As Graham Zellick steps down as chairman of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, he tells of his fears that budget cuts could seriously impede the body’s work.

‘I do not think we feature very much on the radar,’ says Professor Graham Zellick, retiring chairman of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). ‘We are a bit of the governmental machine that just gets on with the job.’

At the end of this month, Prof Zellick steps down after five years at the helm of the independent body set up to investigate miscarriages of justice. Overlooked the CCRC might be, but the chairman is intent on making one point very clear to his political masters before he leaves.

In a remarkably frank assessment, Prof Zellick describes the consequences of budget cuts on his organisation in the latest CCRC annual report. The watchdog faces losing about £300,000 a year, allowing for inflation, over the next three years. Staff were ‘frustrated… angry and dispirited’, he wrote. The legal academic also predicted that his successor (yet to be announced) faces ‘melancholic challenges… as damaging in practice as they are demoralising in prospect’.

Defence lawyers fear that cuts will have a crippling impact on an essential component of the criminal justice system. Zellick, previously vice-chancellor of the University of London, is not attempting to disguise his own frustration. ‘We are talking about relatively small sums of money,’ he says. ‘If you compare our £8 million budget with the amount of money spent on the other side by the police and Crown Prosecution Service, it is not even a crumb off the table.’

Miscarriage campaigners have long been alarmed by the political rhetoric of New Labour. ‘It is perhaps the biggest miscarriage of justice in today’s system when the guilty walk away unpunished,’ said Tony Blair in 2002. It was in the same speech that the then prime minister set out his policy for ‘rebalancing’ the justice system away from the defendant and towards the victim.

So, are these cuts politically driven? ‘No, absolutely not,’ insists Prof Zellick. ‘No one has singled us out. However it’s also true that no one has rescued us from the consequences of across-the-board cuts.’ He describes the non-discriminatory aspect of ‘across-the-board cuts’ as ‘mindless’ and particularly corrosive for a relatively small organisation which has ‘one function’ – to clear up the mistakes of the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts.

The stress point for the CCRC has always been waiting times. That has been the case since the new watchdog inherited a large and controversial historical caseload from a discredited Home Office C3 unit in 1997. As of March this year, the CCRC was taking five months to place an application from a prisoner with a case reviewer for complex cases. It was a noteworthy achievement for an organisation that in 2006 reported waiting times running at about 20 months for ‘in-custody’ applications.

How long is it acceptable for an innocent person to be in prison before their case is reviewed? ‘There is no acceptable waiting time,’ Prof Zellick replies. ‘We should be able to start work on cases as soon as we have all the necessary files and papers. Our object has always been to eliminate waiting periods entirely, subject only to a few weeks that it might take to pull the papers together.’ But, as he readily acknowledges, cash cuts mean longer waiting times.

It is a grim prospect for the small band of lawyers who specialise in miscarriage work. ‘The whole reason why the CCRC was set up was to investigate potential miscarriages and any reduction in funding would mean that they would be in less of a position to investigate,’ says Jeremy Moore, of Manchester-based Carter Moore, who represents Barry George. George was recently found not guilty of murdering BBC television presenter Jill Dando outside her London home in 1999. Moore pays tribute to the efforts of the CCRC in one of its highest-profile successes. ‘A case like Barry George needed a hell of a lot of resources putting into it and whether they would be able to do that in the future is a great concern,’ Moore says.

Defence lawyers fear that the combination of cuts at the CCRC and the impact of the Carter reforms could have a devastating impact on the investigation of miscarriage cases. The Criminal Appeals Lawyers Association (CALA) is lobbying the Legal Services Commission to set up an accredited panel of specialist appeal lawyers to police standards of representation.

What difference does legal representation make to the prospects of an application? ‘It depends on the lawyers,’ Prof Zellick says. ‘Sometimes it doesn’t. If the lawyers aren’t any good it is an enormous hindrance.’ Does the CCRC see a lot of cowboy-lawyers? ‘We see a number,’ he says.

Last year, the CCRC ‘closed’ a total of 1,087 cases, referring only 28 cases to the Court of Appeal. During that period, the appeal judges ruled on 46 individual cases and of those just under two-thirds (65%) resulted in a quashed conviction or a reduced sentence. The CCRC’s success rate (the proportion of referrals being overturned by the appeal judges) runs at around 70%.

Critics, from defence lawyers in CALA through to campaigning groups such as the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation, co-founded by Paddy Hill, one of the Birmingham Six, reckon that figure reflects an overly conservative organisation that is too sensitive to criticism from the Appeal judges. CALA chair Campbell Malone, a partner at Bolton-based firm Stephensons, argues that for the CCRC to accurately reflect the statutory test for referrals (that there has to be ‘a real possibility’ of the conviction being quashed) the figure should be around 55%. ‘I think he’s wrong,’ says Prof Zellick. ‘Also, it wouldn’t be in the public interest for us to send them another load of cases every year when the conviction isn’t going to be upheld. Who is going to benefit from that?’

‘I think that the legislature, possibly without realising what they were doing, for once got it right,’ Prof Zellick says. The 70% figure is ‘about right’ and ‘it leaves sufficient scope for the Court of Appeal to have its say and it means that we don’t clog the courts with large numbers of unmeritorious cases’.

What about the suggestion that the CCRC is too cosy with the appeal judges? ‘Absurd’, replies Prof Zellick. ‘Our work by statute is tied up with their assessment of what is a safe or unsafe conviction.’ Instead, Prof Zellick describes the relationship between the Appeal judges and his organisation as one of ‘creative tension’.

So have any of the judiciary’s refusals to overturn convictions caused him personal unease? He insists not but adds: ‘However I do believe that the appeal court should be readier to quash convictions even in the absence of new arguments or evidence where they have reservations about safety of convictions.’ That was the ‘big complaint’ of the Royal Commission chaired by Lord Runciman, he says. That commission was set up in the wake of the Birmingham Six trial which sent seismic shockwaves through the criminal justice system and led to the creation of the CCRC. ‘My impression is that the court is less inclined to do that now than it was then,’ he says. ‘That is regrettable.’

Jon Robins is a freelance journalist.