Judicial Review and Courts Bill (Ninth sitting)

Caroline Johnson Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Public Bill Committees

[James Cartlidge]

As ever, the hon. Gentleman makes a number of interesting points. Some of them go quite a bit wider than the clause before us, although he did enter the caveat that, given the importance of this clause, he was making some broader points, and I think that is fair. Taken together, these provisions are very important in terms of the coronial court. They do address matters relating to streamlining and ultimately, therefore, the backlog; and before I go into the specific points that he raised, some of which were very sensitive and very important, I want to talk about the backlog.

What the hon. Gentleman said was incredibly important. He specifically acknowledged that covid is responsible in large part—or however he wants to couch it—for the backlog in the coroners’ courts, and he is absolutely right. Let us be absolutely clear about this: social distancing has had a dramatic impact in the courts, particularly where juries are concerned. That is true in the Crown court. It is true in the coronial court. It is simple maths. The coroners’ buildings were not designed suddenly to have a rule about 2 metres, which was there, after all, for everyone’s public health benefit. The coroner’s house in Sunderland, for example, has capacity for, I believe, 54 persons in the courtroom. With social distancing, it had 11, so it does not take a great leap of imagination to work out how much harder it would have been to dispose of cases with a jury.

[Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

In support of the Minister’s point, I can say that during my visit to a Crown court last week, there were five defendants who would normally be sat in the same dock in the courtroom, but because of social distancing, a separate courtroom and separate dock are having to be used just to hold the extra defendants, which means, of course, that that courtroom cannot be used for anything else.

[James Cartlidge]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Was it Lincoln, by any chance?

[Dr Johnson]

The Old Bailey.

[James Cartlidge]

Ah! I asked because my hon. Friend is obviously a Lincolnshire MP. She is absolutely right. Since I got this job—I have been in post only a matter of weeks—I have visited Crown courts and magistrates courts around the country, and to someone who has not been to one recently, it is very striking to go to a Crown court and see the limitations caused by social distancing. We are trying to deal with those, but it has been a job of work to deal with them.

[Dr Johnson]

I just wonder whether my hon. Friend could update me on what work he is doing with the Department of Health and Social Care to alleviate some of these restrictions. Now that we sit next to one another in, for example, the House of Commons Chamber, is the social distancing measure still required?

[James Cartlidge]

There are some very good examples. There are one or two that we are working on at the moment, which I will go into more detail about at the appropriate moment. But the most important thing by far is that many existing courtrooms in the Crown court have come back into use as social distancing has reduced. For example, I was visiting Highbury magistrates, where the maximum number of people in the building had been lifted, because, for example, when people arrive to be allocated to cases—there are all kinds of reasons why we have lots of people in a court building—the capacity in itself becomes a significant constraint.

I appreciate that this provision is about coroners, but what I am describing is fundamental to the current debate. I could not care less, frankly, what people say on Twitter. They are all predetermined—there is not a single swing voter out there. But the Labour party has now strongly put forward a message, effectively, that the backlog in the Crown court is not because of covid but because of this Government. I find that wholly disingenuous. It is not only inaccurate—the hon. Member for Stockton North is shaking his head. It is not only inaccurate; it therefore conveys a false sense of the reality on the ground.

Let me give a statistical example. On 31 December 2009, the outstanding case load—what we have generally come to call the backlog, although there is always an outstanding case load—was 47,713. In December 2019, it was 38,291. Surprise, surprise: when courts were closed because of social distancing and jury trials suspended—although we restored them as quickly as possible—that figure shot up. It created a huge bottleneck. And we still have those problems. It really matters what we say on this, because people must understand the extent to which the pandemic has hit our ability to dispose of cases, because obviously it therefore dictates the solutions. On this side, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham said, that has meant, for example, trying to lift restrictions where we can, which I think is very important. Therefore I am grateful that, in the matter of coronial courts, the hon. Member for Hammersmith has put on the record his recognition of the impact of covid on the backlog.