Courts and Tribunals Bill (Seventh sitting)

Yasmin Qureshi Excerpts

Tuesday 21st April 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Linsey Farnsworth]

I am about to conclude, so I will not.

I support new clause 29, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington, but I submit that the change and modernisation that the Bill seeks to introduce bring an opportunity to review all aspects of the criminal justice system in relation to ethnicity and socioeconomic background to ensure fairness for all.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South and Walkden) (Lab)]

I want to comment on two points. First, I agree entirely with the speech of the hon. Member for Chichester on the problem with clause 3 and jury allocation, and I especially agree with her point about the retrospective reallocation of cases, whereby people waiting for trial by jury will suddenly find that their case will be removed from the jury and heard elsewhere. She outlined in comprehensive detail all the issues—not just jurisprudence issues but legal and factual issues. I support what she said so I will not repeat it.

I also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley about these issues. She highlighted the disparities in the way that different groups of people are treated in our criminal justice system. I applaud my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington for tabling new clause 29. I hope that the Government will consider accepting it although, of course, if we did not abolish jury trial we would not need it.

We are told that the reason for clauses 1 and 3, which restrict access to jury trials in many cases, is to do with the backlog. That is where the Government start their position—the backlog—and I want to concentrate on that aspect. Please bear with me: I will blind the Committee with a few facts and figures because I think that they will make logical sense of why people such as me say that juries are not the reason for the delays. It is important that we get that sense.

There are currently around 88,000 cases awaiting trial in the Crown courts. The queue for the Crown court is now so long that some trials are being fixed for 2030—the Committee has heard that. We have talked about the old adage that, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” That is happening, and the delay is unacceptable, but the answer is honestly not to get rid of one of the fundamental systems that we have had in our country for centuries.

The reason for the delay is not juries but the court structure and how things happen there. One judge sitting in one courtroom for one day is known as a sitting day. The Old Bailey has 18 courts. It therefore has capacity for 18 sitting days per day, 90 sitting days per week and 4,500 sitting days in a 50-week year. For the last 15 years, restrictions have been placed on the number of sitting days in Crown court centres around the country. Resident judges, who are the principal judges at each court centre, have been told that funding will be given only for a limited number of sitting days. Restrictions of between 9% and 25% have been imposed. That is what the previous Government did.

There is always a queue for the Crown court; that is inevitable, as cases cannot be tried immediately. However—and here is the story—up until the start of 2019, that queue was managed without any undue delay. The backlog had come down from around 56,000 cases in 2014 to 33,000 cases by the start of 2019. All those cases were tried by a jury, and within a reasonable time: within six months if the defendant was in custody, and between eight and 12 months if they were on bail. Given that cases were being tried within a reasonable time in 2019, the suggestion that jury trials somehow take longer or are more complicated has no basis.

The length of the cases backlog rose from 33,000 at the start of 2019 to 71,000 by summer 2024, and rose by another 10% to around 80,000 last year. That increase is a direct consequence of the restrictions placed on sitting days. The problem was exacerbated by the closure of some courts. For example, Blackfriars Crown court in central London, which was a custom-made, modern Crown court building with eight courtrooms and the capacity to host 2,000 sitting days in a 50-week year, was closed and sold in 2019. Over the six years since then, 12,000 potential sitting days have been lost.

There are around 4,000 rape cases in the backlog. Trials for rape that have one defendant and one complainant often takes five days—although some trials are quicker and some take longer—so 2,400 of such cases could have been tried in the 12,000 sitting days that were lost following the closure of those eight courtrooms at Blackfriars. The budgetary decision to close one court led to the inability to try what would have been half of all rape cases in the backlog. Similar examples exist all over the country, including where individual courtrooms within a Crown court building sit empty, meaning that the court is open but operating below its potential capacity.

The Crown court estate has a maximum capacity of around 130,000 sitting days. Currently, it is permitted to have 113,000 sitting days, which is partly because the Government have invested some money and allowed an increase to the number of sitting days. The Government have said that that number is a “record high”, but it is high only relative to the low numbers of the previous 15 years. Given the current backlog, I would say that it is incorrect to say that it is high. We need to invest in more sitting days and having more courtrooms open.

[Alex McIntyre]

I too am pleased that the Government have decided to uncap sitting days, but does my hon. Friend recognise that although the physical capacity might be there, there are capacity issues with all the teams around that? Even if we open the courts and uncap sitting days, it will not bring down the backlog in the short term, because we will still need to find more prosecutors, solicitors, barristers, court clerks and, of course, judges. All those need to be in place, which would take longer than just uncapping the funding.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

There are enough solicitors, barristers and judges available. Some of my former colleagues, who are now assistant recorders and recorders, were told that they could do x number of jury trials in a year, then the night before they would be due to sit in a particular Crown court, their session would get cancelled. The only issue here is with the number of court clerks, many of whom were dismissed during the years of Conservative Governments. However, those people do exist, and they can be recruited. It is not that difficult to recruit a few extra court clerks, as courts still have the capacity to do so, and it is better to do that than to throw away the whole jury system as we are doing at the moment.

It is important to note that, in any event, this law will not come into place for two or three years, which is enough time to recruit more people if there is a capacity issue—

[Alex McIntyre]

Will my hon. Friend give way on that point?

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I will, but first let me explain. We have enough time to get those people in, so that we can increase the sitting days and reduce the backlog.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yasmin Qureshi]

No, because let’s face it: in the jury trials we are talking about, people are not getting sentences of more than three years. There is hardly going to be a King’s counsel dealing with those cases—it is not even going to be a leading junior who will deal with those cases. A lot of the barristers will be middle ranking; the KCs will not be dealing with these types of cases. There are enough members of the Bar to fill the capacity issue.

