Crown Court Criminal Case Backlog

Baroness Porter of Fulwood Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Porter of Fulwood (Con)]

My Lords, I also start by welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, and thanking her for an important maiden speech. The issues of sentencing, prisons and the court system simply cannot be separated. The backlogs that have triggered this debate must be looked at in that wider context. The recent Public Accounts Committee report, looking specifically at the Crown Court backlog, made the point that, at the end of last year, 11% of the prison population was made up of remand inmates, the highest level in 50 years. Some 32% of the remand population have been held on remand beyond six months, with 5% on remand for more than two years. The report makes the point that even getting levels down to where they were in 2019, just six years ago, would free up as many as 8,000 prison places.

The state of our prisons and the very difficult and important work of helping to equip people for a life beyond their release is made even harder with such a high proportion of inmates there on remand. The situation is also not helping the remand prisoners themselves; the longer someone waits before coming to court for resolution of their guilt or innocence in the eyes of the law, the more removed they often become from the day-to-day fabric of their life, job, family and friends. That helps no one.

There has been political consensus for a long time now that much sentencing is not optimal, with people being sent to prison when in many cases other sentences would be more appropriate. The courts sit at the heart of this conversation. The sentencing review that has been referenced and is being undertaken by David Gauke is hugely important, but these reforms should not be looked at piecemeal. As Leveson also undertakes his review into this issue around backlogs and the criminal courts more broadly, the two reviews absolutely must be dovetailed together into one coherent whole.

Reform is long overdue, and it requires us to look at the system as a whole: sentencing and courts. With court backlogs and prison capacity forcing these issues to be addressed, we should see this as an opportunity. I ask the Minister two specific questions. First, what is being done to consider the impact of the large number of remand prisoners on the wider pressures and capacity issues in the prison system? Secondly, can he commit that the Government will respond in an integrated way to the two reviews when they report, and consider changes to sentencing and the courts system as a whole?