DOES JURY RANDOMNESS STILL SERVE THE INTERESTS OF JUSTICE?

Juries: I think that my reader is well aware of the controversy emanating from the previous incumbent at the Ministry of Justice and his wish to eliminate some trials currently happening before a jury of "12 good men and true" although that early 17th century, 'good' implied distinguished rank or valour. The following is an attempt to reveal the underlying reality of juries and jurors.  But first some history: the modern English jury as we know it was established 1/6/1974 by the Juries Act.  Juries are selected by designated local catchment areas with reference to post codes. 

The current basic requirements for jury service are:-

Age: 18-75 on the date service starts

Registration:be on electoral register

Residency: lived in UK for at least 5 years since aged 13

Foreign nationals who meet Residency rule

Disqualifications are:-

Bail: anyone currently on bail connected to a criminal offence

Criminal Convictions: anyone who has received a custodial or detention sentence of at least 5 years

Recent Sentences: of custody active or suspended or community order or drug rehabilitation requirement within last 5 years.

It would seem that lacking a comprehensive knowledge of the English language would be a given for rejection of a juror but that assumption, unlike in America, is rather hasty because under s12 of the Juries Act 1974 defence and prosecution have the right to challenge an individual juror but they must provide a cause: prima facie evidence to the judge proving the juror is unfit to serve and before the juror is sworn.  That is therefore a rather difficult task in the circumstances. In addition a juror can be challenged if related to or knows persons involved in the case.  For obvious reasons an employee of the CPS cannot be a juror on a case prosecuted by his/her employer nor can a police officer if connected to the police station where s/he is based.  A juror can be excused if having served as such within two years previously. 

The prosecution retains an ancient right known as "Stand By for the Crown" to ask a juror to step down without giving an immediate reason.  This applies only when the potential juror is clearly unable to serve, eg if drunk or in high profile cases involving national security. It is the judge, however, who has the finial say in the discharge of a juror.  

Other common law based jurisdictions including Australia and some American states allow more challenges to potential jurors. 

The principle of a random selection of "peers" to determine a defendant`s guilt or innocence is now being questioned. Since 1945 this country has been subject to unprecedented levels of immigration and those newcomers have tended to settle with their kith and kin to the extent that today for example there is a concentration of non white citizens in various areas, eg 

English courts have historically ruled that "randomness" overrides "forced representation".  In practice this means that where an ethnic minority defendant is tried in an urban centre before a highly diverse jury the outcome could be different if the exact same offence were tried before a mono-racial jury.  This is no esoteric subject for ivory tower debate.  Annually roughly 350,000 - 480,000 citizens are randomly selected for jury duty and around 200,000 are actually selected to undertake jury service sitting on 13,000+ completed trials.  However recently, and the topic of some of my posts here earlier this year, the subject of perverse verdicts has become more than just a matter for legal eagles` discussions over tea and scones in an Oxbridge college. It focuses minds on whether "randomness" is approaching its sell by date. 

In landmark cases like R- v-Ford [1989] and R-v-Bridge[2019] the Court Of Appeal established that a defendant does not have a legal right to a racially balanced jury nor can a judge deliberately manipulate the random selection process to engineer an ethnically diverse jury pool.  Although perverse verdicts in a handful of high profile cases have drawn attention, particularly protest related ones, overall conviction rates in the Crown Court have been fairly stable over the long term, which doesn’t suggest a growing pattern of “runaway” acquittals.  However there is perception and there is reality.   Academics and civil rights groups have pointed out there is a major issue with perception and trust. 

The fact that no research has been or is allowed into the findings of a jury and how those findings were constructed are firmly closed to scrutiny leads to speculation, educated or otherwise.  Section 8 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 makes inquiry into their deliberations an offence. Professor Cheryl Thomas’s research for the Ministry of Justice found no sign of systematic bias and found that verdicts broadly tracked the evidence. Variation between juries is inevitable but variation is not unreliability. The more pressing question is trust. Government intentions to remove some offences from eligibility for trial by jury are now in a state of flux.  Reducing the trial backlog as the reason for the proposed changes has been exposed as a possible curtain over more nefarious reasons.  

The case for the reform is vulnerable on its own terms. The evidence suggests that juries are not the primary cause of the backlog and the government’s own estimate of the saving is some £31 million, about 0.2% of the Ministry’s budget. The Criminal Bar Association attributes delay to chronic underfunding and restricted sitting days and warns that shifting fact finding to a less diverse judiciary risks undermining public confidence. The Institute for Government has gone further, cautioning that the changes could raise the risk of wrongful convictions.

The irony is plain. Random selection, the very feature that critics might point to as a weakness, is what gives a jury verdict its legitimacy. A decision by twelve strangers carries a representative authority that a single judge, however able, cannot replicate. If public confidence in the criminal process is to be protected the more promising course is to address resourcing and court capacity, not to trade away the one institution that the public demonstrably trusts but for how much longer.

INEFFECTIVE TRIALS 2013-2026: WHY HAS SO LITTLE CHANGED? PART 3

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  It`s not uncommon for a foreign language to express sentiment, observation or opinion more pithily and accurately than in English. And so it is on the subject of this my final thoughts on ineffective trials. 

As a reminder in 2013 ineffective magistrates court trials were already 18%.  By 2015 the figure had fallen to 15%. Then along came Covid. Current figures suggest that nearly 90,000 cases are awaiting trial at the magistrates court with overlisting still being considered at around 23% of cause of ineffective trials.  It seems that the problem is known but the remedy is not.   I have previously written what an ineffective trial really is and the ramifications it has for all those involved.  The Independent Review of the Criminal Courts has made the point with unusual clarity. Courts are under pressure to reduce backlogs while dealing with uncertainty over sitting days, judicial availability and case preparation. Overlisting becomes a way of trying to ensure that court time is not wasted when a trial drops out but when the listed cases actually do proceed some cannot be heard and become ineffective.  As I wrote in Part 2, " When too many cases enter the system [overlisting] some trials do not proceed and add to the queue in a vicious circle."

