‘Outdated’ factors such as the number of pages in a case will no longer determine advocacy fees under new Ministry of Justice proposals unveiled today. Instead, payments will be based on the seriousness and complexity of the work.
Publishing a consultation paper on a modernised advocates’ graduated fee scheme (AGFS), justice minister Sir Oliver Heald said the current system ‘does not focus enough on the skilled work that barristers and solicitor-advocates demonstrate every day in the Crown court. I want to change that to ensure the system is simpler and fairer’.
He added: ‘As we take steps to update and modernise our criminal justice system, it is vital that the way we pay criminal defence advocates fairly reflects this new reality.’
The scheme pays criminal defence advocates legal aid for representing those accused of crimes in the Crown court. Legal Aid Agency spend on publicly funded criminal defence advocacy in the Crown court under the scheme was around £213m in 2014/15.
The consultation paper states that the current scheme ‘relies too heavily’ on pages of prosecution evidence, served by the Crown Prosecution Service, as a means of deciding how complex individual cases are and, therefore, how much a defence advocate should be paid. It also relies on the number of witnesses to help determine the fee to be paid.
The new scheme would introduce a ‘more sophisticated system’ of classifying offences, based on the typical amount of work required in each case. However PPE will continue to feature in drugs and dishonesty cases.
The ministry says the proposed scheme is designed to be cost-neutral.
The scheme was last reformed in 2007.
Highlighting the latest case for intervention, the ministry said there had been considerable changes to the way criminal cases are run and the way evidence is served, including the increasing use of electronic evidence. ‘As a result of the changing environment, the government considers that the volume of evidence is no longer necessarily reflective of the amount of work an advocate has to undertake on an individual case,’ the paper states.
The ministry also understands that it can be often unclear to an advocate what their fee will be at the point of taking on a case.
The consultation closes on 2 March.
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