Ministry of Justice

The clearest measure of the failure is the backlog.

The Crown Court backlog stood at 73,105 open cases in September 2024, up from 40,862 in January 2020, before the pandemic. The previous government set a target in the 2021 Spending Review to reduce it to 53,000 by March 2025, backed by £477 million. The National Audit Office concluded that the target was no longer achievable. More than a quarter of Crown Court cases now wait a year or more to be heard, and some trials listed for 2024 were adjourned as far out as 2026. A victim may wait years for a hearing. A defendant may wait longer on remand than the sentence the offence would carry. Justice delayed on this scale becomes justice that arrives too late to mean very much.

The buildings meant to deliver it are themselves failing. In 2022 the ministry estimated that half of all Crown Court courtrooms were at risk of sudden closure at any time because of their condition, from leaks and heating failures to structural decay. The courts are not only overloaded. They are physically falling apart.

The prison system is full. In 2024, 16,231 prisoners were released early under the SD40 scheme, which allows lower risk offenders to leave at 40 percent of their sentence rather than the usual half. This was not reform. It was an emergency measure to stop the estate seizing up. At the same time the remand population, prisoners held awaiting trial or sentence, has risen to 20 percent of all prisoners, driven directly by the court backlog.

These pressures are not separate. They form a vicious circle. Backlogs put more people on remand. Remand worsens overcrowding. Overcrowding forces early release. Early release overloads probation. Overloaded probation supervises badly, which leads to more reoffending, which feeds back into the backlog. Each part of the system exports its crisis to the next, and the loop tightens with every turn.

Probation is the part of the system the public never sees until it fails. There were 5,436 full time equivalent probation officers in post in September 2024, against a target of 7,159, a shortfall of 1,723, or 24 percent. Into a service already a quarter short of the staff it needs, the prisons have been pouring early releases. In July 2024 the service formally began what it called a Reset, reducing the supervision given to those released so that officers could carry the load at all. A service supervising less because it cannot supervise more offers the appearance of protection rather than the substance.

Legal aid has been cut harder, and discussed less, than almost any other part of the system. Average spending per case fell from £454 in 2010/11 to £337 in 2024/25 in real terms, and eligibility was sharply narrowed. The result is a rising number of unrepresented defendants and litigants in person attempting to navigate a complex system without a lawyer. Citizens may possess legal rights on paper, but those rights become theoretical when affordable representation is unavailable. The strain was compounded by a cyberattack on the Legal Aid Agency, which disrupted the very systems representation depends on.

Demand has been driven up by sentencing. The average custodial sentence for triable either way offences rose from 12 months in 2013 to 16 months in 2024, and magistrates, once limited to six months, can now impose up to twelve. Longer sentences mean more pressure on prison capacity. More pressure means more early releases. More early releases mean more pressure on probation. Parliament has legislated repeatedly for more punishment while declining to fund the space to hold it, and the ministry has been left to absorb the difference.

The body meant to coordinate a response was switched off while the crisis was building. The Criminal Justice Board, convened by the ministry to bring courts, prisons, police and probation together for strategic planning, did not meet at all between July 2021 and July 2023. For two of the years in which the system was tipping into crisis, the mechanism designed to prevent exactly that did not sit.

The leadership has turned over at a pace that makes sustained reform almost impossible. Since 2010 the office of Lord Chancellor has changed hands thirteen times across twelve people: Ken Clarke, Chris Grayling, who banned books in prisons and later became known as Failing Grayling at Transport, Michael Gove, Liz Truss, David Lidington, David Gauke, Robert Buckland, Dominic Raab, who resigned over bullying allegations, Brandon Lewis, who lasted 49 days under Truss, Raab again before resigning a second time over the same investigation, Alex Chalk, Shabana Mahmood, and now David Lammy, appointed in September 2025 when Mahmood moved to the Home Office. Raab is the only person to have resigned the role twice. One of the oldest offices of state has been treated as a staging post, and David Gauke, who once held it, now leads the independent Sentencing Review tasked with fixing the system he formerly ran.

The ministry can point to genuine strengths. Britain retains an internationally respected legal system, and judicial independence remains strong at a time when it is under pressure across much of the democratic world. The appointment of Lord Timpson, who built a business on employing former prisoners, as minister for prisons and probation has been widely welcomed. The Sentencing Review offers a real chance to reduce demand on the system structurally rather than managing it through emergency releases. These are not trivial achievements, and a fair account records them.

But the public does not experience the strengths. It sees a Crown Court backlog that has nearly doubled since 2020, more than 16,000 prisoners released early because there was nowhere to hold them, a probation service a quarter understaffed, legal aid spending cut by a quarter per case, courtrooms closing because the roof leaks, and an office of Lord Chancellor that has changed hands thirteen times in sixteen years, one holder resigning it twice. The justice system runs on credibility, and a system this visibly overstretched, underfunded and constantly reorganised is one whose credibility is steadily draining away. The ministry's greatest strength is the enduring quality of Britain's legal institutions. Its greatest weakness is that it has allowed those institutions to be overwhelmed by a demand the rest of government created and declined to fund. The rule of law is not an abstraction. It is the promise that the state will answer fairly and promptly when something goes wrong, and on that promise the Ministry of Justice is now running a deficit as large as any in its crumbling buildings.