The Nightingale Court at Barbican will stay open until 2023
(Picture: ES/Tristan Kirk)Seven of London’s Nightingale courtrooms which opened during the pandemic will stay open for another year, the Ministry of Justice has announced.
The ad-hoc courthouses at the Jurys Inn hotel, in Croydon, and conference centres in Borough and Barbican are among 12 locations around the country which will remain in operation until March 2023.
The Evening Standard revealed last month that two Nightingale courtrooms at a conference centre in Monument will shut down in early April, with a hunt ongoing to find replacement space elsewhere in the capital.
Four extra hearing rooms for family court cases which were created at the MoJ’s headquarters in Petty France are also going to be wound down by the end of March.
“Nightingale courts continue to be a valuable weapon in the fight against the pandemic’s unprecedented impact on our courts, providing temporary extra capacity,” Justice minister James Cartlidge said.
“Combined with other measures – such as removing the cap on crown court sitting days, more use of remote hearings, and increasing magistrate sentencing powers – we are beginning to see the backlog drop so victims can get the speedier justice they deserve.”
Today’s announcement will see almost half of the temporary courts across the country close.
Nightingale courts in Middlesbrough, Peterborough, Nottingham, Warwick, Manchester, Liverpool, Bolton, Chester and Winchester will close within weeks.
As well as London’s Nightingales, extra court space in Maidstone, Chichester, Telford, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Leeds, Swansea, Cirencester and Fleetwood have been extended to March 2023.
The national backlog of criminal cases stood at 58,350 in the latest published figures from December last year.
The MoJ is aiming to bring the backlog down to 53,000 by 2025, but is braced for an influx of criminal cases into the courts as a result of the government’s policy to recruit 20,000 extra police officers.
The MoJ says Nightingale courts are closing in areas where they have sufficient hearing rooms for the available Crown Court judges, while a recruitment drive to find 1,100 extra judges is underway.
