Court Waiting Times: Kent

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

Tuesday 8th April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tristan Osborne) for securing the debate and for his opening remarks. He laid out the impact of court waiting times in Kent on behalf of constituents, as is his job.

I will begin by laying out the background to how we arrived at the challenges that we face, given the apparent profound amnesia of all other Members who have spoken. As a result of the pandemic, all jury trials in England and Wales were suspended on 23 March 2020. There was a limited reopening in June, beginning with just 26 courts—less than half the total. Gradually, more courts were added, but trial times and the number of individual courts available were both significantly impacted by the need to have covid protection measures in place.

The previous Government, recognising the central importance of jury trials to our judicial system, decided to keep them during the pandemic, as the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford recognised. That decision was supported at the time by the then shadow Justice Secretary, who is now the Foreign Secretary. The Opposition will not apologise for keeping jury trials, and I welcome the fact that the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Sir Nicholas Dakin), recently reiterated his party’s agreement with that decision.

The decision required the Government to take extraordinary steps to tackle the impact of social distancing measures on our ability to hold jury trials. We opened, and extended the use of, 20 Nightingale courts, and increased the number of judges by 1,000 and raised their retirement age. That brings me to sitting days, which are of course necessary to fund the use of the court capacity available. Each financial year, the Lord Chancellor decides to fund a certain number of sitting days in the Crown courts to ensure their efficient and effective operation. In April 2021, coming out of covid, the then Lord Chancellor removed the cap on sitting days for ’21-22 and subsequently removed the cap for the following two years. As a result, the number of sitting days in each year rose from 81,899 in ’19-20 to 98,604 in ’21-22, and to 100,950 in ’22-23.

Let us look at what Labour said it would do when it was in opposition. Its general election manifesto argued:

“Victims wait months, sometimes years, for their case to come to trial, unable to move on with their lives.”

Labour said that it would “address the courts backlog”. It would therefore have been reasonable of voters to assume that Labour had a plan to bring the backlog down, but what has been the reality since it took office? What do we see today, after Labour has spent nine months in charge? Instead of working through the backlogs, waits are getting worse under this Government. There are now over 74,000 unresolved prosecutions in our courts and the backlog is growing. Some suspects are being told that they may not face trial until 2028.

Those delays, caused by court closures, the pandemic and strike action, have serious consequences. A record 17,000 people are now held on remand, taking up one in five prison places. Yesterday, on 7 April, according to the Idle Courts data feed, 68 out of 516 Crown courtrooms across England and Wales sat empty. That is 13% of our Crown capacity not in use. Yesterday, in Kent, the picture was equally stark. Only three courts were sitting in Canterbury and just one in Maidstone. This is not a system working at full strength. In a stark admission, the Lord Chancellor herself actually admitted defeat and said that the courts backlog will keep on rising. So much for what Labour said in its manifesto.

What could Labour have done differently? Since taking office in July 2024, the Lord Chancellor has acted too slowly. She has wasted valuable time by failing to fund the additional sitting days offered to her by the Lady Chief Justice, sitting on her hands when many more court sessions could have been running. On taking office, the Lady Chief Justice was clear that at least 6,500 sitting days were available to address the courts backlog. Did the Labour Government take up that full offer? No. Instead, there was an increase of just 500 Crown court sitting days in September. Realising their mistake, in December, they funded an additional 2,000 Crown court days. That brought the total to 108,500 by the end of 2024.

More recently, the Lord Chancellor came to the House on 5 March and announced that the total number of sitting days would rise to 110,000. That is the story of Labour’s time in government and its efforts to tackle the problem so far—dither and delay. Even now, we are still short of the 113,000 days a year that the Lady Chief Justice says are available, and are losing valuable time to hear cases in order to tackle the backlog. Nearly half of victims have had their Crown court trial date rescheduled, with most facing repeated delays before their trial takes place. The frequent adjournments and extended waiting times cause victims immense stress, severely impacting their wellbeing.

I know that the challenge is particularly severe locally, for which I understand a number of causes have been identified. The hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford identified variation even within the waiting times that he has experienced locally. For example, there are more cases entering the system, likely related to the fact that police numbers in Kent are at an historic high and charges are up 50%. There are also acute staffing challenges, which have not only resulted in the closure of the Maidstone Nightingale court but, as I highlighted earlier, left courts empty even when the physical space is available. One of the reasons that has been discussed locally is that Kent struggles to recruit and retain legal professionals, as many move to London for better pay. I understand that there has been discussion of a south-east allowance to tackle that.

For victims, it is vital that the Government take action to reduce the backlog. As Members have said, justice delayed is justice denied. In yet another display of the absence of their own ideas, Ministers have asked Sir Brian Leveson to consider the future of criminal courts, and specifically the merits of hearing more trials outside the Crown court. The review will consider the merits of longer-term reform, as well as court efficiency. I understand that Sir Brian will consider court reform options that would reduce demand on the Crown court. We look forward to seeing his recommendations in full and giving our perspective on them.

The Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde), asked questions about shorter sentencing. He fell into a common trap of trying to make comparisons between short sentences and non-short sentences in relation to reoffending rates. He fails to understand that when judges make decisions on sentencing, they do different things with different cohorts. If we case-match for the difference between the types of people who get short sentences and non-custodial sentences, the differences in reoffending trickle down to single figures. I ask him to consider that when discussing this issue in future.

When might we expect to see the review published, and does the Minister, or the Government, intend to implement any of its recommendations in legislation this year or in future years? Can she update us on how many Nightingale courts remain in use, and what assessment the Department has made of their value for money in bearing down on the backlog? The Government should also think about how to ensure that court procedures are efficient. To that end, will she be looking to extend the pilots for the court case co-ordinators that have been implemented recently? I would be grateful for her comments on those points.

Quite simply, we need more courts open for longer, hearing more cases. The Labour party decided to tell the general public that it would fix everything once in office, and that it would solve the many difficult challenges across our public services flowing from the pandemic and global challenges. However, whether it be small boat crossings, inflation, economic growth or today’s topic of the court backlogs, things are actually getting worse, not better.

The Government talk frequently about their inheritance. Even if we take at face value the contested £22 billion in financial pressures apparently binding their hands, which I do not, I gently remind them that the equivalent figure in 2010 when we took office was around £100 billion. I do not remember them giving us much leeway for the difficult decisions we had to make then, including in relation to funding the judicial system. The buck stops with them now, and I took forward to the Minister fulfilling their commitments.