Justice secretary David Lammy today announced that he will fund unlimited sitting days in the Crown court to drive down the backlog – but still intends to curb jury trials.
Removing the cap on sitting days for the year beginning 1 April will free judges to hear as many cases as the system can support, Lammy said. Magistrates’ courts will be funded to its 'highest operational capacity'. Some £287 million will be invested in repairing and upgrading court buildings. Funding commitments have been agreed for the next three years to enable the judiciary to plan ahead.
However, despite all this, Lammy confirmed that he still intends to curb jury trials, declaring that the extra investment will support the introduction of new judge-only trials and other reforms. He will reveal more details at a Microsoft artificial intelligence event in London today.
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Law Society president Mark Evans welcomed the extra investment but said the government needs to ensure there are enough judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers to work on the cases, as well as to overcome issues such as prisoners not being delivered to court on time.
Criminal Bar Association chair Riel Karmy-Jones KC and vice-chair Andrew Thomas KC said priority must now be given to funding recommendations made by the Leveson Review on efficiency. They stressed that existing rights to trial by jury must be retained.
Fiona Rutherford, chief executive of legal thinktank Justice, urged Lammy to drop his plan for jury trials, saying it would ‘trample on one of the few parts of the system the public still trusts' and risk miscarriages of justice, especially for marginalised communities.
Bar Council chair Kirsty Brimelow KC said it was not too late for the government to show it is listening to legal professionals, saying that judge-only trials would 'drain precious resources away from the needed reforms that can be implemented now and place additional pressure on a stretched and stressed workforce'.
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