This week plans come before the House of Lords to expand the powers of Crown Prosecution Service caseworkers to handle a wide range of magistrates’ courts cases. It may be logical to argue that deploying these so-called designated case workers or DCWs for minor cases will free more experienced and qualified lawyers for more serious work. Yet inherently it means that the quality of representation for the prosecution will decline – because we are prepared to pay only junior staff to handle cases in the lower courts.

The proposals – which involve trials carrying jail terms and offences such as common assault, drink-driving and public order offences – seem to come from the same cost-cutting stable as parallel plans to cut legal aid fees in the moxt complex crown court trials.

Last summer, after ministers endorsed Lord Carter of Coles’ plans for an overhaul of the overhaul of the legal aid scheme, the Legal Services Commission (LSC) rolled out a new system of funding for these complex trials. The terms offered were so unattractive that almost all the most able advocates in the country have refused to do the work.

Every day brings a new crime initiative. Jacqui Smith has just announced the “Tackling Violence Action Plan” to include measures to fight back against knives, guns, gangs, binge drinking and rape. Who cannot raise three cheers for all that? But what is going on away from the streets, in the courtrooms where legal battles are fought between State and citizen? Will these moves improve the quality of a justice system designed to convict the guilty, protect the victims and acquit those wrongly accused?

Governments delivered 14 Criminal Justice Acts in the past 25 years (against 5 in the preceding quarter-century) – a mere portion of the torrent of new statutes that are the product of a political war to claim the higher moral ground on criminal justice and which place a heavy burden on the courts. system.

On legal aid, the LSC has abandoned the principle that only the most experienced advocates be allowed to be paid for taking these cases. Long-term results: poorer defendants receive poorer representation and the most able lawyers quit legal-aid work in droves. Meanwhile, the LSC intends to roll out competitive tendering. With that, the quality of the service – said by Lord Carter to be fundamental – will be abandoned in favour of price-cutting. And although case workers handling magistrates’ court cases will have to obtain a qualification from the Institute of Legal Executives, that is not enough to allay concerns about deskilling.

Jointly the moves represent a reduction in the quality of justice – both for defendants and the victims of crime. Robert Brown is a criminal and fraud partner with Corker Binning in London

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