Issue 402  14th June 2025

Chancellor Rachel Reeves today committed up to an extra £450m a year to the courts system by 2028-29. This will ‘increase Crown court sitting days to record levels’ and help implement the forthcoming recommendations of Sir Brian Leveson’s review of the criminal courts, she said. The pledge appears in HM Treasury papers issued alongside the chancellor’s Spending Review. They reveal that day-to-day spending by the ministry will grow by an average of 1.8% a year in real terms between the 2025-26 financial year and 2028-29, rising to 3.1% when calculated from a 2023-24 baseline...

Capital spending is set to rise sharply next year to help fund 14,000 new prison places by 2031, but will remain flat from 2027 to 2029. Last December Reeves declared that government departments would be asked to identify 5% efficiency and productivity savings when setting their budgets for 2026-27 to 2028-29. The Treasury said the MoJ has committed to delivering at least 5% savings and efficiencies, including savings identified through the so-called Zero-Based Review. These savings include ‘reductions to back-office headcount’ and using AI to reduce administrative costs. The MoJ has also worked with the Office for Value for Money to identify £360m of ‘technical efficiencies’ by 2028-29...

The probation service will receive up to £700m in extra funding per year by 2028-29 compared with 2025-26, Reeves said. This will 'deliver the transformative reforms’ recommended in former lord chancellor David Gauke’s Independent Sentencing Review. The Law Officers’ departments, meanwhile, will see total funding rise from £1.1bn this year to £1.3bn in 2028-29. Day-to-day spending will rise by £160m in real terms from 2023-24 to 2028-29. This 'will provide record investment into the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to bring criminals to justice, with total funding of £1 billion in 2028-29,' the Treasury said. 'The CPS will recruit more Crown advocates and frontline staff to prosecute cases, build workforce capacity and capability, and improve the quality and efficiency of prosecutions'...

... Under plans for “once-in-a-generation” reform to reduce the backlogs, an independent review set up by the Government will recommend ministers should follow the example of Canada, Australia and New Zealand and allow defendants in the crown court to opt for a judge-only trial. Sir Brian Leveson, the senior judge heading the review, will recommend the move as a way to speed up trials to tackle the record backlog of more than 75,000 cases which is forcing some victims to wait up to four or five years for justice. He told a conference on modernising justice: “I can see the advantage in lots of cases. You will get a reasoned judgment [from a judge]. In front of a jury, you don’t get a judgment at all, you get guilty or not guilty. The case will be undeniably speedier because the judge doesn’t have to explain to the jury all the basic premises of the criminal law.”

Sir Brian is also expected to recommend that the public should be spared jury service if a case is going to last more than 12 months because of the “unfairness” of it taking a year out of their lives and livelihoods. Instead, such cases would be heard by a judge without a jury. Other proposals will further scale back people’s right to a jury trial for some lower level offences such as assault of a police officer while resisting arrest, racially aggravated criminal damage, dangerous driving and possessing a class B drug like cannabis. These are likely to be tried either by an intermediate court comprising a judge and two magistrates or by extending the powers of magistrates to try cases carrying sentences of up to two years, rather than only those with maximum jail terms of one year, as at present... He also said it would be up to the Government to decide which types of cases it felt were appropriate for defendants to have the right to spurn a jury but he said the judges would have the discretion to overrule any request if it was in the public interest to do so... He suggested one type of case judge-only trials could be where there was significant “public opprobrium” over the case such as sexual or sadistic violence and could sway the jury... He said it could also apply to factually or legally extremely complex cases where a jury may struggle to fully understand the case. A third type could where there had been alleged confession or identification, where judges tended to be more rigorous in scrutinising its validity than necessarily a jury...

He is expected to deliver his report to Ms Mahmood next week with publication expected in early July.

After 200 years, rough sleeping will no longer be a crime as the Government confirms it will formally scrap the Vagrancy Act by Spring next year. The Act was introduced in 1824 – towards the end of the Georgian era - to deal with rising homelessness which increased after the Napoleonic Wars and Industrial Revolution. While use of the Act against rough sleeping has significantly declined over the years in line with modern attitudes and greater understanding around the causes of homelessness, it remains enforceable in law. The Government will be repealing the Act to ensure rough sleeping is no longer a criminal offence, as it concentrates its efforts on getting to the root causes of homelessness, backed by major funding...

Emergency workers will be better protected from violence and abuse when visiting homes as the government introduces new laws to support frontline staff. The new measures, tabled today as amendments to the government’s landmark Crime and Policing Bill, will close an existing loophole that allows people to get away with racial and religious abuse towards police, fire and ambulance workers making house calls. Currently, it is illegal to racially or religiously abuse anyone in public, but this does not extend to behaviour within a private home. The gap was originally designed to ensure that the laws that allow police to keep public spaces free from serious disorder did not overstep into private conversations held in homes...

By closing the loophole in the Public Order Act 1986, the government is making clear that racially or religiously motivated abuse and threats towards our emergency workers will never be tolerated, regardless of where it takes place. Under the change, offenders of abusing emergency workers in any setting could face a maximum sentence of 2 years imprisonment...

Solicitor advocates have called for a refresh of their seemingly ailing brand amid evidence that the career benefits of the designation are declining. Dwindling numbers are making use of their higher rights to appear in court, their specialist association has been disbanded and hardly any solicitor advocates now take silk...

The Solicitors’ Association of Higher Court Advocates – founded in the same year solicitors were permitted to acquire higher rights of audience – has been wound up following a members’ vote. SAHCA’s website was taken down this month. Andrew Morris, a higher court advocate at ITN Solicitors specialising in criminal law, would like to see an Inn of Court or advocacy group step in to help with training. This would help colleagues to ‘take on bigger cases and feel they will be more accepted on a level playing field with the bar’, he said. Morris also called for the ‘brand’ to be better promoted...