CPS to go paperless by April, says Starmer

The Director of Public Prosecutions has committed to making the Crown Prosecution Service entirely digital by April 2012.

Keir Starmer QC told a Law Society seminar that the criminal justice system needs to move away from a paper-based system and transform the way criminal cases are handled. By April 2012 digital files will be the ‘currency’ of the CPS, with information passed digitally from the police to the CPS and sent over secure email to the defence.

Internally, he said the CPS would work digitally and put files in a ‘depository’ that could be accessed securely by the defence, the court and the probation service.

Starmer said the move ‘will be the biggest transformational change in a generation’ and bring the criminal justice system up to date with other professions that have already moved away from paper-based systems.

The DPP said the timetable would be ‘challenging’ but the CPS is determined to achieve it by the April deadline. He said: ‘We need to be radical. The challenges facing the criminal justice system provide an opportunity to radically reform the way we deliver criminal justice. We should seize that opportunity.’

Starmer said the CPS is already ‘making great strides’ in its ability to prosecute using technology. He gave examples of the early guilty plea pilot in Liverpool, in which files are made digitally; Winchester Crown court, where evidence is presented on laptops in court; and Dyfed Powys, where advanced information is served electronically.

The former chairman of the Law Society’s criminal law committee, Ian Kelcey, said he accepted the need for increased use of IT, but said: ‘any technology has to work for the defence as well as for the prosecution’.

He raised concerns over the cost of acquiring the necessary equipment; of printing costs being passed on to the defence is prosecution material is served electronically, as well as the difficulties of taking laptops in to prisons and problems with secure email.

Starmer said the CPS is working with the prison service to tackle the issue of taking laptops into prisons and said the CPS had no problem with defence solicitors passing on information to clients via insecure email, with the client’s permission. ‘If we work together it is possible to get through the problems. But we can’t contemplate a system in which we are still a paper-based system in 10, 20 or 30 years time.’

Starmer also said the criminal justice system needs to improve its control of cases that go to court. He said 67-69% of cases in magistrates’ courts and 72-74% of Crown court cases end up with guilty pleas, with 38% of cases listed for trial in the magistrates’ court and 42.5% of cases listed for trial in the Crown court resulting in guilty pleas on the day of trial or shortly before it.

‘That means nearly every other case that had been prepared for trial was prepared unnecessarily because there was no trial. And that has huge ramifications for the police, the CPS and for victims, and is a huge waste,’ he said.

Starmer said: ‘We have set up our courts as trial courts when they are in fact sentencing courts. We need to divide cases into two broad categories - those that are genuinely going to trial, and the vast majority of cases that will not [go to trial].'

Speaking at the same event, the senior presiding judge Lord Justice Goldring said the early guilty plea pilot was going well, with the average time between first appearance and final hearing on average three weeks.

He said the pilot would be reviewed and if it was found to be efficient, he had ‘no doubt that it will be rolled out’.