Forty-Third Report - Reducing the backlog in criminal courts

Select Committee

Public Accounts Committee HC 643 9 March 2022

Report Status Government responded

Conclusions & Recommendations 23 items (5 recs)

Source View on Parliament website

Government Response (AI assessment · 23 of 23 classified)

Accepted 10

Accepted in Part 1

Deferred 4

Not Addressed 2

Recommendations

5 results

2 Acknowledged

Victims of rape and serious sexual offences are facing unacceptable delays to justice that compound...

Recommendation

Victims of rape and serious sexual offences are facing unacceptable delays to justice that compound and extend their suffering and lead to too many cases collapsing. The number of such cases waiting longer than a year has increased by more … Read more

Government Response Summary

The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Since publishing the End-to-End Rape Review Report, the government has made progress in delivering actions to support victims of rape and serious sexual offences, including publishing progress reports and local scorecards. They are also recruiting additional Independent Sexual and Domestic Violence Advisers.

HM Treasury

3 Accepted in Part

We are not convinced that the Department can recruit enough judges to deliver on its...

Recommendation

We are not convinced that the Department can recruit enough judges to deliver on its ambition to reduce the Crown Court backlog. Reducing the backlog to 53,000 by March 2025 relies on increasing the number of days that the Crown … Read more

Government Response Summary

The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. They have increased the pool of fee paid judges and are taking action on remuneration and adjusting their recruitment approach. Recruitment for 70 Circuit Judges and 125 Recorders commences in 2022, and shortfalls will be mitigated by increasing Recorder recruitment and sittings, approving District Judges to sit in the Crown Court, and approving Circuit Judges to sit in retirement.

HM Treasury

4 Not Addressed

We remain unconvinced that the prison system will cope with the likely increase in prisoners...

Recommendation

We remain unconvinced that the prison system will cope with the likely increase in prisoners given the planned increase in police officers and the Department’s work to reduce the backlog in criminal courts. In October 2019 the government announced it … Read more

Government Response Summary

This response is for a different recommendation about waiting times for elective and cancer treatment, and does not address the prison place shortfall concern.

HM Treasury

5 Deferred

Vulnerable users and people from ethnic minority backgrounds are potentially impacted disproportionately by efforts to...

Recommendation

Vulnerable users and people from ethnic minority backgrounds are potentially impacted disproportionately by efforts to tackle the Crown Court backlog, which the Department and HMCTS have not done enough to understand. Since the start of the pandemic, HMCTS significantly increased … Read more

Government Response Summary

The government will evaluate the experience of victims, witnesses and defendants in criminal courts as part of the HMCTS reform evaluation, with findings anticipated in Autumn 2024, and will work with partners to improve data collection, while monitoring relevant metrics, including exploring additional ones, to better understand the experience of victims from all backgrounds.

HM Treasury

6 Accepted

We recognise the long overdue move towards bringing data on the criminal justice system together,...

Recommendation

We recognise the long overdue move towards bringing data on the criminal justice system together, although it is not clear how the Department will use this to improve performance. In December 2021, the Department published a national scorecard and an … Read more

Government Response Summary

The government published local criminal justice system scorecards in March 2022 and will publish them quarterly to increase transparency and support collaboration. It will also use the data to identify disparities and share best practices, with plans to improve data quality and metrics.

HM Treasury

Conclusions (18) Observations and findings — click to expand

1 Conclusion Not Addressed

On the basis of a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, we took evidence from the Ministry of Justice (the Department) and Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service about the backlog in the criminal courts.1

Government Response Summary

Acknowledges the report and its date. This is a procedural note rather than a response to the substance of the conclusion.

