Case Explained: Court backlog will take decade to fall to pre-Covid levels despite overhaul, says MoJ | UK criminal justice – Legal Perspective

The backlog in criminal courts in England and Wales will take a decade to fall to pre-Covid levels despite radical changes including curtailing jury trials, according to figures from the Ministry of Justice.

The justice secretary, David Lammy, said the government was determined to press ahead with the jury trial changes despite a potential rebellion from Labour MPs. He took aim at critics, who he said “sounded quite patrician, quite old-fashioned, quite male”.

It will take a decade for the changes to reduce the backlog even to below the current levels because of the scale of the increase, Ministry of Justice figures show. More than 80,000 cases are now in the crown court backlog, which is predicted to reach 100,000 by 2028, when the overhaul would come into force should the bill pass.

Lammy was speaking at the Microsoft AI Tour in London, in recognition of the fact that he is relying on artificial intelligence to help reduce the court backlog. But it is the decision to reduce jury trials that has attracted the most controversy among MPs and the legal profession.

In a rebuff to his critics, the justice secretary said jury trials were a small part of the package to cut the backlog and added there was a danger of failing to acknowledge the toll that delays were taking on victims of crime, in particular on women.

“There will be heated debate [in parliament] about what the government is proposing,” said Lammy. “And I hope that we centre victims in that debate and I have observed that sometimes the debates have sounded quite patrician, quite old-fashioned, quite male, forgetting often that the victims of crime are often vulnerable, often minorities, sadly children and very often women and we have to keep them in the front of our minds.”

Some of the strongest criticism of further limiting jury trials has come from the legal profession and Lammy, who qualified as a barrister in 1995, said that it was “a conservative profession with a small c”.

He pointed out that the bar had opposed changes to the double jeopardy rule, which had prevented someone being tried more than once for the same offence. However, once the changes were passed they provided “partial justice” for the family of Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in a racist gang attack in 1993.

Lammy said only a combination of investment in modernisation and changes such as judge-only trials would start to bring the court backlog down.

On Tuesday, the government announced it would lift the cap on court sitting days, one of the measures that critics of the changes have said would help clear the backlog.

Lammy said that, as critics had requested, he had found more money for courts, with funding increasing to £2.8bn next year – including £287m to fix the crumbling court estate – from £2.5bn last year, and announced measures to tackle inefficiencies, including the failure to get prisoners to courts on time. But, he said, that was not enough.

“Change won’t happen, of course, overnight,” said Lammy. “But here’s the reality: if we do nothing at all, the crowd will rise around 200,000 cases by 2035.”

The reform package, including extra sitting days, would reduce demand on crown court time by nearly 20%, the Ministry of Justice said.

Under the reforms, more cases would be heard by magistrates courts as well as a new “swift” bench division in the crown court for cases with an expected sentence of up to three years, which would be heard by judges sitting alone.

Lammy said that an increase in arrests and new criminal offences, with more than 3,000 created since 1997, had contributed to the backlog, as well as austerity. The average victim waits more than 250 days for justice, while a victim waits a “staggering” 423 days in rape cases, he said.

The reforms are expected to apply retrospectively to cases that are in the system in 2028, meaning that if defendants had opted for a crown court trial expecting a jury, they could get a judge-only trial. The courts minister, Sarah Sackman, said it was crucial the same rules applied across the board once the reforms came in in order to avoid a “two-tier system”.

There will be a new digital national listing model, and an AI listings tool is expected to be introduced that could predict the length of trials and assign empty court rooms, based on technology used to reduce NHS waiting lists. There will be new “blitz courts”, where similar cases are listed over a shorter period.

The Labour MP Karl Turner, a vocal opponent of the reforms, told Politico 60 Labour MPs were prepared to rebel on the proposals. “If whips think this rebellion that’s about to come is about some PLP members being cheesed off at the government, they have it wrong,” he posted on X.

“We will NOT allow this government or any government of any political persuasion to do away with the right to a trial by jury.”

Richard Atkinson, immediate past president of the Law Society, welcomed the added investment commitment to reform and modernisation but said AI was not a magic bullet. “The government’s proposals go too far in eroding the longstanding right to be judged by a jury of our own peers. They allow a single judge to determine guilt in serious, life-changing cases, which could significantly affect people’s liberty and reputations, he said.