Peter Kandler [Sam Pearce]

A FOUNDER of the country’s very first law centre has called on the new Prime Minister to get serious about fixing the broken criminal justice system.

Peter Kandler – who lives in Kentish Town and was this year made an honorary King’s Counsel (KC) for “transforming access to justice” – has spent a lifetime working with legal aid cases and is believed to be the first lawyer to speak to a client in a police station.

Now aged 91, he was still taking instructions from clients in custody right up until the Covid pandemic outbreak in 2020.

He said “destruction” of the courts system, “exhausted” solicitors, cuts to funding was a recipe for more and more miscarriages of justice.

Mr Kandler told the New Journal: “The situation is just very disappointing and it’s depressing. This Labour government has a lot on the plate thanks to the Tory destruction of the courts. It was [Chris] Grayling who destroyed it all, by selling off the courts and cuts to legal aid.

“In some areas now in the country there are no legal aid solicitors left at all. The ones that are, they are exhausted.

“And the clients themselves are having to travel huge distances, even in London. Adults have to walk to Hendon. Young people have to walk to Highbury. We hear of them having to sleep rough over the night to be there in the morning.

“The law centres are surviving and they are doing a great job in protecting tenants and helping with social security and acting with workers who are not unionised. And they have changed things. You used to have right wing magistrates backing the police every time. You would have complete frame ups, basically because you were black. Law centres have changed all that and affected the legal situation in many ways.”

He said he had written to Sir Keir Starmer when he became prime minister calling for law centres in “every deprived area”, but did not get a meaningful response.

Mr Kandler said: “People need help. It’s so obvious. On the whole Camden is a decent council. Burnham has promised more council housing and crucially he talks about council housing rather than affordable housing.

“But thousands upon thousands of homes have to be built, like after the war.”

Mr Kandler set up the North Kensington Law Centre in 1970 with Michael Zander, a former professor of law at the LSE, and Lord Tony Gifford QC, considred one of the most prominent advocates of his generation.

He said: “My favourite story of that early time was the management committee in the 1970s wrote to the Royal Borough of Kensington for a grant. And we got a letter back saying they would lend us the money if I resigned along with two friends on the staff.

“I remember there was once a story about what would have happen if they closed us down, and the police had said there would have been a ‘riot’. It was nice that the police thought that. We knew we were having an impact.”

He recalled several memorable cases including one that involved the persecution of gay men in a public park toilet off the North Circular.

Mr Kandler said: “At one point the police had two way mirrors in all the toilets in the London train stations. The police would peer in through these mirrors watching us all pee.”

Mr Kandler said the idea for law centres came from the New Left – a political movement focusing on social justice and civil rights made up of Marxist and Communist activists.

“We did a lot of crime and housing and as far as I know I was the first solicitor to go to a police station,” he said.

“I was going in for free at the time. You didn’t get a solicitor in those days unless you were paying for it. That’s how those Irish families ended up serving all those years in prison and being beaten up in the stations, guns being put through the hatch in the cell door, and all that.

“They could never do that now because solicitors are going in all the time. It’s what annoys me now that law centres don’t do criminal cases, when I think they ought to.”

He added: “I always found if you behave decently with the police as well as with your clients, they reluctantly respect you.”

Mr Kandler is still on the executive of the Law Centre Network but he said he had retied aged 86 due to Covid.

On getting the KC award for the law centre work, in April, he said: “It was a strange experience. There were six of us getting this KC. I had to be helped up the steps to a special seat. I forgot to bow three times as you supposed to.

“There were 94 proper barristers and it went on and on for an hour in a freezing cold Westminster Hall.”

He added: “I did get written to by someone afterwards reminding me that I was supposed to be a socialist…”