DISORDER IN THE COURT
Barristers strike amidst backlog of nearly 60,000 cases
CROWN court backlogs in England and Wales remain near record levels, as barristers' strikes continue to grind proceedings to a halt. Data published by the Ministry of Justice shows that there were over 58,653 outstanding crown court cases as of March 31st, 2022, including 47,611 outstanding trials.
Barristers are striking as a recently proposed pay increase is not being applied to delayed cases.
Whilst this is a slight improvement on the 60,970 case backlog seen between April and June last year, it is still significantly higher than 38,305 at the end of 2019.
This has completely eclipsed the previous reduction of the backlog, shrinking 40% between 2015 and 2018 from 55,124 to 33,218 cases.
The Criminal Bar Association (CBA) has blamed underfunding and understaffing for trial delays that lead to increased backlogs. Their ongoing strike action is in response to government plans to not pay the recently increased rate for outstanding trials, potentially worsening the backlog.
Jo Sidhu QC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association, said: “Each week dozens of trials are now being postponed at the last moment, as specialist criminal barristers have been forced to walk away from the jobs they love over Government's continuing refusal properly and swiftly to redress a decade of slashed rates to criminal legal aid.“
“Government talks of how the action by criminal barristers will disrupt the court system but, as the Ministry of Justice's own figures show, it is Government-created disruption and inaction that is crippling the system and it has been worsening markedly for over a year now.”
“If we haemorrhage specialist criminal barristers, who provide both prosecutors, defence advocates and judges, then victims of crime take the added pain of more months or years to their trial dates.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Our decisive action kept justice moving in the face of the unprecedented impact of the pandemic. As a result, the number of outstanding cases at the Crown Court has fallen by over 2,000 since its peak last summer.”
“We have proposed a 15 percent pay rise for barristers and we encourage them to work with us so that we can continue to drive down the backlog and prevent any further delays for victims.”
Over a quarter (1,907, 27%) of trials between January and March of this year were declared 'ineffective', which means they were unable to proceed on the intended date and needed to be pushed back. Prepandemic, this had never exceeded 19%.
A further 4,827 trials were vacated, meaning they were delayed before the trial date. Vacated trials are recorded when they are delayed, not when they were originally scheduled, meaning the number of vacated trials is not included in the quarterly totals.
Even when cases successfully make it to trial, it is taking far longer to reach a resolution. Currently, the average time between offence and trial completion stands at 641 days, a slight increase on 624 days last year. This is a significant increase on an average of 501 days to completion between 2014 and 2019.
Only 3,070 trials in the first quarter of the year were considered effective. This is 43% of all trials, the lowest percentage of effective trials since a record slump of 40% at the beginning of 2020. This is compared to averages of 50-51% in years previous.