Speeches by Farnsworth.

“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?”

“Thank you. That is really important work, so thank you for that. I lastly want to pivot a little bit to a different topic, which is your international strategy. How many international liaison prosecutors do you have deployed in the country at the moment?”

“It is on resourcing but is slightly different. It relates to the advocacy strategy. I think a large proportion of money is spent on outside counsel, but I know that you have legal traineeships in place now in the CPS. What is your current advocacy strategy going forward?”

“May I ask one more question?”

“Going back to the specialist prosecutor role, you said you are looking at whether there need to be more of them. Senior Crown prosecutors can be at the senior Crown prosecutor grade for years, even decades, without getting a specialist prosecutor role. You said that a lot of them go to the central casework division bec…”

“Is that to build up relationships with overseas contemporaries? What would the strategy be there? What would be the need to go over?”

“The Government have emphasised the importance of international co-operation to tackle irregular migration as a core plank of the strategy for dealing with that situation. As a result, the NCA is recruiting about 100 new officers to be deployed in-country. I hear what you say about the costs involved, but would you say …”

“As an international liaison prosecutor, my job was to facilitate international co-operation, working with the NCA and overseas authorities. Does the Home Secretary agree that that is the key to smashing the criminal people smuggling gangs, not gimmicks such as the Rwanda scheme?”

“I welcome the Minister’s announcement, not just as a former Crown prosecutor but because the towns in my constituency are sadly not immune from antisocial behaviour. We often see a small group of people repeatedly committing this offence in our towns. Does the Minister agree that respect orders will be a useful interve…”

“I want to take you back to the recruitment of salaried judges. I have a question that has two elements, in terms of increasing your pool of people. You talked about working with the magic circle firms to try to get more solicitors. Are you working with any other pools of people, such as law centres, high street practic…”

“Thank you; that is very reassuring. The second part of the question is about females. Are there any schemes that will expedite increasing the number of female judges? For example, with female bishops in the House of Lords, as I understand it—Andy will correct me if I am wrong—they were ringfencing the next appointment …”

“I will generalise in that case. My question was getting at the fact that there seem to be occasions when there were as many sitting days in comparative years, but there was a disparity in the number of cases disposed of. The question is about those differences and what is affecting the disposal of cases, notwithstandin…”