythrop hunt. Does he not therefore agree that the RSPCA was perfectly within its rights to prosecute the Heythrop hunt, and is doing a sterling job ensuring that animal abusers are brought to justice?

[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.

[Mr Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)]

My hon. and learned Friend makes a good point. I am a member of the RSCPA and support its prosecutions, but this was a summary case before the magistrates court, so why did it not, in the first instance, use its own in-house team of lawyers—which I as a member have to pay for—and go to expensive Queen’s counsels only when the case goes to the higher court? Surely, it was an error of judgment on the part of the RSCPA to use up such huge amounts of its members’ money.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

I am very fond of expensive QCs, but it is a matter of judgment. The RSCPA, in that case, made a misjudgment. I am not criticising, for one moment, the quality of the representation that it had, but any private organisation, whether a charity or an individual, spending such an amount of money on that sort of prosecution is open to criticism. If I were a member of the RSCPA, I would want to know that my money was going to the purpose that I thought it was intended to go towards, that is to say, protecting animal welfare, rather than—as it appears, from comments made by many—the pursuit of some political agenda.

Last October, I asked the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright), an oral question in Justice questions about why the courts rarely seem to make costs orders against the RSCPA when it brings prosecutions that fail, either because it got the law or the facts wrong, and cases collapse. Although the Minister promised to write to me, he did not, but the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), kindly replied with a somewhat opaque letter, which did not contain any information of interest or value relating to the discussion that I intended to have.

Undoubtedly, the RPSCA is fortunate because it is not subjected, as the CPS is, to orders for costs when it makes a mess or fails to bring home a prosecution. The CPS set aside £154,000 in the financial year 2005-06, and more than £1.5 million in 2010-11, in relation to costs awarded against it by the courts. Whether those costs fell under section 19 or section 19A of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 does not much matter: these are big numbers. The CPS has a turnover of some £600 million and I understand that the RPSCA has a turnover of about £120 million. One would think that there ought to be some read-across for the sums paid in response to costs orders, but we do not see that.

Finally, I think it was my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire who suggested that Her Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Service inspectorate should, either of its own volition or with the encouragement of the Attorney-General, consider the way the RPSCA conducts its prosecutions, whether thematically or by looking at particular cases. I agree with my hon. Friend, and I encourage my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General to do that. When he and I worked together—it was a joy—we encouraged the Serious Fraud Office to invite the inspectorate to look at its prosecuting activities. That was a beneficial and useful inspection. I encourage my right hon. and learned Friend, in the little spare time that he has, to encourage Mike Fuller to look at how the RSPCA conducts its activities as a prosecutor.

Of course, I respect the right of the RSCPA to conduct itself as an animal welfare charity with all the vigour and all the money that it can lay its hands on, but it needs to be careful that it does not move away from being an animal welfare organisation and becomes a political campaigner, using the state prosecuting system as a weapon to promote its political campaigns.

[Chris Williamson]

Upholds the law.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

The hon. Gentleman, whose constituency I do not know, but who is a member of the league, mumbles that it should uphold the law. Of course, it should. Nobody doubts that we should uphold the law. My central point is that it must be done dispassionately, proportionately and without turning a charity into a weapon of political campaign.