7 Conclusion Acknowledged

As the backlog has increased, so has the time that defendants, witnesses and victims have waited for their case to be completed. Between March 2020 and June 2021, the 1 C&AG’s Report, Reducing the backlog in criminal courts, Session 2021–22, HC 732, 22 October 2021 2 C&AG’s Report, paras 2, …

Government Response Summary

The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation and states that it is working with the judiciary and partners to improve timeliness, reduce demand in the Crown Court, and improve the wider system capacity. Spending Review provides extra funding to improve waiting times and reduce the Crown Court backlog. They will write to the Committee by October 2022 to update on progress.

8 Conclusion Acknowledged

The Department’s plan to reduce the Crown Court backlog to 53,000 cases relies on increasing the number of sitting days from 100,000 in 2021–22 to 105,000 in 2022–23, then 106,500 in both 2023–24 and 2024–25.10 HMCTS told us that it has the court staff that it needs to meet these …

Government Response Summary

The government acknowledges the need to recruit more judges and highlights the actions taken to improve the pool of fee-paid judges, adjust recruitment approaches, and increase the judicial retirement age, setting a target implementation date of March 2024.

9 Conclusion Accepted

In the meantime, the Department is relying on using part-time judges (recorders) to provide the additional judicial capacity it needs. It recruited 104 crime recorders in the last recruitment round, and is looking to expand numbers further significantly. The Department told us that currently recorders are not working as many …

Government Response Summary

The government is already addressing the shortfall in judicial capacity by increasing Recorder recruitment, allowing crime Recorders to sit more days, and approving District Judges and Circuit Judges to sit in retirement.

10 Conclusion Acknowledged

In 2017, the Lammy review into how ethnic minorities are treated in the criminal justice system noted the importance of recruiting a diverse judiciary, and recommended a national target to achieve a representative judiciary by 2025.15 In 2020, the judiciary published its diversity and inclusion strategy to improve the representation …

Government Response Summary

The government acknowledges the importance of judicial diversity and highlights the actions taken to improve the pool of fee-paid judges, adjust recruitment approaches, and increase the judicial retirement age, setting a target implementation date of March 2024.

11 Conclusion Accepted

The Department expects that the demand for prison places will increase significantly. Its plans to increase the number of days that the Crown Court hears cases, and the resultant reduction in the backlog, will likely mean more people being convicted and sent to prison. The recruitment of an additional 20,000 …

Government Response Summary

The government is committed to building as many prison places as are needed, investing £3.8 billion to deliver 20,000 modern prison places by the mid-2020s and continues to invest in critical maintenance projects to ensure as many prison places as possible are kept online.

12 Conclusion Accepted

In July 2021, the Department estimated that its court recovery plan and the increase in police officers would result in a shortfall of 4,000 prison places by the end of 2023, over and above the 18,000 additional prison places that HM Treasury had already agreed to fund as part of …

Government Response Summary

The government is committed to building as many prison places as are needed, investing £3.8 billion to deliver 20,000 modern prison places by the mid-2020s and continues to invest in critical maintenance projects to ensure as many prison places as possible are kept online.

13 Conclusion Accepted

The Department described how it is tightly managing the prison build programme to ensure there is sufficient capacity, including closely monitoring the delivery of new prison places against the demand for those places. The Department told us that HM Treasury and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority are also closely involved, …

Government Response Summary

The government states it is already committed to building as many prison places as needed, investing £3.8 billion to deliver 20,000 modern prison places by the mid-2020s, and has delivered around 2,700 already.

14 Conclusion Accepted

We have reported previously on matters concerning the expansion and maintenance of the prison system. For example, in September 2020 we found that the Department had delivered just 206 new prison places, against a commitment of 10,000 new-for-old places by 2020.22 In March 2021, we reported that the 2019 Spending …

Government Response Summary

The government states it is already committed to building as many prison places as needed, investing £3.8 billion to deliver 20,000 modern prison places by the mid-2020s, and has delivered around 2,700 already.

