Could we learn from Toronto’s £500m courthouse?

I defy anyone from England and Wales not to walk into the Ontario Court of Justice in Toronto and not feel a little envious.

This spacious, sleek and immaculately clean building is what a courthouse should be like. Opened in 2023, it is the first high-rise court facility in the province, providing 63 courtrooms including rooms for cases with multiple defendants. Dotted across the 17 floors are 10 settlement rooms.

Once visitors have come through the large security area (with a dedicated fast-track separate entrance for attorneys), the ground floor is home to a café, dozens of seats and tables, a staffed information point and interactive screens for searching for court times and rooms. The legal aid floor has several open counters and a ticket system like the deli counter at your supermarket.

More than anything, the place feels functional and accessible but also friendly and warm (not unlike Canda itself). Walls are painted in bright colours, there are large windows and six working lifts.

Such comfort and amenities do not come cheap or without controversy. Ontario amalgamated six criminal courthouse locations to centralise operations and the whole project took five years and cost around £518m (to put into context, London’s ongoing flagship court building is costing £600m and will house 18 courtrooms dedicated to economic and cybercrime cases).

The Ontario project was funded by a public-private partnership called an Alternative, Financing and Procurement project. The private sector party involved borrows at private financing rates to pay for project costs during construction and carries that financing until fully repaid by the public sector. This private sector financing cost is ultimately passed through to the public sector as a cost and reflected in the AFP model. The project agreement lasts for 34 years.

The UK equivalent was the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), launched under the Major government but accelerated during the Blair administration. The scheme was heavily criticised for imposing high long-term costs and not delivering the value for money promised.

PFI was abolished in 2018 by then chancellor Philip Hammond – although the UK continues to pay for projects financed under this scheme.

The Confederation of British Industry, which today announced it would link with national firm Browne Jacobson to champion the reinstatement of PFI, makes the point that public investment alone will not deliver the government’s infrastructure ambitions.

The CBI chief executive Rain Newton-Smith adds: ‘By developing the next generation of public-private partnership models the government could crowd in private capital and accelerate the delivery of major infrastructure projects such as new schools, hospitals and roads. Since the moratorium on new private finance in England in 2018, countries such as Canada, Australia and the United States have successfully delivered hundreds of projects through reformed PPP models leaving the UK as an international outlier.’

Certainly it is highly tempting to look at the polished and pristine court centre in Toronto and not wonder whether we could be more imaginative about how we finance our big infrastructure projects.

Almost a year ago, I visited the civil justice centre in Cardiff, where the only hint of innovation was in the system for moving water leaking through the roof into buckets. What more could governing authorities in Wales, if given the licence of that offered to Ontario administrators, do to revamp local justice services?

One note of caution, however, for anyone tempted to pioneer a multi-million-pound court project. Speaking to attorneys in Toronto, several complained that the colours were too bright and the lifts too slow. No matter what you build, it would seem, some will never be happy.