Crown Prosecution Service

Debate between Valerie Vaz and Keir Starmer

Tuesday 23rd June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) on securing this important debate. I immediately declare an interest, as I was the Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 to 2013. The current DPP was head of CPS London as a member of my staff and is known to me.

The CPS is a demand-led organisation that has taken significant cuts in recent years. As a result, it has significantly fewer staff and less resilience, and faces probably a greater challenge now than it has for many years. I pay tribute to the staff who work in that environment and deliver the best they can in the circumstances.

One of the unknowns for a demand-led organisation such as the CPS is the caseload. In the years that I was DPP, the number of cases coming into the service from the police undoubtedly reduced, which significantly softened the impact of some of the cuts. The difficulty as I see it, and the risk that the CPS was running when I was DPP, is that the reason for the reduction was never properly understood—no one could explain why the numbers were going down and, equally, no one could properly predict when they would twist and go up. I note the recent reports of increased numbers of sexual abuse cases coming into the CPS; those cases are highly resource intensive.

The cuts to the CPS are not dissimilar to the cuts to other parts of the criminal and civil justice systems. As the Solicitor General will know, a series of very critical reports on the cuts to the civil side, from this House and elsewhere, have indicated that the strategy for the past five years has been to cut first and look at the evidence and the impact later, rather than the other way round. That is a very serious criticism of any strategy. One of my concerns has been whether over the past five years there has truly been a criminal justice strategy that goes beyond simply taking the money out and focuses on the services to be delivered.

Against that background, and recognising what Sir Brian Leveson said in his recent report on the efficiency of the courts, namely, that there is an irreducible core minimum of funding below which we cannot deliver services, will the Solicitor General tell us what arrangements are currently in place to ensure that the Government have a line of sight on the risks being run by reducing resources for the CPS? Have there been evidence-based assessments of the impact of the reduced resources? If so, will some or all of those impact assessments be published? If, as the Lord Chancellor indicated this morning, the rights of victims will be taken more seriously in future, are there currently plans to increase resources for the CPS so that it can deal more effectively with victims?

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

I welcome my hon. and learned Friend to the House—his expertise is widely welcomed here—and thank my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) for securing this debate. My hon. and learned Friend mentioned the CPS staff; does he agree that it is totally unacceptable that they have to work weekends, unpaid, with an increasing workload?

[Keir Starmer]

There is of course concern about the workload of CPS staff. One effect of the reduction in resources is that staff have to work much harder in different circumstances and at different times. That is part of the risk when the resource of any organisation is reduced. It does not mean that one must always return to the status quo and that there cannot be change. However, it does highlight my point that there needs to be a constant risk assessment when resources are reduced in the way they have been.