Eight hours before the new 'rule of six' comes into force, affecting everyone in England. Still no publication of the new criminal law yet. Anyone?
This is late even by the standards we have come to expect
Here are the places you might expect to find it, if you are playing 'hunt the new criminal law which is going to impact on tens of millions of people's lives in 8 hours time' along with me
Here is my best guess at what the rules are going to look like - but the devil as always will be in the detail and we don't have it yet. How are people meant to plan the lives around this?
I have also been told that some journalists have been briefed about the detail but are *under embargo* until tomorrow!!!
Difficult to emphasise how ridiculous that is
It's 5:15pm. New laws in force tomorrow. Everyone's (in England) everyday lives affected profoundly. Are they just... not going to publish anything this time?
Perfectly possible they are still arguing over the detail, by the way
Which is what happens when you allow (Parliament! This is on you) the Executive to pass criminal laws without prior approval. No need for prior warning or debate.
Less than six hours to go
I have just realised that waiting for Covid regulations Twitter is an (even more) boring version of waiting for football transfers Twitter
“Announce Regulations!”
I don’t think they have ever been this late. There must be a row going on
Still nothing. Weird. And bad
So this is where we are at 23:08 on the night before the new 'rule of 6' apparently comes into force. The government website says tomorrow. Huge curtailments on everyone in England's private and family lives. And yet, extraondinarily, the laws themselves have not been published!
This is no small thing. Since 26 March, over 50 sets of lockdown laws have been brought in by a flick of Matt Hancock's pen, with no prior parliamentary input or vote, using a procedure which was designed for emergencies but appears to now be a permanent state of affairs...
... Generally, laws have appeared a day or two before they come into force. That in itself is highly problematic, because people need to know and understand the law of the land and this gives them almost no time to do so. But this is the most extreme delay yet.
It is a basic principle of the common law and human rights law that people cannot be punished for laws they cannot access or hope to understand. What will the police do tomorrow? Have the laws come into force without being published? It's a real mess
The Divisional Court has ruled that the Government acted unlawfully and irrationally when deciding not to implement the full funding recommendation in Lord Bellamy’s Criminal Legal Aid Review.
I had the rare honour of acting for my professional colleagues, Criminal Law Solicitors Association (@CrimeSolicitors) and the London Criminal Courts Solicitors Association (@lccsa), the Interested Parties in the case. Their press release is below.
The Claimant @TheLawSociety was superbly represented by Tom de la Mare KC @thebrieftweet, Gayatri Sarathy and Emmeline Plews of @BlackstoneChbrs, instructed by John Halford of Bindmans LLP Gayatri Sarathy and Emmeline Plews of Blackstone Chambers, instructed by John Halford of @BindmansLLP.
The amount of work which went into putting the case together and presenting the oral arguments, and standing up for the rule of law, was extraordinary - a credit to the profession.
Together with the Law Society, the CLSA and the LCCSA provided the Court with a large number of witness statements from solicitors up and down the country, at every level of seniority, describing the relentless, physically demanding and emotionally draining nature of criminal defence work and the chronic underfunding which has led to a crisis in the retention of solicitors who are leaving in their droves for better pay and conditions that can be found elsewhere.
The Government response to the Criminal Legal Aid Review utterly failed to grasp the extent of the crisis. Despite the review recommending a 15% increase to solicitors fees as “no more than a minimum starting point”, it increased fees by only 9% with a further 2% promised this year.
The ruling today confirms that the Government response to the review was so flawed as to be unlawful and irrational.
In today’s ruling Lord Justice Singh and Mr Justice Jay described the evidence we submitted from our members alongside the Law Society as “a mass of convergent evidence from honest, professional people working up and down the country”, which is “cogent”, “impressive” and “compelling”, and which “brings home [that] women and men working up and down the country at all hours of the day and night, in difficult and stressful circumstances, carrying out an essential service which depends to a large extent on their goodwill and sense of public duty”.
Some very public-facing comments by Lord Reed in the opening of his summary of the judgment:
- Policy is not that the UK will process asylum claims whilst people are in Rwanda, Rwanda will process them (despite the former often being claimed)
- The non-refoulement principle is contained in a number of treaties not just the European Convention on Human Rights and Human Rights Act
Prediction is a mug's game but if I were giving a public judgment rejecting the government's appeal this is how I would begin it!
This is a beautifully clear summary of the relevant legal principles. A model of its form - plain English, focussed on the public
The Home Secretary acted unlawfully by accommodating, since December 2021, thousands of unaccompanied child asylum seekers in hotels. Kent Council also acted unlawfully in passing on responsibility for them.
A judgment suffused with humanity, legal rigour and common sense from Mr Justice Chamberlain, starting from changing the parties' preferred acronym to emphasise the human element.
The House of Commons Privileges Committee has reported on the conduct of MPs who impugned 'the integrity of that Committee and its members' and attempted 'to lobby or intimidate those members or to encourage others to do so'
This is the suggestion of contempt based on Erskine May (the Parliamentary procedure bible) - which I think is quite convincing. The comments of members about the Privileges Committee being essentially corrupted were very arguably over the line
One point which I think was striking about the MPs who criticised the report is none of them seemed to point to any particular finding they disagreed with. They just went for the committee and the individuals on it.