Interview: Rowena Collins Rice

Rowena Collins Rice does not struggle to recruit. And no wonder, for a job in the Attorney General’s Office offers something rare in our sprawling, disparate civil service: its staff, she says, enjoy “an unsurpassed, bird’s eye view of the whole of the way that government works.” Managing some of the country’s most challenging legal, criminal justice and legislative issues, Collins Rice’s tiny, 40-strong team handles the attorney general (AG) Dominic Grieve’s oversight of far bigger organisations – most obviously the 6,500-strong Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) – and his interactions with ministers and officials across government, plus the supporting work of his deputy, the solicitor general.

The fiendish, multi-faceted complexity of those interactions is partly what makes the work so “rivetingly interesting”. The AG must “superintend” the treasury solicitor’s legal teams in departments, she explains, but also challenge those departments when they sail close to the legal wind. He shapes criminal justice reforms on behalf of the government’s prosecutors, but also fulfils a formal role as the country’s most senior barrister. And he plays a fully political role as a cabinet member, while giving dispassionate rulings on appeals made under the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA).

Being the Attorney General’s director general and legal secretary, then, isn’t a straightforward job. And when Collins Rice took the role in January, she arrived without any preconceived ideas about what would be required. It was a matter of “boarding a moving vehicle, getting into the driver’s seat, and seeing what the traffic up ahead is going to require from me in terms of steering.” Since then she’s come across a number of tight hairpins and dangerous drivers – but her CV includes stints as a key player in the freedom of information and libel reforms, and a stretch as secretary to the Leveson Inquiry. Collins Rice is pretty comfortable operating at awkward intersections of the law, politics, personalities and the public interest.

The long arm of the law
One of the AG’s most important tasks, Collins Rice explains, is acting as “chief legal adviser to the government, and to Parliament, and to the Crown.” This gives Grieve an “over-arching responsibility – a constitutional one, I suppose – towards the rule of law” and he has, for example, regularly spoken out to defend the European Court of Human Rights, whose critics include Tory ministers.

This aspect of the AG’s role can bring him into conflict with other ministers: when he fears that a department’s actions may not be legal, says Collins Rice, it’s his job to “help government understand the legal issue, and to manage it and assess legal risk.” These discussions with departments are obviously fraught with difficulty, and Collins Rice notes that it’s part of her job to “maintain our excellent working relationships with my opposite numbers in the legal departments in Whitehall, so that when issues come up they come up within the context of a good understanding of each other’s business, the political context, the personalities involved and everything else.”

This relationship-building role will become increasingly important, she adds, “as the Government Legal Service [GLS] moves forward with its shared services agenda”. Treasury Solicitor Paul Jenkins, who reports to the AG, is gradually taking over the management of departmental legal teams – something that could lead to those teams’ loyalties being called into question when a department finds itself at loggerheads with the AGO.

To guard against this danger, Collins Rice says she wants to “make sure that the departmental legal head is still regarded very much as the ‘go-to’ lawyer by the department: the person who understands the department’s business and its needs, who can make the most sophisticated assessment of legal risk, and so on… We’re in no sense aiming for any kind of homogenisation or divided loyalties”. And the emerging shared service won’t just cut costs on everyday legal work, she argues; it’ll also improve the quality of advice that departmental lawyers can provide. “It’s always been the case that different departments don’t have an identity of interest and that many legal issues are debateable,” she says. “What the GLS has tended to do well – and will, in my view, do even better in future – is to provide a forum in which that can be debated and discussed, so that advice which is fully rounded and honest about the risk can be put up.”

More divided loyalties
On criminal justice policy, too, the AG walks a fine line between his various responsibilities. As the minister responsible for the government’s prosecutors, he must consider the impact of any proposed changes to the criminal justice system, and influence reforms so that prosecutors can “best work with other parts of the system to achieve greatest overall smoothness, efficiency, policy effectiveness and the rest.” Meanwhile, as the titular head of the bar, he must also feed the views of barristers into the system – and their interests may not coincide with the prosecutors’.

The AG’s input into criminal justice policy would be more straightforward if he had a traditional minister-official relationship with the heads of the organisations he oversees. But while most secretaries of state have the constitutional right to give instructions to their officials, the AG instead “superintends” bodies such as the CPS and the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). Public prosecutors must be protected from political interference, so whilst the AG speaks on prosecution matters in Parliament, he is also charged with “championing the independence of public prosecutors” – including, awkwardly, from himself.

