Boosting the sentencing power of magistrates is the wrong way to reduce a huge backlog of criminal cases
The court system of England and Wales was already in crisis before the pandemic – a direct effect of government cuts leading to closures and staff shortages. Between 2010 and 2020, the Ministry of Justice’s budget was cut by 40%. Annual spending on legal aid fell by almost £1bn over a period of five years. Then Covid hit, gumming up the system further and leading to widespread cancellations and delays. The consequence is an enormous backlog that has been largely overlooked, in part because most people do not regularly interact with the justice system. Currently there are 372,000 cases waiting to be heard in magistrates courts and almost 60,000 in crown courts, where more serious offences are tried.
We don’t tend to describe court delays as a “waiting list”, but a long queue for justice is what these numbers add up to. This affects victims and witnesses as well as defendants. All must wait, sometimes for years, for the outcome of events that may well have changed their lives. For those held on remand and subsequently found not guilty, there is no recompense for time wasted. Cumulatively, and over time, the risk is a wider loss of public confidence in the legal system. Among victims’ groups, one fear is that offenders may be emboldened. The number of reported rapes reached a new record of 63,136 in the year to September 2021.
