Kevin Beach acknowledges that it is ‘a long time since I practised criminal law’ (see [2009] Gazette, 17 April, 9). This comment is unlikely to inspire confidence in readers seeking to derive an informed judgement on the abilities of associate prosecutors. He suggests that the reason police officer prosecutors were replaced by ‘professional advocates’ was because of the desirability that the latter ‘...with deeper and wider knowledge should represent the public, because they would tend to be more objective and better able to help the courts...’

I have been an associate prosecutor (until recently ‘designated caseworker’) for nearly 10 years, regularly conducting prosecutions in the magistrates’ courts. It has never been suggested that I, or my colleagues, lack any of the qualities he rightly attributes to professional advocates.

He is quite wrong to assert that associate prosecutors ‘have not... entered under the aegis of professional regulation’. I would suggest that he consults the page of the ILEX website devoted to associate prosecutors from which I quote the following: ‘ILEX now provides associate prosecutors with an independent regulator, just as the solicitors and barristers employed within the CPS have their regulatory bodies.’

It is regrettable that he has chosen to base his remarks on nothing more than, as he puts it, ‘...an impression that the CPS is becoming a tick-box service, devoid of individual wisdom judgement or discretion’. Fortunately, under the Code for Crown Prosecutors, both Crown prosecutors and associate prosecutors are required to base their judgement on something less tenuous than ‘an impression’.

Richard Lynn, Crowborough, East Sussex