Our criminal justice system has become increasingly fragile over the past decade, while having to cope with a rising complexity of crime coming into it, not least sexual violence and domestic abuse. Our new ten-point plan, Systems Shift, argues that a new Government needs to avoid the system overloading and collapsing— otherwise, we will never have the time, the money or the energy to set the system back onto the road to recovery. Specifically, we argue that a new Government has to take emergency measures to alleviate the overcrowding crisis in our adult male prisons and make a large dent in the Crown Court backlog.
As far as prison capacity goes, the reality is that, because of past failures to tackle the sources of demand on our prisons and inability to build prison places to keep pace, there are no good options left on the table. Given the urgency of the issues, we recommend that a new Government shorten the amount of time people sentenced to four years or less serve in prison, using secondary legislation as soon as possible. This will involve resetting the release point for all determinate sentence prisoners sentenced to four years or less (excluding those who are assessed as posing a high risk of serious harm to the public). We also recommend that a new government passes legislation to re-sentence Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentenced prisoners, as recommended by the Justice Select Committee of the House of Commons in 2022.
Turning to the Crown Court, we recognise that the scale of the Crown Court backlog is daunting— latest data suggests that there were 67,573 outstanding cases at the end of 2023, the largest ever on record. We believe the backlog represents a fundamental problem within the criminal justice system and, like the prison capacity crisis, needs to be alleviated by taking immediate action. We argue for a new Government to set a clear ambition to speed up Crown Court cases to bring the average time from receipt of a case into Crown Court to completion down from 247 days to 165 days by the end of the next Parliament. As part of that plan, we urge them to introduce a temporary streamlined ‘Crown Court’ process for the least serious not guilty cases, and explore new ways to incentivise solicitors and barristers to strengthen court capacity.
Failure to take early action on both the prison population crisis and the court backlog will, in our view, hamper any efforts during the rest of the Parliament to make the necessary system shifts. Our view is that any of these moves needs to be done very early into a new Government and be done openly and honestly. It will require a clear articulation of the need for it and the risks of acting and the risks of not acting, and with transparency the impact of these measures over time.
But, in our view, we cannot delay any longer. We urge whoever forms the next Government to take the opportunity of a new Parliament to deliver the fundamental ‘systems shift’ we need, in order to deliver a fairer and more effective justice system that retains the confidence of all our people.