R v Kwaysy Khaliq

When assessing a special preparation fee under paragraph 17 of the Criminal Legal Aid (Remuneration) (Amendment) Regulations 2020, the appropriate officer must determine the hours reasonably required to read the excess prosecution pages and consider all relevant circumstances.

Cross-checking billing numbers may form part of reading the relevant material where attribution is disputed. The reasonableness of relying on physical rather than digital searches is fact-sensitive. Drafting, editing and general trial preparation do not fall within the special preparation work measured by the provision.

The appellant advocate represented a defendant acquitted after trial on firearms and related offences. The prosecution evidence exceeded the applicable page threshold, and the advocate claimed 73 hours of special preparation concerning mobile-phone billing data.

The determining officer initially allowed 15 hours and increased that figure to 25 hours on redetermination. The appeal concerned the disallowance of the remaining 48 hours, including whether the claimed work fell within the scope of paragraph 17 and whether digital search techniques should have reduced the time reasonably required.

1. Appeal allowed. The appropriate additional payment was to be made, together with £100 paid on appeal and £50 costs.
2. Under paragraph 17 of the Criminal Legal Aid (Remuneration) (Amendment) Regulations 2020, the assessment required consideration of the hours reasonably needed to read the excess pages, together with all relevant circumstances. The benefit of work undertaken by other advocates was also relevant, although no such work assisted the appellant in this case.
3. The evidence comprised 2,618 excess pages concerning a spoof mobile phone and billing data from approximately 20 phones. Attribution was central because potentially several defendants might have used the spoof phone, and each call or message generated a new number. Those features materially reduced the usefulness of digital searching and justified greater reliance on physical searches.
4. Cross-checking numbers across billing records formed part of the process of reading the material. In accepting the general proposition stated by Master Leonard in R v Swaby, the court distinguished the present case because the material and attribution issues were not wholly analogous.
5. The determining officer was nevertheless right to question time claimed for drafting, editing and trial preparation, which did not properly fall within the hours reasonably required to read the excess pages. Considering the schedule as a whole, 40 hours of special preparation was reasonable.

The judgment records an appeal against the determining officer’s redetermination. The officer had increased the allowance from 15 to 25 hours. The High Court (Senior Court Costs Office) allowed the appeal and assessed 40 hours as reasonable.