Friday 14 August 2015

On Kids Company

The sudden closure of the well-known charity Kids Company last week has been a major news story, and one about which everyone seemingly has an opinion.

It may be premature to make up one’s mind about Kids Company without full information, but one thing is for sure: yet another gap has opened up in the provision of services and assistance for vulnerable children. It may yet be shown that Kids Company was poorly managed or financially irresponsible, yet few would dispute that it provided services that assisted some of the most vulnerable among us: children at risk of homelessness, drug or alcohol addiction, physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, truancy, and imprisonment, to name just a few risk factors for these children.

The loss of Kids Company should be seen as part of a broader picture of cuts to services affecting the most vulnerable among us, and particularly children. So what should be done?

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a law firm, we consider that a crucial step would be to restore legal aid that would assist children. This is relevant in many areas of law, including immigration, family law, social welfare, and housing law. In all of these areas, cases that historically would have been in scope for legal aid funding have been cut from scope, or the test for legal aid has become more stringent, excluding many who should be able to access it. To look at it from a prison law and criminal law perspective, many of these vulnerable children may be the children of prisoners, or at risk of imprisonment themselves.

In particular, the restoration of legal aid in the areas of prison law that have been cut from scope would certainly assist: for example, it used to be possible to get legal aid for prisoners in relation to categorisation, so that they could get moved to a lower security category; and for transfers, so that they could access relevant offending behaviour programmes and move to prisons which are easier for family members to visit. All of this assists in the rehabilitation of the prisoner and the maintenance of their ties to their family, supporting vulnerable children and prisoners alike.

The benefit of this is that the funding would be restored to organisations such as law firms which are properly regulated and audited, lessening the chance of severe financial mismanagement which is more of a risk in charities which are arguably not so closely regulated or held so firmly accountable for the use of their funds.


The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the firm or its partners.

Appeal News from Wainwright & Cummins

This week Wainwright & Cummins had two successes at the Court of Appeal, with two appeals against sentence brought by the Prison and Criminal law teams granted on behalf of imprisoned clients.

Appeal #1

The first appeal, on Tuesday, was for credit of 38 days that the client, Mr B, spent remanded on tagged bail before his conviction. The sentencing Judge did not state in court that Mr B should have the 38 days credited towards his sentence despite the requirement to do so in s240A of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Therefore we brought the appeal to have the 38 days credited. We got agreement from the prosecution that Mr B was entitled to the days, and on Tuesday 11/08, the appeal was successful and the 38 days were credited towards Mr B’s sentence.

This led to the Prison law department at Wainwright & Cummins being extremely busy all day, because with the 38 days now credited towards his sentence, Mr B was due to be released immediately, as he was only 36 days from release. So we spent much of the day first chivvying the Court to send the Order to the prison, and then chivvying the prison to process the Order once it was received, in order to release Mr B!

Appeal #2

The second appeal was today (Friday 14/08) and involved a slightly more complex legal argument than for Mr B: that an extended sentence passed on our client Mr V was unlawful and that it should be substituted with a standard determinate sentence.

After some wrangling with the Court in pre-appeal correspondence, the legal issues were sorted and the appeal itself granted this morning without the need for extensive legal argument from our Solicitor Advocate Mr Curtis Myrie: it was clear to all that the sentence passed was unlawful and it was therefore quashed. Mr V will not be released from prison earlier, but he will spend a full year and a half less on licence than he would otherwise have done had the appeal not been successful.


Overall we are very proud of our success this week and look forward to replicating it frequently in weeks to come!