Mr Khan: I am a solicitor and no longer practising.

Chairman: We should do that. Do you mind?

Q115 Mr Khan: Not at all; it is done. We also get reduced sentences from the Chairman for declaring that. May I just begin by saying it is quite clear from the NAO that the criterion they use for success/effectiveness is cases where charges are dropped. Is that the criterion you use?

Mr Macdonald: Sometimes cases are dropped for good reason. Sometimes we need to drop a case because a piece of evidence is not forthcoming.

Q116 Mr Khan: Is the criterion for how effective the CPS is the same for you as it is for the NAO?

Mr Macdonald: We have a number of criteria. We have public service agreement targets which we are supposed to meet. I have myself a number of benchmarks which I would want to use. I have already mentioned some of them. We want to have a reasonable conviction rate, we want public confidence and we want to be an employer of choice.

Q117 Mr Khan: I thought so. I was hoping that would be the case. Are you doing better on those things than you are on these things?

Mr Macdonald: We measure public confidence. It is a slow business; it is improving. We are certainly becoming an employer of choice. We have strong employment policies, we attract people from all communities to work for us, which is something we are ---

Q118 Mr Khan: Experiences of victims and witnesses?

Mr Macdonald: That is obviously hugely important.

Q119 Mr Khan: Is that improving?

Mr Macdonald: It is. The public confidence work which is done includes work with them and the new witness care units are having an impact.

Q120 Mr Khan: So it would be unfair for us to judge you just on the basis of how effective you are vis-à-vis delays.

Mr Macdonald: I think so. It is a public service and it is constitutionally important but there is a wide range of measures. This is one aspect of our work.

Q121 Mr Khan: The experience of you and the Chairman in magistrates' courts is probably even longer ago than mine; it is not for me to say. As far as the criteria of delay and charges being dropped are concerned, how are we doing compared with when the CPS was first set up 20 years ago? Are we better than we were then or worse or have there been peaks and troughs?

Mr Macdonald: All the figures, all the measures about ineffective trials and all that sort of thing are all improving. I am quite clear that we are in a much better position than we were five years ago. We still have a long way to go but we are improving as an organisation, I am quite confident about that.

Q122 Mr Khan: What about the Chairman's point: 10, 15, 20 years ago?

Mr Macdonald: The late 1980s. There are people in this room who have worked for the CPS since then; the ones who stayed were pretty brave individuals. I remember the view of the bar about the CPS in the late 1980s, I remember the view that the legal profession generally took of the CPS - it was unprintable.

Q123 Mr Khan: So the direction of travel is going the right way.

Mr Macdonald: I think so.

Q124 Mr Khan: May I just say that my overriding memory of magistrates' courts seems to be of waiting around. I spent a lot of time just waiting around. It is quite clear that some of the cases being moved from one court to another are to do with DCA problems, but what discussions do you have with the DCA about timetabling of cases, location of cases et cetera?

Mr Macdonald: One of the advantages we had was the creation of Her Majesty's Courts Service which means there is now a unified organisation running the magistrates' courts and the Crown Courts across the country. We regularly meet with the DCA to talk about ways in which they can do things which would help us: courts for DCWs; moves not to switch cases between courts so often; cooperation on listing ---

Q125 Mr Khan: How fruitful are your discussions?

Mr Macdonald: It is early days for HMCS. We work together in a cooperative spirit. I am sure there is more we can do.

Q126 Mr Khan: For example, if we were to make a recommendation for greater cooperation might that help?

Mr Macdonald: We should all welcome that.

Q127 Mr Khan: You talked about summary justice and Mr Bacon pursued this. In your experience, it is not really touched upon in the NAO report, how many defendants are unrepresented?

Mr Macdonald: I cannot answer that question, but I suspect in the simple guilty pleas it would be quite high. We probably can provide a sort of answer; I do not know exactly how accurate it would be.

Q128 Mr Khan: Could you drop us a note on that?

Mr Macdonald: We shall try to find out.

Mr Khan: The Chairman slandered defence lawyers for trying to make the system not work

Chairman: I take that back: a fine outstanding body of people.

Q129 Mr Khan: I should be interested to know how many defendants are unrepresented.

Mr Macdonald: I remember from my time and you probably remember the same, that the first large batch of people being processed through the magistrates' court tends not to be represented.

