Courts and Tribunals Bill

Baroness Levitt Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

My Lords, I spent 35 years at the criminal Bar as both a defender and a prosecutor, and then I spent three years as a Crown Court judge dealing with jury trials. From that, it is clear to me that our criminal courts are under pressure that is unlike anything I have seen in my professional career. From inside the system, every day it can be seen that delay is not just a question of statistics but a daily reality that shapes the experience of victims and defendants, and, increasingly, takes a toll on the judges, advocates and court staff who work tirelessly to keep the system functioning. This is not spoken about as much.

There is insufficient time in this debate to explore the recruitment and retention crisis at the criminal Bar, or its looming equivalent in the judiciary, but, in summary, it is contributed to by the working conditions created by the backlog, which puts pressure on the system to speed up throughput, sometimes at the expense of careful consideration of an individual case. That is not justice; it is administrative crisis management, and it is not good enough. We can therefore all probably agree that the Bill matters, but it may be less easy to agree on what to do about it.

What I say next is said with great affection for my own profession: lawyers have a tendency to regard procedural reform as the first sign of constitutional collapse; experience suggests otherwise. The history of criminal justice is a history of adaptation. The question is not whether change should occur, because change has always occurred; the question is whether it leaves the system fairer, more effective and better able to deliver justice. Some of the debate generated by the Bill has proceeded as though jury trial were the only fair means by which guilt or innocence can be determined. With respect, that has never been the position in England and Wales. The vast majority of criminal cases—usually some 90%—are and have always been dealt with by magistrates. I am a supporter of jury trial; it is one of the strengths of our system, but we have to be honest and realistic: it is expensive and time-consuming. That is precisely why, throughout our history, we have reserved it for cases Parliament regarded as sufficiently serious to justify that expenditure of time and resources.

However, what is meant by the most serious cases changes over time, and every Government redraw the line as to which cases require it. That is why we no longer use juries to try breathalyser cases, as we did in the 1970s. The system was adjusted so that drink-driving cases were dealt with by magistrates, and rightly so.

Whenever somebody suggests that only a jury can be trusted to determine guilt or innocence in a fair way, I find myself wondering what precisely it is that they are saying about magistrates. Lay magistrates—a majority—are members of the public, just like juries. They give their time voluntarily; they bring experience, judgment and common sense; and throughout my career, I saw them dealing conscientiously and fairly with difficult cases. Magistrates deserve recognition as a cornerstone of our system, not dismissal as a second-class form of justice.

There is an uncomfortable truth which we owe it to the public to acknowledge: at present, there are too many cases going to the Crown Court. We also have to recognise that delay does not only affect victims and innocent defendants; it also changes behaviour within the system. The question before us is not whether defendants deserve protection—of course they do—but protecting the innocent cannot be at the expense of allowing the guilty to play the system. Every Crown Court judge has encountered cases where one cannot help wondering whether a guilty plea owes as much to the attractions of delay as it does to the merits of the defence. A defendant may calculate that, by contesting the case, they can secure not merely this Christmas at home but perhaps the next one as well, and possibly even the one after that—and perhaps, if they are lucky, in the end the victim will just give up.

A justice system that rewards delay should not be surprised when delay becomes part of the strategy. There were certainly occasions during my time on the Bench when I looked at a case in the Crown Court and found myself asking, “What exactly is that case doing here?” We should trust our magistrates to decide where the justice of the case means that it should be tried—and we can trust them. Even in the system as it operates at the moment, the statistics show that magistrates often err on the side of caution by sending cases to the Crown Court where the eventual sentence was actually lower than the one the magistrates could have passed.

The Bill is not simply an exercise in reducing a backlog; it is an opportunity to address aspects of the criminal justice system that have required attention for years. Take appeals from the magistrates’ court. I have never really understood a process that effectively says, “You’ve had a trial before a properly constituted court. You didn’t like the outcome. So, now you can have another go in front of another court”. That may have made sense in the days when there was no accurate record of what had happened in the magistrates’ court. But in the 21st century, the recording and transcription of magistrates’ court proceedings can—and is—going to happen. So, only those cases where there is an arguable appeal should go ahead, and that is of course exactly what happens in every other court, including appeal from the Crown Court to the Court of Appeal.

My concern about the current system of magistrates’ court appeals is not in fact principally that it is grossly inefficient—even though it is—but that it is also unfair. Behind many of those appeals is a victim: someone who thought that the process had finally ended with the conviction but who will now be required to relive the entire experience again, in all likelihood months, if not years, later. A proper appeals system is not about giving defendants a second bite at the cherry; it is about the convicting the guilty while acquitting the innocent.

This Government have rightly assessed that to improve the criminal justice system requires investment and efficiency, but the modelling makes it absolutely clear that alone these are not enough; there must also be sensible modernisation of our procedures. The question before us is not whether reform is risk-free—it never is. The real danger is not that we change too much, but that we change too little, too late. After a lifetime practising in the criminal courts, I have concluded that the public care far less about preserving our procedures than they do about actually receiving justice in a timely way. So, our duty is to preserve what is best in the system, reform what is not, and leave behind a criminal justice system that works better than the one we inherited.