A courtroom is not a railway carriage.  If there are ten passengers and only six seats putting ten people on the platform does not increase the number of seats. Courts have a finite number of courtrooms, judges, magistrates, legal advisers and sitting hours.  Current listing practice is like force feeding geese to expand their livers prior to their slaughter to produce pâté de foie gras although it might initially make the waiting list look worse; so be it.  An honest waiting list is preferable to an apparently efficient list in which cases repeatedly collapse and have to be relisted. 

We are told almost daily of the advances in AI and daily there is a not insubstantial number of courts closed for myriad reasons.  Below is the crown court  situation today. 

Distant video hearings have been commonplace for ever increasing forms of hearings. With a well designed system underutilised courtrooms could be considered for an expansion of such hearings.  There will obviously be cases where geography, defendant welfare, witnesses, security or the interests of justice make transfer to such courts inappropriate but where those considerations do not apply, spare capacity should be capable of being used.  A case should go to an available court real or video rather than wait unnecessarily for an unavailable court.

I ended Part 2 of this series as follows,"Statistics which are not measured might be helpful in understanding why the courts are in this untenable position.  Are such numbers available?  If not, why not?  Are they available but being withheld?"  I would suggest that it might be useful to know of an ineffective trial:-

Why did it fail?

When was it first apparent that it would fail?

Could the problem have been avoided?

Who was in a position to prevent it?

How much court and professional time had already been spent?

How long did the defendant, victim and witnesses subsequently have to wait?

A box ticking exercise perhaps but one which could produce greater efficiency in the gathering of statistics and forming a realistic platform on which to consider change. If the problem is truly over listing then changes surely must be considered. 

If it is poor prosecution preparation, change prosecution case management.
If it is defence readiness address that.
If it is lack of court capacity, provide more capacity or reduce demand.
If it is judicial or legal adviser availability, deal with that directly.



A statistic which merely says "ineffective" is a description.
A statistic which identifies the preventable cause is a tool for reform. Every trial which fails to take place has cost money; in many cases lots of money, such sums currently not known to the public. Another example of statistics not known or wanted by the MOJ or known and withheld. To list but a few that come to mind in terms of possible cost:-


How many judicial hours?
How many court staff?
How many advocates?
How many witnesses?
How many police officers?
How many hours of preparation?
How many journeys?

A court that lists fewer cases but hears them effectively may be performing better than a court which appears extremely busy but continually adjourns, relists and reopens cases.  Even in my time on the bench there were various training sessions in pushing matters to an early conclusion the most memorable being under the slogan CJSSS:  Criminal Justice: Simple, Speedy, Summary.  That was followed by  "Stop Delaying Justice!" initiative that succeeded CJSSS in 2011. Legal analysts, senior judges and practitioners generally view programs like CJSSS and Stop Delaying Justice! as short-term successes that ultimately collapsed because they failed to fix the fundamental structural issues of the wider justice system.  There is a danger especially with a new government which is using modern social media in attempts to furnish its image that the answer to every difficulty will be another administrative reform, another procedure, another target or another management initiative. 

There are only two fundamental ways to reduce an overloaded system: increase capacity or reduce demand and preferably both. In addition to enough sitting days, judges, magistrates, legal advisors, courtrooms and properly prepared advocates to deal with the work which Parliament requires the courts to undertake, does every case currently entering the criminal courts need to consume the amount of court resource it presently does?

After thirteen years perhaps the statistics have finally done their job. They have shown that ineffective trials are not simply occasional accidents nor a problem created by Covid. They are symptoms of a criminal justice system which has repeatedly struggled to match the work demanded of it with the capacity available.  An uncomfortable [for some] conclusion is, as in so many aspects of our society, we have become better at managing failure than preventing it.  A case which repeatedly returns to the list is not evidence of efficiency. It is evidence that something has gone wrong.  When a trial fails the system should know why, whether the failure could have been avoided and what it cost. 

The lesson from 2013–2026 is therefore simple. We already know much of what goes wrong. The real question is whether there is now the courage to change the system that allows it to happen.

THE END.

INEFFECTIVE TRIALS 2013-2026: WHY HAS SO LITTLE CHANGED? PART 2

The phenomenon of trials failing to proceed in 2013 was not new.  The politicians in the House of Commons might have wished it away but deep in the bowels of Petty France mathematicians, statisticians, market research analysts, data scientists, data analysts, operations research analysts and others of similar expertise were like busy bees looking for explanations as to why the known problem of maladministration causing overlisting, defendants being absent and witnesses being unavailable was apparently intractable. Then along came Covid. 

It would be wrong to pretend that the pandemic did not fundamentally disrupt the criminal courts. Courts closed or operated with reduced capacity. Hearings were postponed. Jury trials were suspended or severely restricted. Cases accumulated but Covid was the exception, not the rule. Pre Covid the ineffective trial rate in magistrates courts was fairly settled at around 15%-16%. In 2026 Q1 the rate was 21% and had been steady for six years. In the same quarter overlisting was the cause of 21% of ineffective trials. The courts did not simply suffer a temporary Covid spike and then return to normal. They reached a new plateau. At the end of March 2026 the magistrates courts had 370,722 open cases; a series peak. The non-Single Justice Procedure caseload alone stood at 184,565. More strikingly, the number of open trial cases had reached 83,020, up 15% in a year and substantially above the 50,689 recorded in Q1 2022. Trial receipts have exceeded trial disposals in every quarter since Q1 2022. That is not simply a statistical curiosity. If more cases enter the trial system than leave it the queue grows. And when the queue grows finding courtrooms, judges, magistrates, advocates, witnesses and defendants at the same time becomes progressively more difficult.

