Independent Sentencing Review

Tristan Osborne Excerpts

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call Tristan Osborne for the last question on this statement.

[Tristan Osborne (Chatham and Aylesford) (Lab)]

Leaving the best until last, Madam Deputy Speaker.

As a former police officer, I can say that community payback works. Does the Lord Chancellor agree with me and many of my colleagues in the criminal justice system that rehabilitation of offenders, including filling potholes and clearing fly tipping, is popular, not only in Chatham and Aylesford but in Newark and across the country?

[Shabana Mahmood]

My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. I am determined that we toughen community punishment and make sure that unpaid work truly pays back to the communities that have been harmed by crime. That is why I work with businesses and local authorities, so we can all have a system that drives down reoffending—a system where reparations are made to the communities that have been harmed by crime, whether they are in Newark, Birmingham Ladywood or indeed anywhere else.

Victims and Courts Bill

Tristan Osborne Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 20th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Tristan Osborne (Chatham and Aylesford) (Lab)]

May I first pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Anneliese Midgley), the families of victims across this country who are here listening to us today, and the victims who are seeking justice through this Bill? I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Natalie Fleet) for her strong articulation of concerns about rape and domestic abuse, and my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Dr Tidball) for her very strong speech. There have been some extremely passionate speeches today, with constituents’ views at their heart.

As a former police officer, I have seen the criminal justice system from both sides, and I can tell the House that it has fallen short in recent years—not just in prosecuting crime, but in supporting those who are most harmed by it. We have heard similar testimony today. This Bill is an important and necessary step towards restoring the principle that justice is not just about punishing offenders, important though that is. It is also about standing up for the most important part: victims. As I have said in Westminster Hall debates, justice delayed is justice denied. Given the previous Government’s record with regard to policing cuts, soaring court waiting times, the mismanagement of probation services and our prisons being left full, I am afraid the inheritance is dire, but this Government are trying to correct those mistakes. I will cover just three points, because I am conscious that other colleagues wish to speak.

On victims’ rights, it is absolutely correct that we should have reasonable ways of getting a perpetrator into a courtroom, but the Bill needs to go further; I would support audiovisual recording of such things. We do that for the Supreme Court, where people are able to see sentencing. With victims’ consent, justice for high-profile cases should be in the public domain. I urge the Government to go further by allowing the rest of society to see justice being served, as I think we are now reaching that point in our technological development.

I welcome the fact that the Bill grants victims a statutory right—not just a courtesy—to be kept informed and to have their voices heard during critical stages of the process. I also support granting enhanced powers to the Victims’ Commissioner. As someone who worked as a police officer, I know that antisocial behaviour, from nuisance biking to graffiti and persistent noise, is a major problem in many communities across the country. The Victims’ Commissioner will have the power to stand up to local councils and other bodies of authority on behalf of people who have less of a voice in society. I welcome that measure, because I believe that victims of antisocial behaviour should be treated the same as any other victim of crime.

I welcome the time limits for sentencing reviews, which the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) mentioned. He will be aware that the Bill extends those limits; if a review is received in the last 14 days of the existing 28-day period, there will be an additional 14 days to act. Could the Bill go further? Of course it could, but this is a welcome step none the less.

Lastly, I will discuss the court backlogs and the impacts on communities, which I have raised in Westminster Hall debates. I welcome the powers in the Bill to improve sentencing powers for six offences, including unlawful subletting, breaches of restraining orders and violation of criminal behaviour orders. We need to get the magistrates to step in and work with that.

In short, there is a lot in this Bill that we should support. I encourage colleagues to vote for it today.

Court Waiting Times: Kent

Tristan Osborne Excerpts

Tuesday 8th April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tristan Osborne (Chatham and Aylesford) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered court waiting times in Kent.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank everyone present for attending. I appreciate that it is the end of the term, so it will be a pleasure to witness the popular and lively debate that we are going to have over the forthcoming hour, I hope, but we will see.

I am very grateful to have the opportunity to open today’s important debate about court waiting times in Kent and, more broadly, across the entire country. This issue has become more pressing in recent years and is symptomatic of deeper structural challenges across the entire justice system of England and Wales. The issue is not just about numbers or administrative delays, but about real people whose lives are being upended because the justice system is struggling to deliver in a timely manner.

I hope that today’s debate will allow us to scrutinise these issues and, more importantly, to come together to find practical and meaningful solutions to the crisis that we are facing, because at its core the phrase “Justice delayed is justice denied” remains as relevant today as when it was coined. That truism has never been more evident than in the context of the growing delays in trials and hearings. For victims, defendants, witnesses and everyone involved, long waits for justice can be an agonising experience. The delays are not just frustrating; they have far-reaching consequences for people’s lives, for their mental health and for the reputation of the justice system itself. When delays are allowed to go unchecked, the system loses its legitimacy and people begin to lose confidence in its ability to deliver justice at all.

This is a national issue affecting courts across the entire country, but Kent has been particularly impacted by the delays, especially certain parts of the county. Some courts are experiencing far more severe backlogs than others. For example, according to open-source information, Maidstone Crown court currently has 2,367 outstanding cases, compared with Canterbury, which has 894 outstanding cases. Those figures are interesting, and I will go on to talk more about them. Additionally, the latest figures from the Kent police and crime commissioner, covering the period from July to September last year, show a 269% increase in court backlogs compared with 2019. This leaves a total of 3,261 Crown court cases waiting to be heard in Kent as of September of last year.

