The head of the Crown Prosecution Service has warned that cutting its budget would have a “catastrophic” impact on the backlog in the crown courts, as he revealed that almost 75,000 defendants were awaiting trial at the end of last month.
Max Hill, the director of public prosecutions (DPP) for England and Wales, told the House of Commons justice committee that the backlog was above the 70,200 recorded in August 2020, after court closures because of Covid.
Giving evidence to the committee on Tuesday, Hill said that if the government target of reducing the crown courts backlog to 53,000 cases by March 2025 was to be reached it would require investment, and any cuts to reduce the UK government’s debt would have dire consequences.
“If we are not able to maintain the budget that we were given in the spending round of 2021, and if we are therefore not able to maintain the expansion in our numbers within that budget envelope, I think it will be catastrophic for our work, I think it will be catastrophic in terms of the impact on the backlog,” he said. “You cannot go on asking hard working staff to just work harder.”
The cuts to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) budget after austerity measures were introduced in 2010 were among the heaviest in Whitehall, prompting fears that it could be targeted again as the government seeks to make savings.
But Hill said that, even under the current levels of funding, reducing the backlog to the 2025 target would be a challenge.
“A number of things would have to happen,” he said. “They would include quite a significant increase in sitting days, the number of cases per week, month and year that can be dealt with in the crown court. That would require an increase in judicial capacity – full-time or part-time. Where that’s part-time that means experienced barristers in the main making themselves available to sit as part-time judges [recorders].
“That would mean they would not be available to prosecute for us and many of the most senior prosecuting advocates are crown court recorders, that would drive a resourcing issue for the CPS and we would need to keep up with sitting days if they were to rise.”
He said the best thing the CPS could do to reduce the backlog was to increase its efficiency “and the only way to do that is to increase the size of the Crown Prosecution Service”.
Hill said budget cuts had led to the number of CPS staff falling from more than 8,000 in 2009-10 to 5,500 in 2018 when he became DPP. He said after two successful spending reviews the CPS had welcomed 562 new starters – approaching 10% of headcount – in the current financial year, as it used “every penny that we have to increase the size of the CPS not back to where it was but to a reasonable level”.
He said it would be unfair to blame the current backlog of 74,587 defendants on the strike by criminal barristers, citing it as just one contributory factor.
• This article was amended on 2 November 2022. An earlier version of the text and headline said the figure provided by the CPS for the crown courts backlog was “almost 75,000 cases”; this is actually the number of defendants awaiting trial. Separate figures provided by HM Courts and Tribunal Service put the backlog at about 60,000 cases.