[Dr Mullan]

The hon. Member for Gloucester pointed to what the Bar Council said, but let us be fair and talk about what it said in its completeness. It may well have said that the people currently practising dropped out, but the Minister quite directly asked how it was going to train these people up and get back to that point, and it made the point that the people who have dropped out of practising criminal law have not evaporated into thin air. They are still there; they are just practising in other areas of law, and when the situation is right for them, they can just come back into practising criminal law.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

That is absolutely correct. Of course, one of the reasons why some people left the criminal Bar is the fact that the legal aid funding was not great, but I assure Members that if they did not have other work to do, they would come back to the Bar. There are enough barristers and solicitors in the legal system for that.

[Alex McIntyre]

Will my hon. Friend give way on that point?

[Yasmin Qureshi]

In a moment.

The main reason why the Government have cited is the backlog. What I am trying to say is that it is not the juries that cause the backlog. It is quite clearly the case that, with investment in court structures and court personnel, the courts could be fully up and running, and we could probably get rid of the backlog within the next year or two. The right to a jury trial is not worth sacrificing to get rid of court backlogs.

[Alex McIntyre]

I remember the discussion the shadow Minister spoke about; we discussed MPs swapping political constituencies at the same time. The Institute for Government was very clear that the biggest constraint is the workforce, so is my hon. Friend saying that the Institute for Government has got it wrong?

[Yasmin Qureshi]

The Institute for Government also said that juries do not take up that much time—they save more time. The point is that, without too much difficulty, we could get the courts up and running and working for extra sitting days. Essentially, if we had more court sitting days, we would not have the backlog; it is not the juries that are causing the backlog.

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

Does the hon. Lady recognise that the 2025 Criminal Bar Association study noted that one in five barristers are considering leaving the criminal Bar, not because of the ineffectiveness of jury trials but because they have to work in crumbling buildings, because there is a significant administrative burden associated with passing on information to the CPS and because of the number of ineffective cases that then do not go ahead? Does she agree that if we tackle the inefficiencies in courts, we are more likely to improve our retention of criminal barristers and encourage some of them to come back into the profession because the system will work better?

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I entirely agree. The state of some of the courts in this country is sad. They are completely neglected, which creates a lot of challenges.

[Dr Mullan]

We are leaning heavily on the points made by the Criminal Bar Association. The Government seem quite rightly to be extremely concerned about the training of future barristers, but the Criminal Bar Association has made the point that that training often takes place in what the Government are describing as less serious cases. That is where the more junior people get the experience they need to work on the more serious cases. If those cases are not available, how do the Government expect barristers to be trained to the level required to take on the more serious cases with a jury trial?

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I agree with the hon. Member.

I want to set out why we have a backlog and what we can do. Everybody has talked about various things that we could do, such as triaging the cases more effectively and more routinely, like Liverpool Crown court and some of the others that have seen a considerable reduction. There are the issues of transporting prisoners on time and internet connections in court. We have discussed a number of things that can lead to a reduction in the backlog.

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington and I thank her for tabling new clause 29. The reason why we need it is that, years ago, the importance of jury trials was recognised by the current Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, and the fact that the new clause has been tabled shows that we believe they are important. We really should not be restricting jury trials. It is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[Amanda Hack (North West Leicestershire) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine.

My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington is a passionate advocate for fairness and equality, as she has demonstrated throughout this Committee and in her work more broadly. By tabling new clause 29, she offers an approach to ensuring that we can build confidence in the system once the changes have been implemented. We have to recognise that the system is not creating fairness at the moment. We have significant backlogs, which have more than doubled since 2019. Continuing with the system as we find it is simply not an option. Ensuring that trials go ahead in a timely manner will also improve fairness.

On Second Reading, I spoke about my experience as a victim of an either-way offence. The defendant chose a jury trial. The choice to experience a jury was not mine. I did not choose to be cross-examined by the defendant. I did not choose for the case to be postponed twice, and colleagues working in the system, who had to arrange for witnesses and courts to be available not just once but three times, did not choose those postponements either. We heard the testimony from Chief Constable Sacha Hatchett about the process and the impact that delays are having on all parts of the system. She said:

“Our focus has to be on victims and on keeping people safer from harm. That is absolutely where our officers are, but the caseload and the work that is generated by delays in the system do affect our officers.”––[Official Report, Courts and Tribunals Public Bill Committee, 25 March 2026; c. 68, Q137.]

We have an opportunity to tackle the backlog and to put trust back into the system. I spoke to the CPS in the east midlands just a few weeks ago, and it said that it is currently listing cases for 2028. We cannot just rely on increasing sitting days to solve the backlog. If it were that simple, we would not have an increasing backlog today. We cannot just rely on improving technology. We have to work through a whole package of changes, and that was echoed in Sir Brian Leveson’s report.

I have heard, not only in the Chamber but in this Committee, that jury trials are a cornerstone of the legal system, but we have to be honest with ourselves. That cornerstone is at risk if changes are not made. We need to ensure that changes to the system, including to jury trials, create confidence in that very system. The evidence presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington identified that we need to address the perception of fairness from those of any ethnic background or those who are white British and live in lower-income households. It needs addressing now, even without the changes—we have to reflect on that. The current system has to be addressed, and I would welcome a response from the Minister on how we can work through the detail of the review mechanism suggested by my hon. Friend.