13/07/2022
Cachella Smith
76 per cent of magistrates gave remote hearings the thumbs down during a Justice Committee panel on adult custodial remand.
The Chief of the Magistrate’s Association, Tom Franklin, has said that the move to remote hearings “is something that concerns us”.
He clarified that he wasn’t saying that there isn’t a place for remote hearings, but that the “headlong rush into it without proper research” was a concern.
From a survey the Magistrates’ Association conducted, he cited figures of 86 per cent of magistrates saying they had encountered technology difficulties, while 76 per cent said that remote links with adult defendants had made communication more difficult.
He explained magistrates were particularly concerned about vulnerable defendants and that very often magistrates weren’t told in advance about vulnerabilities of the defendant.
To date, however, there has been no research into the experience of defendants.
“Taking the maxim of justice – justice needs to be seen to be done as well as done – that feels like a very big whole in understanding the impact of remote hearings if we don’t know how it is perceived by defendants,” he said.
“The reality, particularly when it was being done through police stations, was probably like all of our experiences being on zoom meetings where you’re the one online and you can’t see whose speaking, you can’t hear them and that is very concerning so far as the experience of defendants.”
He was supported in the view by former Chair of the Magistrates Association, John Bache, who said: “It’s an important decision to decide to send someone to custody I would much prefer to have someone in front of me, rather than just on the screen.
“I can’t say figures, I don’t think anybody has got the figures, but it’s much easier talking to someone face to face we all know that.”
The remand population has been increasing since June 2019.
The number of those in remand stood at 12,747 on March 31 2022 – the highest March remand population since 2009, but also the second consecutive quarter which has seen a decrease.
The untried prison population had fallen by 2 per cent compared with March 2021, but the convicted unsentenced population had risen by 17 per cent.
As of March 2021, one third of remand prisoners had been held beyond the legal limit ahead of trial.
The panel of Tom Franklin and John Bache were asked about the reasons for this increase, with Tom Franklin responding “what really strikes me in this area of remand is the lack of data, so we are grappling in the dark to know what’s going on.”
He said that anecdotally there was no perception of a massive change in the flow of those remanded, and that it was entirely possible it could be due to Covid backlogs.
Currently, however, the data does not exist to support or disprove that.