By Maria Ward-Brennan
The Crown Court backlog is now at its highest on record resulting in the National Audit Office (NAO) making clear that the Government’s targets to cut are no longer achievable.
In a new damming report by the NAO, it revealed that 6,523 cases have been waiting for two or more years to be heard.
While on average it takes 683 days from offence to a case completing at the Crown Court, including 279 days from first listing of cases in Magistrates’ Courts to completion.
The report stated that currently, almost a fifth (18 per cent) of cases awaiting trial are sexual offences, and cases involving violence against a person are nearly a third (32 per cent).
It also found that the actual levels of incoming and completed cases have been consistently lower than the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) forecast at the 2021 Spending Review.
The issues causing these backlogs including: a shortage of legal professionals working in criminal law; high rates of ineffective trials; an increase in complex cases such as adult rape; cases delayed by Covid-19 and the criminal defence barristers’ industrial action.
The MoJ has an ambition to reduce the Crown Court backlog of 67,573 cases to 53,000 by March 2025, but as NAO stated today, that is no longer achievable.
Tana Adkin KC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association noted that the “report confirms that which criminal practitioners have known for years – that the criminal justice system remains in crisis without a plan for sustained investment, despite the repeated warnings of prosecutors and defence advocates who are tasked with delivering justice daily in our publicly funded courts.”
The Law Society’s president Nick Emmerson explained that “the UK government’s shortsighted approach to justice including more than a decade of under funding of our criminal justice system, has resulted in a chronic shortage of judges and lawyers, huge backlogs, crumbling courts and prison spaces running out.”
He pointed out that “an alarming lack of progress has been made in reducing the backlog but in fact, it continues to worsen.”
The NAO said the MoJ must work closely with the other parts of the system to gather intelligence, understand how changes in policy and activity in one part of the system will affect other parts, and take coordinated and timely action in response.
“If the government had listened to our warnings sooner, it would not have found itself in the critical state we now see with emergency measures being taken to deal with the crisis over prison spaces,” Emmerson added,
This comes as the Government took emergency measures last week which could see defendants kept in police custody for an extra night instead of being brought to court because the prisons are full and overcrowded.