In Q2 and Q3 2013, 72% of the ineffective trials attributed to court administration were not heard because of overlisting.  Plus ca change........It could be argued that there is a chicken and egg situation with regard to ineffective trials:  the backlog causes ineffective trials but also ineffective trials contribute to the backlog.  When too many cases enter the system [overlisting] some trials do not proceed and add to the queue in a vicious circle.  

In Q1 this year 4,884 trials were vacated before the date set. 52% resulted from the prosecution discontinuing the case before trial and 19% were attributed to an anticipated lack of court time. A case discontinued before trial, a trial vacated because there is no court time, a cracked trial following a late guilty plea and an ineffective trial are all different events but from the perspective of all those anticipating to be present; victim, defendant, witness or police officer their time has been wasted. For the victim reluctant to attend it might be a final straw in a decision to withdraw. For a police officer it is a further waste of public money when s/he could be "on the streets." For the rule of law it could be a further example of an offender "getting away with it."

Similar problems beset crown court. The ineffective rate in Q1 2016 was 24% compared with <20% in 2019. For a defendant who has pleaded not guilty and is eventually dealt with by a jury trial the median waiting time in Q1 2026 was 48 weeks compared with 27.1 weeks in 2019.  This is the government`s quandary now that the proposed reduction in jury trials is again up for debate. 

The answer to the above disappointing statistics can no longer be the mantra that Covid caused the backlog. There is a strong argument that ineffective trials remain substantially above their pre Covid level insofar as trial receipts continue to exceed trial disposals; the number of open trial cases continues to rise; overlisting remains a major cause of ineffective trials and the time taken to bring cases to completion remains above pre Covid levels. So the question must be asked if Covid was the cause of the problem or merely the event which revealed how little spare capacity the system actually has. If the answer is the latter, putting more meat through the meat grinder cannot be a suitable remedy.

Statistics which are not measured might be helpful in understanding why the courts are in this untenable position.  Are such numbers available?  If not, why not?  Are they available but being withheld? 

To be continued...................................

MORE DISTRICT JUDGES: FEWER LAY MAGISTRATES

I was reading an article yesterday on the state of the current housing market. Its central observation was that too many sellers are attracted to the agent who appears to give the best i.e. highest value for their property only to find that many weeks or months down the line the house is still for sale with limited interest being shown. Such sellers either have to offer the contract to another agent with a realistic i.e. lower valuation or remove it from the market to re offer months later.

In April the MOJ began a marketing campaign to enlist thousands of new magistrates.  It would appear that like the house vendor who can`t sell their house the recruitment drive has been re launched today.  At a time of financial belt tightening for so many families is it any wonder that there is a dearth of capable people willing to sacrifice annually a minimum of 13 full days worth of earning potential or leave from employment to enter a system of which truly most are unable to imagine.  Added to that time commitment there is additional need for training days and an awareness that social rules applying to judges at the High Court are applied equally also to the newest recruit to the magistracy.  

Unlike the estate agent the MOJ does not have a financial market as a guide to its selling the position of a lay magistrate to the general public.  Either it reduces the requirements of candidates or accepts that its offer is unacceptable at current standards. 

With the MOJ under the spotlight more in the last year than in the last decade it will take only a single academic study to show that full time district judges without the need for a legal advisor can take over from lay magistrates at no additional cost when their increased efficiency is taken into account, for that hitherto unthinkable change to be seriously proposed.  Like so much ad hoc reasoning within this government as with its predecessor this problem will be pushed into the neverland of tomorrow as so many others have been since 2024.  

INEFFECTIVE TRIALS 2013-2026: WHY HAS SO LITTLE CHANGED? PART 1

I suppose I am not unique at having reached a stage in life when looking back has a longer perspective than looking forward.  Now, a decade or more on from my last sitting, that perspective allows me to consider whether my meandering legal observations were just that or whether there was a substance to them, particularly substance borne out by the reality of change effected by some of the most inept political figures ever to have sat round the cabinet table at 10 Downing Street.  It might only be a footnote in history but is there significance in the fact that of all those Lord Chancellors, 14 since 1997 and 9 since 2012,  only one ever made it to occupy the highest office of prime minister and that was by common consent the most  calamitous, incompetent and hapless of them all; The still Right Honourable Liz Truss?  

There is an old saying that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The criminal justice system has an additional problem. Sometimes it does remember the past because the statistics are still there  but nobody appears to have asked whether the problem recorded then is still the problem being experienced today. Back in 2013 this blog was looking at the effectiveness of trials in the magistrates' courts. It was not a new subject even then. In the first quarter of 2013 39,115 trial hearings were listed in magistrates courts. Of those 44% were effective, 38% were cracked and 18% were ineffective indicating that those trials although listed did not take place and had to be re-listed.  In practical terms it meant that a courtroom had been occupied. A bench or judge had been allocated. A legal adviser had prepared. Prosecution and defence lawyers may have prepared. Witnesses may have attended. A defendant may have attended. Victims may have waited. And then nothing happens.

According to the MOJ for Q1 2013 court [mal?]administration was responsible for 21% of those ineffective trials, the defendant did not appear for 20% and prosecution witness[es] failed to attend in 16%.  Between 2015 and 2019 that ineffective rate had steaded to around 15% but for Q1 2019 court administration problems had risen to 27% and absent defendants to 24%.  Within the former group 72% of the failures were due to overlisting. That management issue was and is perhaps the most galling for magistrates.  It certainly was for me personally.  One couldn`t but feel sympathy for those attending be they lawyers or witnesses who were told that their case could not be heard. In Q1 of this year overlisting accounted for 21% of ineffective trials. So notwithstanding all the apparent technical advantages bestowed upon magistrates courts since my retirement efficiency is running to stand still. 

