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England and Wales High Court (Senior Courts Costs Office) Decisions |
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You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> England and Wales High Court (Senior Courts Costs Office) Decisions >> Regina v Spence [2022] EWHC 1785 (SCCO) (07 July 2022) URL: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Costs/2022/1785.html Cite as: [2022] EWHC 1785 (SCCO) |
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SENIOR COURTS COSTS OFFICE
Royal Courts of Justice London, WC2A 2LL |
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B e f o r e :
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REGINA | ||
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SPENCE | ||
Judgment on Appeal under Regulation 29 of the Criminal Legal Aid (Remuneration) Regulations 2013 |
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HTML VERSION OF JUDGMENT
Crown Copyright ©
The appropriate additional payment, to which should be added the sum of £1000.00 (exclusive of VAT) for costs and the £100 paid on appeal, should accordingly be made to the Applicant.
Costs Judge Whalan
"1. Interpretation
…
(2) For the purposes of this Schedule, the number of pages of prosecution evidence served on the court must be determined in accordance with sub-paragraphs (3) to (5).
(3) The number of pages of prosecution evidence includes all –
(a) witness statements;
(b) documentary and pictorial exhibits;
(c) records of interviews with the assisted person; and
(d) records of interviews with other defendants,
which form part of the committal or served prosecution documents or which are included in any notice of additional evidence.
(4) Subject to sub-paragraph (5), a document served by the prosecution in electronic form is included in the number of pages of prosecution evidence.
(5) A documentary or pictorial exhibit which –
(a) has been served by the prosecution in electronic form; and
(b) has never existed in paper form,
is not included within the number of pages of prosecution evidence unless the appropriate officer decides that it would be appropriate to include it in the pages of prosecution evidence taking in account the nature of the document and any other relevant circumstances".
20. The issue is whether it is appropriate for the determining officer to reduce the PDF by the number of blank pages that he found. It is not a course of action that, it seems to me, is one that should be widely adopted. The repeated phrase that the calculation of the graduated fee is meant to be mechanistic does not militate towards individual PDFs being scrutinised page by page. I can understand why the determining officer took that approach in this case having decided that the PDF had been created from an Excel spreadsheet which is known for producing blank pages. But it seems to me an approach that could only be adopted in extremist.
21. Mr McCarthy challenged the appropriateness of the determining officer's approach given that it was impossible for solicitors to challenge which pages had been disallowed in the absence of any information. I think there is a good deal of force in Mr McCarthy's point albeit that it is not which, as a matter of practicality, will be difficult to deal with in any proportionate fashion.
22. Ultimately, I have concluded that I should not take the PDF as my starting point, although the determining officer had little choice but to use that document. It is a document (whoever created it) which would appear to be unsatisfactory for the purpose of calculating PPE. The difficulty in challenging the subsequent manipulation of that document by the determining officer only highlights that this is not satisfactory.
23. I prefer to take the view that the document on the DCS is the one which ought to be contemplated, at least in this case. The move towards evidence being produced on the DCS is clear and if there is a reliable page count on that platform, it seems to me to be inevitable that that is the one on which reliance will be placed in due course. Whilst there are practical difficulties in the determining officer not being able to see the document, for the purpose of this case alone, I am prepared to accept Mr McCarthy's information of the page count on the DCS that it contains few if any blank pages as would be expected from the print preview to Excel document.
CJ Rowley went on to "stress that this is a decision made on the specific facts of this case" (24).
It seems to me, however, that when exercising the formal (often quite technical) requirements of the LGFS, the only fair and equitable way of reaching a total PPE count – and in this regard the inclusion of an exhibit of undoubted general relevance – is to adopt the count recorded in the DCS.