My Lords, the points to be made against these regulations are so obvious and so strong that really they do not need to be made yet again in tonight’s debate. The problems—the total lack of judicial discretion, the obvious impossibility of recovery in so many cases and the risk of excessive pressure on defendants to plead guilty to avoid the charge escalating from £150 to £520, or, in an each-way case, from £180 to £1,000—were all foreseen by the noble Lords, Lord Beecham and Lord Marks, in Committee in July of last year. They have all since been the subject of widespread
criticism by a series of distinguished legal commentators in a succession of legal periodicals such as the Criminal Law Review, Criminal Law and Justice Weekly and so forth. Professor Nicola Padfield, a most distinguished legal academic and criminologist and now master of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, described them as “astonishing” and quoted another commentator as saying that they were the most unworthy provisions on the statute book. The president of the Law Society called them “outrageous”.
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What perhaps were not foreseen in Committee were the consequences that have recently been highlighted in the press, notably in the Times on Monday of this week and in the Independent today: first, the reductions in the awards both of compensation for victims and of prosecution costs in order to be able to accommodate these mandatory costs, both of those being, unlike court charges, within the court’s discretion; secondly, the reduction of fines or other penalties, again as compensation for these charges; and, thirdly, the very powerful objections of the magistracy to the point where already, as we have heard, more than 50 magistrates have resigned in protest. These regulations, the very last of the previous Lord Chancellor’s series of cost- saving or money-making regulations, are the most objectionable of all and must be not merely regretted but withdrawn.
I will add a point on which I touched in earlier debates that concerned the cutting of legal aid or increases in court fees. If the Lord Chancellor truly needs to achieve significant savings, he should revisit the whole question of jury trials. In particular, does a need remain for juries in all cases where presently there is a right to them—even, for example, in serious and complex fraud cases, and even in comparatively trivial cases where the jurors themselves feel that their time is wasted? In January of this year, Sir Brian Leveson—he of the inquiry into the press, now President of the Queen’s Bench Division—produced a comprehensive review of efficiency in criminal proceedings. I commend it to the Lord Chancellor. Pages 87 to 92 discuss these questions. That of course is for the future. For the present, these regulations must indeed be regretted.