he prime minister issued a firm warning to rioters yesterday: everyone who has participated in the violence will face the full force of the law. Police will be making arrests. People will be held on remand. Charges will follow. Convictions will follow.
The Ministry of Justice has signalled that courts may operate around the clock to deal with cases, as they did in response to the London riots of 2011.
This will require already overstretched and underpaid criminal defence solicitors to work round the clock to help bring the riots to an end. And they will – because they’re decent people playing a crucial role in ensuring the criminal justice system produces trusted and fair outcomes. As the High Court noted in its January ruling on criminal legal aid fees:
‘What this impressive body of evidence brings home is the women and men working up and down the country at all hours of the day and night, in difficult and stressful circumstances, carrying out an essential service which depends to a large extent on their goodwill and sense of public duty.’
When criminal defence solicitors have worked round the clock to help end the riots, instead of saying ‘thank you’, the government needs to revisit the pittance they are paid for the amount of work they do and the hours they put in. And by ‘revisit’, I mean (for starters) implement the minimum 15% uplift recommended by the Bellamy review in 2021.
As the High Court also said in its judgment:
‘Unless there are significant injections of funding in the relatively near future, any prediction along the lines that the system will arrive in due course at a point of collapse is not overly pessimistic.’
The government may well rely the goodwill and dedication of criminal lawyers (and court staff) in the coming weeks if it wants to send a defiant message to the rioters. But it would be nice if ministers showed similar goodwill in return as lawyers help to clear the backlog.
