Calvert-Smith's swansong focuses on banishing negative vibes

Paula Rohan hears Sir David Calvert-Smith's vision of creating an efficient CPS before signing off in October

Sir David Calvert-Smith QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), may be moving to pastures new in October, but until he walks out of the Ludgate Hill headquarters of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for the last time, it is still his baby.

Sir David has felt protective of the CPS ever since he started his five-year fixed-term stint in 1998, having viewed its creation from the outside with some dismay while acting as prosecution counsel at the Old Bailey.

'It had always struck me it had a premature birth with insufficient resources and had taken up place as the dustbin for all the complaints about what was wrong with the criminal justice system,' he recalls.

'It was started on 1 October 1986 before it was really ready, so in terms of the people resources and the money resources it wasn't ready to go in many parts of the country, and therefore got a bad press.

I thought that was unfair on the devoted professionals who worked within it.'

Sir David's aim from then was to develop the CPS into a 'much more outgoing, outward-facing service', and he feels that following the 'shock waves' caused by the Lawrence inquiry report and the Auld report into criminal justice, that this has been achieved to a large extent.

Extra funding, restructuring, and increasing confidence both within the CPS and from the outside have all helped to turn the 42 CPS areas into 'mini criminal justice systems', he says.

Key to all this has been a far better relationship with the government.

'I think the government now realises that we are the central element of the criminal justice system - standing between the police on one side, the defendant on the other and the courts on a third - and that this small and still very cheap organisation is vital to the proper functioning of the rest of the system,' he says.

He is proud of the way the CPS has moved towards more contact with witnesses and the wider community - and with the police in particular.

'We spent far too much time - that is, the CPS and the police - over the first 12 years or so of our existence fighting turf war battles,' he admits.

'[We were] expending a great deal of time and energy when actually we should have been working together to build cases against defendants and to ensure so far as possible that we don't build cases against the wrong defendants.'

Getting rid of the blame culture may have been an upward struggle, but Sir David says a much harder task is convincing the media that it is running its cases in the proper way.

He concedes that the CPS should be a 'beacon of fairness' - 'if we're not ahead in that game, then that's bad news' - but one of his main frustrations, he says, is that despite his policy of openness with the press, the CPS still gets negative coverage in the national media.

He says this is misinforming the public.

'In a sense I think it would be a good idea if every child had some education in the way in which the criminal justice system works, so that when they read a report or hear a broadcast about a case which has resulted in somebody being acquitted, they know what that means,' he says.

'It may or may not mean that the case should never have been brought - but it certainly doesn't always mean it should never have been brought.'

Sir David would also like to leave having rearranged the career structure - he says Crown prosecutors should be allowed to sit on the bench, and the ban on this is still a deterrent to entering the CPS.

'You clearly can't sit as a district judge and hear a case that is prosecuted by your own employer, so it's a question of devising a system that would enable this process to take place.'

He argues, though, that despite a certain amount of 'sneering and snobbery' about a public sector career, the tide has turned enough that the CPS can overcome former recruitment problems by marketing a career in the service as something to be proud of.

'More people [now] think of the idea of prosecuting alleged offenders as being a valuable service, and one which the CPS pays you reasonably well for,' he says.

'[It] provides a reasonably flexible workplace, trains you and generally looks after you like a proper employer should.'

However, he says that a career as a criminal lawyer on either side of the fence is not always easy as it has been subjected to an 'astonishing' number of changes and new initiatives.

'I do have some sympathy, but I think the reality is that criminal justice - and law and order generally - are so high up the political agenda now, the whole idea that we will all be left in peace for a couple of decades is pie in the sky,' he predicts.

'The trick is going to be how well we can harness and co-ordinate the changes, make ourselves flexible enough to absorb them without too much angst, and make people feel that when they carry them out, they are valued for having done so.'

The CPS will also be subject to changes through the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith's, 'third stage' (see pages 20-21).

But Sir David insists the CPS is well on its way to achieving those aims through initiatives like the charging pilots.

He says he is confident he will leave the CPS entering a new dawn as an increasingly powerful, but well-respected, organisation.

'We can ruin or improve a police investigation, we can ruin or improve the court's ability to narrow the issues, and get the right answer more quickly,' he says.

'We can ruin or improve the defence's ability to mount a proper defence, and have access to everything they are entitled to.

We have this ability to make things a lot worse or a lot better for very little money.

The second stage was the realisation that we are rather an important little cog in the wheel.

The third stage is going to take advantage of that realisation.'