MEANS TO WHAT END?


Having attended a three-hour training course run by the Criminal Defence Service on the new means test in magistrates' courts, the recent facile letter from the director of the service provokes a response (see 2006 Gazette, 21 September, 17).



Applicants may not have to complete each and every page of the forms, but they will have to read and consider each of them and decide whether or not they are required to be completed.



The court duty solicitor will spend more of his time helping applicants complete forms for subsequent appearances (which is part of his obligation) and it is likely that, in many own-client cases, the forms will not be submitted on the first hearing date because evidence of means will not be available, causing an adjournment. The early cover fee is next to useless, as the preconditions are impracticable. We now hear that a fee is to be paid to solicitors for assisting in completion of the forms. One wonders who costed all of this.



What is hard to fathom is the point of this bureaucracy for clients and the courts. It is clear from the Carter review that there is no real problem with magistrates' court legal aid expenditure. The means test is, for now, not going to apply to the Crown Court, which is the place where there are some recognised expenditure problems.



Christopher Pye-Smith, Pye-Smith Arthur & Cobb, Grantham, Lincolnshire