A former Conservative solicitor general called upon ministers to address the ‘complete collapse’ of the miscarriage of justice watchdog in a debate on the House of Lords yesterday in which a retired appeal judge appeared to push for the entire set of commissioners to be replaced.
Lord Edward Garnier KC asked the government what its plans were to reform the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) prompting concerns from all sides of the house for urgent action including Baroness Butler Sloss, the first female Lord Justice of Appeal, who revealed that someone who worked for her ‘may have been unjustly sent to prison well over 10 years ago’. ‘Is it not time that the entire commission is set aside and new people appointed, with everything done as a matter of some urgency?’ she asked.
The debate followed last week’s bruising encounter between the CCRC’s leadership team, chief exec Karen Kneller and head of casework Amanda Pearce, with the House of Commons justice committee – as reported here. The chair of the committee Andy Slaughter called the pair’s performance ‘pretty half-hearted’ and queried whether they were the right people to lead the organisation.
The former New Labour Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer said that it has been ‘widely agreed that the CCRC has been failing, not just for a year but for decades’. He said there were ‘urgent cases’ adding ‘for example, the Lucy Letby case’. ‘What steps are the Government going to take to ensure that, while the review is going on, the public can have confidence in their dealing with those sorts of cases?’ he asked.
Edward Garnier, who was co-author of an influential 2021 report into the CCRC commissioned by the All-Party parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice, asked the minister for justice whether he shared the Kneller’s view that it was appropriate to come into the office ‘only one or two days every couple of months’. ‘Does he agree that the CCRC needs real leadership? It needs an executive chairman with legal standing, full-time salaried commissioners, and higher quality and better paid caseworkers, and it needs to get rid of the predictive test for referring cases to the Court of Appeal. The CCRC is vital to the justice system of this country. It is in a state of complete collapse and it needs gripping by this Government.’
The Lib Dem peer Lord Marks of Henley said Kneller ‘demonstrated a complete lack of the required diligence’ over the botched handling of the Malkinson case. ‘Is it not now time for her to go and to be replaced… by a full-time, executive, highly qualified chair?’
The justice minister Lord Ponsonby said he listened to last week’s justice committee. ‘Clearly, how it chooses to conduct its affairs is a matter for the CCRC itself,’ he said. The government appears to have accepted the case for urgent reform. Ponsonby said concerns were recognised by the Lord Chancellor who had ‘put in place the framework’ to consider change ‘which may be radical change—we wait to see.’
The minister said a new interim chair is to be appointed ‘probably for a period of about 18 months’ and that, together with the Law Commission review, ‘may result in changes at the CCRC’. ‘The Ministry of Justice has increased the CCRC’s budget year on year since 2020-21. The budget for 2025-26 has been set at £10.1 million, which is an increase of 38% since 2021-22. We recognise the need for increased resource, a recommendation made by the report to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, put his name.’
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