There is a special kind of silence that haunts the corridors of our courts. It is not the contemplation of a jury deliberating on the facts; it’s the stagnant silence of a waiting room. It is the silence of a victim who has been told, for the third time in two years, that their trial has been “postponed” because there is no judge, no space or capacity to hear them. It is the silence of Katie, who in 2017 reported her partner for bodily harm and rape, but did not see a conviction until seven years later, in 2024.
For a lawyer, the jury box is rightly hallowed ground. It is the heartbeat of our common law, a symbol of the citizen’s role in the administration of power. I started my career in law and I take its traditions into consideration. But as Secretary of Justice, I have to be realistic and romantic. We are currently living through a quiet constitutional crisis. Today around 80,000 cases are stuck in the Crown Court backlog. If we do nothing – if we surrender to the petty conservatism that says the system can never change – that figure is projected to reach 200,000 by the mid-2030s. We simply cannot manage or invest our way out of a 2.5-fold increase in human misery.
When we talk about the rule of law, we often treat it as an abstract set of principles bound in leather volumes. But the rule of law is also a public service. If the state cannot provide that service in a time frame that allows a victim to recover or a defendant to move forward, then the law does not apply. It’s failing. The progressive case for judicial reform is not a technocratic exercise in efficiency. It is a fundamental argument whether the institutions of the British state can work for the people we are sent to Parliament to represent.
In the progressive imagination, we often focus on the justice of the judgment itself. We are concerned – rightly so – about the quality of the evidence, the impartiality of the jury and the rights of the accused. But progressives must not ignore the most brutal injustice of all: victims being turned away from justice by the hour. In rape cases, the average wait from arrival in court to conclusion is 423 days. The Victims’ Commissioner has described this as an “extraordinary tax” which causes many people to simply abandon the process altogether. Justice delayed is not just justice denied; it is justice rationed by sustainability.
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A three-year wait for a trial may be a manageable concern for a corporation or a wealthy litigant. For a young person in an insecure job, or a survivor of sexual violence, it can be a life-destroying burden. Nor are the victims evenly distributed. Blacks are 13 percent more likely to be victims of crime than whites, and people of mixed ethnicity 43 percent more likely. When the justice system breaks down, it is vulnerable communities who pay the highest price.
The modern Crown Court was created in 1971, a year when digital evidence meant a grainy photograph and a complex trial lasted a week. We are not just dealing with an emergency caused by long Covid and long Conservatism. We are facing a structural change in the nature of crime and evidence. A single contemporary trial can involve vast volumes of digital material: downloads of encrypted messages, complex forensic DNA analysis, and the detailed reconstruction of someone’s digital life. A single smartphone can contain tens of thousands of messages and years of location data.
Sir Brian Leveson’s review noted that jury trials now take roughly twice as long as they did in 2000. At the same time, Parliament has added more than 3,000 new offenses to the statute book since 1997. We are looking for a 20th century system to deliver justice for 21st century crime. Institutions do not fail all at once. They fail slowly, through delays, moves and the quiet erosion of public trust. When the gears stop, the response from parts of the legal establishment is often to demand more oil: more money, more sitting days, more of the same. And make no mistake: we are delivering more investment than any previous government in our country’s history. We have secured £2.78 billion for our courts and lifted the cap to provide the Crown Court with unlimited sitting days.
But investment without reform, in a system where demand continues to grow, is a recipe for managed decline. This stagnation will take years to subside even with the measures we are taking. A progressive government must ask a simple question: are we acting to solve today’s problems or to preserve yesterday’s legacy?
I understand the concerns raised by some in the legal profession. They argue that the reform risks eroding the trial by jury. But there is no automatic right to a jury trial in every case in our system, and there never has been. Today, only about 3 percent of criminal trial cases reach a jury. More than 90 percent of all cases are heard in magistrates’ courts without one. Our reforms are not designed to abolish juries. They will protect them. Under our proposals, around three-quarters of Crown Court cases will still be heard by 12 members of the public. But we will ensure that the jury system focuses where it matters most.
The Courts and Tribunals Bill creates a new Division of the Crown Court Bench. For “any” offenses that carry a sentence of three years or less, a judge will hear the case alone. Indictable offenses only – including murder, rape, GBH – will remain decided within the jury system. This approach is not as radical as our opponents say. District judges now sit only every day in magistrates’ courts. Crimes in youth courts are tried without a jury. Civil cases rarely involve juries. In Canada, I felt like a visitor from the past as I toured their modern justice system, where trials by judges alone are a daily occurrence.
Governments before us, from Callaghan in 1977, to Thatcher in 1988 and the coalition government in 2013, have changed the threshold of what goes to a jury. We are doing this again, in a more systematic way, because of the scale of the crisis we face. We are also removing the defendant’s automatic ability to choose a Crown Court trial in these mid-level cases, a process that can be used to delay proceedings and place further strain on the system.
By moving these cases through the courts more efficiently, we free up jury trials for the most serious crimes. In other words, we’re protecting the jury by making sure it doesn’t get crushed under the weight of an ever-increasing number. This is not only about the way of judging: it is also about modernization. Much of our justice system still relies on processes that belong to another era: paper filings, manual listings, and administrative delays that waste valuable court time. Every hour lost to bureaucracy is an hour stolen from justice.
Technology can help us change that. We are introducing AI tools that automatically transcribe hearings and assist judges with routine administrative tasks, freeing up time for the exercise of judgment rather than paperwork. We are also piloting AI-assisted listing systems to help courts plan trials more effectively, estimating trial length and identifying capacity before spiraling delays. Alongside this, we are supporting the judiciary to introduce a National Listing Framework to end what many victims rightly see as a postcode lottery in waiting times. We are expanding the use of ‘Blitz Courts’ to resolve similar cases more quickly, increasing the use of remote hearings where appropriate and placing specialist case co-ordinators in each Crown Court to handle cases.
None of these reforms replaces human judgment. But together they allow judges, lawyers and court staff to spend less time fighting the machinery of the system and more time delivering justice.
At its best, Labor has always been a party of institutional renewal. We do not worship at the altar of the way things have always been. We ask how things can work better. This tradition runs through our history, dating back even before the Labor movement became the Labor Party. The rights our movement won for unions in the late 1800s did not preserve the 19th century state; they reformed it to protect working people. Aneurin Bevan did not romanticize Britain’s fragmented voluntary hospitals. He built the NHS so that the state looked after everyone, against the BMA. In 1997, Labor introduced the minimum wage and gave the Bank of England operational independence, despite fierce opposition from parts of the economic establishment. Progressives have repeatedly been told that reform is an affront to tradition. Again and again, those reforms have strengthened the institutions of the British state rather than weakened them.
The same is true today. We can either manage the slow decline of our courts, watching as victims leave and public trust slips away. Or we can modernize the system so that justice is delivered quickly and fairly.
Eight centuries ago, point 40 e The Magna Carta promised that “we will not deny or delay anyone’s right or justice.” Today that promise rings hollow for many who wait years for their case to be heard. Rebuilding this contract with the British people means rebuilding the state’s ability to deliver justice. It means moving away from a system that can feel like a private club for the legal profession and towards a system that functions as a public service to the citizen.
These reforms are not an attack on our legal heritage. They are an attempt to preserve it. By making the difficult but necessary choices now, we can ensure that the lamp of justice – the jury, the jury, and the rule of law itself – will continue to burn brightly for generations to come. Not as a museum object, but as a living and breathing reality for every citizen, regardless of zip code, skin color or bank balance.
(Further reading: Why cutting juries could help save British justice)
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