PAROLE, LEGAL AID AND VICTIMS

The Guardian recently reported on the increasing costs of legal representation at parole hearings (Legal aid bill for parole board challenges tops £2m, 20/05/06), the legal aid costs apparently having risen tenfold in five years. Rather worryingly, the paper reported concerns from the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats that lawyers had found a new ‘gravy train’ and that public money should not be wasted on prisoners’ rights without seeking any balancing views. They even suggested that the Chief Inspector of Probation’s views, expressed in the report into the release of Damien Rice, is that representation for prisoners at these hearings has resulted in prisoners’ rights coming before public safety.

Coincidentally, responses to the LSC consultation on the funding of the general criminal contract and the use of preferred suppliers were due shortly after this report was published and the new Home Secretary has announced plans to allow victims’ groups representation on the Parole Board and at parole hearings. Whilst funding is always precarious, it is particularly worrying if the funding issue is going to be linked to a direct attack on the current structure of the oral hearings themselves.

The very obvious reason why the legal aid bill for parole is soaring is the government’s policy decision to lock up more people and to massively increase the number of prisoners serving life and indeterminate sentences. It is disingenuous in the extreme to blame prisoners, or their lawyers, for the additional costs that arise from these policies. As is well known, Britain imprisons more people and has more life sentenced prisoners than any other European state. If this is the political decision that has been taken, the consequential costs, from prison building to parole hearings cannot be blamed upon those who are imprisoned.

The suggestion that the current system is not sensitive to the needs of the victim may well signal the first attempts to change the structure and nature of oral hearings. The current system is actually very victim focussed, allowing the victims direct input to the conditions of release, albeit through the probation service. The suggestion that this needs to be replaced with victims groups having a say on decision making is very troubling and far from increasing the sensitivity of the system to the needs of the victim, it is more likely to result in unrepresentative groups exerting undue influence over the review process.

Whilst the current review system is far from perfect, it has evolved over time to take account of the requirements of the Convention and the practical input of those involved in the review process. The ripples of concern that are being expressed are perhaps more to do with recent high profile failures by the probation and prison service in terms of the quality of their reporting and supervision as opposed to the quality of decisions made by the Parole Board itself.

The system is already heavily weighted in favour of public safety, and as the Roberts case demonstrated, this can extend as far as not disclosing material to a prisoner which will be relied upon to imprison him. It is crucial that individual mistakes and failures should not be translated into systemic failures and result in a remodelling of the parole system based on prejudice and misunderstanding.

Simon Creighton, Bhatt Murphy solicitors