The increase in the criminal courts backlog is ‘not necessarily’ the result of cuts to the Ministry of Justice’s budget, the department’s permanent secretary has told MPs.
Antonia Romeo told the public accounts committee yesterday that the rise in the backlog before the pandemic was partly the result of a change in the ‘case mix’ coming before the courts and also due to the number of judicial sitting days.
She also said she did not ‘foresee a significant difficulty’ in the MoJ tackling the backlog at the same time as reforming the Human Rights Act.
Committee chair Meg Hillier asked if ‘the pre-pandemic cuts went too far in retrospect’. Romeo replied that the 2010 spending review had been ‘particularly challenging for the department’, but that planned cuts in 2015 were ‘not in fact sustainable, so in every year we actually ended up with an increased budget’.
She added: ‘I think we are in a significantly better position now following the spending round last year and the spending round we’ve just gone through’.
Hillier replied: ‘I applaud your ability to spin the treasury settlement to you so positively, because it is the stop-start funding that has caused some of the problems, surely?’ She noted the rise in the backlog from 33,000 to 41,000 before the pandemic, saying: ‘That suggests that, for all your positive words, there was still a big issue even before Covid hit.’
Romeo said: ‘I don’t disagree with that, but I guess what I’m saying is that it was not necessarily to do with the funding decisions that had been made previously.’
She added that, after ‘an all-time low’ in 2018/19 of around 33,000 outstanding cases, the MoJ decided to ‘essentially maintain the outstanding case load at that level and sitting days were set in order to do that’.
‘Now, in retrospect, then the case mix changed,’ Romeo said. ‘We had more triable either-way offences, we had therefore more coming into Crown [court]. That is what caused the increase and therefore immediately the decision was taken to give more sitting days.’
She added: ‘I don’t think a line can be drawn is, I guess, what I’m saying – I’m not attempting to spin anything – from the funding decisions taken in previous spending rounds to that, it was more about a decision about what we thought was going to happen in terms of the case mix and what the trend was in terms of crime.’
Romeo also said that the MoJ’s plan to get the backlog down from around 60,000 to 53,000 by March 2025 was ‘not just a decrease of 7,000’. The reduction is based on a ‘counterfactual … of what would happen given what we are expecting receipts into court to be’, Romeo said.
‘Doing everything that we can do, we hope to get it down to 53,000 and we think we will by the end of the parliament,’ she added.
Richard Holden asked whether plans to reform the Human Rights Act would put additional pressure on the MoJ as it deals with the backlog.
Romeo said: ‘We are a department of 88,000 people. We are able to manage both really significant operationally difficult things while also doing quite detailed policy work on a range of other issues, including the Human Rights Act.’
‘I don’t currently foresee a significant difficulty in doing both of those things,’ she added.
Romeo also revealed that a new chief executive of HM Courts and Tribunals Service is likely to be appointed by April. ‘The recruitment [process] has now closed,’ Romeo said. ‘We will be sifting very shortly, interviewing and hoping to get somebody in post before the end of the financial year.’
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