Call them criminals not ‘court users’, QC tells officials

THE chairman of the Bar Council has urged the Government to stop describing criminals as “court users” and “customers”.

Andrew Langdon QC complained about the “ministry speak” used to describe people who go to court.

He described such “use of language” as “wretched” and said it was predicated on the basis that courts deliver a “product”.

Mr Langdon launched the tirade against “guff about service users” in a legal magazine.

“At some point in recent history – I’m not sure when – the language used to describe people who go to court changed,” he writes in the latest issue of Counsel. “We used to call them witnesses, judges, lawyers, litigants, defendants, jurors, ushers, clerks and members of the public.

“Now these same people are collectively ‘court-users’. Some (who?) are apparently ‘customers’ and others (all of us?) ‘stakeholders’.”

He added: “Recently, a memo from Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service used all three words when, in school monitor language, it warned barristers that… when entering one of Her Majesty’s court buildings, they would have to sip their takeaway coffees in front of security staff to prove that they were not carrying acid.

“Putting aside for a moment the rights and wrongs of the proposed sip test, the use of this language to describe people who go to court is not confined to officious directives but permeates ‘ministry speak’ at every level.

“Perhaps by itself that does not matter very much, though it is annoying to have to decipher which particular ‘users’ are being referred to.

“For example, it is difficult to imagine that the Ministry is thinking of the pockets of alleged drug-dealers awaiting trial when it expresses a desire to reduce cost to ‘our users’.”