Criminal Court Reform

Baroness Foster of Oxton Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)]

My Lords, the Justice Secretary repeatedly emphasised the lengthy waiting times in bringing cases to court. I am not a lawyer—I am one of the non-lawyers in the Chamber today—but I was disappointed that the Statement did not acknowledge the difficulties that had been brought about by the Covid lockdowns, across two or three years, which should be acknowledged. Notwithstanding that, the Minister pointed out that all the evidence, including from social media, that now has to be collected for any trial these days takes an inordinate amount of time to collate. Nevertheless, when it comes to unnecessarily lengthy waiting times, this is pure hypocrisy, given that the same Justice Secretary supports bringing to court former British soldiers who served in Northern Ireland 50 years ago. In addition, the Government have certainly managed to find time recently to bring to court, pretty quickly, people who had maybe put not very nice posts on social media. Neither the public nor, I think, many in the judiciary support the steps that the Government wish to take—certainly from what I have heard. I therefore urge the Minister to reconsider this ill-judged proposal and defer bringing it forward.

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her observations, which echoed what the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, said. I did my best to try to keep this non-partisan as far as possible until provoked into it by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie. It is true that Covid had an effect on the backlog, but that is not the only element; a lot of it is due to the cuts in the criminal justice system. For example, one of the questions that I am sure somebody will ask me at some point is why we simply do not open up all the unused courtrooms. The reason is that a court is much more than just a room. It is staffed by a lot of people, which includes the barristers and the solicitors, and we do not have enough criminal barristers any more because of the cuts to legal aid—about which the party opposite was warned at the time they made them. That is why we are going to increase funding for legal aid and the match funding for pupillages to try to grow back up that venerable body of practitioners. I will not comment on individual cases or categories of cases; this is a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution.