I was definitely around in the year 2000, strutting my stuff in wig and gown, but to tell the truth, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 slipped me by.  By way of mitigation, this was the third year of the New Labour Government, and the welter of legislation had reached snow storm proportions.  New Labour, brave New World!

The RIP Act has only recently reached my in-tray, and all for the wrong reasons.  According to the preamble, it was an Act to make provision for and about the interception of communications, the acquisition of data relating to communications, and the carrying out of surveillance.  In two words – Big Brother!

It was enacted ostensibly to help in the war against terror, home grown and imported, and it gave the powers that be the right to snoop and eavesdrop, apparently with impunity, on anybody and everybody who strayed onto their radar.  All very commendable when used properly, and all very worrying when used arbitrarily.

We lived with this Act for the best part of ten years.  Then New Labour became Old Hat, and in May we had a New Dawn.  The newly elected Coalition Government is reviewing the Act and its implementation, and by all accounts, not before time.

A recent survey suggested that public servants are gainfully employed in their designated posts for only 32% of their working day.  A frightening statistic if true, and one of the many reasons why the public sector is being targeted for swingeing cuts.

The picture emerges of all these civil servants with time on their hands, and as the saying goes: “The Devil makes work for idle hands.”  The Mandarins in town and city halls throughout the country woke up to the RIP Act and decided to put it to use to while away the working hours.

Examples of their use of the Act are breathtaking.  One council kept a family under surveillance for many weeks to check if they were living in the same catchment area as the school where they had entered their children.  The council was forced to apologise.  Another council used the Act to spy on residents disposing of their refuse, to see if they were recycling properly or overloading their bins.  Yet another council used the Act to spy on dog walkers, to see if their pets were fouling the pavement.

The list goes on.  Nothing whatsoever to do with the war against terror, and everything to do with unwelcome and unacceptable intrusion into daily life.  Worse still, a monumental waste of public time and money.

Give somebody a whistle, and he will want to blow it.  Give underworked and overpaid civil servants the power to abuse legislation, and they will do so.

The sad reality is that no lessons have been learned by this abuse of power.  Unless they are daily monitored, these councils will continue intruding into our daily lives. 

For all our sakes, let’s hope the Coalition Government brings them to heel, and the sooner the better. RIP.

As the Coalition Government marches towards its date with destiny and the great British public in October, some departments are in warp drive to achieve the necessary savings to balance the budget.

Leading the drive, and with well aimed publicity, is Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary.  He has already signalled the closure of hundreds of courts, the reduction of legal aid across the board, and the burgeoning prison population.

Next on his agenda is the discount to be expected on a custodial sentence in return for an early plea of guilty.  This achieves two laudable aims.  The first is that prison sentences will be shorter, and so relieving the chronic overcrowding, and the second is the enormous saving of court time.

Under the present nebulous regime, the defendant is entitled to a one third discount for a plea of guilty to be indicated “at the first opportunity”.  The jury are out on the exact meaning of this.

Under our system of arrest to conviction, there are three obvious “first opportunities”.  The first is at the police station, when the defendant is interviewed and charged.  The second is at the Magistrates’ Court, if it’s still open, when mode of trial is considered, and the third, for more serious offences, is at the Crown Court.

Statistics show that the number of defendants who take their case to the door of the court before pleading guilty is over 70%.  The cost involved in allotting the necessary court time, assembling a jury panel, getting the witnesses to court, together with solicitors and counsel, is enormous, and it is this ‘waste’ of time and money that Kenneth Clarke now seeks to address.

I am all in favour of discounts for early pleas of guilty, but it may not be as easy as first imagined.  The biggest problem from the outset is the charging process, invariably in the hands of the local Crown Prosecution lawyer.  Time and again they either overcharge, or prefer the wrong charges, and being civil servants, they won’t be told.  This places the burden on the defendant to show that he would have pleaded guilty from the outset to the proper charge, but it is unattractive.

If this initial obstacle can be surmounted, then a fixed discount tariff can be applied, with a 50% starting point for a full and frank confession before charge.  The suggestion that a 10% discount for a guilty plea at the door of the court simply won’t work, as the wavering defendant might decide to chance his arm with the jury, and he has very little to lose.

Keep the 30% discount, even at the door of the court, and with discounts between 50% and 30% on offer, this should make a real difference.

There has been a tremendous fuss following the decision of some County Councils to switch off their static speed cameras, otherwise known as Gatsos.  This is all part of a cost cutting exercise across the public sector, ostensibly to reduce our enormous deficit and start balancing the books.

Almost overnight, the debate has polarised between the motorists, several million by all accounts, who have been caught by these cameras, and regard them as an unnecessary evil, and road safety campaigners of various hues who see them as an essential tool in the great scheme of things.

These cameras have multiplied by several thousand over the past ten years, and have provided a welcome income to the County Councils on whose patch they are stationed.  Problem is the servicing and maintenance, which is considerable, so on balance, they have become a luxury they can no longer afford, or so the argument goes.

For my part, as a law abiding motorist, and you would expect nothing less, they serve a purpose, in much the same way as a marked police car travelling at 65 mph in the slow lane of the motorway.  Once spotted, all approaching vehicles reduce their speed to within the maximum permitted, and crawl past until it is safe to hit the accelerator and speed off into the middle distance.  Speed cameras, helpfully painted in florescent yellow, serve the same purpose.

Some of the more histrionic outbursts from road safety campaigners fall well short of the mark.  One such campaigner had a teenage son who was killed in a car driven by another teenager, which crashed at night whilst driving 80 mph in a 40 mph limit.  Needless to say, the driver was inexperienced, and high on drink and drugs.  It is obvious that no static speed camera could have prevented that accident, and it seems a curious argument to advance in favour of their retention.

