CBA Briefing: £1.5 million matched funding for criminal pupillage

Welcome back

The French have a word for it: la Rentrée. That back to school phase in September which kicks off the autumn term. We welcome back those members of the Criminal Bar who have enjoyed time out from court work this summer to reconnect with family and friends. Pausing to repair is essential if we are to continue as a vibrant body of practitioners. For many of us it was work as usual, through the remarkable heatwave. The business of the courts is never done.

Au revoir and thanks to Riel Karmy-Jones KC

Riel Karmy-Jones KC’s term of office as Chair of the CBA came to an end on 31st August 2026. Members will have read Riel’s farewell message.

We are hugely grateful to Riel for her peerless leadership of the CBA, initially as Vice Chair with Mary Prior KC and then as Chair for the past twelve months. With great energy and steely resolve, Riel has led the CBA’s campaigns on the Courts and Tribunals Bill, the response to Lord Leveson’s Review of the Criminal Courts and on the Harman Independent Review of Bullying, Harassment and Sexual Harassment at the Bar. Riel has lobbied hard within the MoJ, CPS and CLAAB to secure long awaited increases in Crown Court graduated fees.

Alongside these major campaigns has been a huge amount of background work on behalf of the Criminal Bar, representing our interests in meetings with ministers, parliamentarians, civil servants, the Judiciary, the Bar Council, the BSB and with numerous other stakeholders, and making countless media appearances. Riel has also been a superb administrator, from dealing with proposed changes to the CBA constitution to managing the voluminous daily inbox.

Riel’s calm and authoritative leadership will be greatly missed. She continues with her criminal practice and will no doubt see many of you in robing rooms.

Taking over as CBA Chair will be Andrew Thomas KC, of Lincoln House Chambers, Manchester, who served as Vice Chair over the past year, and Kama Melly KC, of Park Square Barristers, Leeds, as Vice Chair. Our own Northern Powerhouse are ready for the challenges of the year ahead.

Matched funding for criminal pupillage: a call to chambers to take action

On Saturday 29th August 2026, the Government and COIC announced a £1.5 million offer of funding to chambers to support criminal barrister pupillages. The scheme will provide chambers with a grant of £12,000 to £13,000 per additional pupillage offered.

The matched funding scheme was announced by Justice Minister Sarah Sackman KC MP. Its aims are to boost recruitment to the independent Criminal Bar and help initiatives to widen access to the profession from applicants from all backgrounds.

The scheme will help fund pupillage awards for up to 100 additional pupils. The proposal was first announced in December 2025, and much work has since taken place on the details of the scheme. We are hopeful it will run for at least three years, allowing chambers to build up their recruitment over that time.

We are extremely grateful to our colleagues at the Council of the Inns of Court who have stepped forward to provide the administration for the scheme. This will sit within their existing pupillage matched funding scheme, but these 100 additional awards will be exclusively for criminal pupillages.

Further details will be set out in an FAQ document and within the application form, which will be published in the next few days.

This is an opportunity for all chambers

This scheme is an offer of generous support to chambers in recruiting and training the next generation of criminal barristers. The premise is that awards will be made to encourage additional offers of pupillage: in other words, if your set was planning to recruit two pupils in the next round, aim to recruit three.

We must be ambitious in our recruitment. The backlog of work in the criminal courts has come about because the volume of work has increased substantially.

The projection is that the Crown Court will sit for 113,000 days this year, rising to 118,000 over the next two years. Compared to the cap of 97,400 days in 2018/19, that is a rise of more than 20 per cent. For the foreseeable future, the volume of work in the Crown Court is going to remain higher than ever, and our chambers should be reflecting the need to cover that volume in our business plans.

We are conscious, of course, that funding is only one small part of what is required to deliver pupillage. We are dependent on the dedication and hard work of unpaid pupil supervisors, together with the hundreds of other barristers who voluntarily help deliver education and training through chambers, the circuits and the Inns of Court. We also recognise that this is not a quick fix to the current backlog. This is about securing the long term future of the independent Criminal Bar and of our individual sets of chambers.

The second aim of the matched funding scheme is to support the work which many chambers are already undertaking to widen access to the profession from the broadest range of backgrounds. This includes tools such as outreach schemes, mini pupillage and internship schemes, contextual recruitment and equal merit provision. There will be an expectation that chambers have, or are working towards, such systems.

The CBA strongly supports this scheme and we encourage all criminal sets to apply. We have been working with the team at the MoJ over the past few months on how best to deliver these measures. There has been enthusiasm on all sides. We are grateful to Tim Storrie KC, Keir Monteith KC, Stephen Akinsanya OBE and Mark Fraser for their advice and support, and to Phil Robertson at the Bar Council. Our thanks also to Mrs Justice Lieven, Hayley Dawes and all the team at COIC for making this scheme deliverable.

AGFS consultation: the CBA’s response

As we communicated in our message last week, on Wednesday 26th August 2026 the CBA published its detailed response to the Government’s consultation on changes to the AGFS scheme. Read the full response here.