And then along came Covid.  The MOJ's current series shows the ineffective-trial rate rising from 17% to 23% across 2020 and 2021. Since then the rate has remained broadly stable at between 21% and 23%. The pandemic undoubtedly disrupted the operation of the courts.  That was then, this is now.  Why has the criminal court system not returned to its pre Covid level of trial effectiveness?  That is rather more difficult to answer.  Comparative figures for ineffective trials for 2013 and Q1 2026 are below.

At the end of March 2026, the magistrates courts had an open caseload of just over 370,000 and open trial cases had reached 83,020.

Scattering the numbers above is not to suggest that the good old days of 2013 were better; that would be ludicrous; there have been enormous changes.  In 2013 overlisting was already a recognised problem.  In 2019 court administration remained the largest individual cause. Then Covid produced a major deterioration and in 2026 overlisting is again the largest recorded reason for ineffective trials.  The last thirteen years have seen major reforms in the lower court including  the introduction of technology, halving the number of actual courts to the raising, lowering and raising again the sentencing powers of these courts.  But overlisting is still the bane for all court users.  Perhaps the criminal justice system has spent years trying to deal with the symptoms of delay without sufficiently addressing some of its causes.

END OF PART 1

JURIES, JUDGES, BARRISTERS, DEFENDANTS AND PERVERSE VERDICTS

Those with a legal ear to the ground can`t be unaware of the noise surrounding barrister Rajiv Menon KC who faced unprecedented contempt proceedings (up to 2 years' prison) over his closing speech defending a Palestine Action activist accused of damaging an Elbit Systems arms factory in Filton.  The trial judge had ruled that counsel could not invite the jury to disregard the court's rulings of law, disregard their juror oaths, or apply the principle of jury equity. Menon nevertheless referred to jury independence in his closing speech

This raises the fundamental question of what happens when the evidence against a defendant is overwhelming but the defendant nevertheless wants the jury to acquit?   Not because they did not carry out the alleged offence or because of some technicality  but because the motivation for the offence was such that they believed it was right.  That is a rather different proposition which raises the uncomfortable possibility that, in some cases, the defendant may actually be better off without a barrister because they do not have to obey the rules of a club of which they are not a member.

The Court of Appeal has already ruled that the original procedure for bringing the contempt proceedings was unlawful. That did not, however, settle the underlying question of what a barrister can properly say to a jury. The issue is still alive.

In April 2019 activists targeted Shell's London headquarters on Belvedere Road spraying graffiti, pouring fake oil, breaking windows and climbing the roof to protest against climate change. At trial in April 2021 a jury acquitted the six Extinction Rebellion activists of criminal damage despite the judge directing them that they had no defence in law. They had dispensed with their lawyers and represented themselves to enable them to put forward a defence that was not available to their barristers whose actions are strictly governed by the Bar Standards Board (BSB) Handbook, specifically Part 2: The Code of Conduct. They wanted to speak directly to the jury. There was no pretence that the damage had not occurred. The argument was essentially that what they had done was justified by the circumstances and by their beliefs. The jury acquitted them.

In the cases of Clive Ponting in 1985 and the Colston Four in 2022 their  defence teams successfully argued that their actions were in the public interest, leading to historic acquittals despite the judges` explicit directions to convict.  The bottom line is that the jury itself cannot be ordered by a judge to convict.  A judge can tell a jury very strongly what he or she thinks about the evidence and can explain what verdict would follow if the jury accepts particular facts. The jury is, however, the body which decides whether the defendant is guilty.  Even where a judge considers an acquittal would be perverse the judge has no power to pre-empt the jury's verdict by directing them to convict.

And this brings us back to the Menon case which is therefore about rather more than one barrister and one closing speech. It raises a much bigger question about the relationship between the judge, the advocate, the defendant and the jury. A judge can tell the jury what the law is. A barrister must obey the judge but a defendant representing himself can stand in the witness box, or before the jury in their closing speech, and say what they believe. And if what he believes is: “Yes, I did it but I ask you to acquit me,” there is something rather fundamental about the jury system which allows him to make that appeal. To some degree litigants in person are enabled to pursue actions forbidden to barristers and actively take that route for their defence so achieving the spectacle of perverse verdicts.

There is one further possibility which has been alluded to in an earlier post on this Blog. The previous government's proposals to reduce the use of jury trials have been presented principally as a response to the Crown Court backlog. That is the official explanation. But is it the whole explanation?  There have been a number of recent cases in which juries have acquitted defendants involved in highly political causes.  In addition to those cases mentioned above, climate protesters and Palestine Action supporters,  notwithstanding evidence which, on the face of it established what they had done, have been acquitted.

Could governments be concerned that a jury does not always behave as the Government, the prosecution or even the judge expects particularly where questions of political, religious or ethnic identity are involved?  And, more specifically, has there been concern about the possibility of block voting on an identity basis, including the possibility of Islamist influenced voting in cases involving Israel, Palestine or terrorism?

A jury is supposed to decide the case before it, not the political cause with which a defendant identifies. Yet twelve individuals bring their own experiences, beliefs and prejudices into the jury room. That is both the strength and the weakness of a jury system.  Indeed the same applies to magistrates courts.  As a peripheral observation:  if a bench constituted three Muslims could a Jewish defendant feel that s/he would get a fair hearing? 

David Lammy's own 2017 review concluded that juries did not, on average, produce different results for BAME and white defendants while identifying disparities in some magistrates court outcomes.  Those results indicated that juries are less susceptible to certain forms of bias than magistrates.  Why then reduce their role?

If there is a fear that identity politics can produce verdicts which depart from the straightforward application of the law, removing or reducing jury trial would certainly reduce that particular risk.  However on the other hand the jury system is akin to a defensive barrier between government which makes the law and the protection of the citizen from the excesses of that legislation. 

If the jury alone decides guilt how far may a defendant, as opposed to his barrister, appeal to the jury's conscience?