Q130 Mr Khan: My suspicion would be poor duty solicitors would be equally as ill-prepared to represent unrepresented defendants on the day of hearing as your poor colleagues at the CPS. That is already talked about in the NAO report, which would seem to me to be an additional reason for problems with delay and other things like that.

Mr Macdonald: Could be.

Q131 Mr Khan: May I also ask the NAO to look into that issue of the defence side? You use the word "defence" which I think is a generalisation for defendants who are represented and those who are not. There are issues around this which are worthy of investigation.

Sir John Bourn: Yes; we will.

Q132 Mr Khan: The next area I want to explore is that the report talks about the fact that many of your lawyers, those who present the prosecution, get given the case papers less than 24 hours before a hearing and if it is a trial, less than two days before a trial. Why is that?

Mr Macdonald: It is because of the way we are organised internally and partly it is because cases move between court rooms. We do need to have more continuity and more ownership of cases and the new sort of organisation, when we move to it, ought to provide that, in other words lawyers working in much tighter teams. We are asking lawyers to go to court more than they used to. We are trying to move out from behind our desks, so that we do not just review cases, but we argue them as well and that is important for us as an organisation. It does mean that lawyers have less time in the office and we are still feeling our way through this to be quite frank about it.

Q133 Mr Khan: Do you think that is the most effective use of a prosecution lawyer's time for the lawyer who prepares the case and does the work to be the lawyer who prosecutes it?

Mr Macdonald: That form of accountability is essential. If you are making a charging decision, there is no better discipline than knowing you are the one who is going to have to go to court and argue it. If you are farming the case out to an agent, whether it is a solicitor or a barrister, there is always someone else who can take the blame if you have not done a piece of work. You are not the one who gets it in the neck. Presenting our own cases exposes us in a way which will be very, very helpful to performance management.

Q134 Mr Khan: Would that deal with some of the problems you have in your relationship with evidence gathering, with witnesses, how reliable they will be and whether they will turn up?

Mr Macdonald: I think so. The other reform which is helpful to us here of course is the new right we have to interview witnesses before trials start. It is very important in sex cases in particular, but in all other sorts of cases actually, many other sorts of cases.

Q135 Mr Khan: You talked about the police and CPS working more together now than they have done for the last 20 years, because although they are still separate, they work together more. What has your experience been of the working relationships inside police stations? As I understand it, police officers, before they charge, liaise with the CPS. What is your experience of that?

Mr Macdonald: We have duty prosecutors in the police stations and the officer will come with the evidence and they will have a conversation. The duty prosecutor will make his or her decision. We also have lawyers co-located; we have teams of lawyers working in police stations side by side with the police and this is a model which is familiar in other jurisdictions and it is clearly building up very constructive relationships. There are obviously rubbing points here. Some of our people did not want to go into police stations, some police officers resent the charging initiative, but by and large there is a very constructive relationship between prosecutors and investigators. We have to maintain our independence; there is no point just giving the police the advice they want to hear. However, with that standpoint, working together, we can achieve a lot more.

Q136 Mr Khan: If we were to see, for example, fewer people being charged in years to come, it might not be because you are going soft, it might be because the police are receiving better advice from you.

Mr Macdonald: I hope we shall just find more people charged with sustainable cases, rather than fewer people charged.

Q137 Mr Khan: Do you have a comparison internationally as to how your overseas partners are doing and whether there are lessons to be learned?

Mr Macdonald: The extraordinary thing about this is that I do travel quite a lot because we are moving to do things the way they do in the States and Canada and Australia. The truth is that our foreign partners do not keep these kinds of figures; it is quite extraordinary. They are not bothered in America about how long it takes a case to get to trial or ineffective hearings; they have a completely different approach. For example, in America they do not want the right charge first time: they want a higher charge than is right first time so they can then negotiate it down. It is a completely different culture. They do not tend to keep the sort of figures that we do, so it is quite difficult to make international comparisons.

Q138 Mr Khan: How long should we wait to invite you back and expect to see improvements in the figures we have seen today?

Mr Macdonald: I do not know how often you have people back.

Q139 Mr Khan: We can have you back next week, in three months or a year.

Mr Macdonald: That might be a little optimistic.

Q140 Mr Khan: How much time do you want?