Britain’s broken courts are a betrayal of justice

Share this article

Over 76,000 serious criminal cases are stuck in a court backlog. Of those cases, nearly a quarter have been in the queue for over a year. The wait to be heard in the magistrates’ court is even longer: 310,304 hearings were in abeyance at the end of March, equivalent to roughly three months at current rates. And the situation is getting worse: backlogs throughout the entire justice system increased by over 10% last year. Yet, despite this, one in five crown courts will not sit today.

The problem is now so severe that cases are now being scheduled as far away as October 2029. These delays are not just mere inconveniences either; victims and their families have to return to their daily lives under the anxiety and uncertainty caused by them. Survivors of sex offences, for example, are waiting an average of 839 days from their first report to a final outcome. What is more, the longer the wait, the more likely it is that victims will never get justice, often because victims walk away as evidence against offenders becomes weaker. Justice delayed, consequently, really is justice denied.

It is therefore unsurprising that trust and confidence in the criminal justice system is low and declining still further. 73% of victims aren’t confident reporting a crime will lead to justice; one YouGov poll reported in June that a majority of Britons have ‘no’ to ‘not very much’ confidence in Britain’s courts and judicial system – the first time on record. Crucially, low confidence doesn’t just reflect widespread frustration, but it also means that low-level crimes are increasingly underreported, further eroding the rule of law and leaving lawlessness ever more unchallenged.

Together with numerous other serious issues – from judges interpreting legislation in warped ways to the early release of dangerous prisoners and prison overcrowding – the dysfunction of our justice system represents yet another example of Britain’s crumbling state capacity.

Let’s be clear: this is the fault of both the Conservatives and Labour. The Tories could have forced the justice system into action, but they lacked urgency and the political will. In 2021, the Criminal Justice Board’s Steering Committee was tasked with reducing the backlog; the Ministry of Justice even made an ‘Action Plan’ to create a ‘whole-system approach’. Yet despite having responsibility for strategic oversight of the issue, the board left a lower-level group, with no representatives from the judiciary, to oversee progress, after which the board itself didn’t meet for nearly two years.

Similarly, Labour have no serious plan to resolve the crisis. While new restrictions on the right to choose a trial in the Crown Court should make a substantive difference, their new strategy is emblematic of Westminster’s decay. Increasing sentence reductions for pleading guilty, for instance, means that offenders are getting softer punishments because the system cannot cope under the strain of new cases; scrapping prison sentences of under a year will mean that petty crime career criminals will be even less deterred than they already are. Such policies are demonstrative of an increasingly soft-on-crime state, even as low-level crime reaches record highs.

But it need not be this way – it is not inevitable that we live under a state which struggles to administer justice to criminals. 

We should force our courts to sit every day for as long as possible, including in the evenings and on weekends. Judges and lawyers should be offered greater remuneration for sitting during unsociable hours, and there should be no cap on the times or number of days a court can sit for. Expanding court hours and removing court recesses would make more efficient use of existing capacity, and send a signal to the public that justice is being enforced. In the spirit of a transparent, open justice system, a court league table should be made publicly available, and remuneration awarded to employees of each court should be tied to their position in the rankings.

Nightingale Crown Courts closed following Covid should be reopened, permanently, until the backlog is cleared. To man these new courts, we should offer all former judges, barristers and junior court staff financial incentives, such as tax exemptions tied to how many cases they work on. 

But while administrative reforms will ease pressure in the short term, they cannot resolve the deeper structural problem: a significant proportion of crime is committed by a small pool of career criminals. Over half of all offences are committed by just 10% of offenders. Giving these people far more time behind bars (and actually enforcing that, rather than letting them out early) would reduce crime significantly, and consequently decrease the number of new cases the justice system is facing. 

This, obviously, would be the policy of any normal country. But not the UK. At present, these ‘prolific offenders’ do not receive more severe punishments than those with fewer, or no, prior crimes; in fact, the opposite often occurs. Since 2007, there have been more than 50,000 cases where individuals with over 50 prior convictions have avoided jail; in 4,000 of these cases, the individual had over 100 previous convictions. One man with over 300 previous offences, mostly theft-related, was spared imprisonment for another three theft-related convictions.

Clearly, this must change, or the backlog will never be cleared. At its core, the crisis in our courts is not a bureaucratic failure to speed up the judicial process and to stop bogus claims, but rather it represents a betrayal of the basic promise of justice that is supposed to characterise British society.

Only four of the 63 clauses in the Magna Carta remain valid today. One of those four, clause 40, states ‘to no one will we deny or delay right or justice’. Can we really say that the British state is still keeping its end of the bargain?

Share this article