All credit to the Lord Chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, in refusing to accept 20% cuts to the MOJ’s budget. Whether she will succeed is another matter. There will be a time when she will realise that her department is a dysfunctional mess and that she will have to get grip. It will not be an easy task.
The MOJ has gone way beyond rearranging the deckchairs as the criminal justice system sinks below the waves. As things stand the best that the Lord Chancellor will be able to achieve is to stop it fracturing into a thousand pieces when it smashes into the sea bed. It is no exaggeration to say that we are dangerously near that point. There is a back log of about 80,000 crown court trials. Despite the heroic work of judges and listing officers, all they can do is try and hold back the tide. And the highly skilled criminal barristers and solicitors needed to keep the show on the road are facing burnout. I can’t remember a weekend when I was not preparing trials. The way the system operates is that unless you have a fixture you are on a warned list. And fixtures are rare beasts. Last Monday I had seven trials warned. They can come in at any time within a two week period . How on earth does one prepare? It means that if there are any barristers available they are often parachuted in the night before. It’s a nightmare. These are serious cases. And it will get worse.
So the MOJ has come up with a wheeze. They have given magistrates the power to give sentences of imprisonment for a single offence of up to twelve months . They announced with a fanfare that this would save 2,000 sitting days at the crown court. Hooray! What they failed to announce, but achieved through stealth without bothering to consult anyone, is cut the number of sitting days by 105,000. The economics of the mad house.
A few days ago the CBA conducted a survey of crown court sitting days. On one day alone 20% of courtrooms were closed to save money. The judiciary are rightly furious. Why should defendants have to wait so long for a trial? Why should accusers of serious offences have to wait so long? It is a disgrace. So many complainants in rape cases just give up because of the wait. How is this justice? Or even a nod in the direction of fairness? It is shameful.
But the dishonesty of the MOJ seems to have no bounds. Mary Pryor KC, the talented and feisty chair of the Criminal Bar association, wrote these chilling words to members a few days ago.
“For two months, the MOJ has been in possession of a report from the independent body set up by the government that assesses the state of criminal legal aid and addresses how to modernise the criminal justice system. The body is the Criminal Legal Aid Advisory Board (CLAAB) which was set up in September 2022 as part of the agreement reached with the CBA. The CLAAB report has yet to be published. It has been significantly delayed seemingly without good reason. It must be published before the budget and it must not be shelved. We need the CLAAB report and the statistics from the MOJ and the HMCTS which have now been delayed for half a year so that those making the decisions can do so with the full impact that their decisions may make on the criminal justice system. Government plans to increase the number of prosecutions for rape cases and halve violence against women and girls require a functioning justice system in which cases are heard within a period of six months……”
Barristers pay for post call training of our pupils out of our own pockets. But we don’t have the numbers of skilled professionals to cope with backlog. There are about 2,000 criminal barristers left. Burnt out, demoralised, stressed and still underpaid. Many young barristers would be far better off re-training as train drivers. It only takes a year and a half.
The CBA has made submissions to the Treasury about how the criminal bar can be made more attractive. It will cost no more than 2% of the legal aid budget. Will they listen? I won’t hold my breath. It appears that the only way anything attracts the attention this government is industrial action. I really do hope that we don’t have to take it. But I and many more of my profession will if it saves the CJS from destruction. This is an existential moment for the bar.
Keir Starmer of all people must know this. People will soon begin to wonder what the point of reporting a crime is if it takes 4 to 6 years to come to court and even then there might be nobody to prosecute or defend.