Leaky ceilings, mounting backlogs and burned-out barristers — can the government fix the courts?
EMILIO CASALICCHIO
The defendant could have been tried at a Magistrates’ Court — the lowest criminal court in England and Wales — where a panel of volunteer justices might have dealt with the case in an hour. Instead, he gambled on a full trial in the Crown Court, where 12 members of the public, often less prone to convict than magistrates, will decide his fate.
It’s a tradeoff future defendants may not have the opportunity to make, as England’s once-lauded court system creaks at the seams.
A growing backlog of cases has prompted the United Kingdom’s Labour government to search for radical ways to make English justice more efficient. Among the recommendations being considered are new restrictions on jury trials.
Since 2019, the average length of time between a case arriving at the Crown Court and being completed has rocketed 70 percent, to 239 days. Across England and Wales some 80,000 cases are awaiting trial, with some now starting to be scheduled as far away as December 2029.
The case backlog is expected to hit around 105,000 by spring 2029, according to official forecasts —even with extra funding to put judges on the bench for longer and the rollout of temporary “Nightingale courts,” created to handle the cases that racked up after the Covid lockdowns.
The accused wait, and so must their victims. Mary Prior, a senior barrister who until September was chair of the Criminal Bar Association, warns that the consequences of the pileup go beyond justice being delayed, or even denied. A broken justice machine can lead to a broken society.
Prior says furious members of the public could attempt to take the law into their own hands, citing the 2024 riots across Britain after three girls were murdered in Southport: “Riots arise because people don’t think the law is working for them.”
The government has turned to retired judge Brian Leveson to fix the crisis. Among a list of ideas, he proposes stopping defendants gambling on jury trials in cases where the maximum sentence is two years, which would divert many serious cases away from the Crown Court. He also suggests reducing some sentences to fit under that new cap.
Meanwhile, Leveson suggests creating a new mid-tier court, where a judge and two magistrates would oversee trials with expected sentences of up to three years.
The measures combined would slash the role of juries.
The Labour government is expected to sign off on the plans in the coming months. But insiders warn the changes could undermine fairness for defendants — and won’t make a real dent in the backlog unless ministers find the money to undo decades of cuts and neglect.
“The whole system is both figuratively and literally crumbling and falling around our ears,” says Law Society President Richard Atkinson. He lamented the system’s crippling inefficiencies and the dire condition of the buildings. “It is a truly horrendous picture.”
Indeed, time appears to slow down in the courts. There is no such thing as punctuality. Nobody questions a 15-minute pause in proceedings stretching into 30 minutes or an hour. Cases often get going late in the morning and break for the night in the mid-afternoon.
Despite the need to reduce the case backlog, more than a fifth of courtrooms sit vacant each day due to organizational, maintenance and personnel issues. Jurors and dock officers fall asleep in public view. Hold-ups and mistakes that leave victims and defendants waiting extra weeks or months for justice are the accepted norm.
One ambitious starter, observing court at the beginning of her Crown Prosecution Service career, says the system is rife with “mismanagement,” sighing: “By the end of day two, I thought: Now I understand the backlogs.”
POLITICO spent a week visiting England’s Crown Courts, speaking to dozens of barristers, judges, clerks, probation staff, defendants and their families, to understand how a best-in-class justice machine came to be broken, and whether it can be fixed.
Wondering when justice might begin
A defense barrister lets out a deep sigh as she contemplates another wasted day at Isleworth Crown Court in west London.
The defendant in her morning hearing, an attempted strangulation case, failed to show up — she thinks because he was never told about the court date — and the defendant in her afternoon hearing is nowhere to be found either.
(The names of the defendants mentioned in this piece have been withheld to comply with U.K. law aimed at not prejudicing trial verdicts.)
The defense barrister, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about the court system, had worked late preparing for the hearings. Both were listed, as usual, mere hours before their scheduled start times. She gets paid for her court appearances after each case concludes — an indefinite point in the future. But she doesn’t get paid for the prep, which could be 30 hours for a serious case. And the fee for failed hearings is lower, despite the wasted time on paperwork and travel.
“It’s a slog,” she laments, staring at the patches of duct tape holding the stained carpets together in the corridor. “It’s relentless. The caseloads are insane.”
Days when none of her hearings go ahead are far too frequent, and becoming more regular.
Sometimes the prison transport contractors fail to bring defendants; sometimes the probation service forgets to tell a bailed defendant they are due in court; sometimes a document or a staff member is missing; sometimes evidence is not up to scratch or has not been shared with the relevant legal teams; sometimes the prisons haven’t granted the barrister access to meet their clients; sometimes a video link isn’t working; sometimes a translator who speaks the wrong language has been sent; sometimes there are building maintenance issues. The list goes on.
The government argues new tech will fix the administrative bottlenecks, but those in the trenches are more skeptical. “Our overlords claim AI is going to solve all our problems, but we just want a fucking printer that works,” one usher snorted.
Tech can’t fix crumbling buildings. In 2016, ceilings in Maidstone dripped toilet water onto jurors and barristers during a rape trial. Just this summer, floodwater cascaded down the walls of the most high-profile criminal court in Britain.
