Solicitors will act as ‘legal advocates’ to provide free legal advice and representation to alleged victims of rape under the Labour party’s plans to tackle violence against women and girls, the shadow lord chancellor pledged last night.
Setting out a future Labour government's plans for justice, Shabana Mahmood MP said that rape victims will receive state-funded legal advice and representation to protect their rights as their cases go through the criminal justice process. Advice will be provided by a ‘local solicitor’ who will be ‘at hand in every police area in England and Wales.
Mahmood, a former practising barrister, said that the solicitors will have ‘experience acting for vulnerable people’ and will be ‘trained on the specific challenges of rape cases’.
The legal advocates, she said, will help victims exercise the right to review any decision made by the Crown Prosecution Service and assist them in challenging unnecessary and inappropriate requests for personal records. ‘We know this works because it has been tried and tested,’ said Mahmood.
The scheme is modelled on an initiative piloted in 2020 in Northumbria. The idea was developed by Labour’s former solicitor general, Dame Vera Baird, who served as the area’s police and crime commissioner for seven years before being appointed victim’s commissioner in 2019. In 2020 the Northumbria police and crime commissioner estimated that it would cost £3.9 million to roll the scheme out nationally.
The Law Society has warned of a ‘crisis’ in the availability of duty solicitors: the number providing representation at police stations has fallen by 26% since 2017.
Despite this, Mahmood said that she ‘doesn’t foresee difficulty in getting people to sign up’ to undertake the role. She said that the scheme would be funded by the local police and crime commissioners.
Speaking last night at a joint event hosted by the Law Society and the Bar Council, Mahmood pledged to ‘work with the judiciary to ensure rape cases are always treated as a priority in listings’.
To tackle the ‘failing’ justice system and backlog of 66,500 crown court cases, Mahmood said she would mix a ‘traditionalist’ approach with ‘radical’ ideas, and did not rule out limiting jury trials, as mooted recently by the lady chief justice, or considering judge-only trials for some cases.
Mahmood did not pledge increased funding for legal aid, stating that she could not make unfunded proposals. But, in these ‘perilous times’, she said that if she becomes justice secretary in a Labour government, she will be a ‘champion of our legal industry’. She pledged to work with the Treasury to ‘ensure our legal services are a growth sector’ and to seek a ‘renewed partnership for the legal sector’.
Commenting on the plan for legal advocates for rape victims, Richard Atkinson, vice president of the Law Society, said: ‘Whilst it is a laudable ambition, without significant funding and improvement in the morale of the profession, the prospect of the ambition being fulfilled is highly questionable.’
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