Ministers also introduced a cap on the number of days judges are paid to sit in court and hear cases, to help reduce spending.
In 2016-17 there were 107,863 of these “sitting days” recorded, but that had fallen to 81,899 by the eve of the pandemic. If there’s no judge, there’s no hearing, which meant individual courtrooms were left idle even if the rest of a court complex was still hearing cases.
Then the Covid pandemic happened, which left all Crown Courts closed for two months during the first lockdown other than for urgent and essential work. When they reopened, many individual courtrooms could not be used for trials because they were too small to comply with social distancing requirements. Everything slowed to a snail’s pace and the backlog exploded.
This is when the unintended consequences of earlier closures began to bite harder. Take for example Blackfriars Crown Court in London. Its nine court rooms were once an important centre for serious organised crime cases, but ministers decided to close it in 2019 and hoped to sell the land.
Many of its cases were shifted to Snaresbrook in east London, but since the pandemic it has been overwhelmed. At the end of September 2019 it had 1,500 cases on its books, official figures show, but as of September this year it was juggling more than 4,200.
Before the pandemic, only 5% of outstanding cases for violence across England and Wales had been in the system for more than a year – now a quarter of cases have taken that long. There have been similar increases in the length of time taken for criminal damage, possession of weapons and drug offence cases.