00:00I spend most of my working days in and out of the criminal courts around London and sometimes beyond.
00:05And each day I see signs of decay in the system and the human impact of the chronic delays currently affecting the criminal justice system.
00:15My name's Tristan Kirk, I'm the courts correspondent for the London Standard.
00:19In London, soon we will be setting trials for criminal cases in 2030, some five years into the future.
00:27That means the victims, the witnesses and the defendants all waiting for years.
00:34Christmases come and go, birthdays, major life milestones, all waiting for justice to be done.
00:43In this country, we used to have a system where we could pride ourselves on justice being done in a timely fashion.
00:50It may take some months, sometimes a year or so, but now it has become routine for cases to go two, maybe three, and sometimes even four years into the future.
01:03And often those are cases involving allegations that happened sometime in the past.
01:08So you are talking about a wait for justice that can stretch to six or seven years on occasions.
01:13That, quite frankly, is not good enough and is why the government is looking at changing how the justice system fundamentally works.
01:22But in the meantime, the standard has looked at the impact all of these delays have on the victims, on the witnesses,
01:29and, yes, on the defendants, who are sat waiting for justice to be done to be able to recover from the trauma of what happened,
01:38to be able to put it into their past, to be able to move on professionally and personally without this terrible cloud hanging over their life.
01:47We sat down and spoke to some of the people who have been trapped in this broken justice system.
01:53Violet is a woman who spent five years waiting to see justice being done.
01:58She went to the police in 2018 and said that she had been the victim of sexual violence by four men.
02:04Initially, to her utter frustration and horror, the case was dropped by the police.
02:11There were major mistakes in the way that it was investigated.
02:14She fought that and eventually there were charges brought.
02:19A trial was set and then the trial was delayed at the last minute, just as she was waiting to give her evidence.
02:25She was told it will be another year before this trial can take place.
02:31She told us about the utter devastation that that causes.
02:34A life on hold, waiting to recover, waiting to rebuild mentally and emotionally from what has happened.
02:43We also spoke to Nigel, somebody who'd fallen victim to a horrendous stalking campaign.
02:49His life had been turned upside down by a woman that he was actually dating at the time.
02:55He went to the police in January 2024 and it was not until this summer that he finally saw justice being done.
03:04A lengthy period of time which, like Violet, was punctuated by a trial being set and then adjourned at the last minute.
03:13Yet another delay that he had to contend with.
03:15He told us about the trauma that it causes to victims who are in this position.
03:21Waiting, feeling like they can't do anything else except focus on the case that they are involved in.
03:27And we also went to the courts and we saw firsthand how defendants received this news.
03:33At Isleworth Crown Court, a judge told a defendant, an 18-year-old across the courtroom, that his trial would be set in December 2029.
03:44You could see on his face, stunned, couldn't believe that it could be that far away.
03:51But that, unfortunately, is the reality in the courts, not just in London, but up and down England and Wales.
03:57Well, this isn't a sudden decline in the justice system in this country.
04:03It is the culmination of years and years of neglect and allowing the system to decay through funding cuts and basically ignoring the problem.
04:16In 2019, the then-conservative government withdrew some of the funding for the criminal justice system.
04:23They put a cap on the number of days that judges could sit.
04:27And it came after a sustained period of time when court houses themselves had been shut down and the budgets for justice had been strictly limited.
04:38In 2019, things were considered to be OK.
04:43They weren't great, but there wasn't a terrible crisis.
04:47And they were looking at courtrooms and thinking that they weren't being used as much as they maybe could do.
04:52And we can get away with some budget cuts.
04:55That decision should be held onto as a calamitous piece of political policymaking.
05:02Because soon after that, the pandemic came.
05:072020, there were shutdowns, there were restrictions, social distancing.
05:11And it became very quickly apparent that the court system had been stripped down to the bone with its budgets reduced and its buildings taken away.
05:21And so this suddenly was a system under pressure and very much unable to cope.
05:27The backlogs in cases started to grow rapidly.
05:30We went from a position of under 40,000 cases waiting to be heard to today when we've got something like 80,000 cases waiting to be heard.
05:42And that means delays, chronic delays, years of waiting for your case to get to the front of the queue.
05:49In the pandemic, in 2022, then-Justice Secretary Dominic Raab made the surprising decision to go to war with criminal barristers at a time when the system was in crisis.
06:03And so we ended up with this sustained pitch battle between politicians and lawyers.
06:07And in the middle, the system continued to decay.
06:10And now we're at a position where Labour is in power, and they are contemplating some incredibly serious reforms to the system.
06:20They say that things have got so bad that we now might have to take away jury trial for all but the most serious cases.
06:27They're talking about major reforms, not because they might be the best ideas, but simply because they have to, because the system is not just in crisis, but on the brink of total collapse.
06:41Around five years ago, it took something like 400 days for a criminal case to conclude, from offence all the way through to sentence.
06:50Now, that figure is over 600 days.
06:54That's a 50% increase in the time it takes for justice to be served.
06:58So what's the solution?
07:00Labour is currently mulling over ideas from Sir Brian Leveson, a retired judge,
07:05who suggested that all but the most serious crimes should not be tried by jury.
07:11But to be overseen by a judge and magistrate instead.
07:14The idea is that that would be quicker.
07:17It would help courts to get through the backlog faster and drive down those numbers so that we do not see so many years of delay.
07:26Some courts are putting on what are known as blitz courts to bring on multiple trials earlier than expected
07:34in the hope that some of the defendants might see the light, enter a guilty plea, and that case will also fall out of the backlog.
07:42But in the meantime, criminal lawyers say that the jury idea isn't a workable one.
07:49They say that fundamental reform of how the system works is not the answer.
07:54Instead, we need a government who invests in justice.
07:59Multiple years of massive investment to say that this is a cornerstone of our society
08:05and it's no longer acceptable to have a justice system that is falling apart at the seams.
08:11The buildings are decaying and now the way that we even put on trials is falling apart.
08:17The lawyers and the legal experts say it's time for change in mindset as well as process.
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