Courts and Tribunals Bill

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

We all know that years of underfunding and under-investment have caused a crisis across our legal and justice systems. I commend some of the people who spoke earlier about their experiences, particularly the hon. Members for Bolsover (Natalie Fleet) and for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols). It takes immense courage to stand up in the Chamber and put those experiences on record. They came at this from a different point of view. I have immense respect for them. Of course, they are doing what we should be doing here. Victims and survivors—their voices, stories and needs—should be at the heart of the justice system, and they are, as we know, facing unacceptable delays to justice. The Government, of course, must speed up the process. Only the state can do that. It is only through the state that the citizen can get justice, so there is an undeniable need for reform.

The second part of the Bill makes immensely important interventions that will make a real difference to victims. They include the repeal of the presumption of parental involvement, and measures relating to the admissibility of evidence and special measures in court, and they are to be welcomed. The question that we are debating, however, is the degree to which clauses 1 to 7 are the major reforms needed to speed up the process. Removing the right to jury trial for offences that are triable either way and imposing a single-judge model are serious changes to individual rights, as we have heard. They go beyond what Sir Brian Leveson recommended that the Government do to address court backlogs, and they increase the risk of bias and miscarriages of justice, increase the risk to the safety of judges, and increase pressure on legal aid services.

Although nobody denies that action is necessary, we have to bear in mind that the Institute for Government estimates that the Bill will save only between 7% and 10% of total court time, and that judge-only trials will save only 1.5% to 2.5%. There is little concrete evidence that these are the right sorts of changes to make, and we fear that they will not achieve what we want.

I turn to Wales, because the problems are not the same everywhere across the England and Wales jurisdiction. Welsh Crown courts make up only a small proportion of the overall court backlog. Indeed, the Lady Chief Justice said that Wales is disposing of—wait for it—

“more Crown Court cases than it receives”.

That suggests that our Crown court backlog is actually going down. The legal reform charity JUSTICE points to Welsh Crown court measures that were taken to increase efficiency when those courts faced covid-era backlogs as examples of practical steps that have helped to keep clearance rates high.

Rather than us restricting a fundamental public right in order to tackle a problem, what would be useful in Wales is action to tackle the operational issues that our courts face, which we all know about. We need better data tracking, modern systems, improved pay, measures to address the Tory court closures, and proper building maintenance. Some of those things are pretty boring, but we will not make a difference until we address them.

We fear that the Bill could make things worse in Wales. Although there were 2,663 outstanding cases at the Crown court in Wales as of December 2024, there were nearly 12,000 outstanding cases in magistrates courts; they have serious capacity challenges that look set to increase as a direct result of the Bill. We also have serious challenges in Wales in recruiting magistrates, especially Welsh-speaking magistrates.

The hon. Member for Hornsey and Friern Barnet (Catherine West) mentioned a pilot scheme. It seems to me that, rather than making a huge, untested change of this gravity, a pilot scheme is exactly what we should be looking at, if we are to make changes to jury trials, because then we would actually know the effect. We need a pilot scheme with a sunset clause, rather than changes that will break the system everywhere to address an urban English problem.

It is undeniable that there is a crisis in the court system, and that we need changes to address it, but we need different solutions to address different problems in different areas. We must not break something in which there is so much trust at a time when we should be doing everything in our power to protect trust in politics—and, I fear, trust in the law, too.