THE SAMPLE, NOT THE STAMP

What goes around comes around; an old adage which is understood worldwide and comes home to roost on this site. Since the first post here in 2013 this will be number 1,580 but it`s unlikely 13 years from now to be the most viewed.  That privilege currently belongs to a post  published Friday, 16th August 2013 titled WARRANTS OF ENTRY & UTILITY COMPANIES//SIX OF THE BEST. When I discovered this my first thought was that something somewhere is going wrong. What can a 13 year old and older series of posts offer to a reader in a world where 13 years has seen a totomic change in British society?  It remains, extraordinarily, the most visited "old" post on this site;  proof, if proof were needed, that the British public's appetite for stories of bailiffs, bullying and bench sitters being taken for fools has not diminished with the years.

Comparing that post to the current legal and procedural landscape the process for obtaining a warrant of entry to disconnect electricity or gas supply or fit a prepayment meter has changed in several concrete ways.   Since 6th February 2023 the listing and determination of applications for warrants of entry for the purpose of installing a prepayment meter was suspended with immediate effect, following Ofgem's announcement of a market wide review into the practice.  This followed an investigation (triggered by a Times exposé of British Gas debt agents breaking into homes) that found companies were bypassing Ofgem guidelines by obtaining rushed court warrants with several hundred warrants sometimes signed off in minutes leaving no time for genuine evaluation of individual cases; essentially confirming, at national scale, exactly the "rubber-stamping" the blog had complained about for years. 

Readers might recall my complaint of a decade ago that too many colleagues treated these applications as legal confetti,  signed, sealed and handed back across the table before the ink was dry, with scarcely a glance at the "particulars" behind the request. I described Southern Electric turning up with nothing but an address and a debt figure, expecting us to wave it through like a parking permit. I described a bailiff who could not confirm the name on the account she wished to force her way into. These were not isolated eccentricities. They were, it now transpires, symptomatic of an industry-wide practice that eventually became a matter of national outrage rather than merely magistrates' court gossip.

After the listing of prepayment meter warrant applications was suspended nationwide on 6th February 2023 on 21st February 2023 Ofgem announced that two suppliers had been given permission to restart and the courts recommenced listing such applications only once suppliers had satisfied Ofgem's new standards. So a supplier must now clear a regulatory gate with Ofgem before it can even bring a warrant application to a magistrate; an extra check that didn't exist in 2013. The complete sequencing of the revised requirements was as follows:-

6 February 2023 — listing of prepayment meter warrant applications suspended nationwide.

10 March 2023 — Ofgem announced all suppliers had signed up to the updated Code of Practice.

8 January 2024 — Ofgem announced three suppliers had been given permission to restart involuntary PPM installations.

21 February 2024 — Ofgem confirmed a further two suppliers had been given such permission.

Only once a supplier had satisfied Ofgem's new criteria  company by company, not industry wide,  did the courts recommence listing such applications at all.

Mandatory pre-application steps are now written into supplier licences, not just "good practice".  The Good Practice Guide the blog described was voluntary and unevenly followed. It's since been formalised as a licence condition. From 8th November 2023 energy suppliers must follow new stricter rules before a prepayment meter can be involuntarily installed  including making at least 10 attempts to contact the customer and carrying out a site welfare visit before installation with the highest-risk customers (e.g. those on powered medical equipment) exempted entirely. The rules specifically end forced installations for people over 85 and those with high-risk illnesses.

The hard and welcoming fact is that the system has actually changed and changed for the better.  There is also, at last, a fee protection I would have welcomed a decade ago.  Standard Licence Condition 28B now caps such charges and prohibits suppliers passing on costs associated with obtaining the warrant itself. It will not undo the injustice suffered by those who wrote to me in 2014 and 2016 describing the many repeat applications against them  but it should prevent the same happening to others.  Ofgem has extended the relevant licence conditions to 30th June 2027. 

Does this mean the rubber stamp has been retired for good? I would not go so far. Judicial guidance now explicitly directs magistrates to satisfy themselves that Ofgem's standards, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Rights of Entry (Gas and Electricity Boards) Act 1954 have all been properly engaged with  which is welcome but guidance is only as good as the bench applying it, crowded list or no crowded list. As I have said before and evidently must say again: it will take a brave and diligent bench to make sure this is more than paper reform.

However life is not all sunshine and rainbows for those unable to cope with rising utility bills.  There is one further wrinkle the original six posts could never have anticipated and it deserves its own footnote for those of a procedural turn of mind. The old model, whatever its failings, was at least one of individual attention: a bench, a bailiff and a single warrant argued (or not argued) on its own facts. The new regime abandons that model almost entirely. Applications now arrive not as bundles of paper across a table but as a CSV file submitted electronically to an assigned court office with a separate file for each purpose:  prepayment installation, commercial disconnection, safety or theft cases and so on. The written information for each case is confirmed on oath and filed by the court officer sight unseen by the magistrate save in sample form.  

For lists under 100 cases the guidance recommends the bench examine five; for larger lists, ten  with at least five prepayment cases guaranteed a look whatever the total. If those samples satisfy the court the remainder are granted en bloc. Only "unusual applications," particularly residential disconnection, must still be heard individually.

I confess to mixed feelings. It is, in one sense, precisely the sort of structured, evidence based scrutiny I spent years wishing my colleagues would apply case by case. And yet it is also, by design, a system in which the overwhelming majority of warrants are never individually seen by the magistrate signing for them, merely inferred safe by statistical proxy. Whether that is judicial efficiency or rubber-stamping wearing a spreadsheet, readers might judge for themselves.

With continual criticism rightly falling on the Single Justice Procedure and the judicial acceptance of a statistical analysis to determine whether or not a utility disconnection or prepayment meter at an additional cost to the consumer is installed, judgement appears to be ever more distant  from the individual whose door may yet be broken down and drifting instead toward a bureaucratic exercise in probability where the fate of the many rests not on the facts of their own case but on whether a handful of others' paperwork happened to pass muster on a given morning.  

