Alison Saunders was on a train to Durham when she heard the guilty verdicts in the trial of Max Clifford.
“I usually travel in the quiet carriage, so I can’t get phonecalls, but I had a text telling me all about it.”
The director of public prosecutions is smiling. Did it truly feel like result in to celebrate?
“Yes and no. It’s never ever wonderful, is it? A guilty verdict signifies victims have been abused, and for them it is been a long journey. I was pleased they have been believed so from that point of view it’s a vindication.”
Two weeks ago, nonetheless, when the jury was sent residence the day just before Great Friday, it looked as if the sky might be about to fall in on Saunders’s head.
Six months earlier she had taken up her occupation as director of the Crown Prosecution Service’s 7,000 taxpayer-funded personnel with a pledge to make the organisation more sensitive to victims. Now it looked as if the selection to prosecute a clutch of public figures for sex offences dating back to the 1970s may well demonstrate disastrous – for Saunders and the CPS, for everyone who believes convicting rapists issues, but over all for the victims of sex crimes who may be discouraged from reporting them by the spectacle plastered across the media of so many substantial-profile failures.
Items acquired even worse when, following his acquittal for rape, Conservative MP and former deputy Commons speaker Nigel Evans attacked the CPS. His trial had been a “very public execution attempt”, he stated, and likened it to a “witch hunt”. He demanded the CPS repay his £130,000 legal fees, suggested a statute of limitations, and complained about the existing law, whereby accusers in sex circumstances – but not defendants – are granted anonymity.
Colleagues sympathised, with at least five MPs joining a chorus of complaints. At Evans’s request, Labour property affairs select committee chair Keith Vaz wrote to the CPS Inspectorate asking “no matter whether we need to make adjustments”. Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg agreed there had been “queries to response”.
Coming on the back of not-guilty verdicts in the trials of DJ Dave Lee Travis and Coronation Street actors William Roache and Michael Le Vell, Evans’ trial was witnessed by some as proof that police and prosecutors had received carried away. Established to prove themselves after the scandalous failure to consider complaints about Jimmy Savile seriously, they had gone “fishing” for complaints and then “bundled” them with each other, top to the several fees laid towards Travis, Evans and Clifford. Following the evidence offered by some witnesses in earlier situations, Lord Macdonald, a single of Saunders’s predecessors as DPP and now a Liberal Democrat peer, advised a newspaper that prosecutors were in danger of treating a series of weak situations as amounting to a powerful 1.
Sitting in her leading-floor workplace, with a view dominated by the Shard, but stretching from the City of London to Crystal Palace, Saunders dismisses this notion. “We don’t believe 3 weak instances make a robust a single,” she says steadily. “This is not a new phenomenon. With any variety of offending – assault or shoplifting or theft – if there’s a series of offences, we’ll place them with each other. If there’s a pattern of offending across a time period of time, that provides the jury a context.”
She will overview the Nigel Evans situation, as a lot of this kind of high-profile instances are reviewed. Does she anticipate to be hauled over the coals at her subsequent meeting with Dominic Grieve, her boss and the attorney standard?
“No,” she says, and laughs for the first time since we began talking. “He understands. The attorney basic understands how we make decisions.”
As well as the nation’s chief prosecutor, Saunders is now head of a massive public-sector organisation, and seems to delight in this element of her occupation. She peppers her conversation with modern day management-talk, talks of constructing “resilience” and “flexibility” in her workforce, is proud of the CPS’s e-finding out university, of “joint improvement plans” with police, “personal finding out accounts” for staff, a new “management development programme” for managers and “victim liaison units” in which skills is shared.
She joined the organisation in 1986, is the initial DPP appointed from within the CPS’s personal ranks, and says her appointment last November was the highlight of her job – alongside the conviction in 2012 of Gary Dobson and David Norris for the murder of Stephen Lawrence, following her selection to prosecute them for a second time. Rightly proud of her very own achievements, she also radiates loyalty to her organisation and sees herself as a manifestation of its achievement. “It truly is a reflection of in which the support is that it has grown 1 of its own. That is been a real boost, not just for me, but for the complete service.”
An expert in situations involving youthful and vulnerable witnesses, Saunders is now in a place to encourage this agenda, and has lobbied police and crime commissioners for a lot more expert support. “I feel ladies have had, as witnesses and victims, a raw deal,” she says. The new target on female victims, and difficult stereotypes by means of expert coaching in domestic violence instances, is welcome, but “lengthy overdue”.
Saunders is not the first female DPP. In the boardroom, exactly where portraits of all former DPPs hang, there is one female currently: Dame Barbara Mills. But she would like progress for girls to be portion of her legacy “from all kinds of perspectives. I give talks to college students about ladies in the law. That is the place I think the CPS is wonderful. We’re now more than 60% females, we have received a truly very good track record.”
When she took over the work she said that investing in education her employees was a priority, along with supporting victims. Born in Aberdeen, educated in south London, Saunders does not fit the posh, white, male mould of the legal elite in this nation, and obviously wants the CPS to supply an substitute profession path for girls. But with 28% cuts to the CPS budget, and lower scores in a recent employees satisfaction survey, is this probably?
