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The
Department for Constitutional Affairs Selborne House Mr
D Clark 10th October 2003 Dear Mr Clark DCA CONSULTATION PAPER 'DELIVERING VALUE FOR MONEY IN THE CRIMINAL DEFENCE SERVICE' Thank you for your letter of 25th September 2003 (with enclosures) concerning the recent DCA consultation paper Delivering value for money in the Criminal Defence Service. This chased a response to an earlier letter dated 28lh August, which appears to have been misplaced. I am very sorry for the considerable delay in replying. Your letter has been passed to me because I am the Consultation Co-ordinator for the Department for Constitutional Affairs. I turn first to your complaint that the consultation paper has failed to comply with the Government's Code of Practice on Written Consultation, issued by the Cabinet Office in November 2000. Having carefully considered your comments, I agree that while the consultation paper states that it complies with the Code of Practice it in fact fails to do so by being put out for consultation for a period less than the minimum 12 weeks required by the Code. Officials should have highlighted this in the consultation paper and the paper should have contained a Ministerial statement explaining why the Code had not been followed in full. Although the period allowed for consultation was less than 12 weeks, this was not due to any desire to minimise responses. A considerable number of responses have been received and are being analysed. There has been, as you will be aware, a considerable overspend in the legal aid budget this year and, in a situation where the resources available for legal aid is necessarily limited, the Government was obliged to act swiftly to ensure that resources are targeted efficiently in order to ensure that services continue to be provided for those who need them most. It was for this reason that the length of time allowed for responses had to be shortened. However, as I have stated above this should have been made clear in the paper via a Ministerial statement explaining why it was appropriate to depart from the full terms of the Code. This was an oversight and I am sorry that it happened. We are closely monitoring all of our consultation exercises to ensure that such oversights do not happen again in the future. I would like to make clear that this Department does not consider that it can simply ignore the Code of Practice or select which parts it will comply with. The failure to explain the
shortened deadline for responses and the related omission of a Ministerial statement were genuine oversights. In this regard you may wish to note that the Cabinet Office is currently conducting a consultation exercise on a proposed revision of the Code of Practice1. The Department of Constitutional Affairs is playing a full part in this consultation exercise as part of a programme of activity to drive up the standard and effectiveness of our own consultation exercises. We hope to learn from and apply best practice from across Government. I hope this clarifies the situation surrounding the issue of this consultation paper and the time allowed for responses, but if you wish to raise any further questions in the light of my response please do not hesitate to get in touch. I turn now to your complaint that it is untrue (as asserted in the consultation paper) that the number of people receiving CDS funding has fallen substantially over the last year. It is certainly true, as you state, that the change in counting methods at the Legal Services Commission has had a considerable effect on the 'acts of assistance' figure. Whilst we believe that there has been some drop, for instance in police station work, a good deal of the fall between 2000/01 and 2001/02 can be attributed to that change. On reflection too much reliance may have been placed on those particular figures. Nonetheless, we do not believe that this undermines the basis of the consultation. The fact remains that the unit cost of work is continuing to rise steadily, which means cither that we can help fewer people with the same money, or spend more to help the same number of people. That is why the proposals in the consultation paper arc aimed at focusing the CDS on the core services - police station advice and representation in the interests of justice - in order to keep costs under control. I would stress, however, that no final decision has yet been reached on implementing the proposals in the paper. All views and comments received during the consultation will be taken fully into account before any final decision is made on changes to the CDS.
Laurence
Fiddler 1
The consultation paper can be found at: |
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Copyright 2004 ~ Clarke Kiernan Regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority - No.262841 |