Baron Grey Limited

Since 2011, the Ministry of Justice has closed 200 courts and tribunals across England and Wales. The Ministry is currently consulting on whether to close a further eight across five regions in the coming months.

Save within the Treasury, there is little appetite for this latest round of culls, with MPs from all sides and a legal profession united for once standing opposed to this further erosion of the principle that justice should be dispensed locally.

There are now vast swathes of the country where people have to travel long distances in order to get to court, and what if you don’t have a car and have to rely on public transport? It will be the rural communities that will be hardest hit. As an MP in Derbyshire has observed, since the closure of Buxton Magistrates Court, people now have to travel 40 miles in order to get to Chesterfield Magistrates’ Court on the other side of the Pennines, a journey that can take 90 minutes on a good day.

How can this be right? Just think about this common scenario. A person arrested and charged with an offence is remanded into custody overnight to go to their nearest court the next day. They have to be taken there. Since the transportation of prisoners has been outsourced, the transport van used to pick the prisoner up has to travel from its home base, usually some distance away, to several police stations in the locality in order to pick up prisoners to transport them to several different courts. Our unfortunate chap will be lucky to arrive at court in the morning.

In the meantime, the victim may want to attend the hearing, as might the families of the defendant. They might be youths, elderly or disabled. They might not drive. They might have valuable information that they wish to pass on to the advocates at court in order to assist with the court proceedings. How will they get to a court which could be in an area they don’t know and have no idea how to get to at short notice? What about the magistrates (who are volunteers and are the clearest example of local justice being meted out by local people) who will now be expected to travel to areas that they have no inherent knowledge of in order to dispense justice?

The government justifies its position on the basis of statistics – that courts are working well under capacity, so therefore close courts and make the remaining ones work harder. This logic is deeply flawed as there are complex reasons as to why a court room may not necessarily be sitting for its full allocation of hours in a day (one of them being that everyone is waiting for the prison vans to arrive!).

When I started out on my legal career in South West London in the early 2000s, we had magistrates’ courts in Kingston, Richmond, Wimbledon, Acton, Ealing and Hammersmith. Of these six, Kingston, Richmond and Acton have closed, and Ealing and Hammersmith are earmarked for closure. Only Wimbledon remains.

Above everything else, court closures deny the one thing that the system should be based on above everything else – justice for the people who use it.

35 people have been fatally stabbed in London since the beginning of the year, with more than 50 fatalities in the UK as a whole in the same period. According to recent figures released by the Office of National Statistics, stabbings in London are at their highest level for 6 years, with a staggering 23% rise from the previous year. It has been widely commented that there have been more murders in London in the past 4 months than in New York, something that would have been considered inconceivable only a short time ago.

The government and the courts have been concerned about the rising use of knives in the commission of criminal offences for some time. Increased sentences for knife offences have been around since 2008 and a there is now a minimum 6 month prison sentence for those who are convicted of a knife offence for a second time.

Why then, are these deterrents not making a difference? One factor may be the reduction in the use of stop and search powers by the police. For many years the police were heavily criticised for what was perceived to be an indiscriminate use of these powers by disproportionately targeting ethnic minority groups without reasonable grounds for doing so. For instance, black people were 6 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people.

When Theresa May was Home Secretary, she openly criticised the police for their stop and search powers, so much so that the numbers of stop and search began to fall dramatically. Since her election to the role of Prime Minister, the numbers have kept on falling. For instance, people from a white background saw a 38% decrease in stop and search between 2016 and 2017.

So what powers do the police have to detain a person for purposes of a search? Generally speaking, the police are entitled to stop and search an individual if they have reasonable grounds for suspecting that a person is carrying illegal drugs, weapons, stolen property or an object used for the commission of a crime. The police officer must give you their name, the police station they are from and the reason they want to search you. They must tell you what they expect to find.

Will increasing the use of stop and search, and perhaps controversially, targeting certain groups within society (as advocated by Trevor Phillips), lead to a decrease in the shocking statistics we have seen recently? Certainly, something needs to be done. People need to feel safe where they live. The decrease in police numbers and lack of “bobbies on the beat” contribute to the feeling that the police have abandoned the streets to the criminals. When was the last time you saw an officer patrolling your local neighbourhood? Perhaps we should look at the modelled approach in tackling violent crime that has proved so successful in both New York, closer to home, Glasgow? This may work in the short-term, but a long-term sustainable solution is needed, for which there is no simple answer.

The causes run deep. Policing, and with it stop and search, is only one part of the solution. Money must be found to tackle poverty and increase educational awareness of those who are the most impressionable, such as the young. Only when the root causes are tackled will knife crime diminish on a long-term basis.

Written By : Ben Hall & Simran Chawla

Drink driving once again hit the headlines this month when Ant McPartlin, part of the famous and long-standing duo “Ant and Dec”, was arrested and subsequently charged with driving with excess alcohol.

Drink driving is one of those unusual offences in so much as it is prevalent across the whole spectrum of society. Most offending can broadly be associated with a root cause such as poverty or drug addiction. It is no shock that that a higher percentage of offenders have mental health problems than exist in the population at large. Drink driving on the other hand has no underlying factors other than the perception of risk – taking a chance that you feel fine, or you won’t get caught, or it’s not really that bad. Young or old, rich or poor, male or female, it doesn’t matter.

I’m not pre-judging Ant McPartlin, and none of us should either. He hasn’t been convicted of any offence. He may plead not guilty. We shouldn’t trust all we read in the papers, particularly when the family in the other vehicle splash their story all across the pages of a tabloid newspaper before the matter has even gone to court.

What I can say is that drink driving and other alcohol-related driving offences such as being drunk in charge of a vehicle can be a complex area of law to deal with. It may not be as simple as drinking alcohol, getting in a car and then driving. What if you drank the night before, feel fine, and then make the decision to drive to work? Do you know if you are over the alcohol limit?

What about the scenario where you’ve had a few drinks, you’ve locked yourself out of your home, and you make the decision to get in your car, turn on the engine in order to get the fans blowing hot air to warm you up, and then you fall asleep? You may not think so, but you are putting yourself at risk of being charged with a criminal offence.

The consequences of a conviction can be devastating. Not only will you lose your licence, but it may also mean losing your job. What do you do if you need your car in order to earn a living? What if your wife and your children rely on you financially? Even if this isn’t the case, your conviction may mean that the holiday to the United States is now off, as they won’t let you into the country with a criminal conviction.

Here at Baron Grey Solicitors we won’t judge you. Good people sometimes make bad decisions.  It’s our job to convince the court that you deserve a second chance.

Should the offence be denied, then we have access to the best experts and counsel in the country to assist you in winning your case. You will find our tailored approach to your case second-to-none. You will always receive good, honest, straightforward advice. You expect high standards. We deliver them.