Alison Saunders is right to step down as she must take responsibility for CPS failings

Her 32-year record will always be rightly remembered for her successful pursuit of two of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence, but the role of DPP was a bed of nails

Saunders maintains she did not wish to renew her contract (PA)

Whoever decided that Alison Saunders should stand down in October as director of public prosecutions – she maintains she did not wish to renew her contract – it is plain that her tenure in the office has been controversial, if not tumultuous.

Her 32-year record as a career civil servant lawyer that culminated in her appointment as DPP in 2013 will always be rightly remembered for her successful pursuit of two of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence. Her career was distinguished by a quietly effective dedication to the Crown Prosecution Service, and it was one of the main reasons why she was the first DPP to “rise through the ranks” to the very top. Her performance after the riots of 2011 in processing and exacting appropriate results for an extraordinary volume of cases of disorder was especially admired.

However, the role of DPP has proved a bed of nails for her. She has defended her record and the staff, understandably, against allegations of incompetence made with the benefit of hindsight, and by those who do not have to take responsibility for such momentous decisions. To an extent she may have been the victim of changes in public opinion and an overexposure to the interests of sections of the media. She may well have felt, in the circumstances of the Leveson Report and widespread revulsion at press hacking of phone messages and emails, that she had little choice but to prosecute some journalists for breaking the law in securing leaked information.

Nonetheless, there was only one successful prosecution, and even that was overturned. Today, by contrast to the fevered atmosphere earlier in the decade, the second stage of the Leveson Inquiry into the links between the press and the police and other public officials has been abandoned. At all events, prosecuting editors and reporters was never going to secure Saunders glowing reviews.

Similarly, the VIP child abuse scandal led to the confused on-off prosecution of the former MP Greville Janner. Again, the climate of public opinion and press interest placed additional pressures on the DPP’s office. She suffered the ignominy of having her initial judgment not to prosecute Janner overturned, an unprecedented event. That can only have damaged morale and the standing of the service, even though Janner was in fact eventually judged to be unfit to stand trial anyway, more or less as she first determined.

Such vicissitudes come with the job of DPP, and are at least in part compensated for by the salary of around £200,000 and the prestige of the position. Journalists or stray lawyers second-guessing decisions or making simplistic populist judgments are the normal background noise that anyone in the criminal justice system should safely ignore.

The one signal and systemic failure of the CPS under Saunders – and many of her predecessors – is the manifest failure to ensure the duty of disclosure of evidence to defence lawyers is properly discharged. For that there can be no excuse. History is littered with famous cases of miscarriages of justice as a result of such failings, only some of which were rectified by long-delayed pardons and other remedies, and some, bathetically, arriving posthumously. It is perhaps inherent in the adversarial system that there is a bias among prosecutors towards suppression of facts unhelpful to the prospects of a successful prosecution. Still, every DPP has to ensure it is resisted, and to be responsible when it is not.

The only favourable thing that can be said about the series of high-profile rape cases that recently collapsed because of disclosure failures is that they did so before much more irreparable harm was done to the liberty, health and reputation of those accused. On the other hand, the plaintiffs – who claimed they had been raped – would have felt they had not been served justice, and it could act as a possible deterrent for rape victims coming forward in the future.

No doubt a lack of resources in the criminal justice system is one novel factor in these failures, especially in an age when vast quantities of digital and social media data can provide vital evidence. No doubt Saunders is right to point to the real-terms cuts in the budget for justice as impediments to her work; no doubt, too, Saunders is right to defend her staff against any lazy journalistic “insult” about their integrity.

Nonetheless something fundamental and very wrong happened to the way the way the Crown Prosecution Service told defence teams about evidence, and that represented a major threat to the integrity of the justice system, certainly as it related to such crimes. The – unrelated – travails of the parole system and the Worboys case have added to a wider sense of unease.

The collapse of the rape cases may not have been Saunders’ personal fault by error of commission or omission, but she had to take responsibility for what occurred on her watch. That too is something that comes with the job. Saunders did her very best in a difficult job, but it is time for a fresh start and fresh leadership.