Justice denied: Govt failing to take urgent action on crown court backlogs, PAC warns

5 March 2025

Report highlights backlog’s devastating impact on victims of crime and their families as prison population on remand awaiting trial swells to highest level in 50 years.

Government appears to have simply accepted that excessively high Crown Court backlogs will continue to grow. In a report published today, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) warns that the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is not taking the urgent action required to bring down backlogs from an unprecedented high, but is tinkering at the edges, reacting to each new issue that affects the courts, without planning for long-term solutions.

The MoJ accepted during the PAC’s inquiry that justice delayed is justice denied. Concerningly, however, it intends to wait for the results of Sir Brian Leveson’s Independent Review of the Criminal Courts before starting to plan the fundamental changes it knows are needed. Without these changes, Government acknowledged to the PAC that the backlog of 73,105 cases would continue to grow. Waiting for the Leveson Review, which will not finally report till Autumn 2025, will delay reforms by many months. The PAC calls on the MoJ to set out a plan of actions it can start now.

The PAC’s recommendations come in the context of an ongoing devastating impact on victims of crime and their families caused by the backlogged system, particularly for victims of rape and serious sexual offences (RASSO), and violent crimes. The PAC’s inquiry heard that RASSO prosecutions take over two years on average to come to trial, with many finding the court process as traumatic as the crime itself and others withdrawing from the prosecution process due to court delays. The report calls in particular for a reduction in the number of hearings in cases of serious sexual and violent offences that are delayed or postponed on the day scheduled, as it is such circumstances that distress victims the most.

The report further finds that the population of defendants on remand waiting for their cases to be heard is at its highest level for fifty years. One in twenty of the remand population, some of whom will be found not guilty, had been on remand for more than two years. The PAC’s inquiry heard that some people awaiting sentencing are spending so long on remand that upon sentencing they are released from court, having already served the length of their sentence. The report calls on the Lord Chancellor and Lady Chief Justice to urgently discuss how to reduce remand numbers to 2019 levels, which would free up 8,000 vitally needed prison places.

The pressure on the courts system is attributed by MoJ to the consequences of the recruitment of over 20,000 additional police officers since 2019, leading to more crimes being prosecuted, and to a shift to more complex cases that take longer to conclude. The PAC notes that this increase in demand for Crown Court time was predictable. Despite MoJ knowing in advance that Government was planning on greatly increasing the number of police, and receiving funding specifically to meet the consequent rise in new criminal cases, it failed to adequately forecast the scale of the increase nor prepare the Crown Court for the increase in workload. The PAC’s report recommends MoJ should make better use of the data available to it to help prepare the courts system for its future caseload.

Chair comment

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, Chair of the Committee, said: “The Government agrees with this Committee that 'justice delayed is justice denied'. For a country where the common law originated, we should aspire to have the best functioning criminal justice system in the world. All parts of the system must act optimally together. It is therefore disappointing that the Crown Courts backlog is now at a record high of 73,000, compared to a record low of 33,290 in March 2019 pre-COVID.

“This can have particularly severe consequences for some victims and their families. For example, victims of rape and serious sexual offences (RASSO) can wait for three years or more for these cases to come to trial. In 2024, 59% of victims of adult rape dropped out of the justice system because research shows they could not bear the trauma any longer. The number of ineffective trials currently stands at a staggering 25%.

“The remand population has almost doubled from 9,602 in 2018 to 17,600 in September 2024 (20% of the entire prison population). 770 prisoners have been on remand for over two years. These are shocking statistics involving sometimes innocent people which should be carefully scrutinised to see how the system could be improved. All in all, our report is a terrible indictment of our criminal justice system and the Government urgently need to reorganise it to aspire to that world class standard for which the UK used to be renowned.”

Further information

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