Courts: Chronic delays in London and South-East
HM Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) expects to make “reasonable progress despite the challenges” in cutting court backlogs, its operations director said yesterday.
However, Daniel Flury admitted that performance was “unacceptable” in the Crown Court, county courts and certain tribunals.
“We need to work hard to get back to an acceptable level of service,” he said.
Mr Flury said that despite “major challenges”, including backlogs in the Crown Court of 73,000 cases and 330,000 in the magistrates’ courts, there were “a few bright spots”.
He explained that the courts had not recovered from the “shock” of the pandemic, and before that the number of cases was increasing “everywhere”, whether criminal or civil.
Since the pandemic, a combination of “complexity and volume” had driven up the caseload, with more police officers being recruited, sexual offences in the Crown Court attracting not-guilty pleas and “far more” asylum appeals.
Meanwhile, the “supply side” of the justice system was finding it difficult to respond to “some of this demand”, and struggling to recruit judges, HMCTS staff, criminal defence solicitors and advocates, and probation officers.
He highlighted the case of court legal advisers or clerks, saying that HMCTS had recruited 161 last year, but it “took time” to get them to sit on cases because they needed to be trained.
Mr Flury said the challenge was retention, because their pay scales had lagged behind other government departments for some time and after their training by HMCTS they often left for better paid jobs at the Legal Aid Agency or Crown Prosecution Service.
Speaking at a Westminster Legal Policy Forum conference on efficiency and tackling backlogs in the courts system, Mr Flury said the outlook for the family and civil court backlogs was “much better” than criminal, with the figure for public law family cases falling almost to the level of 2016/17 – a “bright spot in an otherwise difficult picture”.
Private law family backlogs had also fallen where the pilot Pathfinder courts, which adopt a problem-solving approach, had been rolled out – in Dorset and North Wales. Earlier this year, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said £12.5m would be spent expanding the pilots.
In the Crown Court, Mr Flury said there were “real, real challenges” in London and the South-East, with cases being listed for 2027 and 2028, and the ability of HMCTS to move cases around the country “somewhat limited”.
“The reality is that, in London and the South-East, cases are being chronically delayed. We completely accept that.”
Mr Flury said the majority of tribunals had seen large increases in caseload, particularly the immigration and asylum tribunal. He said artificial intelligence (AI) was being explored as an easier way of producing transcripts of decisions.
Commenting on the Crown Court backlog, Lee Summerfield, director of responsive audit and investigations at the National Audit Office (NAO), said the current backlog had a higher proportion of complex cases than before because during the pandemic the focus had been on dealing with the “faster, simpler cases”.
For example, there were more adult rape cases, with defendants pleading not guilty more often and at a later stage in the process. The proportion of ineffective Crown Court trials had also increased, from 16% in 2019 to 27% in 2023.
Referring to a joint report by the MoJ and NAO on reducing the Crown Court backlog, published last month, Mr Summerfield said the increased number of police being recruited was always “going to have an impact”.
Speaking in a panel discussion on court backlogs, Penelope Gibbs, direction of campaign group Transform Justice, said the “game changer” for the magistrates’ courts would be to get some of the “lower level crimes” out of the system.
She said most of the people fined by magistrates were poor and HMCTS struggled to get them to pay.
Ms Gibbs said that for crimes such as criminal damage, common assault and low-value shoplifting, police cautions and community penalties offered a “far greater menu of options”.
She added that Transform Justice had “huge concerns” that video hearings did not support effective engagement by defendants and their widespread use during the pandemic did not improve efficiency.
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