The UK’s courts are racking up record backlogs as the after-effects of the pandemic and the 2022 barristers’ strike are blamed for an ongoing productivity crisis in the justice system- 73,000 trials were unheard at the end of September. Any layman would expect that courts are constantly full and overloaded – not so…
The group behind the Crush Crime campaign and the new Looking for Growth Initiative of innovation-oriented entrepreneurs and activists has organised a new public court leaderboard to make otherwise unavailable information on court sitting rates public. The tracker is updated every day…
Lawrence Newport points out that “on any given working day 10-30% of our Crown Courts are simply shut – instead of clearing the backlog of 73,000+ cases that are languishing in our court system.” Today the Old Bailey has a whopping eight courtrooms unused – a third of its total. Court sitting days have been capped at a lower number by the government than last year at 106,500. The number agreed by the Tory government was increased by Mahmood by only 500 – which is “at least 5,500 fewer than the capacity of the system” according to the Lady Chief Justice. Now the public can see that spare capacity borne out every day…
Paula Barker, Liverpool Wavertree MP backing Andy Burnham, told Times Radio there wouldn’t be trouble from the markets under Burnham:
“The markets will have to fall in line.”
