Thank you to everyone who has written to me about the Government’s proposals to reform the criminal courts.
While it has received far less attention than the public service failures Labour inherited from the Conservatives in areas like schools or the NHS, it is deeply worrying that the dire state of the justice system is harming victims and allowing criminals, murderers, and rapists to evade justice. It’s shocking that there are nearly 80,000 cases waiting to be heard, and that the backlog is on track to reach 100,000 by 2028 unless we take decisive action. Behind every one of those cases is a victim, a witness, or a defendant waiting – often for years – for justice. In many cases, the wait is so long that victims simply give up and drop out rather than face years of uncertainty. The Chief Constable of Warwickshire Police told me recently that the wait times from charge to court for rape and serious sexual offences was averaging around 3 years in our area. This is simply not acceptable, and victims in particular have suffered far too long.
Since taking office, the Labour Government has already invested heavily to stabilise the system: nearly £150 million to make courts fit for purpose; £92 million a year for criminal legal aid solicitors; an extra £34 million a year for legal aid advocates; and a record number of Crown Court sitting days. But even with this investment, the reality is that we cannot spend our way out of the backlog. Quite simply, there are not enough judges and criminal barristers to cope with the pressure the system is under, and recruiting and training the numbers needed is impossible in the short-term.
That is why the Government is proposing reforms to restrict jury trials in less serious cases to ensure the system is faster, fairer, and more certain – while keeping them for the overwhelming majority of cases where they are truly needed.
At the moment, only around 3% of criminal cases end up before a jury, and after these reforms three-quarters of those will continue to. The proposals focus instead on lower-level and mid-level cases where delays are longest and where victims are most likely to drop out. Key measures include:
- Creating new “Swift Courts” within the Crown Court, where certain cases with likely sentences of three years or less will be heard more quickly by a judge alone. Evidence from comparable systems, such as in Canada, shows this can save around 20% of the time taken by a jury trial.
- Stopping defendants from gaming the system by electing for a jury trial simply to delay proceedings in the hope that their case collapses. In future, judges and magistrates – not defendants – will decide the appropriate venue.
- Increasing magistrates’ sentencing powers to 18 months (with the potential to extend to 24 months if needed), allowing them to handle more cases and ease pressure on the Crown Court.
- Updating the threshold for summary trials in criminal damage cases to reflect inflation.
- A small number of highly technical and exceptionally long fraud cases may also be heard by a judge alone, but only where the court considers it appropriate and necessary.
I want to be absolutely clear that these reforms are not about eroding the principle of trial by jury, an important principle that I continue to uphold. They are about preventing criminals from exploiting the system, relieving intolerable pressure on our courts that have resulted from Tory cuts and mismanagement, and – above all – making sure that victims do not wait years for justice. I simply cannot accept a situation where victims of sexual abuse, in particular, are left for years in limbo because politicians did not take action to get the court backlog under control.
Alongside these reforms, the Government is investing £550 million over the next three years in specialist support services so that victims and witnesses receive the help they need to stay engaged with the justice process.
I fully understand why you, and many others, are protective of jury trials. They are a vital part of our justice system, and they will remain so. But at this moment of crisis, doing nothing is not an option. These carefully targeted reforms will keep the most serious cases before juries, while ensuring the whole system works better for victims and for the public.