Senior management at the miscarriage of justice watchdog were told there was a “hole at the heart” of the organisation as MPs criticised its working from home policy and asked executives if they felt they were the right people to continue leading it.
In an evidence session on Tuesday, the chief executive of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), Karen Kneller, was questioned by the cross-party Commons’ justice committee over its failings in the Andrew Malkinson case, her expensive French business courses, and the organisation’s remote working policy, under which, she told them, she worked just one to two days in its Birmingham head office each month.
The CCRC has faced severe criticism over its handling of Malkinson’s wrongful conviction. Sources have previously told the Guardian Kneller was given the nickname “Karen Invisible” by staff, and described by some working for her as “absent”, with her “finger off the pulse”.
Asked if such reports were fair, Kneller told MPs: “No, I don’t recognise that at all.
“I have been highly visible within the organisation: weekly updates to staff, monthly staff briefings, I’m in calls and meetings all the time. So that is not something that I recognise.”
The working from home policy had allowed the CCRC to recruit high-calibre staff from across the UK, enabling it to fill positions it had previously struggled to fill, MPs were told.
But the committee chair, Andy Slaughter, said he was “shocked” senior staff were absent from the office. “There does seem to be a hole at the heart of this organisation,” he said.
He asked Kneller, and Amanda Pearce, CCRC casework operations director, if they “really feel now, with everything that has happened, that you are the right people to lead this organisation forward”.
Kneller replied: “I think we are absolutely the right people to lead this organisation.”
The handling of the Malkinson case led to an apology from the CCRC and the resignation in January of its chair Helen Pitcher.
Asked if she had personally apologised to Malkinson, Kneller replied: “No, I haven’t.” Asked if such an apology might be appropriate, she said: “Absolutely. Without doubt, we got that case wrong, Mr Malkinson was failed.”
She added: “Absolutely, I extend my apology to Mr Malkinson. Everyone in the organisation deeply regrets what happened on that case. I can’t begin to think of the impact this has had on him, the double impact of serving a sentence, suffering miscarriage of justice and then the way we handled his case, so absolutely.”
Kneller was questioned about reports in the Guardian that she had regularly attended Insead business school in Fontainebleau over the past five years, including a course whose fees are advertised at more than £21,000 for 10 days’ teaching.
She said she was unable to confirm the exact figures. “What I can say is, over the course of my 12-13 years as a chief executive, the organisation has invested around £50,000 in my development,” she added.
Slaughter asked what she thought of Pitcher’s resignation letter, in which the departing chair stated that some departing commissioners had advised her to remove the senior management team.
Kneller said it was “unfortunate” and “it felt a very strange thing to say in a resignation letter”.
She urged the committee “and others to judge our performance across all of our case work, and not only those cases that get into the headlines, which is a tiny, tiny minority of our casework”.