The much published decision of named County Councils to switch off their cameras is not the way forward.  Far better to switch off most of them, and leave a few token cameras still working.  To the motorist determined to exceed the speed limit, if he doesn’t know which cameras have been disabled, he will surely slow down at each and every one, just in case it’s still switched on.

In this way, the County Councils will reduce their expenditure, but derive maximum benefit and the thanks of road safety campaigners.  Surely it’s the best of both worlds.

Somerset and the West Country are favourite retirement areas for wrinklies of all shapes and sizes, mainly from oop North, where the climate is less agreeable.

It is akin to the Elephant graveyard, where old bulls and cows come to die, and with the advances in medical science, are taking longer and longer to do so.  In the meantime, they clutter up the check out tills at their local supermarket, and drive home at 4 mph.  Bless them!

Summer time is also a time when the warmer weather brings out the worst in the Great British bull and cow, and no more so than the outfits on show in public.  Whilst this phenomenon is not confined to wrinklies, they do tend to stand out from the herd like a sore toe.  I have learnt to live with singlets, tattoos, shorts displaying legs that should never be on show, even in the privacy of the home, but I draw the line at bare horny feet, with discoloured and unclipped nails, encased in Resurrection sandals.

And where is Health and Safety when you need them most?  It cannot be hygienic under any circumstances for these feet to be paraded when food is being sold.

With this in mind, I have been researching the law on indecent exposure, and correct me if I’m wrong, but there seem to be two separate offences.  The first is the common law offence which, in general terms, covers all open lewdness, grossly scandalous behaviour, and whatever openly outrages decency or is offensive and disgusting, or is injurious to public morals by tending to corrupt the mind and destroy the love of decency, morality and good order.  These are indictable offences with unlimited fines and imprisonment.

There is also an offence of exposure under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which on the face of it, seems to be confined to the male genitals.  If I am right, then there is no offence committed if a female exposes her genitalia.  A curious distinction, and possibly sexist.

I have concluded, sadly, that neither offence covers the indecent exposure of horny feet, and more’s the pity.  But let’s not be fainthearted.  Despite the swingeing cuts in public finances heralded by George Osborne, local councils are still recruiting for completely naff jobs.  So why not a horny foot inspector with ‘on the spot’ fines?

Something needs to be done, and done quickly, to stamp out, or on, this malaise before it reaches epidemic proportions.

It should be blindingly obvious to one and all that with the advent of the Coalition Government, there would have to be compromise between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats if a consensus was to be reached.

This meant that each Party had to abandon some of its “holy cows” which they had assiduously fed and watered during the election campaign.  With cuts in public expenditure and the priority of balancing the national books being an essential part of the agreed agenda, the change in Party policy should come as no surprise.

With this willingness to bend with the political wind comes the decision by Kenneth Clarke, the newly appointed Justice Secretary, to review our whole attitude to crime and punishment, and I for one welcome this decision.  I have argued in earlier articles that the “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality of Little England is misguided and doomed to failure, as the recent past has demonstrated.

The statistics are frightening.  In the space of fifteen years, the prison population has doubled to a record 85,000.  This is not because crime has doubled.  It is simply because sentencing courts in the recent past have been compelled to pass custodial sentences where other sentences were more appropriate.

Crime and punishment has historically been the preserve of the backwoods Tory, but not any more.  It was the outgoing Labour Government which enacted the Criminal Justice Act 2003, a disgraceful and wholly unnecessary piece of legislation, with the stated aim of making convictions easier to obtain and increasing custodial sentences by a factor of ten.

More statistics.  Approximately half of the prison population are serving sentences of 12 months or less.  It costs on average £40,000 per prisoner per annum to keep them locked up.  You do the maths as they say, and all this before you throw into the pot the enormous legal aid budget, in the region of £2 billion.

The argument advanced by Little England is that if you keep offenders locked up, it is safe to walk the street at night.  But with a few rare exceptions, every offender is entitled to release at some time in his life, before he dies of boredom in his cell, and to avoid reoffending, he needs support in the community at all levels.  Surely it is better to use our precious national resources to this end.

Allied to this root and branch review of prison law comes the clarion call to the police from Theresa May, the Home Secretary, to forget about ‘targets’ and concentrate on cutting crime.  Sadly, this message has fallen on deaf ears, the deafest being a handful of Chief Constables who clearly feel uncomfortable about any new initiative which might disrupt their cosy way of life.  Remember Ian Blair?  The enormous salary, subsidised housing benefits, an inflated pension pot, chauffeured cars, entertainment allowances and the best seats in the house, and all in the interests of serving London.

Amazingly, Julie Spence, the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, and one of the most vocal critics of this clarion call, stated, and apparently with a straight face, that just one third of her work is about cutting crime.  She went on to say that her task was to provide a 24/7 social service law enfarcement (sic) agency.  Worse was to come.  She had spoken to half a dozen chief constables and none had differed from her view!  Perhaps she should speak to the people who really matter – the victims of crime!  And speaking of cuts, Julie Spence would be high on my list when heads start to roll.

And what exactly had Theresa May said to ruffle Plod’s feathers?  “I know that some officers like the policing pledge, and some like the comfort of knowing they’ve ticked the boxes.  But targets don’t fight crime. Targets hinder the fight against crime. In scrapping the confidence target and the policing pledge, I couldn’t be any clearer about your mission.  It isn’t a 30 point plan.  It is to cut crime.  No more and no less!”

Amen to that!