“It’s really difficult. I’m not going to say it is simple,” she says, before listing efficiency cost savings like minimizing London premises from forty to two. In spite of cuts, she says with blue eyes gleaming, performance has improved. There are issues – this kind of as getting far better support from police forces and far more early guilty pleas – that cuts have “helped us to do, forced us to do”.
If cuts are so useful, would she like to see far more of them?
“No,” she says, and laughs. “I think there will come a time when we can not take any a lot more cuts with out sitting down and asking: ‘What does a prosecution service do? What can we do?’ We haven’t reached that level however. I’m not entirely sure when that point would be.”
Some individuals would say that in the wider legal context, that point is now. This week noticed a dramatic stand-off between government and judiciary when Alexander Cameron QC, elder brother of the prime minister, persuaded a judge to keep – or cancel – the trial of five males accused of fraud on grounds that it was not possible for them to secure the legal representation they needed to ensure a fair trial. Yesterday the Financial Perform Authority, prosecutor of the case, announced it would appeal.
Saunders will be viewing, not least since the CPS has three of its very own fraud circumstances in the pipeline. The situation arose simply because of cuts to legal help, and the refusal of barristers with the essential specailist encounter to work for fees which have been diminished by 30%.
Does Saunders feel barristers should agree to work for significantly less? She won’t say. Nor will she say what she thinks of the scenario in which justice secretary Chris Grayling will discover himself if this week’s choice is upheld.
She also refuses to comment on Britain’s above-total prisons – “that’s a matter for sentencing policy” – even though she does not get any pleasure from sending criminals there: “If that is what the law says has to occur, then it does. I get fulfillment from bringing instances to court and seeing justice being completed.”
Saunders’ predecessor, Keir Starmer, who was witnessed as an astute operator politically, is operating for Labour on a feasible “victims’ law” and may stand as an MP. Saunders insists her interest in the victims of crime is not political at all.
“The explanation I’m hunting at victims is because we have victims who seem every single single day. They’re the ones who allow us to deliver cases ahead of a court, and I consider we owe it to them to improve the operate we do and ask how we can assist.”
This consists of following up following trials have concluded, and Saunders has written to Max Clifford’s victims asking to meet them. She presumably would not meet the witnesses in a failed prosecution, such as these who accused Nigel Evans or Dave Lee Travis of abuse?
“I have,” she says speedily, before turning her answer into a generalisation: “Not automatically the ones in these cases, but I have met victims in other instances exactly where we have not succeeded.”
Saunders has the conviction of Roy Whiting for the abduction and murder of eight-yr-old Sarah Payne on her CV, and supports media campaigns on criminal justice problems. What did she think of Rebekah Brooks’ naming and shaming of paedophiles in the News of the Planet?
“Some of the campaigns run by papers, not just Rebekah Brooks, but other papers, have been extremely instrumental in changing factors and raising awareness of issues. I know Sarah’s law [making it possible for entry to the Sex Offenders Register] was campaigned for, which was a great point to do. With some issues, FGM [female genital mutilation] for illustration, the campaigns that papers have run have been really very good. The Evening Regular is undertaking some thing on asset recovery. I believe these campaigns are really essential and get issues to a wider audience than we can.”
Saunders’ decision to deliver the UK’s first prosecution for FGM against 31-12 months-outdated east London physician, Dhanuson Dharmasena, who is alleged to have committed the crime in the process of stitching a woman’s vagina soon after childbirth, has been criticised as properly as praised, due to the fact Dharmasena was not accountable for the first process, but Saunders is bullish.
“The situations in this situation do fit the legislation, otherwise we wouldn’t be prosecuting it. We are very keen to make certain that wherever attainable we are hunting at FGM situations. We’ve had extremely number of referred to us. We’re still in double figures.”
She says prevention is “far far better” than prosecution, and suggests a new strategy to the dilemma may well contain “more proactive perform by the police – police going to airports when they know there are times of 12 months individuals go for FGM ceremonies so they can talk to men and women on the way there or on the way back”.
She praises the awareness-raising amid teachers championed by the Guardian, which campaigned for education secretary Michael Gove to write to each and every college.
“There are some men and women in England and Wales who nevertheless do not know about FGM and may possibly not select up the signs. I think it’s significantly much better now, but five or 10 years in the past, if you had been a instructor, you may possibly not have thought, ‘Why is this woman currently being taken out of college to go to her home country at a certain time of year?’ Whereas now I feel teachers are extremely mindful, because of the campaigns that are going on, and we have had cases where teachers have contacted police or social solutions.”
Outside her constructing, the Guardian’s photographer asks Saunders to perch on the concrete barrier that divides the cycle lane from other targeted traffic with the dome of St Paul’s behind her – just as a picture of the cathedral sits behind the desk in her workplace.
Good-natured and jokey as she waits for the photographer to set up, Saunders says: “I really feel like performing this.” She flexes the muscle groups in both arms, strongman-design.
“You can do that,” I say eagerly, for the camera, being aware of she will not.
The director of public prosecutions drops her hands, and presses her brightly painted fingernails together in front of her.
Alison Saunders, director of public prosecutions: "I consider girls have had, as witnesses and victims, a raw deal"