This can make life difficult when things go wrong inside such organisations, as happened recently at the SFO. Last November, the National Audit Office (NAO) qualified the SFO’s 2011-12 accounts, on the basis that former director Richard Alderman had agreed massive redundancy payments without seeking Cabinet Office approval. Equally farcically, last month it emerged that during 2012 the SFO had accidentally sent 32,000 documents relating to the BAE al-Yamamah bribery investigations to the wrong person – creating understandable concerns among the SFO’s informants that their identities might be revealed.

The difficulty for the AG, says Collins Rice, is that his function “is to protect, advocate and explain the independence of the SFO and why that’s important.” In short, the AG is not the boss here; the SFO chief is “specifically constituted as an accounting officer in his own right”, with financial accounting responsibilities to Parliament and the NAO, and “it’s not necessarily [the AG’s] job to check whether things are okay.”

The SFO’s current chief, David Green, has been in post since April 2012 – he inherited the redundancy arrangement and tried to cancel it – and Collins Rice says he’s “appraised the size of the task and is very much up for it. My perception of the SFO is that it’s going places.” The previous leadership, though, has left a very public mess – she talks of supporting Green “in the work that he’s doing to address these inherited problems, and to turn around the reputation of the office.” The AG, she adds, has “mentioned his own disappointment that the trust, openness, confidence and free flow of information which is essential to his relationship [with the SFO], was not the approach brought by David’s predecessor.”

Long crowbars give more leverage
It is one of the paradoxes of the AG’s role that whilst his powers over the organisations he ostensibly oversees are largely indirect, he has some fairly strong cross-government levers. He is, for example, important in deciding whether a government should agree to release papers produced under a previous administration, under the FoIA. Coincidentally, earlier in her career Collins Rice helped both to produce the FoIA, and to manage its implementation in Whitehall.

What does she think of how the Act works now? Legal advice is well protected, she notes, and she is sceptical about the concern – raised by former cabinet secretary Lord O’Donnell, among others – that the Act’s existence has deterred officials from keeping full written notes: “I think I’ve seen the opposite issue, which is the danger of putting things down incontinently, without enough circumspection, and then finding that it’s disclosable,” she comments.

However, Collins Rice is plainly concerned that the FoIA is “an administrative overhead which is capable of being expensive and burdensome”. She has “a lot of sympathy with this sense of burdensomeness in departments, and also with the sense that we may be able to defend this space but it can be quite effortful to be put to the task of that defence. And maybe if we were doing an FoIA now it would look very different.”

The problem, she explains, is that the act is “radical because there’s very little ground between that which must be disclosed and that which must not. There is little ground for the maybe, which makes some decisions hard and uncomfortable and difficult.” Some of the exemptions for policy advice, she adds, “are dependent not on the nature of the advice but on the question of what harm would be done” by its release, making the decision-making process “quite a difficult administrative burden.” Collins Rice clearly believes that the FoIA should have been made simpler and cheaper to administrate: “Some have said it was passed in the early days of a government that had been out of power for a long time, so it had the sense of being an Opposition measure,” she says. “Has it transformed public trust in government? Probably not. Has it helped? Probably.”

Trust me, I’m a journalist/lawyer/politician
Public trust has, of course, been in short supply recently – and not only trust in government. The revelations over tabloid phone hacking have pushed public perceptions of journalists below even those of politicians; and here again, Collins Rice had a ringside seat. As secretary to the Leveson Inquiry, she’s proud of its low costs and its openness to public scrutiny. Thanks to its live broadcasts and regular web updates, she says, “at the height of the inquiry we were some of the top world trends in media terms – and that shows, I think, that people felt very engaged with it, and that they felt it was unmediated. In an inquiry dealing with the media, it was exceptionally important that we were able to communicate in an unmediated way.”

On the other hand, the inquiry’s job was made tougher by the fact that it was investigating a moving target: even as it heard from witnesses, new revelations were constantly emerging about the misdeeds of police officers and News Corporation staff. “What we were looking at was happening daily, live,” she recalls. “That meta-dimension to it was, my goodness, difficult to handle. We were fortunate in the calibre of everyone, I think, who was involved in that inquiry, that it was as successful in its own terms as it was. I choose my words carefully there.”

