The hearings are private (stock photo)
(Picture: PA Archive)Magistrates are handing out criminal convictions in private court hearings lasting as little as 90 seconds, in a system where the majority of prosecutions will never be looked at by a qualified lawyer, the Evening Standard has learned.
The Single Justice Procedure (SJP) was established to allow courts to sit behind-closed-doors, issuing fines and convictions in a system that was designed for speedy justice.
However evidence has emerged of magistrates dispensing justice in alarmingly short hearings, with some lasting just a matter of seconds.
Adding to concerns that speed is being prioritised over quality, a Ministry of Justice efficiency drive is reducing the involvement of court legal advisors, with SJP magistrates in future being heavily relied upon to spot errors and prevent miscarriages of justice.
A secret report into a pilot of the new SJP system – obtained using Freedom of Information requests – reveals magistrates were tested against a target time of just 90 seconds to deal with each prosecution.
Courts in Lavender Hill in southwest London and Leamington Spa in Warwickshire were set a “recommended 90-second baseline”, as magistrates sat alone to analyse evidence, decided whether to convict or not, and sentence defendants.
When London magistrates averaged two-and-a-half minutes per case compared with the “expected 90 seconds”, the author of the report reassured HMCTS bosses they “would expect to see higher levels of productivity” when courts become “more experience(d) with the new process”.
SJP is used for low-level crimes such as not paying TV licences and speeding, and was controversially deployed during the pandemic for Covid breaches.
Evening Standard research has found an SJP magistrate in Swindon handed out £54,000 in Covid fines in a session lasting just 15 minutes, getting through 40 cases at an average rate of 22.5 seconds each.
At Lavender Hill last September, a magistrate convicted and sentenced 204 defendants for driving offences within 55 minutes, while in Merseyside a magistrate sentencing Covid breaches averaged a case every 84 seconds.
Hundreds of thousands of members of the public are prosecuted each year through SJP, and Penelope Gibbs, founder of campaign group Transform Justice, has been critical of the way speed is prioritised.
“The process of convicting people of crimes under the Single Justice Procedure should not be described as if it were a conveyor belt which needs to go faster”, she said.
Most SJP defendants do not engage in the justice process, she added. “If the system were working properly every defendant would give details of their mitigation and magistrates would be taking as many minutes as they needed to consider the right sanction.”
The MoJ says SJP lets courts deal with low-level offences “more efficiently, freeing up valuable court space and time”, and a spokesperson added: “There is no time pressure on magistrates to make decisions.”
The new system – dubbed 3:1 – will see three magistrates working side-by-side on their own caseload, while sharing access to a single legal adviser who can be reached by phone or videocall.
As magistrates usually have no formal legal training and neither prosecution not defence are represented in SJP, legal advisers are expected to conduct “quality checks” to look for errors.
Across the five-month pilot in London, legal advisers managed to carry out quality checks on just 28 per cent of SJP cases. HMCTS had set a target of 75 per cent.
Laying bare just how limited the involvement of qualified lawyers could be in the future, the pilot data shows in one session 178 prosecutions took place and just three per cent were checked for mistakes.
In the final phase of the London pilot, magistrates dealt with 1830 cases and 14 errors were spotted. But the data shows less than 500 cases were actually checked by legal advisers.
Currently legal advisers sit in on SJP sessions, but in the 3:1 system magistrates will be expected to pro-actively reach out if they want legal advice. In the London pilot, that happened in just 0.5 per cent of cases.
The MoJ insists magistrates will continue to have “timely legal advice” under the 3:1 system, and “are no more likely to make errors”.
However the report also reveals how mistakes are made in a justice system increasingly reliant on digital automation, identifying instances of “incorrect” fines for guilty defendants being “filled in automatically” in the court’s computer system.
“There either needs to be a way to draw attention to the automation to ensure magistrates check for mistakes, or a way to improve the automation to avoid these errors being made”, it states.
In a July message, Lord Justice Edis urged magistrates to “embrace this new way of working”, adding: “I hope it will achieve substantial benefits in improving timeliness in our courts while maintaining the fairness and transparency of our justice system.”
The HMCTS report says magistrates have “high” confidence in the new system, and reported it made “little to no impact on their ability to access legal advice and support”.
SJP defendants always have the right to request an open court hearing with a bench of magistrates and dedicated legal adviser, while applications for SJP cases to be reopened can be made if mistakes have been made.