THE JUSTICE LADDER/THE MISSING STATISTICS: BY ACCIDENT OR DESIGN?

The world of 2026 does not revolve around the sun; it revolves around statistics.  From Pythagoras to Einstein via Euclid and  Newton numbers have shaped the world we live in and know today.  We, the public, unable to put our ear to the closed door whisperings of our masters  have only the numbers these masters provide to us in order to make our judgements as to whether we wish them to continue with their policies for another parliamentary term.  Nowhere is this filtering of information more profound than at the door in Petty France London SW1 home to the Ministry of Justice. 

There are several descriptions of this filtering.  It is a system where some information is readily made available, some must be extracted under Freedom of Information rules and some is kept under wraps.  It could be The Empirical Boundaries of Justice; The Parameters of Judicial Transparency; The Quantifiable Outlines of Justice; The Statistical Architecture of Justice; The Informational Perimeter of Justice; The Justice Audit but I will settle for the simplicity of The Metrics of Justice. 

In order to interpret the numbers available for inspection it is helpful to know how they are chosen.  There are various agencies and authorities which decide which aspects of justice are important enough to measure and publish.  Court and sentencing data originate largely within HMCTS and other justice agencies and are analysed and published by the Ministry of Justice's statistical and analytical teams. Professional authority over what constitutes and how official statistics are published rests with the Ministry's Head of Profession for Statistics. The wider system is overseen by the UK Statistics Authority and its Office for Statistics Regulation while the ONS independently produces the principal national crime statistics.

With millions of numbers available the decisions on which to collate and publish are made by the Head of Profession for Statistics supported by the Chief Statistician and the relevant statistical teams within the MOJ.  Perhaps just as interesting to the casual observer are the statistics not published. Some that come to mind are:-

Outcomes by individual magistrates' bench;

Conviction rates by individual court;

Appeals and their outcomes by individual court;

Reasons for successful appeals;

Cases abandoned because of prosecution failures;

Defendants waiting more than specified periods;

The proportion of cases in which witnesses attend unnecessarily;

The number of cases where a legal error is corrected before an appeal;

Comparative outcomes for magistrates and District Judges.

The above list is not in any order of significance.  I would think that some readers will have their own ideas of additions which they would consider to be equally or more important.  With controversial changes to the jurisdiction of magistrates courts hiding behind other more pressing current matters within the MOJ there are some valuable pointers as to the quality of justice in the lower courts system.  Of the defendants who appealed a magistrates' conviction in 2024 41% had their appeal allowed. Of those appealing sentence 44% had their appeal allowed.  It`s interesting to note that the comparable numbers for 2010  appeals are 44% allowed against conviction and 47% against sentence allowed.  Observers outside the legal fraternity might wish to come to their own conclusions about very fine disparity between those numbers considering how much water has flowed under the legal bridge in that time period. 

An appeal from the magistrates court is in reality a re-hearing before a crown court judge or recorder sitting with two magistrates. An appeal from the crown court against conviction or sentence goes to Court of Appeal (Criminal Division). In 2025 that court received 4,162 applications.  These can be broken down into 1,181 applications concerning conviction, 2,588 concerning sentence and 393 other appeals.

However those statistics don`t tell the whole story; there are numerical gaps. From 2022/3 the success rate fell from 62% to 37% in 2024/25. We do not know if the appeals were successful because of new evidence, process failure, insufficient evidence, a misdirected jury or legal error[s] or conversely why the majority failed.

As we go higher up the ladder of appeal the stakes for defendants, victims and the public perception become higher.  In 2024–25 the Supreme Court decided 170 applications for permission to appeal granting permission in 61 (36.1%).  A criminal appeal normally requires certification that there is a “point of law of general public importance” and that the point ought to be considered by the Supreme Court which is effectively the finest filter in a complex system of legal filtration.  To continue the analogy a simple flow chart could be shown as follows:-

 

Applications → Permission refused → Permission granted → Hearing → Appeal allowed → Conviction quashed.  

The Supreme Court already records much of the underlying information but its published headline statistics do not present it in the form needed to assess the effectiveness of criminal appeals. It would seem that the permission granted → appeal heard → conviction quashed figures are available only in the labyrinths of Petty France.

The subject of early release of prisoners has made headline news since the change of prime minister prompted a rocket to be sent up the arse of the movers and shakers at the MOJ.  The Parole Board for the justice system can be likened to Camp IV, also known as the South Col for mountaineers.  It is the last stop before the final arbiter of whether justice has been done;  The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). 

The statistics published by the Parole Board for 2025/26 are:- 

3,140 prisoners directed for release

12,528 refused release

8,835 oral hearings

The Board says its convicted Serious Further Offences rate remains below 0.7%. Figures it supplies tell us how many prisoners the Parole Board releases and how many subsequently commit a Serious Further Offence but it leaves a gap insofar as it does not publish statistics on  how many of those released prisoners subsequently commit any proven offence, how many offences they commit, how serious those offences are and whether the rate differs according to the sentence they were serving.  The table below illustrates the statistics that the Parole Board does not supply.

Especially considering the current furore about early release of prisoners occasioned by the crisis in prison accommodation  it must be asked whether the Parole Board`s limited public information is by accident or design.  

At the end of the criminal appeals process sits an institution which is perhaps the most revealing of all when we ask whether the criminal justice system is measuring its own failures. The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) describes itself as the very last stage of the Criminal Justice System. It was established in 1997 to investigate alleged miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and where it considers there is a real possibility that a conviction would not be upheld, to refer the case back to an appeal court. It is therefore not another tier of appeal: it is an independent safety net for cases which have normally already failed at the ordinary appeal stage. The numbers are small in relation to the thousands of criminal convictions produced by the courts but they are difficult to ignore.

