Legislation will remove uncontested road traffic offences from the courts to be dealt with a single magistrate in an office, the justice secretary told bench chairs today.

Addressing the National Bench Chairmans Forum, Chris Grayling said: ‘It’s utterly absurd that three magistrates should spend their time rubber-stamping foregone conclusions in simple road traffic cases.’ 

Where the defendant does not contest the case, Grayling said one magistrate could deal with it more efficiently on the papers, in an office.

Confirming proposals announced last month by his colleague Damian Green, Grayling indicated that the government will legislate to free magistrates up to focus on more ‘serious and contested cases’.

Grayling also wants to address the reason why 40% of defendants who are convicted in the magistrates’ court are sent to the Crown court for sentence yet receive no more than six months’ imprisonment, a sentence that could have been passed by magistrates. 

He said his ‘highest priority’ is cutting reoffending. Stressing the need for caution in the use of out of court disposals, Grayling said that magistrates will have a role in scrutinising the police’s decisions to dispose of matters out of court.

The Offender Rehabilitation Bill, introducing new licence and supervision measures for offenders serving short custodial sentences, will include a new role and powers for magistrates to deal with offenders who breach the conditions of their supervision.

Courts will have powers to deal with those who fail to comply with their supervision conditions, including being able to commit an offender to custody for up to 14 days.

Praising the role played by the 23,500 magistrates, who he said are in the ‘vanguard’ of the changes to our criminal justice system, Grayling suggested that with a falling number of cases coming before the courts there needs to be ‘smart’ ways of deploying them. Although he said he wants to retain the principle of local justice, Grayling wants local benches to cover larger areas, so that one bench may cover the whole of Birmingham or Lincolnshire. That he said requires a ‘new mindset’ for magistrates, who will find they will no longer necessarily know their fellow JPs by sight.

Elsewhere in the speech, he criticised as being a ‘scandal’ that fewer than half of trials proceed as planned in the magistrates courts. On the wider justice system he bemoaned ‘outmoded’ technology and ‘systems that won’t talk to each other’.