In 1944 a departmental committee on justices' clerks chaired by Lord Roche recommended[1] the establishment of MCCs to administer petty sessional areas based on administrative counties and large boroughs.
The Home Office in turn was to make a grant to the local authorities within each MCC area of an amount representing the proceeds of certain fines, plus two thirds of the difference between them and actual expenditure.
The arrangements have never been systematically appraised, and have not adapted to take account of the enormous increase since 1949 in the volume of business and the number of permanent staff, or the fact that central Government now foots most of the bill".
[6]His principal recommendation was that administration of magistrates' courts should be "run as a national service, funded entirely by the Government - but with maximum delegation of managerial responsibility and control of resources to the local level", a proposal rejected, apparently, on the grounds of expense.
Le Vay's findings prompted the government to issue a white paper later that year entitled a "A New Framework for Justice",[7] which in turn led to changes introduced by the Police and Magistrates' Courts Act 1994.
[8] These included: the amalgamation of MCCs; making them more clearly responsible for the administration of magistrates'courts in their areas and defining their responsibilities; permitting the co-option of two members in place of the former ex officio members; requiring each MCC to appoint a legally qualified chief executive, a justices' chief executive, whose function was to be purely administrative, as distinct from the legal and advisory role of the justices' clerk; giving the Lord Chancellor power to combine MCC areas and to direct MCCs as to their standards of performance; and the establishment of the Magistrates' Court Service Inspectorate.
When the Labour Government came to power in 1997 it expressed a strong desire to improve the over-all management of the criminal justice system at both national and local level.
The Lord Chancellor's Department set targets, in the form of public service agreements, for magistrates' courts, and collected data to establish 'National Performance Indicators' of their efficiency and effectiveness.
The Access to Justice Act 1999 also gave the Lord Chancellor greater authority over MCCs, including an ability to direct them to implement recommendations of the Magistrates' Courts Service Inspectorate; to issue a code of conduct for MCC members; and the right to dismiss them for non-compliance with it.
These included better facilities for witnesses and the disabled, the introduction of complaints procedures, expressing court documents in plain English and the publication of charters concerning quality of service.
A number of factors contributed to these developments, the most important being the limits placed by central government on MCCs' budgets, recognition of the need to provide better facilities for all court users, and a drive to concentrate work to achieve speedier, more efficient and cost effective justice.
It differed from MCCs in a number of important respects: in mandatory inclusion of representatives of local authorities and of the District Judge Bench; in its ownership of property; and in the mechanics of its financing.