The CCRC's 2023/24 report recorded 1,629 applications and 25 referrals. In 2024/25 it received 1,541 applications and referred 31 cases; importantly, of the 27 CCRC-referred appeals actually heard that year, 18 were allowed and nine dismissed. In 2025/26 applications rose to a record 1,841, while referrals increased to 45, an 80% increase over the figure two years earlier.

The longer-term figures are perhaps more striking. By July 2026 the CCRC had received 35,723 applications, referred 926 cases to the appeal courts and 622 appeals had succeeded. Thus once a case has actually survived the CCRC's investigation and reached an appeal court, the outcome is very different from the initial application statistics.

This is why the CCRC should be included in any serious attempt to measure the effectiveness of criminal justice. The relevant question is not simply “How many applications does the CCRC receive?” Nor is it “What percentage does it refer?” The more revealing sequence is:

Conviction → ordinary appeal → CCRC application → CCRC referral → appeal heard → conviction or sentence overturned.

The CCRC itself makes clear that, after referral, it remains for the appeal court to decide whether the conviction is unsafe or the sentence unfair.

That final distinction matters. A justice system which records convictions, sentences and appeals but does not prominently display what happens when an independent body identifies a possible miscarriage risks measuring its activity rather than its accuracy. The CCRC is therefore not an embarrassing footnote to the system. It is arguably its final quality-control mechanism. It is in effect the Mount Everest of the appeals system. 

And the question for those who decide which statistics should define the success of criminal justice is a simple one: should the number of convictions subsequently found unsafe be treated as a central measure of the system's performance, rather than as an exceptional statistic at the end of the ladder?

The figures reveal an uncomfortable truth. At every stage of the criminal justice ladder statistics are collected but the figures which most directly test whether justice has been done are often the least visible. Appeals, parole and the CCRC provide opportunities to correct error yet the system rarely presents these stages as one continuous measure of accuracy. Perhaps the fundamental question is not how efficiently the system processes cases but how often it gets them right.

HAVE LONGER SENTENCES REDUCED CRIME?

In very simple terms it might be said that a criminal justice system has three prime concerns; to punish, to deter and to rehabilitate miscreants. Until relatively modern times rehabilitation was off the menu. Christian churches were there to undertake what the state had not even considered. Punishment went hand in hand with deterrence as the main purpose for dealing with those who broke the law.

In the early nineteenth century the law could impose death for property offences which today would be dealt with by a magistrates court and Parliament itself was increasingly horrified by the consequences. Although the law allowed it no child is known to have actually been hanged in England for simple theft; they were generally reprieved usually with transportation substituted.  However at Maidstone on 1 August 1831 14 year old John Bell was hanged for murder. 

There is a strong historical argument that the political changes associated with the Reform Act helped create the parliamentary climate in which the "Bloody Code" was dismantled during the 1830s. In 1832 Parliament began to recognise that the severity of a punishment could undermine the credibility of the law itself. In the following five years capital punishment was removed for several forms of theft, including cattle and sheep stealing and certain forms of robbery and the death penalty was also abolished for most forgery offences. By 1837 hanging had been removed from many more offences until it was abolished in 1965. For those who suggest that the current trend towards longer sentences is a necessary deterrent in an increasingly lawless society the reality can be quite a shock.


The homicide rate in England and Wales was about 1.96 per 100,000 in 1865. From 1902 to 1974 the homicide rate remained below 1 per 100,000. Indeed in 1965 the rate was 0.68 per 100,000. So homicide fell by roughly two-thirds from the 1865 peak to 1965 despite the continued availability of the death penalty for murder. It would appear that homicide rates have historically moved for reasons much more complicated than the severity of the maximum sentence. Are there grounds for thinking that such analysis could be applied to other serious but lesser offending?


On more than one occasion here I have considered "crime figures" as a work of intensive imagination dependent upon the origin of such statistics and the political purposes which drive them. The table below uses selected major offences recorded by the police, England and Wales, 2002–2025.

It is striking that burglary and criminal damage are 75% and 61% respectively lower but robbery is 23% lower. The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), formerly the British Crime Survey, provides the best long-term measure of the amount of crime experienced by the public.

The average custodial sentence length rose from 12.0 months in 1995 to 19.9 months in 2025 and the prison population rose from about 51,000 in 1995 to 86,000–87,000 today. From 1995 to 2025 violent crime fell by 71% and theft fell by 78% whilst the homicide rate roughly halved. During this period the average custodial sentence rose by 66% and the prison population by 71%. The crime decline began while average sentences were actually falling or broadly flat. Can crime reduction actually be attributed to the additional years of imprisonment? From the above chart it can be seen that the Ministry of Justice confirms the rise in average custodial sentence length from 13.7 months in 2010 to 21.3 months in 2023. The Sentencing Academy calculates that the average for indictable-only offences rose from 38.7 months in 2010 to 70 months in 2024. In this period longer custodial sentences and falling crime occurred during the same period.

The question is how much, if any, of the reduction in crime can reasonably be attributed to the additional years of imprisonment?  Many big brains more enlightened than mine have tried to understand the above numbers and millions more in an attempt  to produce answers for their political masters and a public which feels increasingly at personal risk from violent criminality. The rise in victimhood exacerbates this situation with tabloid calls for ever longer sentences inconsistent with the approaching no room at the inn situation with prison capacity.

The only conclusion, however tenuous, from those millions of numbers is that current evidence does not establish that the additional years of imprisonment produced a substantial general deterrent effect.  The corollary is that sentencing will continue to be as much politically driven as it is judicially or statistically. 

CAN "VICTIMHOOD" BE COMPATIBLE WITH ENGLISH JUSTICE?

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That phrase was for millennia a guiding light for primitive forms of justice for many ethnic, tribal or national entities. From the Frankenstein image of mobs with their flambeau besieging the gothic tower of a blazing castle to the horrific images of mutilation or execution by the sword in the current era in middle eastern or African autocracies victimhood has been a basis for a form of justice.

