Cuts are taking their toil throughout the justice system. At the Criminal Cases Review Commission they are biting particularly hard. Staff there, according to Graham Zellick, the retiring chairman, are angry and dispirited. The upshot will be “melancholic challenges” for his successor, “as damaging in practice as they are demoralising in prospect”. Zellick, who steps down next week, was responding to news of £300,000 budget cuts a year for the next three years.

For the small number of defence lawyers who specialise in criminal appeals and their clients this is bad news. “The whole reason the CCRC was set up was to investigate potential miscarriages of justice and any reduction in funding would mean that they would be in less of a position to investigate,” Jeremy Moore, of Carter Moore solicitors, who represented Barry George, says. His client was recently found not guilty of murdering Jill Dando, the TV presenter, outside her London home in 1999. “A case like Barry George needed a lot of resources putting into it and whether they would be able to do that in the future is a great concern,” he says.

Professor Zellick does little to hide his own frustration. “We are talking about relatively small sums of money,” he says. “If you compare our £8 million budget with the amount of money spent on the other side by the police and Crown Prosecution Service it is not even a crumb off the table.”

The first in-depth study of the CCRC is to be published by Justice this month. Righting Miscarriages of Justice? Ten Years of the Criminal Cases Review Commission is written by Laurie Elks, a former commissioner. He records how the seismic shocks of miscarriages of justice such as the Birmingham Six led to the Runciman commission, which recommended the creation of an independent watchdog, failed to register with new Labour. Elks, who left the CCRC in 2006, argues that it is regarded as an unnecessary evil by the Home Office and has been regulated “from a spirit of underlying hostility”.

Tony Blair as Prime Minister famously made clear his intention to “rebalance” the justice system in favour of the victims of crime. More recently, John Reid, when Home Secretary, attempted to introduce the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill in 2006 to prevent successful appeals on “technicalities”. Elks reflects that one interpretation of the desire to introduce that legislation was “primarily to clip the commission’s wings”.

Are the CCRC’s days numbered? “The politicians would be a threat if it were not that . . . responsibility for miscarriages of justice would presumably bounce back to them,” Elks says. His study also documents what he refers to as the judicial impatience with the CCRC. “There is almost certainly a view within the judiciary that if they were referred fewer gilt-edged, old-fashioned miscarriages of justice then they’d be happier,” he says. Zellick insists that the CCRC’s predicament is not the result of a politically motivated attack. “I do not think we feature very much on the radar,” he says. “We are a bit of the governmental machine that just gets on with the job.”

The small number of defence lawyers who specialise in criminal appeals and CCRC applications make the point that it is not just the CCRC that is reeling from cuts. Steve Bird, a criminal law specialist in London who has 35 appeal cases at the moment, says he has closed his books on new cases. “With all the cutbacks to legal aid — the introduction of fixed fees in police station work and now Crown Court — they’re an incentive for solicitors to cut corners and not prepare cases as thoroughly as they used to under hourly rates,” he says. The solicitor predicts a rise in miscarriages. “There will be more people looking for solicitors to do this work and fewer solicitors willing to do it.”

The Criminal Appeals Lawyers Association has been lobbying the Legal Services Commission to set up an accredited panel of appeal lawyers to police standards. “There are lots of pressures on criminal practices to find ways of increasing fees,” says Campbell Malone, its chairman and a consultant at Stephensons, a Bolton firm. “Over the past few years we’ve had an increase in firms doing prison law who are also looking to do appeals. A lot of that work has been done by inexperienced fee earners. It’s a real worry.”

Malone also echoes the concerns of many defence lawyers that the CCRC is overly cautious. The assertion, the solicitor says, is supported by the organisation’s 70 per cent success rate (the proportion of referrals that the CCRC makes to the appeal courts that result in a quashed conviction). “The CCRC is too conservative,” he says. “If the success rate was 55 per cent then it would more accurately reflect the test.”

Zellick denies the charge. He does readily concede that the cuts mean longer waiting times for those prisoners alleging their innocence, although he says they will not affect quality of investigation. How long is acceptable for an innocent man or woman to be in prison before his case is reviewed? Zellick replies: “There is no acceptable waiting time.”

The author is director of communications at the Legal Action Group

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