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Even though, for most of us, the chances of becoming the victims of a crime are reassuringly low, people are fearful of the thought of crime and as such, it remains a key election issue.
As we reach the critical point in this general election campaign, almost every opinion poll puts law and order in the top issues of concern for voters and the battle to appear to be the party best equipped to tackle the gargantuan task of upholding the nation’s law and order, is being as keenly fought as ever.
Sadly, the battle ground upon which the issue of law and order is being slugged out is depressingly familiar with all the main parties trying to out-do the other with bigger and bolder claims about how many police officers they’ll employ or how many criminals they’ll lock up.
And if they’re not boasting about the size of their projected police forces, they’re trying to out-muscle their opponents with machismo slogans about fighting crime.
Just as Tony Blair promised to be “Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime”, and Boris Johnson promised his “Blitz on Crime” by setting up ‘flourescent-jacketed chain gangs,’ in this general election Keir Starmer claims that Labour will “Take Back The Streets,” whilst Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party, will “protect our streets and deliver a justice system for victims and the public”.
As a barrister with 25 years experience of crime, criminals, victims and the criminal justice system, I’ve considered each of the headline policies set out by the five main UK wide political parties and posed the question: will the proposals have any impact upon law and order and the criminal justice system as I experience it. But firstly, what are the big issues face our criminal justice system – I’ll focus on just three.
Plans to Beat the Backlog
The massive backlog of cases caused, not by Covid or the barristers action as claimed by the government, but, overwhelmingly by the closure of courtrooms and court centres over the last two decades, is one. At present the backlog of cases is over 70,000 with the average wait for a case to be heard from arrest or charge to final trial is over 18 months. Every day Judges are forced to adjourn cases for trial for up to two years, because there are no courts or judges available before then. More often than not, the longest wait are for offences of a serious sexual nature such as rape, because the specialist counsel needed to prosecute these offences are simply not able to fit them into their already burgeoning schedules.
Court Case Backlog Worse Now than Before £477 Million Investment to Curb Delays, New Report Reveals
National Audit Office figures show MoJ way off target of reducing court case backlog by more than 14,000 cases and more than 6,000 are two years or more old
The Conservative Manifesto promises to cut the backlog by keeping open Nightingale Courts, funding sitting days, investing in court maintenance, and funding 100 new criminal law pupillages. Nightingale Courts, which are courts set up in non-court buildings, such as hotels or football stadia boardrooms, are unsuitable for the most serious offences as they don’t have cells, whilst their location away from court centres, means that barristers can’t get through other work if they appear in them as most barristers, typically, will appear in a number of different courts in the same court centre over the course of the day.
Funding sitting days and investing in court maintenance is all well and good, but in the absence of any new money, is unlikely to help a great deal, whilst the proposal to create new pupils, again, laudable, but hardly an answer to the current problem as it takes quite a few years before a new barrister has the experience necessary to conduct a crown court trial.
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Labour’s plans to address the backlog are even more limited, promising only to allow ‘Associate Prosecutors’ into the crown court whilst making no promises whatsoever to create new courtrooms or buildings. I have no idea what an ‘associate prosecutor’ is, but I’m not sure I would want one bringing a case for the Crown