The stark disparity in waiting times between courts is deeply concerning, as it undermines the principle of equal access to justice for all. It is a problem that demands urgent attention, as it reflects a growing imbalance in how the justice system is applied. I know it is popular in this place to talk about “two-tier justice”, to coin a phrase, but it appears that under the Governments from 2019 to 2024, many victims and alleged perpetrators, and their families, have had no-tier justice—they have been left in an ever-extended limbo.

The constant pressure to move the system forward means a record-high Crown court backlog across England and Wales, now exceeding 73,000 outstanding cases. That represents a 10% rise between September 2023 and September 2024 and a near-doubling of the backlog versus 2019. It is essential to note that these figures are not just abstract numbers. They represent real people—victims and defendants who have been waiting months and, in some cases, years for their cases to be heard. The cases vary in nature. Some are extremely distressing; they include rape and other sexual offences. For those people, the growing backlog is not just a statistic but a source of extreme anxiety, frustration and uncertainty. For the police, it means an ever-increasing cost to them and the risk of losing cases because of the time that it has taken for them to get to court.

The backlog has a profound impact not just on individuals but on the entire criminal justice system and confidence in it. Courts that are overloaded struggle to maintain their pace. They are increasingly relying on stretched resources and often working in difficult conditions. For those working in the system, deeply honourable individuals—judges, barristers, solicitors and clerks—who have given over their life, in some cases, to supporting the criminal justice system, there is a constant pressure to clear cases more quickly, which has created an ongoing mental health crisis among staff and concerns about the fairness of the justice process in meeting those timelines.

The problem is not only the sheer volume of cases but their complexity. I know that the Government are doing some work around sentencing to look at how we can streamline these processes, but the complexity of cases involving serious violence and domestic abuse requires significant time and attention.

How do we resolve these issues? I have met a number of professionals, including police officers who have been working at the frontline and professionals in the Crown court system itself, whom I have met independently of the process. I have also met people from advocacy organisations and groups, who have suggested a number of recommendations. Some are structural and will involve cost, but there are others that I have been working on with them. One of those is the question of how we can move cases around the system as it stands. As I understand it, the current system does not allow transfers easily between court jurisdictions within geographies, so my first question for the Minister is, can we look at a more centralised approach to case distribution, to move some of the cases from areas of high backlogs to areas of relatively low backlogs? For example, in Kent, we could move cases from Maidstone to Canterbury or other areas around the region, to reduce those times.

My second question for the Minister is about expanding digital and video recording equipment—capital investment —in some of these courts. We know that, with such investment in pieces of equipment, courts can streamline cases. Does the Department have an investment programme to investigate the cost-benefit of speeding up court cases as part of a revenue versus capital exercise? Has that been positioned to the Treasury?

Thirdly, there must be a review of sentencing. I welcome the Government’s current move to look at sentencing, in a process being led by David Gauke, among others. One issue that judges have raised to me is that a significant number of people are electing to go to Crown courts, creating additional pressures on those courts. What could we do in the sentencing process, and what steer has been given, to try to reduce the throughput into Crown courts? I fully accept the principle of justice in this country that individuals have the choice to go before a jury, but is there some way of reducing the throughput into Crown courts?

Fourthly, we know that there is a capital investment issue in some Crown courts, but I understand that family courts are operating out of some Crown court locations across the country. Other family courts are operating out of council buildings and other locations that do not need cell capacity. Has there been a conversation about the family courts moving out of Crown court locations, since they do not need the cell capacity, and freeing up that court space for Crown court and criminal cases? That is another capacity question.

Fifthly, on recruitment of judges, I understand there are significant pressures around locums and trying to get KCs to come into Crown courts to cover the backlog of cases. Is there a streamlined process that could be managed centrally, to advertise or promote that as a career aspiration, rather than an ad hoc process where people can be requested to come in on a regional basis? More central management and support is required from an HR perspective, including supporting criminal justice officers and clerks and the processing of cases in our Crown courts. In many cases, a lot of back office processing is required for the court’s management of individuals. I suggest that, if we invested more in that back office space, we could process cases more quickly.

Some of those solutions require some capital investment —I suspect the Minister will not be entirely happy with that, because it requires engaging with HM Treasury—but some do not. Instead, they require a change in the system’s approach to the judiciary. I absolutely understand that there will be pushback on some of these suggestions, since this has been a nominally independent system for many decades and almost centuries. However, when I have suggested many of these ideas to judges and other court professionals in the system, they have said that in some cases they are already operating with these models. There is already shared casework among some of the London Crown courts, for example, because they have ad hoc agreements. We could support existing conversations between senior professionals in the court system to ensure that we are reducing backlog.

Ultimately, all these ideas are part of a wider pattern to try to reduce backlogs in the Crown courts, which would ultimately serve all our communities: it would help the police with resource allocation around ongoing cases that have reached charging and are waiting to be presented at Crown court; it would help the victim, because the individual would get their day in the sun, and justice, much more quickly; and it would help the defendant, because an innocent person will be able to get their case heard in front of a court without having to wait, in some cases, for years, with all the tolls on mental health toll and on families that such a wait entails. It would also help to restore confidence in our criminal justice system, which is in crisis at the moment due not solely to cuts to Crown courts, but to a lack of policing, and lack of confidence in the back office, in probation and in other criminal justice approaches that we have taken.

I am not suggesting that my solutions will resolve all the problems with our criminal justice system, but this backlog is causing significant concern among residents in my part of north Kent. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s answers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tristan Osborne]

I thank all for contributing this afternoon. I have nothing further to add, and wish everyone a relaxing break.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered court waiting times in Kent.