The Backlog Alibi

I was reading, with the usual mix of disbelief and deja vu, the government’s latest bright idea for modernising justice. Jury trials, we are now told, will be reserved for offences carrying more than three years inside. Three years. As if that were the judicial equivalent of a parking ticket. And naturally, this is all in service of that sacred national priority: clearing the backlog. Efficiency at all costs. Preferably yours.

The thin end of the wedge has now been replaced with something approaching a hydraulic ram. Crimes that tear families apart, vaporise careers and carry lifelong stigma are to be dispatched without the inconvenience of twelve ordinary citizens. Domestic abuse, violent assaults, stalking, hate crimes, serious fraud, dangerous driving causing injury. All now deemed small enough to be handled on the quick by a bench designed for bus queues and disorderly drunks. Magistrates, to their credit, do heroic work. But they are not a substitute for public judgement when years of a person’s life hang in the balance.

And still we are told this is necessary. The system is clogged. The courts are creaking. Juries take too long. It is remarkable how often governments blame the very safeguards they spent a decade starving. If you neglect your house for long enough, the roof will leak. The modernisers’ solution is not to repair it, but to remove the rafters so the water has nothing left to drip through.

Because the backlog is not a natural disaster. It is not an act of God. It is the predictable consequence of empty judgeships, shuttered courtrooms, gutted legal aid, collapsing disclosure units and court buildings that look like a set from a post apocalyptic drama. If they genuinely wanted to fix the system, they could fill the vacancies, restore legal aid, reopen and repair the court estate, fund the CPS so it can cope with digital evidence, and divert the genuine small stuff out of the criminal courts entirely. But that would require money and political honesty, two substances now rarer than a functioning ceiling at Blackfriars Crown Court.

What we get instead is centralisation dressed up as efficiency. Public oversight replaced with bureaucratic throughput. And now, with this three year threshold, a constitutional Rubicon calmly crossed. Once you accept that years of imprisonment can be handed out without a jury, the only thing left to decide is how far you want to expand the definition of minor.

So if this change is to be rammed through, then the very minimum - the absolute bare minimum - is a hard sunset clause. Not the usual ministerial waffle about temporary measures, but a legally binding cut off tied to the backlog falling below an explicit, numerical threshold. The figure should match the level at which the courts actually functioned before austerity hollowed them out. Something like the 2010 caseload, when the system creaked but still worked.

Once the backlog sits below that figure for twelve consecutive months, the restriction should expire automatically. No ministerial discretion. No power to extend it by statutory instrument at 4.59pm on a Friday. If this really is an emergency tool, it must switch itself off when the emergency ends.

And the whole arrangement needs independent monitoring by the NAO or similar, reporting quarterly so the government cannot play hide and seek with the numbers.

If ministers refuse such safeguards, the truth writes itself. A temporary measure with no mechanism to end it is not temporary. It is permanent reform written in disappearing ink. And the pretence collapses: the backlog is not the motive. It is the alibi.

You do not repair a leaking roof by removing the rafters. And you do not fix a backlog by removing the public from justice. Unless, of course, speed is not the point. Control is.