In a report today the PAC says the Ministry of Justice’ “meagre
ambition” to reduce the Crown Court case backlog – which has
nearly doubled since March 2019, to 59,928 - by “less than 8,000
by March 2025” is “unlikely to address unacceptable delays to
justice for victims, witnesses, and defendants”. Since March 2020
alone, the number of Crown Court cases waiting longer than a year
has increased by more than 340%.
The PAC says “victims of rape and serious sexual offences are
facing unacceptable delays to justice” which “compound and extend
their suffering and lead to too many cases collapsing”. The
number of these cases waiting longer than a year to be heard has
increased by more than 400% since the onset of the
pandemic. As waiting times increase, so does the probability that
a case collapses as witnesses and victims withdraw from the
process.
The PAC “remains unconvinced” of MoJ’s real “intentions to reduce
waiting times in the Crown Court, given the slow pace of
recovery” and that there are “significant, systemic challenges”
to clearing the backlog, including the numbers of trained judges,
legal professionals and local staff to support criminal courts.
It also “remains unconvinced that the prison system will cope
with the likely increase in prisoners”, given the planned
increase in police officers and planned reductions in the
criminal case backlog.
, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee,
said: “The Crown Court backlog has doubled since March
2019, to 60,000 of the most serious criminal cases waiting to be
heard. We acknowledge the difficulties created by the pandemic
but the figures show that but these problems were evident before
Covid hit. The Ministry of Justice says it will take 2 years to
cut this backlog by less than a sixth.
“It’s just not good enough. The number of people waiting more
than a year to have a serious criminal case heard has more than
trebled since March 2020 from already unacceptably high levels.
Government can’t keep shrugging off the question of what adding
20,000 new police officers to the mix will do.
“The Ministry of Justice must look at the challenges it’s facing
in the round and come up with a plan that deals with them, not
worsens them.”
PAC report conclusions and
recommendations
-
Unacceptable delays to justice for victims, witnesses,
and defendants is unlikely to be addressed by the Department’s
meagre ambition to reduce the Crown Court backlog by less than
8,000 cases by March 2025 The number of cases in the
Crown Court waiting to be resolved has nearly doubled since
March 2019, from an all-time low of 33,290 to 59,928 cases in
September 2021. Since March 2020 alone, the number of cases
waiting longer than a year has increased by more than 340%. The
Department’s plan is to reduce the backlog by less than 7,000
cases, to 53,000 by March 2025. We remain unconvinced of the
Department’s intentions to reduce waiting times in the Crown
Court, given the slow pace of recovery. In January 2022, after
we had taken evidence in December, the Department announced
that magistrates will be able to hand out longer prison
sentences. The Department expects this will reduce the number
of cases that magistrates need to send to the Crown Court for
sentencing.
Recommendation: The Department should fully explore with
the judiciary what reasonable expectations can be set around how
long it should take for a case to be completed in the Crown Court
and write to us with its findings within the next six
months.
-
Victims of rape and serious sexual offences are facing
unacceptable delays to justice that compound and extend their
suffering and lead to too many cases collapsing. The
number of such cases waiting longer than a year has increased
by more than 400% since the onset of the pandemic. As victims
are made to wait longer for their cases to be heard, their
lives are put on hold and their trauma is prolonged. As waiting
times increase, so does the risk the victim withdraws from the
process and the case collapses. While the proportion of cases
collapsing in the courts in this way has reduced recently, the
scale of victim attrition in other stages of the criminal
justice process is unacceptably high. We are encouraged that
the Department is putting more money into victim support
services, doubling investment from £92 million in 2019-20 to
£185 million by 2024-25. It also has plans to increase the
number of independent sexual violence advisors (ISVAs), whose
support to victims halves the likelihood of a victim
withdrawing from the process. In June 2021, the Department set
out a range of other actions it would take in its end-to-end
rape review, and published a progress update in December 2021,
but cannot yet say what impact these actions are having on the
number of rape and serious sexual offence cases waiting in the
backlog.
Recommendation: In its Treasury Minute response, the
Department should set out its plan to assess the impact of its
measures to support victims of rape and serious sexual offences
and its progress on recruiting ISVAs.
