Speeches by Farnsworth.

“Good afternoon. I am Linsey Farnsworth. I am a non-practising solicitor, formerly of the Crown Prosecution Service, and a member of a number of unions, including the FDA.”

“I entirely agree with my hon. Friend about the proportionality of the Bill, which we discussed in Committee. The word “burden” has been used a great deal this afternoon. In his evidence to the Committee, Andy Burnham said: “I just think that we cannot talk ourselves into a sort of thing where it is all too big a burden…”

“The frustrations that the hon. and learned Member is talking about are surely a good argument for what the Government are trying to do in resetting the relationship between the UK and the EU. Therefore, this Bill would only undermine the UK’s credibility in doing that with our international partners. Does he agree that…”

“But the operational relationships are important.”

“That is now a roving post.”

“There used to be two in Paris, didn’t there?”

“I thought the Operation Invigor post was now a roving post.”

“The upstream suppliers.”

“Is it important for them to travel to countries overseas?”

“I’m not sure we would have been arguing on that point, but it is useful to know that it is being looked at. The CPS annual report talks about the vacancy rate in the CPS as 6.3% among senior Crown prosecutors in 2023-24. What steps are you taking to encourage more experienced prosecutors to progress their career at the…”

“Didn’t those chaser tasks come off the back of a target that you had—we had, when I was there—for finalisation of cases in a timely way? The chasing had to be done; otherwise, you could not finalise the case within the targeted time limit. I may be misremembering and I apologise if I am.”

“I would like to talk about staffing, if I may. At the very start you talked about the commitment of the staff and how impressed you were when you became DPP. You also talked about backlogs of cases and the negative impacts that that has on defendants, victims and witnesses. What would you say the impact of significant …”

“I remember long queues of officers waiting on the phone for it to be answered. I don’t know whether that is still the case.”

“Do the three hours start from the moment the police phone CPS Direct? Is it still a phone-line system?”

“The three hours isn’t the PACE clock, is it? The three hours is your target. When does the clock start to run for the three-hour target?”

“You talked about the attrition rate being good for the CPS Direct lawyers, essentially. The results are good, but the timeliness is going down when out of hours charging is taken into account. As a disclosure, I worked for CPS Direct for five years. Why is it that the timeliness goes down when out of hours is taken int…”

“Thank you. Director, I want to take you back to the red charging and green charging cases and look at the red cases. I think you said that the target is three hours for a decision, and that it was an 83% success rate overall, but when out of hours was taken into consideration it dropped down to 67.3%.”

“Good afternoon, Director. My name is Linsey Farnsworth. I am the Member for Amber Valley. My interests are registered, but of relevance to this Committee is that I was a solicitor with the Crown Prosecution Service from 2003 to March this year. I am a member of the FDA union, and of the APPGs on access to justice and o…”

“The roving prosecutors are based in the UK.”

“That is a reduction. It was 27 in 2019. Is there a reason for that?”