Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he plans to take to (a) improve the retention of criminal barristers and (b) reduce court backlogs.

We are introducing a 15% uplift across most fee schemes in line with the recommendations made in the Criminal Legal Aid Independent Review. This, alongside longer-term reforms, will increase spend by £135m a year – alongside our investment in court recovery this would take expected criminal legal aid spend to £1.2 billion per year. We have given careful consideration to the idea of increasing fees on current cases but there are a number of reasons why our current approach is the fastest process possible.

The median figure after expenses for specialist criminal barristers in the first three years is around £19,000 with the figure increasing significantly after the first year. Thus, the median income after expenses for barristers with 2 years of practice is around £32,000. Between 3 to 7 years of practice, their median income after expenses is around £50,000. The figures above are based on the evidence published by Independent Review into Criminal Legal Aid. It should be noted that this, in its turn, was based on a common dataset shared by the MoJ and Bar Council, constructed following a data share agreement between the MoJ (Legal Aid Agency), Bar Council and Crown Prosecution Service. It has not been possible to compare our estimates on barristers’ annual income after expenses with the minimum wage per hour as we do not hold information on the number of weeks and hours per week that barristers work.

The 15% pay increase would mean a typical criminal barrister earning around £7,000 extra per year. We are moving as quickly as possible to introduce fee rises by the end of September. Solicitors and barristers will start to receive increased fees this year and our modelling suggests that over two thirds of the additional funding will have entered the system within the first year.

Criminal barristers play a crucial role in upholding the rule of law and are a fundamental part of our criminal justice system. Our plans to increase legal aid fees will put criminal legal aid on a sustainable footing and ensure there is a sustainable supply of practitioners.

The Government is committed to supporting recovery across the court system. Over the next three financial years, we are investing an extra £477 million for the Criminal Justice System to help improve waiting times for victims of crime and reduce the Crown Court backlog to an estimated 53,000 cases by March 2025.

The outstanding caseload in the Crown Court has reduced from around 60,600 cases in June 2021 to around 58,300 cases at the end of April 2022.

We have removed the limit of sitting days in the Crown Court for the second year in a row, extended 30 Nightingale courtrooms and raised the mandatory judicial retirement age from 70 to 75. We have also opened two new ‘super courtrooms’ in Manchester and Loughborough, allowing up to an extra 250 cases a year to be heard across England and Wales.

We are also expanding our plans for judicial recruitment to secure enough judicial capacity to sit at the required levels in 2022/2023 and beyond.

By the end of March 2023, we expect to get through 20% more Crown Court cases than we did pre-Covid (117,000 in 2022/23 compared to 97,000 in 2019/20).