The Crown Prosecution Service must be a depressing place to be at the moment. Criticisms of the way it functions have been coming fast and furious over the past few weeks.

First there was the inspectorate report last month, which branded a third of CPS advocates – along with defence counsel – ‘lacklustre’. Last week the Bar Council scored a publicity coup with its canny attack on the service’s ‘Alice in Wonderland accounting’ in relation to in-house advocates – though, of course, the bar has every reason in the world to dislike the use of in-house advocates instead of self-employed barristers.

Now comes the Justice Committee report, which has no particular axe to grind but which has found plenty of ammunition with which to attack the CPS. Although the report praises the CPS’s close working with police, it criticises the ‘piecemeal’ way the service has developed and, at the root of its concerns, says the service does not benefit from a ‘overall vision’. A new vision of the CPS is exactly what the director of public prosecutions Keir Starmer tried to set out last month when he talked about criminal justice needing a fundamental change in ethos, to transform from a ‘system’ into a ‘service’.

Starmer has the right idea, but perhaps he needs to start shouting it an awful lot louder.