What Collins Rice is saying, in her lawyerly way, is that the inquiry achieved what it could within its awkward remit and challenging environment – but it has not been successful in having its recommendations implemented. Reminded that in April she said that “it was only the prospect of quick cross-party agreement that would make the recommendations implementable” – because any delay would allow the press to lean on politicians and kill the proposals – Collins Rice asks for your correspondent’s view. It seems that we have a divided press, I reply, with threats of diehard opposition from the worst offenders creating an effective block on reforms. “It’s very hard, isn’t it? Very hard indeed,” she responds. “Look at the distribution of power that that speaks of – and the closer you get to a general election, the more potent a position the media is in. It is an exceptionally difficult issue.”

By the time the inquiry reported, Collins Rice hints, the government had already cooled on press regulation. When an inquiry is set up to examine “any issue, like press regulation, the government will inevitably be thinking in parallel its own thoughts. It may find that the journey it is on and the journey the inquiry has been set on have become divergent.” But the biggest obstacle to change was clearly tabloid opposition: the recommendations were realistic, she argues, but they’d been produced on the basis of assumptions about “the nature of the relationship that you will have between the media and the government, and the willingness of each side to find a meeting place that both sides can and will work with. Absent that, there is not very much you can do that you’d want to do politically – and that is why decades and decades of politicians have wrestled with this”.

In short, the press is so powerful that it can only be regulated with their consent: “It’s just so difficult for any politician who is in the business of government and who needs a relationship with the media,” she says, praising John Major as “one of our most powerful witnesses”. He, of course, said that Rupert Murdoch had explicitly told him that his papers would withdraw their support unless he changed his European policy.

Glimmers of hope
Nonetheless, Collins Rice does suggest that “if we don’t land [regulation] this time, the next time we inevitably have to look at this issue – in another ten years or whatever – then the landscape will look different.” Politics will be less mediated, she suggests, with social and web-based media providing people with a direct communications line to the public. What’s more, she thinks the Leveson Inquiry has helped alter the public consciousness “more radically than any of the other times the press has been looked at”: regarding not only the press, but also politicians and the police, Collins Rice perceives “more transparency, more curiosity, more public information sharing”. And in this more open, more sceptical climate, “it’s harder to think that it’s safe to make choices about what you do on the basis that no one will ask any questions about it.”

Finally, she notes, Leveson hasn’t yet considered part two of the inquiry’s remit: examining corruption and malpractice within the press and police, and making recommendations on the future relationship between the two. This part of the inquiry can’t be conducted whilst the police are still pursuing criminal charges, and she has no idea whether it will ever be held. “It’s really hard to speculate,” she says. “The interests of the many different parties involved tend in different directions and are changing over time. You could ask that question at monthly intervals and get different answers.”

So once again, Collins Rice finds herself at the heart of an extremely complex and somewhat unpredictable environment: at one point, she notes, “I wondered whether Leveson reforms might find their way into a package which included the defamation reforms.” Indeed, some House of Lords members tried to insert Leveson’s recommendations into the Defamation Act, which received Royal Assent in April. And this too finds an echo in Collins Rice’s CV – for she chaired the defamation working group established just before the last election by justice secretary Jack Straw, and the Act represents the results of her work.

By this stage, readers won’t be surprised to learn that this task was yet another complicated balancing act. “Again, it was an issue where the press have a very keen interest and vigorously express views; and the legal professions on the other side also have a keen interest,” she says. “I was given a pretty tough remit to bring this diverse set of perspectives together and come up with something that could work, in a very short space of time.”

Finally, though, the complexity that has surrounded so many of Collins Rice’s roles has fallen away; for once in her career, she finds herself reviewing an intervention in that thorny interface between law, politics and the public interest that appears to have resulted in a clear sense of satisfaction all round – with the exception, perhaps, of litigious Russian oligarchs.

“We came up with some practical, workable things which managed to gain cross-party, cross-interest support, and the package I think will both support the honest exchange of views without oppressive threats of litigation, and help cases to be settled more cleanly and quickly where they do have to be litigated. It will also do something about our rather unenviable reputation as a sort of libel capital of the world,” she says, finally giving an answer that doesn’t set achievement against challenge; progress against retrenchment. “These are aims and ambitions that a lot of people have had for many years – and now something’s been done,” she concludes. “That’s a good feeling.”