Law Society warns against removal of consent to hearings by 'virtual court'

27th January 2009

The Law Society of England & Wales is calling on Parliament to review plans that would remove the right of defendants to choose whether or not they have a ‘virtual court’ hearing, a process which has only been tested on a small scale.

Despite there having only been a limited trial of live links, otherwise known as 'virtual courts', whereby defendants use a live link for preliminary hearings in the magistrates’ courts from the police station, the Coroners and Justice Bill will remove the right of defendants to consent to this type of hearing.

Paul Marsh, President of the Law Society, says:

"This is a new and relatively untried method of conducting what is a vital first hearing in the Magistrates' Court where a number of important decisions are made. The defendant should have the right to be present in that crucial first hearing, rather than be beamed in as though it was a video-conference meeting.

"The live link trial was to test the technological capabilities of the system rather than the effectiveness of this method, and yet we now see attempts to change the legal framework before the pilot has even started."

The Society points out that when live links were introduced via amendments contained in the Police and Criminal Justice Bill in 2006, Parliament saw fit to require that the defendant at a police station have the right to consent to appearing in court by live link, or choose to appear in the usual way.

However, since then, there has been a limited experimentation of the process and until a larger pilot has been carried out and independently evaluated the Society believes changes to the consent requirement should not take place.

Prison population

The Law Society is warning that one of the knock on effects of removing the right to consent risks putting the already strained prison population under further pressure.

Paul Marsh says: "If the defendant and their solicitor are unable to gather the necessary information to support a bail application, or locate a potential surety, people who would currently be held overnight and released on bail the following day will instead be remanded in custody for many days or even weeks.

"This has the potential to further increase the prison population and squeeze the prison budget, yet retaining the consent requirement will not cost anything. Prisons are already at capacity and this could increase it further because of purely procedural factors, and not because of any public policy decision that bail should be denied."

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