POLICE stations have descended into “chaos” and criminals have been left to “roam the streets”, according to recent reports from defence solicitors in the legal press.

There isn’t much anarchy at Gravesend police station in North Kent, as Peter Swain, a Crown Prosecution Service lawyer, defends the biggest cultural shift in the prosecution of criminal offences since the CPS was set up in 1986. “If you think logically, wasn’t it crazy that there would be prosecutions without going to a prosecutor first?” he asks. “It’s a nonsense that a large proportion of cases start, go to court, solicitors get paid and court time is wasted with cases that aren’t going anywhere because we then use our powers to discontinue them. You don’t have to be Einstein to see that it’s not logical.”

The new charging arrangements (known as the “statutory scheme”) are running in the 14 areas that cover 60 per cent of CPS business. It is now a legal requirement for a CPS lawyer to decide what charges should be laid against suspects in all but minor, routine cases. Swain is eager to dispel what he and his colleagues consider inaccurate reports that the arrangements have led to CPS staff downgrading charges and releasing dangerous suspects on bail without charge. “People who are dangerous are taken off the street now in the same way that they were before — we don’t mess around,” he says.

The service is backed up by CPS Direct, a phone service staffed by 78 prosecutors working from home during evenings and weekends. So far, more than 100,000 calls have been received and lawyers are making 1,500 charging decisions a week at home. This means that 12 per cent of the caseload is handled remotely in those areas covered by the scheme.

At the national launch of the scheme in Maidstone, Kent, last June, Lord Goldsmith, QC, the Attorney-General, said that it was “the cornerstone of the reforms taking place in the CPS”. “It will bring police and prosecutors together as never before, working effectively towards the common goal of convicting the guilty by building robust cases from the start and ensuring that evidentially weak cases are weeded out as quickly as possible,” he said.

In the magistrates’ courts guilty pleas have indeed gone up from 69 to 73 per cent, and in the Crown Court from 65 to 78 per cent since the start of the scheme, and the conviction rates have risen from 77 to 79 per cent in the magistrates’ courts and 76.9 to 85 per cent in the Crown Court. “It’s all about the police and the CPS working together as a team,” says Caroline Mitchell, the prosecution team leader for Gravesend criminal justice unit. “The benefit to the police is that they get advice from whoever is going to prosecute the case and, for us, we get a much stronger case.”

The results in the courts are what Detective Chief Inspector Neil Jerome, of North Kent Police, calls the “real tangible benefits” of CPS charging. “There are less tangible benefits to do with culture and establishing a prosecution team ethos,” he says. “Previously we have had a criminal justice system that comprised different agencies all with their own distinct activity and this is a subtle way of breaking down those barriers.”

But this radical cultural shift was never going to be pain-free. Tim Brown, a senior solicitor at Tuckers and a former police station supervisor for the firm, says: “The police’s complaint before this was that they were charging cases which, when they went to court, the CPS was either reducing the charge or dropping it. They argued that the CPS didn’t want to pursue anything unless there was a cast-iron guarantee.” As he sees it, the old conflict was the clash between the CPS and its obligations under the Code for Crown Prosecutors and the police’s desire to prosecute as quickly as possible. “The venue for that fight has changed and it’s now in the police station,” he says.

CPS lawyers have also been unhappy with the rewriting of their job descriptions. Kris Venkatasami, convener of the First Division Association’s CPS section, reports that many are feeling the strain. Prosecutors might typically spend three days in court and the rest of the week in the police station, and two weeks might pass before they return to the offices. “Nobody is against the scheme but all the Government is doing is using the same resources around and around,” he says. “There are a lot of people who are extremely tired.”

Anne Phillips is a CPS duty lawyer at Gravesend. “It is quite a challenge,” she says. On some days there have been 16 people taken into custody, which can be “an uncomfortable pressure” when the officers are lined up along the corridor. Phillips says, however, that there have not been problems setting up a prosecution scheme in Kent. “It is accepted by the police that they have to consult us, whether they do that willingly or not I don’t know,” she says. “The bottom line is that we are here and we’re probably going to be staying. It’s in everybody’s interests to work together and make it work.”

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