There is a story going round the criminal Bar about a Crown Court judge who recently took exception to the increasing tendency of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to deploy its own barristers for court advocacy. Apparently, this off-message judge struck a blow for the Bar by refusing to give in-house CPS prosecutors more time to prepare cases on the grounds that a barrister wouldn’t need it. It wasn’t long, so the story goes, before said judge got a call from someone higher up ordering him to back off.
True or not, the story sums up the mood of pessimism at the criminal Bar, which is struggling to adapt to a combination of the Government’s clampdown on publicly-funded work and increasing competition from solicitor advocates. Time was when barristers could rely on the judiciary to fight their corner. These days the judges have got enough on their plate simply trying to preserve their own independence in the face of a tidal wave of constitutional reform.
