Carr: Distressing time for those in the criminal justice system
The Lady Chief Justice yesterday complained to MPs about the government’s decisions to reduce the digitisation of civil justice and limit sitting days in the criminal courts.
Baroness Carr told the justice select committee that digitisation was the solution to the civil claim backlogs.
“We just need to get cracking. I can see no argument against it, apart from funding. The benefit in efficiencies is enormous.”
She was responding to a question from committee chair Andy Slaughter, who asked what could be done to improve the backlogs, noting that in the second quarter of this year, the average time for small claims to be heard was a year and for fast-track cases 80 weeks.
On the solution, Baroness Carr replied: “Fundamentally it is as simple as digitisation.”
However, she said that civil digitisation had been “descoped”, so that “bit by bit things have been taken out of the programme so very few cases are going to be digitised”.
As examples, she mentioned that “anything other than a money claim”, such as applications for declarations or injunctions, came out of the online system, along with cases with more than three parties.
Baroness Carr said the benefits of digitising bulk civil claims would be “massive” and the cost would be only £15m, so she could not understand why it was not being done.
She also said that successful family law initiatives to deliver “more positive outcomes for parents and children”, such as Pathfinder Courts which give parents access to Cafcass reports at the start of the process, needed to be rolled out nationally.
The Lady Chief Justice could not conceal her anger when it came to the government’s decision not to increase the number of Crown Court sitting days from the current allocation of 106,500 days to the maximum of 113,000.
She said this had produced a “drastic effect across the board”, with resident judges at Crown Courts pulling out of their lists cases which were ready to be heard before next April. These removals would be accompanied by long delays of “sometimes years”.
Baroness Carr said it had been “a most distressing time” for victims, witnesses, the Crown Prosecution Service, the police, advocates, court staff and judges, with serious violence cases and rape cases coming out of the system, and returning “certainly not before late 2025/26 and going into 2027”.
Full-time, salaried judges were not sitting because they did not have enough sitting days, criminal barristers were losing revenue and fee-paid judges having to cancel bookings, meaning the Lady Chief Justice had to “work hard to keep them onside”.
Baroness Carr said she would be “pressing the case” for the Crown Courts to sit to their maximum capacity.
At the moment, the justice system was “firebrigading instead of town planning”, while the Ministry of Justice was “one of the most underfunded departments” in government, its budget “a tiny fraction of what was spent on other critical public services”.
She agreed that in certain parts of the system, judicial morale was “very low” and in some cases judges had been “marched up the hill and down the hill”, for example on the previous government’s Rwanda scheme for migrants.
On judicial recruitment, she said the real problems were with salaried district judges, Crown Court judges and tribunal judges, one of the issues being the “very expensive” cost of living in London and the South East.
While “good progress” had been made in recruiting Asian and mixed heritage judges, there had been “far less” with recruitment of Black judges. It was not “an easy issue to resolve”, but she was “not comfortable” with the idea of “ringfencing” for certain minority groups.
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