15 Conclusion Deferred

Since the start of the pandemic, the Department and HMCTS have significantly increased the use of hearings held remotely using video technology, and plan to continue to use them to reduce the backlog in the courts.25 We asked what impact the increased use of remote hearings has had on different …

Government Response Summary

The government will consider the experience of criminal court users as part of the HMCTS reform evaluation, with findings anticipated in Autumn 2024, and will work with partners to improve data collection, while monitoring relevant metrics, including exploring additional ones, to better understand the experience of victims from all backgrounds.

16 Conclusion Deferred

The Department told us that the use of remote hearings is at the discretion of the judge in each individual case, and that everybody is entitled to have their reasonable adjustments considered by the judge. However, a third of people who requested reasonable adjustments said their request was not granted. …

Government Response Summary

The government will consider the experience of criminal court users as part of the HMCTS reform evaluation, with findings anticipated in Autumn 2024, and will work with partners to improve data collection, while monitoring relevant metrics, including exploring additional ones, to better understand the experience of victims from all backgrounds.

17 Conclusion Deferred

We also asked about the impact of the pandemic on black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals, particularly given that the Department has faced difficulties collecting and analysing data on ethnicity in the past. Since the Lammy review in 2017 into the experiences of ethnic minorities in the criminal justice system, …

Government Response Summary

HMCTS will consider the experience of criminal court users as part of the evaluation of HMCTS reform, with findings anticipated in Autumn 2024; the MoJ will also work to improve data collection on ethnicity across the criminal justice system.

18 Conclusion Acknowledged

The Department explained that victims of rape and serious sexual offences had been particularly affected by the pandemic. These difficult and complex cases are more likely to need a jury trial, which need space to accommodate the jury. It was more challenging to hear jury trials during the period when …

Government Response Summary

The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation, and states progress has been made in delivering actions to support victims of rape and serious sexual offences, including publishing progress reports and local scorecards. They are also recruiting additional Independent Sexual and Domestic Violence Advisers.

19 Conclusion Accepted

The Department explained how the longer victims wait for their case to be heard in court, the greater the risk the victim withdraws their support of the process and the case collapses.34 It told us that the proportion of cases collapsing through victim or witness attrition fell in the last …

Government Response Summary

The government states the first local criminal justice system scorecards for all crime and adult rape were published in March 2022, with quarterly publication to increase transparency and support collaboration.

20 Conclusion Acknowledged

Several organisations wrote to us to describe the trauma and impact on victims having to wait longer for their cases to be heard.37 In the evidence session, the Department set out some of the actions it is taking to better support victims. It is increasing what it spends on victim …

Government Response Summary

The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation and published the first local criminal justice system scorecards for all crime and adult rape in March 2022. These scorecards will be published quarterly to increase transparency, increase understanding of the system, and support collaboration.

21 Conclusion Accepted

The Department told us that having good data across the criminal justice system is a crucial first step in achieving the right outcomes and bringing the courts backlog down. In December 2021, the Department published two scorecards—one covering all crime and one covering adult rape—that bring together data on performance …

Government Response Summary

The government states the first local criminal justice system scorecards for all crime and adult rape were published in March 2022, with quarterly publication to increase transparency and support collaboration.

22 Conclusion Accepted

We asked HMCTS what progress it had made on implementing Dr Natalie Byrom’s recommendations on digital justice and data.44 HMCTS told us it had set up a senior data governance panel to provide advice on the accessibility of data and will announce in early 2022 what data it intends to …

Government Response Summary

The government published the first local criminal justice system scorecards in March 2022 and will publish them quarterly to increase transparency and support collaboration, also overhauling its governance structures to increase accountability and drive forward progress in priority areas.

23 Conclusion Accepted

We asked the Department what it is doing to improve data flows across different parts of the criminal justice system. The Department told us that joining up data across the system is a priority.49 It has recruited an additional director of analysis and is recruiting a director-general of performance strategy …

Government Response Summary

The government states that it is already taking forward work to improve data flows across the criminal justice system, including establishing a new data and performance board and recruiting key personnel.