Our response was informed by members’ responses to our survey last month, and we are grateful to everyone who took the time to respond.

The CBA’s response is due to an immense amount of work by members of our remuneration committee, led by Richard Christie KC. We are indebted to Neil Hawes KC, Nick Barraclough, Matthew Bagnall, Vincent Scully and Emily Calman, who worked at short notice, across the summer holiday period, to produce such a detailed and considered report.

The Bar Council’s response can also be read here. On all key issues, the CBA and Bar Council came to similar conclusions.

The overall value of the package of increases is between 10 and 12 per cent, but this is not an across the board fee increase. Whilst all brief fees will rise by 6 per cent, the Government is proposing to target larger increases for particular types of cases and particular areas of work.

Our position is that the package is not enough; 76.3 per cent of members were agreed on that point. Also, 97.7 per cent of members agreed that the increases should apply to cases which have already been sent to the Crown Court, as there will be a significant delay, often measured in years, before those cases are completed and can be billed. On the existing proposal, barristers will still be working in 2028, and for a great many cases some years beyond, all at 2022 rates.

The refreshers issue

A significant concern is that the Government are not proposing any increase at all to daily refreshers. Instead, they want to target a significant increase in the fee for guilty pleas. It goes without saying that it would be completely wrong to use AGFS fees in an attempt to discourage trials: it is defendants who decide whether to plead guilty, not their barristers. Omitting refreshers from the increase is simply inexplicable.

As we have pointed out in our response, this proposal would unfairly discriminate against practitioners whose work mainly involves contested trials, and in particular practitioners who undertake RASSO cases. The plain fact is that defendants charged with sexual offences and other cases involving vulnerable victims rarely plead guilty. The latest MoJ statistics show just 14 per cent of defendants in rape cases pleaded guilty, compared with 74 per cent for drugs offences and 68 per cent for theft and burglary.

As the Law Society Gazette’s article on the proposals sets out, because a high proportion of RASSO work is undertaken by women barristers, they will suffer by comparison with barristers who undertake other areas of work where early guilty pleas are more common.

VHCC consultation

The consultation also includes early stage consideration of changes to the VHCC scheme. This will be followed up by more detailed consultation over the next few months. The CBA’s position is that, although the existing VHCC scheme is far from perfect in all its details, it has proved successful in delivering defence funding in complex cases. Any proposal to scrap the scheme and start again would risk taking us back to the position in 2014, when barristers simply refused to take on cases at the reduced rates which were then offered. The current scheme provided a workable solution.

Impact on CPS fees

We are continuing to liaise with the Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, and the CPS over matching the final agreed AGFS increase within the prosecution graduated fee scheme, in as timely a manner as possible. The CPS have been clear that they stand by the principle of effective parity between defence and prosecution fees. As soon as the changes to the AGFS scheme have been settled, we will be seeking agreement on a matching package of increases in prosecution fees. In 2022/23, the CPS increase followed on and was delivered within about six months of the AGFS increase.

Prisoner early release: an end to the uncertainty?

On Monday 31st August 2026, the Government announced its proposals for changes to the prisoner early release scheme, which will adjust the forthcoming changes under the Sentencing Act 2026.

We welcome the fact that this announcement puts an end to several weeks of uncertainty. For too long we have been forced to tell both victims and defendants: this is the Judge’s sentence, but we do not really know what it will mean in practice.

There is no doubt that our prisons are continuing to operate close to full capacity, which creates unacceptable risks to the criminal justice system.

Prison spaces are a finite resource. It is for Parliament to decide how that resource should be used, and there are no easy solutions. Legislation sets the framework, and the courts ensure that it is applied fairly and consistently.

Action has already been taken to reduce the number of prisoners serving sentences of twelve months or less as far as possible, and that now stands at less than 4 per cent of the prison population. Likewise, the number of unconvicted defendants in custody on remand has fallen. What remains is a large population serving sentences for serious offences. Nearly seven in ten convicted prisoners are serving sentences for sexual offences, violence against the person, robbery or weapons offences. Just over one in ten are serving sentences for serious drug offences. Deciding which of those serious offenders should benefit from early release involves invidious choices.

This is a difficult policy area which requires rational consideration, not political point scoring. The Gauke Review provided a welcome element of balanced policy development.

The CBA welcomes the decision to work towards bringing the IPP sentencing regime to a close. We recognise that many of the offenders sentenced under that scheme were identified as dangerous, but sentencing must also be proportionate to the crime committed.

“At the heart of a liberal democracy must be a criminal justice system which is fair to both victims of crime and offenders, so that crimes can be punished, criminals deterred from reoffending and public safety maintained, whilst at the same time offering hope for the convicted that there is a fair process allowing them to be readmitted to society.”

Tana Adkin KC, as Chair of the CBA, 2023

The current sentencing regime for dangerous offenders addresses that balance, and it is sensible to take the same approach to IPP prisoners.