In a country of 3.4 million Muslims of whom it is estimated 20%-25% would welcome or activate for Sharia law to be imposed it`s not unlikely that would include incorporating some aspects of the Quran's teachings which are themselves disputed by scholars.  In the case of rape for example a victim's account of being forced can, in practice, become collapsed into an admission of the underlying sexual act, shifting the practical burden onto her to prove coercion. The nature of the victim and influence on sentence take a unique path. Broadly speaking in classical Islam rape of a free woman is involving two separate violations: one against "God's right" (haqq Allah), triggering the hadd punishment on the perpetrator and one against her personal, interpersonal right (haqq ādamī), requiring monetary compensation to her directly. These two are treated as separate and cumulative much like a thief who both loses a hand under hadd and must still return the stolen property.  If a case collapses for lack of proof and gets recharacterized as a failed zina/qadhf accusation the victim isn't just denied compensation;  she can end up prosecuted herself.  However as per my opening words above, the practice is not just a metaphorical carryover: it's still applied as physical retaliation in a handful of countries today although real cases are rarer than the historical framework suggests because most resolve through compensation or pardon instead. It is not unlikely although little is heard publicly that Muslim voices will become increasingly vociferous when and if a particular case or event provides a trigger.  

The current furore on the early release of prisoners including those convicted of manslaughter has brought a whole new actor into the victimhood drama. Under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 a Victim Personal Statement (VPS) system lets victims describe the crime's impact; physical, financial and psychological  which judges are required to consider  when assessing harm.  Since its implementation this outlet for victims has grown in intensity.  The current situation is that the victim(s) can make a VPS prior to the sentence being pronounced.  

Following the tragic case of PC Harper there was a little reported event last week at Liverpool Crown Court which  re-opened the whole debate on the role and effect of a VPS.  Police constable Simon Ward was left severely injured after being dragged down the street by Candace De Silva`s Range Rover.    PC  Ward made a VPS describing how the injuries left him needing a crutch and knee brace, suffering PTSD, unable to work for 19 months and now in a desk-based role. He said it was "hard to accept I'm now a victim of a crime".  Her prison sentence was suspended. 

 

The point in this post is whether or to what degree does a VPS influence sentencing and whether or not the current situation is providing equitable justice for offender and victim. Is the sentencing structure in England and Wales becoming too victim orientated?  As in some Muslim countries can a sentence be mitigated by recompense to the victim?  This is known as Diyyah (Arabic: دية), commonly translated as "blood money" or victim compensation.  In some countries and situations it allows the maximum capital punishment or physical retaliation to be completely averted.  In the De Silva case her barrister told the court  that she was the sole earner for her family. He stated that her partner did not work and if she were sent to prison the family would immediately lose their home because the partner could not fund the rent.  He added that his client suffered from diagnosed PTSD) and long-term mental health issues. 

In the case above PC Ward made a clearly impassioned statement of the harm he was caused and with the previously mentioned case of PC Harper in his and the public mind the judge chose to suspend a prison sentence on the offender; a sentence which is not unlikely to be appealed.  This facility has been available under The Unduly Lenient Sentence scheme created by the Criminal Justice Act 1988, specifically sections 35 and 36, which came into force that same year and allows  the Attorney General the power to refer a crown court sentence for indictable only offences  to the Court of Appeal if it's considered "unduly lenient"; not just wrong, but outside the range a reasonable judge could have imposed.

It is of fundamental importance to recognise that current practice of VPS is supposed to have absolutely no influence on a judge`s sentence. It is presented as a route for the victim to express in public the effect and degree of harm caused by the offender but is this approach sustainable? Reference again to the tragic death of PC Harper, without the public outcry co-ordinated or not, it is unlikely to have had new legislation in his name. Is this an example of vengeance for that flambeau carrying mob in the age of social media where those aspiring to further a cause can jump on a bandwagon and tailor make it for some nefarious purpose.  The murder of George Floyd, an American criminal,  resulted in Premier League football players and a former prime minister publicly to "take the knee";  an invidious kowtowing to virtual mob violence which disturbed many people  as to the underlying insidious motivations of its proponents.  

The essence of modern western legal systems including that in the UK is built on the principle that crimes are committed against the state, not just the individual.  When or if a "victims' charter" begins to dictate outcomes justice risks shifting from proportional punishment to popular retribution. In simple terms for a wide audience mob violence morphs into a form ready made to be exploited by those skilled in the craft and use of social media. A prime example of this inversion was seen  October 7th 2023 and was  demonstrated when barely 24 hours later on October 8th with hundreds of Israelis still lying dead in southern Israel mobs were formed in western cities screaming genocide against the State of Israel.  The criminal perpetrators were the heroes and the murdered victims were the aggressors.   

Lady Justice has always been seen as the state being above any tendency to be leaning one way or the other; justice is applied without fear or favour.  If the justice system appears to lean towards the mitigating factors of an offender to levels that the public considers overriding the interests of the victim there will be erosion of public trust in institutional justice.  In cases posted here on the position of those supporting Palestine Action the offenders have laid the claim to victimhood in Alice Through the Looking Glass contorted logic. 

If the public feels the state is failing to protect them or punish offenders adequately the demand for decentralized, retributive "justice" will increase from a limited number of political activists to many of those happy to align with a political party  supporting their views at the level of inclusion in a manifesto.  The wide trend to reconsidering the benefits of our democratic system would be further tested.  

In the case above of Candace DeSilva the public petition circulating on Change.org cannot force the judge to change his mind. However, because it has gained significant traction, it serves as a powerful mechanism to catch the attention of the Attorney General. If he decides that Judge Byrne placed too much weight on DeSilva's childcare situation and completely ignored the permanent, life-altering nerve damage inflicted on PC Ward, the case will be referred to the Court of Appeal where her suspended sentence could be replaced with immediate prison time.