No tap water, ramshackle roofing and insect infestations that required so much pesticide a courtroom was ‘unsafe to sit in’. These are just some of the issues plaguing courts infrastructure, the lady chief justice reflected during her annual press conference this week.
Most media picked up on Baroness Carr’s assertion that she was ‘deeply troubled’ by Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch’s exchange during Prime Minister’s Questions about a Gazan family that was allegedly allowed to enter the UK under a scheme for Ukrainian refugees. Her comments came after the prime minister said a judge had made the ‘wrong decision’ by letting the family settle in the UK.
The family of six initially applied for permission to enter the UK using a Ukraine Family Scheme form and were rejected. On appeal, an Upper Tribunal judge reversed this decision based on human rights grounds not linked to the scheme for Ukrainians.
Asked by the Gazette about the condition of the courts estate, the LCJ said that judges ‘have often lived with something so long, they’re just keeping a stiff upper lip’, adding: ‘I go in, and I [say] “are you serious?”’.
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She acknowledged that reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) has closed multiple courts – Harrow Crown Court has been shut since August 2023 – and added that now there are ‘probably too many courts to mention’ in need of renovation.
The Inner London Crown Court even lacks running tap water, she noted.
‘I’ve just been to Cardiff Civil Justice Centre. I was in one room where the air conditioning was knocking so loudly I had to move. In the courts themselves, there are huge sections where the roof has come down, so they have got tarpaulins catching rain.
‘The rain is then channelled through a tube, which is stuck to the side of the wall and… they’ve got blue plastic dustbins, and somebody has cut a hole in the dustbin, and the tube goes into the dustbin. There were, I think, at least two or three courts with that arrangement in place.
‘There was another court that I went into which has got a very serious fly infestation. To combat that, they have sprayed it so strongly that I thought it was unsafe to sit in. The fumes were just toxic.
‘Nottingham has lost 100 sitting days in January because the roof has gone. The resident judge there has had to write to court users to apologise.
‘There are many, many [similar] situations around the country,’ the LCJ said.
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