We didn’t need this week’s report on the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) to tell us why it has lost its way. The failings uncovered by an independent inspectorate – lack of focus, drift and delay, with officials more concerned about process than quality – can be traced back to decisions taken by the last government.
HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate has a statutory duty to visit prosecutors’ offices and go through their files. The inspectorate can also assist other public bodies. Last year it accepted an invitation from Dame Vera Baird KC (pictured), the CCRC’s interim chair, to assess its work. It cost the commission £75,000.
As the inspectorate noted, a previous report in 2021 had ‘shone a light on the CCRC’s move away from full-time salaried commissioners to a fee-based model’. That sounds a bit technical but it’s hugely important.
The Westminster Commission on Miscarriages of Justice, despite its grand name, is ultimately the work of a well-respected campaign group. A report it published in 2021 draws its authority from the two peers who chaired it, Lord Garnier KC, a former Conservative solicitor general, and Baroness Stern CBE, a former long-serving director of the prisoner support charity Nacro.
They recognised that the CCRC’s members – its commissioners – had been undermined by ministers. Until 2012, commissioners received a proper salary and full benefits. Since 2017, they have been less well paid, with some working only one day a week.
The original commissioners were people of real stature, using their unique powers to dig deeply into suspected miscarriages of justice. Now, the work is done by staff for whom CCRC commissioners have no management responsibility.
According to the Westminster Commission, the CCRC was ‘operating in a completely different way from that envisaged and provided for in its legislation, which gives commissioners a central, not a peripheral, role’. That had resulted from a ‘tailored review’ by the Cabinet Office in 2019.
Was Whitehall simply trying to save money? Or was the agenda to emasculate a body given such cast-iron independence that its chair and commissioners can be removed only by the King?
Either way, it led to a finding by the Commons justice committee in May 2025 that the CCRC’s delay in publishing a ‘damning’ report by Chris Henley KC into its handling of the Andrew Malkinson miscarriage of justice demonstrated a ‘spectacular failure of leadership’.
It was no longer tenable for Karen Kneller to continue as chief executive of the CCRC, the MPs concluded. Kneller resigned last July, less than a month after Baird’s arrival.
The chair’s job had been vacant since January 2025, when Helen Pitcher fell on her sword. An independent panel had concluded, by a majority, that Pitcher had ‘relied too heavily on the executive’, which in this case must mean Kneller. The chair should have challenged the chief executive’s performance, the panel said, and held her to account.
Pitcher was experienced at running organisations and she saw herself as a boardroom chair rather than a hands-on investigator. By contrast, Baird’s expertise is as a barrister and she has taken on some of the casework herself – something she believes no chair has done before. This must give her a much better understanding of the structural and cultural weaknesses identified by the inspectorate.
To prepare its report, it inspected a sample of 60 cases from a caseload of 1,500. While inspectors found that case review managers had ultimately made the right recommendation in all of them, ‘the route by which they reached those recommendations was often convoluted’. Caseworkers would go down unnecessary investigatory avenues, wasting time and resources. ‘The organisation lacks the qualitative casework assurance measures at all levels to drive consistent and sustained improvements in casework quality across the CCRC,’ inspectors found.
There are 36 case review managers, each of whom manages about 30 cases. The managers are allocated to one of six groups, each of which has a leader. When a review is complete, the case review manager sends a statement of reasons to a commissioner. At that stage, though, there is no check on quality. One of the reforms Baird is introducing in the light of the inspectorate’s recommendations is to have every statement of reasons checked by a group leader first. That seems such an obvious safeguard that it’s hard to understand why it was not done before.
Baird has accepted all the inspectorate’s recommendations. If she had not, then Anthony Rogers – the chief inspector and an old friend – says he would have had a ‘very honest conversation’ with her. And the government wants Baird to see the reforms through: her term of office has been extended by a year until December 2027.
There’s no guarantee that the CCRC won’t discover another unrectified miscarriage of justice in the meantime. But implementing these procedural recommendations should at least reduce the risk.
