Recommendation 10

Government has also committed additional funding to support the court system to reduce the backlogs, including by making court rooms safe through the installation of plexiglass and introducing 40 Nightingale courts, with plans to increase this by a further 20 courts. It has also brought back into service some court rooms it closed through its court reform programme. The Ministry told us this increase in capacity was beginning to show some results, particularly in magistrates’ courts, but the overall situation remained very challenging.12 Despite having 290 rooms that can be used for jury trials, the Ministry told us that trials involving more than one defendant (“multi-hander trials”) are proving particularly difficult to accommodate, but that work was in progress to address these challenges. It also committed to maximising the number of sitting days for judges this financial year. Despite us pressing the Ministry for clarity, it was unable to tell us what level of backlog it was planning for. The Ministry could say at least that it aims to reduce the backlog to lower than pre-pandemic levels, but those levels were already unacceptably high.13