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We are not convinced that the Department can recruit
enough judges to deliver on its ambition to reduce the Crown
Court backlog. Reducing the backlog to 53,000 by March
2025 relies on increasing the number of days that the Crown
Court hears cases, from 100,000 in 2021-22 to 105,000 in
2022-23, then 106,500 in both 2023-24 and 2024-25. This
requires a significant increase in the number of judges, for
which the Department’s plan does not seem credible. Its plans
are predicated on successfully recruiting 78 full-time,
salaried circuit judges. This is despite only filling 52
of 63 positions during the previous recruitment round. The
resulting dependence on deploying criminal barristers and
solicitors as part-time judges, as well as increasing the work
load of part-time judges, to make up shortfall reduces
much-needed capacity within the legal profession to prosecute
and defend cases. We are concerned that the need to
significantly improve the diversity of the judiciary will be
overlooked in the Department’s efforts to boost the number of
judges
Recommendation: In its Treasury Minute response, the
Department should set out what specific actions it will be taking
to ramp up recruitment while improving diversity in the
judiciary.
-
We remain unconvinced that the prison system will cope
with the likely increase in prisoners given the planned
increase in police officers and the Department’s work to reduce
the backlog in criminal courts. In October 2019 the
government announced it would recruit 20,000 additional police
officers by 2023, which the Department expects will lead to a
significant increase in cases entering the courts, and in turn
custodial sentences. In July 2021, the Department reported a
gap of 4,000 prison places by the end of 2023, even once it had
factored in 18,000 additional places as part of its current
prison build programme. It has since secured funding for 2,000
more prison places, accounting for only half of the shortfall.
We are concerned that the Department’s plans allow for no
contingency and resilience that might be needed if, for
instance, police recruitment leads to more cases entering the
courts than expected or there are delays in its prison building
programme. We have reported before on the Department
under-delivering on its promises to create new prison places
and on the staggering backlog of maintenance work required to
keep existing prisons fit for purpose. We have also been
critical before about the effectiveness of cross-government
approaches to reducing re-offending; sustained progress in this
area will be a vital part of the equation if the prison system
is going to cope.
Recommendation: In its Treasury Minute response, the
Department should set out how it is building resilience across
the criminal justice system and, crucially, how it will ensure
there are enough prison places to meet the expected demand from
increased police recruitment and faster recovery in criminal
courts.
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Vulnerable users and people from ethnic minority
backgrounds are potentially impacted disproportionately by
efforts to tackle the Crown Court backlog, which the Department
and HMCTS have not done enough to understand.
Since the start of the pandemic, HMCTS significantly increased
the number of hearings held remotely using video technology.
However, it only published its formal evaluation of remote
hearings on 10 December 2021, nearly two years into the
pandemic. The limited coverage of the experiences of those with
disabilities or accessibility difficulties painted a mixed
picture, which HMCTS is still reviewing. A third of people
requesting reasonable adjustments felt their requests were
denied. There is insufficient data on ethnicity for the
Department to assess its recovery plans or the pandemic’s
impact on different groups. The Department is continuing to
work on improving the ethnicity data it collects.
Recommendation: In its Treasury Minute response the
Department and HMCTS should set out their plans to specifically
evaluate the experience of victims, witnesses and defendants –
particularly those deemed vulnerable and from ethnic minority
backgrounds – in criminal courts.
-
We recognise the long overdue move towards bringing
data on the criminal justice system together, although it is
not clear how the Department will use this to improve
performance. In December 2021, the Department
published a national scorecard and an adult rape scorecard that
bring together data on performance across the criminal justice
system, including on the size of the backlog, timeliness and
victim attrition. The Department plans to also produce local
scorecards at the police force level. In a complex system with
multiple organisations, the use of scorecards to drive
performance risks creating perverse incentives as organisations
focus disproportionately on the metrics that the Department has
selected to publish. The Department and HMCTS do not yet have
the data they need to fully understand and manage the flow of
cases. Both are relying on a new case management system to
address these gaps, although HMCTS has currently paused the
roll-out of this system.
Recommendation: In its Treasury Minute response, the
Department should set out how the data it has developed and
published will lead to improvements in performance and victims’
experiences. /ENDS
