England's first Community Court is now in its third year. Grania Langdon-Down reviews its impact


‘The judge spoke to you, not to the solicitors. He spoke to you to see how you felt. In the magistrates’ court, they don’t even look up off the desks, they keep their heads down.’



That personal view of a defendant appearing before Judge David Fletcher at the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre (NLCJC) sums up the ethos of England’s first community court – that everyone should be treated as an individual with the emphasis on tackling the underlying issues which drive their offending.



The first evaluation of the NLCJC, now just starting its third year in a multiply deprived area of Liverpool, has just been published. It found that the CJC’s ‘innovative community problem-solving approach’ has had some real successes, although its efforts to engage with the local community have not yet led to any increase in public confidence in the criminal justice system.



Local defence practitioners are enthusiastic about the CJC, although they question whether it would work as well in a city centre. Kieran Fielding, managing partner of Merseyside firm Pearson Fielding Polson, says: ‘I would encourage all my clients to get arrested in the CJC catchment area. If you have a classic feckless, drug-using, homeless client appearing before Judge Fletcher, you know that, within a day, he will be in touch with a drug counsellor and will be seeing a housing worker.



‘You may be sent off for a problem-solving meeting and be back before the judge within two hours. If he had committed the crime in a different part of the city, those services wouldn’t be there and his case would be adjourned for several weeks for assessments.’



However, the model works because it is properly funded and resourced, he says. ‘I don’t think the community courts they are rolling out around the country have the same level of support.’



The research, by Ecotec Research and Consulting for the Ministry of Justice, discloses that: 82% of cases resulted in a guilty plea compared with the national average of 68%; the time between first hearing and sentence was 26 days; multi-agency pre-court hearings to iron out problems mean there were 2.2 hearings per case compared with 2.8 regionally; and warrants for non-appearance or breach of orders were issued within 24 hours in 100% of cases, higher than the national target of 90%.



On the issue of public confidence, there was a slight decrease between 2005 and 2007. However, the researchers say that this reflects national and Merseyside trends.



The lessons learned from the NLCJC project and the subsequent Salford Community Justice Initiative are being fed into the 11 scaled-down versions of the CJC model, which are currently being set up within existing magistrates’ courts and will sit for one or two days a week.



The NLCJC is the ‘Rolls Royce’ version, inspired by the Red Hook Community Justice Centre in New York. Established at a cost of £5.4 million in a former primary school and presided over by a single judge, it costs £2 million a year to run, including the salaries of the many agencies – Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), probation, police, mentoring and advice – based there. It deals annually with about 2,300 non-trial summary and either-way offences committed by both adults and youths within its designated catchment area, and sits once a month as a Crown Court.



Local people can access the wide-ranging services on offer and report crime or other issues – though staff at the centre told researchers that the area’s strong ‘grassing’ culture means people may not be using the centre’s facilities for fear of reprisals.



For John Ballam, chairman of Liverpool Law Society’s criminal law committee and senior partner of Ballam Delaney Hunt in Birkenhead, the CJC is ‘ideal’ from a defence solicitor’s point of view. ‘The building has been refurbished and the facilities are much better than at other courts,’ he says. ‘Cases are dealt with speedily with good follow-up, so that if a defendant breaches a community order, the judge is quick to pick it up. Legal aid is readily available and there are all the agencies on site to refer problems.’



However, he describes it as an expensive experiment: ‘It is only one court serving a population of 80,000 dealing with low-level crime. It is an ideal world which makes its achievements a false picture. You couldn’t do it in the centre of Liverpool because you couldn’t get through the work. Personally, I think community courts should be rolled out everywhere but they would be far too expensive.’



Judge Fletcher spent 30 years as a defence solicitor, the last three as partner with Staffordshire criminal practice Stevens, before becoming a full-time judge in 2003. He gets ‘annoyed’ by suggestions that the CJC has been featherbedded. ‘We are in a nice building, but it was an eyesore before,’ he says. ‘There are always going to be capital costs in setting up a new court, but the running costs are the same as any other court.



‘What is missed is that because, for example, there are probation officers based here, I only ask for a tiny number of full pre-sentence reports. They take seven hours to do, whereas I can problem-solve a case in half an hour – that is a no-brainer as far as I am concerned.’



Certainly for Ursula Doyle, the assistant district Crown prosecutor who manages the CPS part of the NLCJC, having all the agencies under one roof is enormously beneficial. ‘I sit on a group of desks with two full-time CPS lawyers, two CPS case workers and two police inquiry officers who are the “file-builders”. We are also able to work really closely with probation staff and the youth-offending team, which is so much easier than by telephone and memo.’



Jim Murray, senior partner of James Murray Solicitors, one of the largest criminal practices in Merseyside, supports the multi-agency working, but reckons a large part of the court’s success is down to Judge Fletcher’s personality and enthusiasm. ‘It will not be easy to get his like again. He has a memory like a trap.’



While defendants are more likely to avoid prison and benefit from a community order, the judge is not a ‘soft touch’, he says. ‘He’ll give someone the benefit of the doubt on the first, and possibly second, occasion, but if they keep coming back he will be down on them hard.’



The ‘massive respect’ clients have for the judge has had an impact on reoffending, says Kieran Fielding. ‘They know that if they mess him about, he will send them down. But when they successfully complete an order, he will praise them and that is hugely important for someone who has, for the most part, been seen as a failure since they were 12.’



Rachel Oakdene, assistant solicitor with Merseyside litigation specialists Cobleys, says that having a single judge means there is a ‘level of consistency which you don’t get at other courts, and it means he can keep a very tight rein. Clients and their families all speak very highly of him because they consider him to be fair’.



The judge himself argues there are ‘plenty of people’ who could fulfil his role. ‘This is a very good system and you just need to embrace it. But I couldn’t do this job if I didn’t get support from defence solicitors and I can’t speak highly enough of their commitment.’



His use of community orders, direct reparation work and restorative justice – where limited resources allow – puts him at the heart of the current debate over sentencing and the prisons crisis.



The NLCJC was the first court to be given section 178 powers under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to review community orders. Judge Fletcher applies this in about a third of cases as an effective way of keeping defendants ‘on track’, holding twice-monthly hearings for about 50 people.



‘I would never say I am not sending someone to prison because the prisons are full,’ he says. ‘I sentence on the basis of what is appropriate.’ But more people in prison means ‘absolutely less likelihood’ of anything useful being done in terms of rehabilitation, compared with a high-level community order which can be reviewed. However, he does not want the prisons crisis to lead to the power to imprison being removed from some offences.



Judge Fletcher is certainly seen as a ‘robust’ sentencer with a very good feel for his patch. He puts a huge effort into getting to know the community but is not disappointed that the evaluation found that the NLCJC had not led to any increase in public confidence in the criminal justice system.



‘I could be smug and say confidence levels haven’t gone down as much as they have nationally or in Merseyside,’ he says. ‘What interested me is that 2% of local people could name me. That sounds pathetic, but I suspect if you went into the centre of any city and asked them to name a Crown Court judge, you wouldn’t find that sort of recognition.’



Grania Langdon-Down is a freelance journalist