As the defense barrister wonders whether her second case will go ahead, a clerk wanders the long, windowless Isleworth corridor, clutching a clipboard. The case in her courtroom was meant to start 30 minutes earlier, but the police officer running it has gone AWOL. A screen flickers with the title of a case in another court, but the information is wrong; that trial wrapped up last week. In court 3, the trial didn’t get going until 3 p.m. because the defense barrister was late.
Finally, just as the court considers giving up on the hearing and closing for the afternoon, the barrister’s second defendant appears, making excuses about sickness and a problem with the trains.
The 18-year-old saunters in wearing a grey tracksuit and clutching a plastic bag with a couple of drinks inside. He’s been charged with assault against a police officer and pleads not guilty.
The judge schedules his case for March 2029 — four years after the alleged offense.
“This is my first time in adult court,” he says after the hearing. “When this is done, I’ll be, like, 22. It just seems like no one really cares.”
Other defendants that morning also got trial dates for 2028 and 2029. “I’m very sorry about that,” Judge Edward Connell told one about the long wait.
Tough on crime, soft on the consequences of crime
Under the Leveson reform proposals, the 18-year-old’s case would be heard in the magistrates’ court.
Before 2018, it would also have been heard in the magistrates’ court. But the politicians got involved.
A proposal passed by the Conservative government that year made assaults on emergency workers a specific offense and triable in the Crown Court. In 2022, the possible prison sentence was doubled from one year to two, again increasing the chance of cases being sent to the higher court as the government flexed its “tough on crime” muscles.
Nevertheless, sentences for hitting or spitting at a police officer rarely top the 6-month prison sentence magistrates could impose before November 2024 — never mind the new 12-month threshold the government increased it to that month in a bid to reduce pressure on the Crown Court. Almost all assault cases of this nature now go to juries, clogging the machine.
It’s not uncommon for politicians to try to look tough on crime without considering the consequences, says the Conservative former Justice Secretary Alex Chalk. There are few restraints on a “big ego” in the Home Office wanting to “burnish their own political credentials” regardless of the added pressure on the courts, he says.
A tougher stance against sexual offenses and increased efforts to ensure rape cases make it to court have further contributed to the pileup. But the move to take what are often complicated cases more seriously has not been matched with funding for the courts to deal with them, and that squeeze has made matters worse.
Mary Prior, the former chair of the Criminal Bar Association, was in summer prosecuting a child sexual assault case. The two victims gave evidence under a 1999 rule allowing cross-examinations to be filmed long before a trial might start.
The rule was designed to make the ordeal less traumatic for kids, but has led to unintended consequences.
Once the sensitive evidence is gathered, any impetus to ensure a quick trial evaporates. The case Prior was prosecuting was postponed four times before going ahead in 2025 at Leicester Crown Court — three and a half years after the victims first went to the police. One victim completed school, then further education in the interim, and self-harmed each time the case was put off. The accused has now been found guilty.
“I don’t think it’s that long away where a father of a child who’s been abused, who has been waiting three or four years for a trial, just goes and takes the law into their own hands,” says Prior.
In 2022, barristers went on an extended strike over cuts to their wages — further increasing the backlog.
Few in the system think reducing jury trials will solve the problems. Most people POLITICO spoke to argued the Leveson reforms sounded like a poor fix for chronic underfunding and risked more wrongful convictions in serious cases, since magistrates and judges are more prone to determine guilt.
The defense barrister whose clients did not show up says cutting juries will not create more barristers, staff and courtrooms — “it’s just going to be less fair for defendants.” A sitting judge at Snaresbrook Crown Court in east London says removing juries from important cases “is wrong and not the solution.” A probation officer says justice must be “fair and transparent, and getting rid of juries reduces both.”
Another barrister says: “If the jury system goes, I go. It’s the reason I do the job.”
“We are investing in a record amount of court sitting days and increasing funding for maintenance of our crumbling court buildings,” Sarah Sackman, minister for courts and legal services, told POLITICO. “But we cannot spend our way out of the mess we inherited. That’s why we’ve asked Sir Brian Leveson to propose bold and ambitious measures, so we can do whatever it takes to create a system fit for the 21st century and deliver swifter justice for victims.”
Post-trial tribulations
In a Crown Court southwest of London, a 21-year-old defendant glances over the glass of the dock at his mum, who is wearing a black t-shirt and a black skirt patterned with white flowers. The victim he was convicted of assaulting is also wearing flowers for the occasion — big red poppies on a black dress, over fishnet tights.
The trial is finished, and both have come to hear what his sentence will be. But the judge, Claire Harden-Frost, has questions.
“I’m missing quite a lot of information that would assist me, from a prosecution point of view,” she tells the court.
The prosecution barrister was drafted onto the sentencing at the last minute. She didn’t work on the trial and was not given all the relevant paperwork before the hearing.
Harden-Frost looks up at the clock above the courtroom door. She gives the prosecution barrister an hour to do her best, but in the end has no choice but to postpone the sentencing for another six weeks — the earliest date she and both barristers are available.
The 21-year-old’s gran sighs: “I’m very disappointed the prosecution was not better organized, because it’s playing with people’s lives.”
CORRECTION: This article was updated on Oct. 17 to correctly describe one of the key proposals outlined by Brian Leveson.
This article (Inside Britain’s broken justice machine) was created and published by Politico EU and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Emilio Casalicchio
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