Issue 404  28th June 2025

The Crown court backlog has reached ‘unacceptable’ levels with 76,957 outstanding cases – a 25-year high according to the Criminal Bar Association. The latest figures, covering January to March 2025, show an 11% increase on the same period last year (69,021), and an increase from 74,592 since December. At this rate, the backlog will reach 100,000 cases by autumn next year, the data suggests. The median age of open cases and the number of cases open for a year or more both increased compared with the previous quarter. According to the data, 18,093 cases have been open for a year or more. The open caseload in magistrates’ courts also increased to 310,304.

Mary Prior KC, CBA chair, said the figures showed an ‘emergency’ within the Crown court, while minister for courts and legal services Sarah Sackman KC MP said ‘only radical reform’ would help curtail the crisis. Former judicial chief for criminal justice Sir Brian Leveson was asked last year to conduct an independent review of the criminal courts and explore options to ‘speed up justice’. Leveson’s review and recommendations are expected to be published soon, though no date has been given. It will be followed up with findings on court efficiency in autumn this year...

Foreign prisoners will be deported sooner thanks to new legislation introduced today (25 June) to free up vital prison capacity, keep our streets safe and save taxpayers’ money... The move is set to boost efforts which have already seen a 14% increase in deportations since July last year. Foreign offenders make up around 12 percent of the total prison population and deporting them sooner is estimated to free up around 500 prison places per year. On average a prison place costs £54,000 a year and the measures will stop wasting taxpayers’ millions while protecting the British public by getting foreign national offenders out of our prisons and off our streets...

Changes to the Early Removal Scheme will mean prisoners with no right to be in the country will face deportation 30% into their prison term rather than the current 50%. Combined with upcoming sentencing reforms, this could see many serving fixed-term sentences eligible for deportation after serving 10 percent, down from 20 or 25 percent currently. The legislation also extends the removal window from 18 to 48 months before the end of the custodial part of an offender’s sentence... The Early Removal Scheme only applies to those on Determinate Sentences and excludes those being held for terrorism or terror-related offences. It is also a discretionary power so release for deportation can be refused in certain circumstances, including where there is clear evidence a prisoner is planning further crime...

An expert working group led by a former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales has today (Monday 23 June) come forward with considered proposals aimed at protecting the public while ending the long-running IPP scandal for good. The group, convened by the Howard League for Penal Reform and chaired by Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, has spent months exploring ways to end the detention of people serving indeterminate sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP). IPP sentences were abolished in 2012, but not retrospectively, meaning that thousands of people who were serving them at the time remain in prison serving them today. At the end of 2024, the number stood at 2,614, comprising 1,045 people who had never been released and 1,569 who had been released but were later recalled to prison. Almost all of them had been imprisoned significantly longer than the tariff they were given when they were sentenced by the court; more than 700 people have served more than 10 years longer than their tariff...

The report’s key recommendation is to modify the approach taken by the Parole Board in IPP cases. The current release test requires the Parole Board to decide whether it is necessary for the protection of the public for a person to be detained. But the working group proposes that the Parole Board should be asked to set a date as to when the person will be released within a two-year window, and what is required to achieve that safely. A one-year window would apply to those people serving the Detention for Public Protection (DPP) sentence – a sentence like the IPP that was imposed on children. There are still dozens of people who have never been released who were children at the time of their sentence...

The report’s second recommendation is to reform the system by which people on IPP sentences are recalled to prison. The working group finds that the system is currently failing in two main ways: the threshold for recall is too low and the ‘causal link’ test is often misapplied; and there is no independent scrutiny of recall decisions before they are enforced.

The working group’s third recommendation is for a change that would mean some IPP sentences can become spent. Currently, under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, indefinite sentences are never spent, which means that people serving IPP sentences in the community will always need to disclose information about their conviction – even on basic Disclosure and Barring Service checks – adversely affecting their ability to get work, insurance or become a volunteer.

