Shropshire Star comment: Remand system is ridiculous

If the new remand system for Shropshire is the answer, then we need somebody to start asking better questions.

Week by week, more and more examples are coming to light to reveal just how ridiculous a system that exports Shropshire remand cases miles and miles away to Kidderminster is proving to be.

This is not merely a matter of causing inconvenience to people in Shropshire who are being forced to travel, although the ‘get on yer bike’ attitude to our rural area behind the new system is an affront in itself. A very serious aspect is that it is leading to direct injustice, with people being held in custody – and in law these are innocent people unless and until there is a finding of guilt – when previously they would not have been.

This is the equivalent of gratuitously handing out jail sentences for administrative convenience, rather than in furtherance of the ends of justice.

In putting the new arrangements in place earlier this year the Ministry of Justice had already shown that it was going to turn a deaf ear to those whom it presumably viewed as ‘little Salopians’ trying to protect a fiefdom enjoying local justice dispensed locally.

The deaf ear approach has been the policy for those years in which people in Shropshire unsuccessfully tried to keep local criminal courts open. All the bigger towns had magistrates courts, true community courts where magistrates became familiar with the ‘regulars’. There was even, believe it or not, a magistrates court on the Woodside housing estate in Telford.

Gradually almost all this has been swept away, not really in the name of progress, but in the name of saving money. Those savings are only in a global sense, as for people using the courts, who are often among the poorer strata of society, there have been no savings whatsoever.

While officialdom may see complaints from Shropshire about the new remand system as outdated parochialism, what cannot be so easily dismissed is concrete examples of farcical, and unjust, consequences.

In one of the latest cases a woman appeared before Kidderminster Magistrates Court and was locked up for five days. This was not a sentence of the court. It was, according to her solicitor from Telford, because the probation service at the Kidderminster court was not able to carry out the drug treatment assessment which the court had decided she needed. This meant she had to go back to Telford – with the next Telford court five days away.

And a Shropshire solicitor faced with the prospect of his client being continually bounced from one court to the other says he successfully persuaded Telford Magistrates Court to hear the case and sentence the man, in defiance of the new policy that all Shropshire’s remand hearings must take place in Kidderminster.

So here we have the proof of the pudding. It is such a bad system that people are starting to try to get round it.

Despite Shropshire’s objections, all would have lost their force if it worked well in practice. Yet after several months in operation, it has been shown to be something verging on a disaster in practice, a “magic roundabout” in the words of one Shropshire solicitor. This roundabout ride is leaving a lot of people in Shropshire heartily sick.

There is that old cliche of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The old way was not broke. The new way is broke. It remains to be seen if the Ministry of Justice is prepared to eat some humble pie and fix it.