Giving evidence to the Justice Committee this week, Lord Burnett said the increase since March, when the backlog stood at about 40,000 cases, was ‘very substantial indeed’. He pointed out that not all of those cases would result in trials and that the recovery plan target of 250 Crown court rooms by the end of October had been exceeded.
Last week, there were 255 Crown court rooms operating, he said, and he hoped to get to 300 by the end of this year.
However, he warned that ‘even if we were able to run those courts flat out, we would be retrieving the backlog only a little, maybe by 50 cases a week or that sort’. Moreover, as more police and CPS lawyers are being recruited, it is likely the number of cases coming through the courts will increase, he said.
There was now a ‘fairly good sense’ emerging of ‘the jurisdictions that lend themselves to remote justice and those that don’t’, Lord Burnett said. However, technology was ‘not a silver bullet’.
‘The overarching problem that we encounter in the courts, including in the Royal Courts of Justice, is that technology fails us…screens freezing, voices going completely unintelligible, squeaking on the line…the problem is it depends on the broadband of the weakest link’.
He called for ‘realistic’ funding, and was ‘extremely concerned to avoid the position of the backlog that has accumulated being viewed by anybody as a new normal.
‘Funding has got to be provided to help us deal with the work that comes in and the backlog,’ he said.
Lord Burnett was also asked by Sir Bob O’Neill, chair of the committee, about the Prime Minister and Home Secretary’s recent derogatory references to lawyers.
He said ‘the vitality and independence of the legal profession is an essential hallmark of the rule of law’, and ‘identifiable individual failings, unfortunate though they are, do not begin to justify a general attack on the integrity of groups of lawyers’.
