Senior managers at the miscarriage of justice watchdog go into the office only “one or two days every couple of months”, MPs have been told.

Working practices at the Criminal Cases Review Commission faced scrutiny as concern grows over the organisation’s oversight of cases in the wake of the scandal surrounding the conviction of Andrew Malkinson, who spent 17 years in jail for a rape he did not commit.

Karen Kneller, chief of the commission, issued an abject apology to Malkinson for the mishandling of his case. His conviction was quashed in 2023 after it was eventually referred to the Court of Appeal.

In a report on the commission’s handling of the Malkinson case, Chris Henley KC criticised the organisation for deciding in 2012, eight years after Malkinson’s conviction, that fresh DNA evidence did not meet the legal test for referring his case for appeal.

“Without doubt we got that case wrong,” Kneller told MPs on the justice committee.Kneller, who has been chief since 2013, added that Malkinson had been “failed” by her organisation. She said: “Everyone in the organisation deeply regrets what happened. I can’t begin to think of the impact this has had on him. The double impact of being a victim of a miscarriage of justice and then the way we handled his case.” • Case review chief: I’m a scapegoat for Andrew Malkinson failingsResponding to Henley’s verdict that there had been poor oversight of the Malkinson case, Kneller said the commission had been dealing with “a huge backlog” at that time.She said that it was “taking many years before [cases] could be allocated to a case-review manager”. As a result, the Malkinson case “didn’t get the right focus and attention that it ought to have got”.When asked about the organisation’s working practices by Andy Slaughter, the Labour MP who chairs the justice committee, Kneller said that she was in the office one or two days every couple of months.She added that Amanda Pearce, the casework operations director, worked remotely and on average attended the Birmingham office once or twice every two months. “We are not an office-based organisation,” she told the committee.Kneller told MPs that the commission had “struggled to appoint case-review managers” before it had moved to permanent remote working because of the coronavirus lockdowns.She said the organisation could not fill vacancies because it was unable to match the salaries expected in Birmingham but had since “been able to fill the vacancies with some exceptional people”. A “small team” was in the office daily but it consisted mostly of reception and technology staff, she added.The watchdog’s previous chairwoman, Helen Pitcher, was urged to resign by the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, in the wake of the Malkinson scandal. In her resignation letter, she said commissioners had advised her to remove the senior management team.