YOU are unlikely to recognise these three women and their names will not be familiar to you. But if your name should ever cross their lips then you might have very good reason to be worried.

Alison Saunders, Carmen Dowd and Sue Hemming are three of the most powerful lawyers in the country and are about to become the public face of the Crown Prosecution Service. It is their job to decide who should be charged in the biggest criminal cases and, increasingly, they will be appearing on television to announce their decisions.

The practice is used in America where district attorneys regularly call press conferences to announce developments in important cases. But it caused something of a stir here when Miss Hemming, head of the CPS’s Counter-Terrorism Division, went public in August to detail the charges against 11 people in the alleged plot to blow up airliners over the Atlantic Ocean.

Miss Dowd, the head of Special Crime, may well be the next to appear if she decides to press charges against anyone in the loans-for-peerages inquiry. She is reviewing several files of evidence and will decide in the next few months whether anyone should be charged.

She is in regular contact with the police team running the sensitive inquiry, providing legal advice to detectives who have been interviewing Lord Levy and Jonathan Powell.

She refused to be drawn on the issue of whether Tony Blair would be questioned other than to say that the inquiry would go “wherever the evidence leads”. But a public statement about the outcome of the inquiry is likely.

“I think it’s fair to say that you will see a lot more of that sort of announcement taking place,” Miss Dowd told The Times. “These decisions are ours to make and there is a lack of public awareness of that.”

Miss Hemming said: “These announcements mean the public can get to understand that the CPS has a very important role in the criminal justice system, particularly in relation to pre-charge advice and charging decisions.

“Part of the difficulty that the CPS has had in the past is that the public hasn’t really known what we do. We need to get across what we do and to gain their trust, because you can’t trust an organisation that you know nothing about.”

Mrs Saunders, head of the Organised Crime Division, is also expected to take the initiative in publicising successes against the syndicates involved in international drug smuggling and people trafficking.

Unlike the highly secretive Serious Organised Crime Agency, with whom she works hand-in-glove preparing cases for trial, Mrs Saunders and her CPS team are keen to shout about their successes.

The three work at the CPS headquarters in Central London and sit together on panels that review the management of important cases. They have clearly developed a camaraderie, their conversations are frequently punctuated by laughter and they admit to “doing very badly as a quiz team”.

Pushing these three women to the fore is undoubtedly part of a strategy to improve the image of the CPS, a service that is regularly subjected to public relations batterings.

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