The government’s plans to restrict the right to trial by jury to tackle the Crown Court backlog amounts to the quiet dismantling of British justice, says Stephen Davies of local solicitors Edwards Duthie Shamash
The Crown Court backlog stands at a record 80,000-plus cases, more than double the pre-pandemic level of around 38,000 (2019). Trials are now being listed as far as December 2030, and soon it will be beyond that. Victims wait years for justice. Defendants languish on bail or in custody, unable to get on with their lives. Yet instead of fixing the root causes, Lord Chancellor David Lammy MP is pressing ahead with proposals to curtail trial by jury for most ‘either-way’ offences (offences that can be tried either in the Crown Court or Magistrates Court). This is a dangerous distraction.
In 2021, the government falsely claimed the pandemic caused the backlog. The crisis was already exploding before COVID. Court closures and savage austerity cuts, particularly to criminal legal aid, resulted in the justice budget being slashed. In 2010, there were 923 courts. By 2019, just 628 remained, with most of those court buildings in disrepair. Crown Court sitting days (the number of days the Crown Courts are funded to hear cases) had fallen from 110,000 to 86,000. The backlog was rising fast.
Reports from the Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate, Crest Advisory, the Institute for Government and the Public Accounts Committee all warned of the same thing: years of underinvestment had left the system on the brink. The pandemic simply poured fuel on the fire by suspending jury trials. Post-pandemic, a slump in court productivity has made it worse still and new cases continue to outpace disposals.
Scrapping or restricting jury trials for most cases will deliver statistically negligible relief. Leveson suggested a 20% time-saving without any evidence to back it up. In reality, it would free up only a fraction of hearing days while the real drivers – insufficient court capacity, crumbling buildings, lawyer shortages and endless new cases – remain untouched. The Institute for Government and legal experts have repeatedly said the same: this is not a solution to the backlog; it is window-dressing. What it will do is destroy public confidence. Jury trials are not a luxury. They are a constitutional safeguard that put ordinary citizens, not the state, at the heart of justice. Most people will only recognise the value of a jury trial when they have been wrongly accused of a crime. Karl Turner MP has warned the proposal to restrict them is undemocratic, unnecessary and ineffective.
Once you surrender jury trials, you will never get them back. This is not ‘modernisation’. It is the permanent weakening of the one institution that has protected liberty for eight centuries. The backlog demands more courts and more judges, not the quiet dismantling of British justice.
Edwards Duthie Shamash is located at 149 High Street, Wanstead, E11 2RL. For more information, call 020 8514 9000 or visit edwardsduthieshamash.co.uk
