Crown Court Criminal Case Backlog

Baroness Levitt Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure and an honour to follow the maiden speech from my noble friend Lady Longfield. She is a legend. She has spent decades tirelessly campaigning to improve the experience of children. In her powerful and moving speech she demonstrated her continued determination to fight for the rights of some of our most vulnerable citizens. Her persuasive expertise will make her a valued Member of your Lordships’ House and I very much look forward to working with her in the future.

Other noble Lords have and will express concern at the effects of the backlog on victims and defendants. What is less well known is that there is a looming recruitment and retention crisis in the judiciary because, as your Lordships have heard, the caseload of Crown Court judges is unsustainable. The recent Judicial Attitude Survey, conducted by Professor Cheryl Thomas, found very high levels of stress and disillusionment in judges, with 35% of them planning to take early retirement. When you add this to those who will retire by virtue of age, 42% of Crown Court judges will be gone by 2029. Of the part-time judges, from whom new judges are appointed, only 22% are planning to apply for a full-time role.

There are things that can be done, and some of them do not need to cost much money. It just requires the system to think about things differently. It has been a tenet of faith over many years that what is needed is judicial case management. Untold hours have been spent by senior judges and others devising Criminal Procedure Rules which set out timetables. But I hate to have to break it to them that they have been wasting much of their time. Most of the parties to a criminal trial have barely heard of the rules, far less read them. The reason: in the Crown Court there are no sticks and precious few carrots. You cannot make the parties comply and there is no incentive for them to do so, because they are paid the same whether they do or do not.

The result is a large number of pointless hearings in court, achieving little other than both increased blood pressure and an increased backlog. I do not have to imagine these problems because, until just before Christmas, I was one of those judges. I used to think constantly, “I’ve got 35 years’ experience as a criminal barrister, 12 of which were as a KC. I never thought that I would sit in hearing after hearing, day after day, saying to counsel, ‘So, you’ve done none of the things you were ordered to do. Okay, let’s set a new timetable, which you and I both know you are not going to comply with either’”.

Crown Court judges are a precious resource. Many of them came to it because they regard it as public service. Yet they cannot get on with the things they ought to be doing, because they are—to be frank—spending a large proportion of their working lives messing around, setting timetables.

I too have reservations about an intermediate court with no jury. My concerns include the impact on diversity and thus on public confidence. Most juries are economically and socially diverse, the judiciary less so. So, my proposal is not an intermediate court but an intermediate judge: the criminal master, who could, for example, be a district judge interested in promotion to the Crown Court. The master could hear all the small routine applications, leaving the judges free to do what they ought to be doing: presiding over jury trials and passing sentence.