As part of a new strategy to ensure everyone's needs are taken into account, the Scottish Court Service has ordered staff to refer to all accused criminals awaiting trial as "customers". This change seems to have emanated from people who have gorged themselves on manuals of managerial language and who must have watched David Brent in The Office thinking it was a serious documentary.

To call people accused of crimes "customers" of the courts is a piece of rank foolishness. People facing criminal charges posed by the state are not in any sense customers. They are not going to court to buy anything. They are not even going to court voluntarily but rather under compulsion. Someone on trial for a crime is no more a customer of the courts than he is a line-manager of the judge.

What people facing trial are called in court is important because if they are called something inappropriate by lawyers and witnesses - like "the criminal" - it could prejudice the minds of those judging the case. A person charged with a crime is innocent unless and until proven guilty. He or she goes to court for a fair trial. A fair trial is one that does not unduly slant the proceeding against that person.

In English law, in the 19th century, it was common for people in the dock to be referred to as "the prisoner". That was felt to be an unfair thing to call someone who had not yet been proven guilty because it implied they were bad characters, so the term was changed to "the accused". Later, in the 20th century, the term was changed again to be even more neutral: "the defendant". That is still the term today in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and it is very fair.

A person facing a trial is defending himself in a serious forum, so his status in the trial should be given its proper name. It does no one any good to pervert the truth by calling such a person a customer. It gives him and others a misleading expectation of their rights and duties in such circumstances.

If the defendant is to be a customer, what will the Scottish Court Service want other people in court to be called? How about these suggestions:

• Judges – judicial checkout facilitators
• Solicitors – customer service assistants
• Barristers – retail justice spokespersons
• Prison warders – customer accommodation concierges
• Prison governors – enwalled experience directors

  More than any other field of human life, law is dependent of the accurate use of language. Words are everything in law. They are the building bricks of the statutes and court judgments that regulate us. They are the life substance of all our contracts and deeds. Every day, across the land, the words used by advocates in court are critically important in cases determining the future of children’s lives, matters of liberty or incarceration, matters of inheritance, and matters of company fortunes.

  Making the officers of a legal system use language which is patently ridiculous turns that system into an unending pantomime. When the public shouts at the Scottish Court Service "It’s behind you!", they’ll be referring to the dictionary.

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