Barristers and judges spread too thinly. Prisons filled with the untried or unsentenced. Victims dropping out of prosecutions altogether. Such is the bleak picture that official government figures paint of the court system in England and Wales.
How did we get here? Experts have said the crisis in the courts – greatly exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic – is down to a variety of factors. Using government data, the Guardian has outlined some of the issues below.
Rising backlog of cases
The closing of courtrooms during lockdown led to a rapid rise in cases yet to be heard by the criminal courts. Figures from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) show that the backlog in England and Wales’s crown courts has continued to grow ever since – with a record 81,923 people waiting to be tried as of June.
Separate figures show that while early efforts to lower the pandemic backlog were successful in reducing the backlog in magistrates courts, this positive trend is reversing. Defendants waiting to be tried by a magistrate fell from a peak of 131,000 in August 2020 to 69,000 in March 2022. Since then the figure has crept back up, reaching 87,740 as of June.
These backlogs have led to knock-on effects across the justice system, including a record number of people in prison awaiting trial.
Record numbers on remand
More than one in five people in prison are now there on remand, meaning they’re still either awaiting trial or sentence. The figure – over 17,000 people – is up 87% from 2019.
Keeping people in prison is expensive: every prison place costs an estimated £51,724 a year, according to 2022-23 figures, money that cannot then be spent reducing the various backlogs in different parts of the justice system.
Disrupted trials
Cases are taking longer to progress through court. The latest figures, for September to December 2023, show they took 302 days on average from charge to completion, up 38% from the same period in the year before the pandemic.
Part of this is down to courtroom delays: more than one in four crown court trials were postponed on the day they were due to start in 2023, up from one in six in 2019. Historically, the majority of these “ineffective trials” were due to poor case preparation, overlisting (where some cases only get heard if court time becomes available) or the defendant not turning up – but recent years have seen a rise in other causes.
Barrister unavailability meant 1,436 crown court trials were postponed on the day in 2023, up from just 71 in 2019. (In 2022, more than 4,000 trials were postponed after the Criminal Bar Association voted to stop accepting last-minute cover shifts.)
A lack of judges led to 190 trials being postponed on the day last year, up from 87 in 2019. A lack of interpreters meant 62 trials couldn’t be heard – more than double the 2019 total.
Failures with courtroom audio-visual equipment and the dilapidated state of court buildings are also increasingly disrupting trials. Even when cases go ahead, more are overrunning, leading to the next trial being delayed or postponed.
There is a vicious cycle: delays have led to a large increase in remand prisoners which has further delayed the courts. More people need to be transported from prison, which has in turn led to a sharp increase in prison escort services failing to produce defendants.
Legal aid cuts
Legal aid – the system set up after the second world war “so that no one would be financially unable to prosecute a just and reasonable claim or defend a legal right” – has experienced a cut in government spending by a third since 2010.
This is partly because crime has fallen, and with it criminal cases. However, the population that can qualify for legal aid has also shrunk over the years as inflation has outpaced eligibility thresholds.
A National Audit Office report in February found that civil legal aid fees paid to lawyers are now approximately half of what they were 28 years ago in real terms. Most criminal fees received an uplift in 2022, and earlier this month the government announced additional funding for solicitors who work in youth courts and police stations, citing the “dire straits” of the sector.
There has been a large increase in people representing themselves in civil courts, which experts say takes longer. The Law Society found large areas of England and Wales operate as “legal aid deserts” with no providers offering help in certain areas of civil law.
When justice delayed becomes justice denied
A rising court backlog, with some trial dates now being set for 2027, means that people are having to wait longer for justice. As a result, victims and witnesses are more likely to forget details or withdraw from trials altogether because the wait is so long. In those cases, justice delayed really is justice denied.
Figures from the Home Office show that 55% of rape cases ended in the alleged victim withdrawing before their case led to a prosecution in the three months to June this year. The figure has dropped slightly in recent quarters but is far higher than before the pandemic.
The real rise in potential victims dropping out of cases has happened once charges have been brought. Analysis of CPS figures by the Criminal Bar Association shows just 2.9% of rape prosecutions were ended by the potential victim in the three months to June 2019. As of June 2024 this had more than doubled to 7.5%.
