Courts and Tribunals Bill

Lord Jabbar Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jabbar (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Stace on his wonderful maiden speech. Having given my own maiden speech only two weeks ago, I remember the relief that he must be feeling now having done it.

I welcome the Bill and, in particular, the Government’s determination to tackle the very serious problem of delay in our criminal courts. I approach this issue from the perspective of someone who has spent his professional life assisting people caught within the criminal justice systems, particularly across the Commonwealth, in jurisdictions in the Caribbean, east Africa and south-east Asia.

I declare my interest as a director of the Death Penalty Project, an international legal organisation that represents individuals in criminal and constitutional matters within the Commonwealth. In that work, I have seen what delay means for the people who depend on those systems—defendants whose lives and futures have remained uncertain while criminal proceedings have continued around them. That experience has taught me that delay is not simply a question of the efficient administration of the courts; it is fundamentally a question of access to justice and, ultimately, the right to a fair trial.

Of course, defendants are not alone in bearing the consequences of delay. We all recognise that victims and their families wait for justice, and that witnesses wait to give evidence. Families on all sides can find their lives placed on hold, and delay can undermine wider public confidence in the administration of justice. My experience is principally that of assisting defendants, and this is the perspective from which I wish to make my contribution to this debate.

The scale of the problem in the UK is stark. As many have said today, Ministry of Justice statistics at the end of June 2026 show the Crown Court case load reaching a record high of over 80,000—more than double the pre-Covid level. The magistrates’ courts’ case load was just above 380,000, with more than 20,000 cases open for a year or longer. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, referenced, this is what we describe, in reality, as the backlog.

Current estimates indicate that, in some cases, trials may not take place until 2030—an unimaginable timeframe but a reality—and this does not even take into account appeals and further reviews. These are troubling numbers, but they are not simply numbers. Behind them are people whose lives are being placed on hold while the system struggles to deliver justice. It is unacceptable.

I will draw on three reflections from my experience across the Commonwealth. The first is delay as a human cost. The years spent waiting for criminal proceedings to conclude are years of people’s lives. Time is not neutral; it impacts on everybody. For a defendant, the passage of time can have consequences that go directly to the fairness of those proceedings. Witnesses become harder to locate, memories fade and circumstances change. Evidence may be difficult to obtain or test. All this can affect not just the experience of justice but the ability of a court to determine a case fairly.

My work involved assisting people who have faced the death penalty, some of whom spent many years on remand waiting for trial. I do not equate those cases with the problems confronting us here and the courts in the UK, but they have taught me one important lesson: the passage of time can itself become a profound part of a person’s experience of the justice system and, ultimately, the final outcome, so doing nothing is not an option. The Government are right to confront this problem.

My second reflection is this: access to court is not necessarily the same as access to justice. We can make a justice system faster, but faster does not necessarily mean fairer. For a defendant, real access to justice requires proper legal advice and representation, and the practical ability to understand the proceedings, participate effectively and enforce one’s rights. For example, the Justice Committee’s work in its report, Access to Justice: Legal Aid, gives us an important warning. It found that the number of active criminal duty solicitors had fallen by a quarter since 2017, and that only 7% were under the age of 35, meaning an ever-ageing cohort.

These are just some of the issues that threaten the operation of the justice system in England and Wales. Such concerns have also been made with representations by the Criminal Bar Association, the Bar Council and the Law Society. Even the most efficient court process cannot work properly if there are too few lawyers able to advise and represent the people passing through it. For defendants, effective legal representation is central to ensuring due process, protecting their rights and securing the possibility of a fair trial. If we make it faster to reach court but harder for someone to participate effectively once they get there, have we really improved access to justice?

I also agree with my noble friend Lord McNicol and welcome the Bill’s provision for an independent review of whether these reforms create or exacerbate differences in treatment or outcomes between defendants of different racial groups and different socioeconomic statuses. We know from robust empirical studies carried out the world over that impact is never equal. As we seek to make the system more efficient, we must ask whether the consequences of reform are being treated equally.

My third reflection is that delay is a systemic problem and requires a system-wide response. If we increase judicial capacity, do we have enough court staff, prosecutors and defence lawyers to support it? Resources are plainly necessary, but my experience across the Commonwealth suggests that resources alone will not be enough. That has been expressly recognised in the review by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson.

Many Caribbean states, for example, operate under much greater resource constraints than in England and Wales. Recognising this, these jurisdictions sought to confront these problems by setting clearer time limits, improving case management, using technology more effectively and reforming procedure. We see related approaches in other Commonwealth states that are streamlining procedure and setting time limits.

I am not suggesting that England and Wales should simply import these solutions from elsewhere. The lesson is much more fundamental. There is no single solution to delay. We should set expectations, measure performance and manage cases effectively. We should ensure that defendants receive the due process for which they are entitled. In turn, victims will receive their own due process.

In its introduction, the Commonwealth Secretariat’s 2024 guide to case management sought to align efficiency with what it called

“enduring constitutional values underlying the administration of justice”.

What does that mean in practice? It means that efficiency cannot be considered in isolation from the fundamental principles on which our justice system is underpinned: respect for the rule of law, due process, effective access to justice, equality and the right to a fair trial.

These principles are not obstacles to an efficient justice system. They are one reason we have a justice system in the first place. As we seek, rightly, to reduce delay, the question cannot be simply: how quickly are cases moving through the courts? We must also ask: are we delivering justice fairly? Efficiency is not an alternative to justice. Properly understood, it is a means by which justice is delivered, and it must always serve the ultimate purpose of the system: fair, independent and timely administration of justice. I support the Government’s determination to address delay. From the perspective of a defendant, it means ensuring the pursuit of greater efficiency. If we do not do this, it will lead only to wrongful convictions and error, which, in turn, undermine confidence in the justice system. I look forward to working with the Government to ensure that these reforms deliver both.