Who – at least among those of a Conservative mind — didn’t feel a pang of pleasure at the news that Sadiq Khan has been convicted of failing to pay road tax? Won’t that serve him right, he who has been merrily handing out fines to people who fall foul of his Ultra Low Emissions Zone?
Well no, actually. Whatever you think of Khan and ULEZ, it shouldn’t blind you to the outrage against justice that has just been committed against him. Khan was convicted by a magistrate’s court in Herefordshire two weeks ago and handed a £220 fine, plus £85 costs and demanded to pay the £35.84 in road tax which he failed to pay.
But here is the outrage: Khan says that he doesn’t own the car. Moreover, he says that he didn’t have the opportunity to defend himself because he didn’t even know about the prosecution. How come? Because it was one of hundreds of thousands of cases prosecuted each year under the ‘Single Justice Procedure’ (SJP), which was introduced under Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015. This allows large numbers of cases to be hurried through magistrates’ courts on an industrial scale. They are heard by a single magistrate and legal adviser. The Magistrates’ Association has complained that its members do not have enough time to consider the merits of a case. Nor do the legal advisers who are supposed to support them seem to be up to the job.
Northern Rail (a renationalised rail company, it might be added) managed to get 59,000 cases of fare evasion through the courts before one aggrieved defendant successfully pointed out that fare evasion was an offence which was not supposed to be prosecuted under the SJP, leading to all 59,000 convictions to be overturned. Shouldn’t one of those magistrates or legal advisers have spotted that? I say fare ‘evasion’ in the official sense, by the way: the aggrieved passenger who succeeded in overturning his conviction says he had tried to pay his fare but the ticket machine at the station from which he departed was broken. He tried again to pay on arrival, but was intercepted by a revenue protection officer who decided he should be prosecuted without his story of the broken ticket machine even being checked.
In 73 per cent of cases the defendant in an SJP case does not even enter a plea, and is pretty well automatically convicted. That should set alarm bells ringing. Are three quarters of people accused of criminal offences really so laid back that they couldn’t be bothered to plead guilty or not guilty – or are they not actually receiving the notification that they are being prosecuted? Under the rules of the SJP the court doesn’t even have to send out by recorded delivery – just the ordinary post. Reminders are not sent. That is why we end up with people being convicted for not having a TV licence when they have been in hospital, have had no chance to pay and did not even realise they were being prosecuted because the notice is sitting on their doormat at home. In Khan’s case it seems the letter, along with previous demands for road tax sent by the DVLA, went to an address down the road from the TfL offices where the vehicle was registered as being kept. Does Khan really have a 24-year-old Nissan Micra registered at his place of work rather than his home address? I doubt it. It seems to me more likely that it is owned by someone who didn’t want to pay ULEZ and, as a wheeze, thought they would address it in Khan’s name instead.
Surely, the MPs who nodded through the SJP realise that there are people who live in flats and shared accommodation whose post frequently goes missing. The SJP is discriminating against people at the margins of society: those who live in temporary accommodation, who are mentally ill or who have learning difficulties.
He will be culpable if he does not now use his influence on the government to reform the wretched SJP
Where is the European Convention on Human Rights when you need it? It clearly states that a defendant being brought to trial must ‘be informed promptly, in a language which he understands and in detail, of the nature and cause against him’. We have ended up with a bizarre legal system where, if you are, say, a gun-runner for an Albanian drugs gang, the full weight of human rights laws to protect you, even to the point of avoiding deportation if your children don’t like the chicken nuggets available back home, but where for people accused of minor crimes human rights go strangely missing.
My sympathies on this – if not on much else – lie with Sadiq Khan. Nevertheless, he will be culpable if he does not now use his influence on the government to reform the wretched SJP and end the miscarriages of justice.
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