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UK: Court cases decline

01 March 1993

The "biggest decline for 30 years in the number of court cases", according to the latest figures from the Attorney-General, is alleged to have been engineered largely by cost-cutting.
Reductions in cases of up to 20% coincide with the release of a paper of the Criminal Justice Consultation Committee circulated to magistrates' courts, warning of the "substantial cost implications for the CPS, the courts and the legal aid fund" of magistrates' decisions to commit cases to the Crown court, and quoting Home Office research claiming that 60% of cases committed for jury trial could have been dealt with by magistrates.

While the decline in cases has been attributed to an increase in police cautions and a fall in police morale, leading to a decline in arrests, NAPO assistant general secretary Harry Fletcher pointed to an increase in plea-bargaining and a 75% drop in the number of cases sent to the Crown court, and said: "We are seeing an increasingly cost-driven criminal justice system. The fear must be that as cost and market forces become paramount, the issue of justice becomes blurred, even lost."

The vast majority of criminal cases are dealt with in the magistrates' courts, and magistrates decide whether a particular offence merits the grant of legal aid. There has been a dramatic increase in legal aid refusals for cases such as minor assaults and breach of the peace, leaving many thousands of defendants unrepresented before magistrates, even though they could go to prison.

Guardian 1.4.93.