A joyful nation will have awoken this morning to the glad realisation that prime minister’s questions is back. I am not sure if Jeremy Corbyn has been on email soliciting ideas, but here’s one for free.
Fresh from his excellent victory over Saudi jails, it is time for him to raise an injustice against core British values. This is a phrase often but mistakenly brandished aloft like a kind of verbal union flag. Mistakenly, for the fundamental British value is not to hold any value too dearly. Unkindly, the ultimate British value could be defined in a single word: meh.
And yet everyone hears something when they hear the phrase. It might be fairness or tolerance or the NHS or democracy. For many people, a lot of these qualities find their essence in the criminal law and the court system. Clear. Uniformly applied without fear or favour. Open to all, regardless of income and assets. Founded on the idea that a citizen’s good name is their most important possession. Dusty, perhaps, a bit run-down, and too often thronged with people struggling with problems that are nothing to do with criminal activity, they still represent an idea that is the very essence of a civilised society.
But that was before the last lord chancellor decided to turn criminal courts into an income generation scheme for the wretchedly cash-strapped Ministry of Justice, where spending has fallen from £9.9bn in 2010 to £6.4bn in 2015-16. That is more than a third of its budget over just five years.
It’s one thing to charge for access to civil courts. It seems very reasonable, say, for litigious oligarchs from Russia or China to stump up some of the costs of running the courts as well as the huge fees for their lawyers.
It is quite another to demand cash from people who are merely trying to uphold their innocence. But that was what Chris Grayling did in the absolute dog days of the last parliament. Two weeks before the dissolution on 30 March, a statutory instrument introducing the charges was laid before the House. There was no consultation and no debate. The new charges, to be applied in magistrates and crown courts, came into force on 15 April.
Leave aside, for a minute, the brutal arbitrariness of their impact and consider first what this does to our understanding of justice, a fair trial and that basic principle of criminal law, the presumption of innocence. For this new tax on justice falls hardest on those who have failed to persuade the court of their innocence.
If you plead guilty to a summary offence – one that is less serious and not eligible for jury trial, there is a flat charge of £150. But if you want to fight a more serious charge and you lose, then that will be £1,000. If the charge is sufficiently serious to be heard in a crown court, and you lose, it will cost you – along probably with your liberty, costs etc etc – £1,200.
It is hardly a surprise that lawyers (first the Law Society, now the Bar Council) protest that their clients are pleading guilty whether or not they actually are. In fact, that was one of the intentions of the fees, since for some time government has thought that trials were really an indulgence that the taxpayer didn’t want to pay for.
Meanwhile, scores of magistrates have resigned rather than impose a fee on defendants who almost certainly won’t be able to pay the fine for the offence of which they have been convicted. And at least the court has some power to vary fines depending on the defendant’s circumstances. Now there are reports of destitute people convicted of minor shoplifting offences being left in fear of prison by having to find £150 to pay for being convicted.
This is a charge that is strangling one of the most fundamental purposes of the state.
The new justice secretary, Michael Gove, is on a roll after he won his argument over the contract for the Saudi jails. These charges are even worse. Charging for justice is really, really, not British.
