There is a particular kind of silence that haunts the corridors of our courts. It is not the contemplation of a jury deliberating on the facts; it is the stagnant silence of a waiting room. It is the silence of a victim who has been told, for the third time in two years, that their trial has been “adjourned” because there is no judge, no space, or no capacity to hear them. It is the silence of Katie, who in 2017 reported her partner for actual bodily harm and rape, but did not see a conviction until seven years later, in 2024.
For a barrister, the jury box is rightly hallowed ground. It is the heartbeat of our common law, a symbol of the citizen’s role in the administration of power. I started my career in the law, and I hold its traditions in the highest regard. But as Justice Secretary, I must be a realist as well as a romantic. We are currently living through a quiet constitutional crisis. Today nearly 80,000 cases are trapped in the Crown Court backlog. If we do nothing – if we succumb to the small-c conservatism that says the system can never change – that figure is projected to hit 200,000 by the mid-2030s. We cannot simply manage or invest our way out of a 2.5-fold increase in human misery.
When we talk about the rule of law, we often treat it as an abstract set of principles bound in leather volumes. But the rule of law is also a public service. If the state cannot deliver that service in a timeframe that allows a victim to heal or a defendant to move on, then the law is not ruling. It is failing. The progressive case for court reform is not a technocratic exercise in efficiency. It is a fundamental argument about whether the institutions of the British state can work for the people we were sent to Parliament to represent.
In the progressive imagination, we often focus on the fairness of the trial itself. We worry – rightly – about the quality of evidence, the impartiality of the bench, and the rights of the defendant. But progressives must not ignore the most brutal unfairness of all: victims being timed out from justice by the clock. In rape cases, the average wait from arriving at court to completion is 423 days. The Victims’ Commissioner has described this as a “tremendous toll” that leads many to simply drop out of the process altogether. Justice delayed is not only justice denied; it is justice rationed by endurance.
A three-year wait for a trial may be a manageable inconvenience for a corporation or a wealthy litigant. For a young person in a precarious job, or a survivor of sexual violence, it can be a life-shattering burden. Victims are not evenly distributed either. Black people are 13 per cent more likely to be victims of crime than white people, and people from mixed ethnic backgrounds 43 per cent more likely. When the justice system breaks down, it is already vulnerable communities who pay the highest price.
The modern Crown Court was created in 1971, a year when digital evidence meant a grainy photograph and a complex trial lasted a week. We are not just addressing an emergency caused by long Covid and long Conservatism. We are confronting a structural change in the nature of crime and evidence. A single contemporary trial can involve enormous volumes of digital material: encrypted messaging downloads, complex forensic DNA analysis, and the detailed reconstruction of someone’s digital life. A single smartphone can contain tens of thousands of messages and years of location data.
Sir Brian Leveson’s review noted that jury trials now take roughly twice as long as they did in 2000. At the same time, Parliament has added more than 3,000 new criminal offences to the statute book since 1997. We are asking a 20th-century system to deliver justice for 21st-century crime. Institutions do not fail all at once. They fail slowly, through delay, drift and the quiet erosion of public confidence. When the gears grind to a halt, the response from parts of the legal establishment is often to ask for more oil: more money, more sitting days, more of the same. And make no mistake: we are providing more investment than any previous government in the history of our country. We have secured £2.78 billion for our courts and removed the cap to offer the Crown Court unlimited sitting days.
But investment without reform, in a system where demand keeps rising, is a recipe for managed decline. This backlog will take years to bring down even with the measures we are taking. A progressive government must ask a simple question: are we acting to solve the problems of today, or to preserve the legacy of yesterday?
I understand the concerns raised by some in the legal profession. They argue that reform risks eroding trial by jury. But there is no automatic right to a jury trial in every case in our system, and there never has been. Today only around 3 per cent of criminal trial cases even reach a jury. More than 90 per cent of all cases are heard in magistrates’ courts without one. Our reforms are not designed to abolish juries. They will protect them. With our proposals, around three-quarters of Crown Court cases will still be heard by 12 members of the public. But we will ensure that the jury system is focused where it matters most.
The Courts and Tribunals Bill creates a new Crown Court Bench Division. For “either-way” offences likely to attract a sentence of three years or less, a judge will hear the case alone. Indictable-only offences – including murder, rape, GBH – will remain firmly within the jury system. This approach is not nearly as radical as our opponents make out. District judges already sit alone every day in magistrates’ courts. Crimes in youth courts are tried without a jury. Civil cases rarely involve juries at all. In Canada, I felt like a visitor from the past as I toured their modern justice system, where judge-alone trials are an everyday occurrence.
Governments before us, from Callaghan in 1977, to Thatcher in 1988 and the coalition government in 2013, have changed the threshold of what goes to a jury. We are doing so again, in a more systematic way, because of the scale of the crisis we face. We are also removing the defendant’s automatic ability to elect a Crown Court trial in these mid-level cases, a process that can be used to delay proceedings and place further strain on the system.
By moving these cases through the courts more efficiently, we free up jury trials for the most serious crimes. In other words, we are protecting the jury by ensuring it is not crushed under the weight of an ever-growing backlog. This is not just about the mode of trial: it is also about modernisation. Too much of our justice system still relies on processes that belong to another era: paper files, manual listings and administrative delays that waste precious court time. Every hour lost to bureaucracy is an hour stolen from justice.
Technology can help us change that. We are introducing AI tools that automatically transcribe hearings and assist judges with routine administrative tasks, freeing up time for the exercise of judgement rather than paperwork. We are also piloting AI-assisted listing systems to help courts schedule trials more effectively, estimating trial length and identifying capacity before delays spiral. Alongside this we are supporting the judiciary to introduce a National Listing Framework to end what many victims justifiably view as a postcode lottery in waiting times., We’re expanding the use of “Blitz Courts” to resolve similar cases more quickly, increasing the use of remote hearings where appropriate, and rolling out specialist case coordinators in every Crown Court to keep cases moving.
None of these reforms replace human judgement. But together they allow judges, lawyers and court staff to spend less time fighting the machinery of the system and more time delivering justice.
At its best, Labour has always been a party of institutional renewal. We do not worship at the altar of how things have always been. We ask how things can work better. That tradition runs through our history, dating back even before the Labour movement became the Labour Party. The rights our movement won for trade unions in the late 1800s did not preserve the 19th-century state; they reformed it to protect working people. Aneurin Bevan did not romanticise Britain’s fragmented voluntary hospitals. He built the NHS so the state could care for everyone, against the BMA. In 1997 Labour introduced the minimum wage and gave the Bank of England operational independence despite fierce opposition from parts of the economic establishment. Again and again, progressives have been told that reform is an affront to tradition. Again and again, those reforms have strengthened the institutions of the British state rather than weakened them.
The same is true today. We can either manage the slow decline of our courts, watching as victims walk away and public confidence drains away. Or we can modernise the system so that justice is delivered swiftly and fairly.
Eight centuries ago, Clause 40 of Magna Carta promised that “to no one will we deny or delay right or justice”. Today that promise rings hollow for too many people waiting years for their case to be heard. Rebuilding this contract with the British people means rebuilding the state’s ability to deliver justice. It means moving away from a system that can feel like a private club for the legal profession and towards one that works as a public service for the citizen.
These reforms are not an attack on our legal heritage. They are an attempt to preserve it. By making the difficult but necessary choices now, we can ensure that the lamp of justice – the jury, the bench and the rule of law itself – continues to burn brightly for generations to come. Not as a museum piece, but as a living, breathing reality for every citizen, regardless of their postcode, skin colour or bank balance.
[Further reading: Why curtailing juries can help save British justice]
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