The fourth recommendation in the report is for the introduction of an aftercare offer to all people serving IPP sentences who are released from custody with health or social care needs. This would be equivalent to the aftercare duty provided under section 117 of the Mental Health Act 1983.

The working group’s fifth recommendation is to restore the right for people on IPP sentences to apply for annual licence termination reviews.

The sixth recommendation is to reduce the hurdles for someone to bring an appeal against their IPP sentence. The working group suggests creating a positive obligation for every person serving an IPP sentence to have access to a special Criminal Cases Review Commission process, which can expedite their application to the full Court of Appeal (Criminal Division)...

Claims the UK has two-tier justice are "disgusting" and "wrong", the attorney general has said. In his first major interview, Lord Hermer told the BBC that politicians using the phrase needed to think about the "dangers" they were posing to the UK's "essential institutions"...

Accusations that the UK operates a two-tier justice system emerged following the riots in the summer of 2024, with some arguing that the rioters were treated unduly harshly by police and the courts... In an interview for a BBC Radio 4 documentary, Starmer's Stormy Year, Lord Hermer said: "What some people were seeking to do, bringing up 'two-tier', was to make a comparison with the way that people were being treated for trying to kill police officers - and I want to reiterate that, kill police officers - with the response to protests on the streets of London. You can have views as to whether they're right protests or wrong protests, but they were not producing violence that you could even begin legitimately to compare to what was going on [during] the riots. That's where the two-tier comes from." He rejected the label, and said it was "frankly disgusting" to draw comparisons between police officers trying to defend themselves and communities, and protests or demonstrations. "I think it's offensive to our police. It's offensive to our crown prosecutors who are trying to apply the law in the best faith. It is offensive to the courts, where independent judges are applying the law to reach the right sentences. We don't have a two-tiered justice system. We have one justice system, that is an independent justice system...and I think we all need to get behind it, not seek to undermine it."

The Serious Fraud Office has today expanded its global reach by joining the International Anti-Corruption Coordination Centre (IACCC), strengthening the UK’s ability to tackle grand corruption and illicit finance across borders. This strategic alliance builds on the SFO’s recent establishment of a taskforce with French and Swiss authorities to tackle international bribery and corruption.

Based within the National Crime Agency, the IACCC brings together specialist law enforcement officers from agencies around the world to tackle allegations of grand corruption that span multiple jurisdictions. Organisations with a proven intention to fight domestic and international corruption can be considered for membership, with the SFO gaining enhanced access to key partners in the fight against grand corruption involving politically exposed persons. The partnership will boost the SFO’s capacity to gather intelligence and evidence on companies and individuals suspected of corruption overseas while maintaining full control over its investigations...

Researchers who spent six months observing joint enterprise trials have found excessive use of powers, with individuals charged with murder despite only tenuous connections with the crime. The findings from the miscarriage of justice charity Appeal add to concerns surrounding the doctrine, which allows defendants in England and Wales to be convicted of crimes they did not physically carry out if they are deemed to have encouraged or assisted the perpetrator.

Dr Nisha Waller and Tehreem Sultan followed 17 attempted murder and murder joint enterprise trials at the Old Bailey in central London. Such cases have been of particular concern because of the scope for people who made no clear contribution to be tried as if they were the perpetrator and receive a life sentence. In many cases, the authors said, the evidence was said to be “weak, and in some, virtually nonexistent”. They highlighted one “especially concerning case” of seven boys charged with murder, where the prosecution case against five of them relied almost entirely on their “voluntary presence” at the scene. They said their findings point to an “unreasonably wide net” being cast, with overzealous charging decisions by the Crown Prosecution Service and a failure to weed out weak cases before trial...

A CPS spokesperson said prosecutors “use all available evidence to piece together each defendant’s role in a crime. A central thread of fairness runs through how we look at these cases. We choose the right charges for the right people based on the evidence in front of us. We look objectively at the evidence before making our own decisions. The CPS carefully monitors joint enterprise prosecutions, with senior legal oversight over every case to ensure that our approach is fair and proportionate.”