Courts and Tribunals Bill

Baroness Mallalieu Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Mallalieu (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Stace, on a textbook, excellent maiden speech. I hope we will hear much more from him.

I have two interests to declare. I practised at the criminal Bar for 40 years, but I am now long retired; and, despite my warnings about the way in which the criminal justice system was deteriorating through chronic underfunding, my elder daughter defiantly ploughed on to be a practising criminal barrister on the Western Circuit.

It is surely an irony that the two major achievements of the 1945 Labour Government were the health service and giving people without funds access to justice through legal aid. The first consumes more and more revenue; the second has been starved of it to the point of near collapse. Of course, the Government have realised what has gone wrong: 380,000 cases are waiting in the magistrates’ courts and, as we have heard, 81,000 in the Crown Court. There are victims of many sorts—not just the complainants waiting for trials but the wrongly accused. Public confidence is being eroded and our system of criminal justice is seriously damaged.

Just how bad has it become? One circuit leader—it is fair to say that this was three years ago—was asked to suggest one thing that would make things better. He said, “Yes, a bucket to put under the leak in my courtroom ceiling”. I have not made that up. Courts in valuable locations have been sold off and very little money has been spent on the court estate. The result has been breakdowns and closures. Courtrooms have been closed through a lack of judges or recorders and revenue restrictions on the number of permitted days. Over some years, legal aid has been so severely restricted and reduced that no young barrister who wants to make a half-decent living chooses a criminal practice. So few have done so that, on occasions, my daughter—either prosecuting or defending—goes to court to find yet another adjournment, because there is simply no one available to take the opposing brief.

It is not just the barristers who are in short supply. There are so few court clerks that many court centres, on occasion far apart, have had to share one or find one remotely. There is a shortage of interpreters because the rates paid do not compete with more lucrative fields. On a court sitting day, whatever that means—you might think it is a full day, but very often it is not, because the judge trying a case with a jury has to fit something in at 10 am and maybe even something at 2 pm, which can run on because there is no other judge to hear it—the jury involved in the trial are sitting in a waiting room for all that time until it has finished. Prison vans, because of the inadequate contracts, routinely delay trials because they do not bring prisoners to court in time. With these delays, postponements and adjournments, the waiting lists have grown longer and longer.

There are measures in the Bill that deserve support, especially those drawn from part 2 of the report by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, and from the Law Commission. There are also, as the Minister said at the beginning, things that the Government have already started to do that are having an effect and—let us hope—look as though they are beginning to stabilise the Crown Court waiting lists: more sitting days, reopening courts and legal aid to encourage more people to enter the criminal Bar and to train more magistrates. The magistrates’ court lists are, as we have heard, already hopelessly overloaded as it is.

I am glad and relieved that the Government have stepped back from their earlier, shocking, wider position on the removal of jury trials, but the Bill as it stands needs some more radical pruning. In making changes to cut the waiting lists, the one thing that we surely do not want to do is further damage public confidence in the criminal justice system. Two particular aspects of the Bill would do that.

First, both research and experience show, as the noble Lord, Lord Russell, said, that women and girls, especially, and Black and minority communities place confidence in the present right to be tried by a jury—particularly in serious cases—or, in other words, to be tried by a group of people with a range of experiences, some of whom may understand their condition better than a single, usually male and white, judge. Your case may seem minor to others, but for you a conviction may destroy your job, marriage, family, home and life. That right should be automatic and retained.

Secondly, if you are tried today in a magistrates’ court and are wrongly convicted—which happens, especially as many of the accused are not legally represented—you want to know that you have the right to have a rehearing in the Crown Court. The Post Office workers who were wrongly convicted in the magistrates’ court were almost all sentenced to less than two years. Under this Bill, they would have had no automatic right to a Crown Court hearing. Yet, and this is perhaps the most significant point, the figures from June this year show that 56% of such appeals succeed. Magistrates’ courts should surely be for swift justice for low-level crimes, not a tipping ground for Crown Court overflow cases.

That is where we are. What is the answer? First, look at those Crown Courts that have eliminated their backlog—we can find out their names; Liverpool is certainly one, and there are others—and do what they are doing, which is essentially much better and more efficient case management, countrywide. Secondly, we need more courtrooms, more sitting days, more judges, proper resources and full court days, not requiring one judge to do the work of two because it is cheaper. Finally, we need incentives to plead guilty at the very earliest stages, more use of the so-called Goodyear directions—where judges are able to give realistic indications of the sentence in the event of a guilty plea—reviews of cases in the waiting list and the removal of those no longer in the public interest, and, of course, as has been said, the increased use of technology to reduce case management hearings using up court time.

Forty years in practice have taught me that, although the result is not always right, jury trial is the best and fairest system by which to determine guilt or innocence. It is surely about trusting the people—which, if you believe in democracy and freedom, is what good government does.