UK Law Articles
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The Times
April 3 2000
£30m saving as CPS breaches Bar monopoly BY FRANCES GIBB
MORE than £30 million a year in public funds will be saved under reforms, taking effect from today, that allow the Crown Prosecution Sevice to put its own barristers into court.
The reform, the climax of more than ten years spent in battling over advocacy rights in the Crown Court and above, is the final nail in the coffin of what was once the Bar's monopoly of advocacy rights in the higher courts.
Instead of briefing barristers at the Bar, which costs the Crown Prosecution Service more than £95 million a year, it will now be able to train its own employed barristers and put them into trials.
The Director of Public Prosecutions, David Calvert-Smith, QC, is expected to be one of the first of the Crown Prosecution Service barristers to go into the Crown Court and reclaim the advocacy rights he lost when he was appointed to the post as head of the service.
Edward Bowles, senior Crown prosecutor at Camberwell, said that more than 500 barristers in the service would now be able to take cases in the higher courts, alongside the 1,400 CPS solicitors.
"It has been a long-drawn- out struggle. But now barristers who prepare a case, the person who knows most about it, will be able to see it right through - for instance, in an appeal against a sentence."
The Bar opposed the reforms on the ground that the Crown Prosecution Service's lawyers could not be impartial and would be swayed by a need for high conviction rates.
But Mr Bowles said that there was no individual performance monitoring of the CPS lawyers' caseloads or conviction rates. "There was some justifiable concern that the CPS would be over-stretched if it took on the higher courts. But that was when the CPS was not up to strength." A training programme was under way for the first tranche of 75 barristers, he said.
The reforms take effect under the Access to Justice Act 1999, which opens up the higher courts to all advocates who are trained, whether employed (that is, working for the Government, commerce, industry or the Crown Prosecution Service) or not. Solicitors have already won the right to appear in the higher courts, although only a few hundred have made use of the rights.
