Abstract:
The new government has "placed a renewed focus on public sector productivity" and has set "productivity, efficiency and savings" targets for departments. In this report, we consider the productivity of the justice system, focusing in particular on the Crown Court of England and Wales, the court that deals with the most serious criminal offences. This is a part of the public sector that has rarely been considered in such terms, but one where increases in resources in recent years do not appear to have delivered improvements in performance. In particular, the backlog of outstanding cases in the Crown Court has risen sharply: it now stands at more than twice its level at the beginning of 2019, and is considerably higher than the Ministry of Justice had previously projected. It continues to grow. In this report, we produce new estimates of productivity in the Crown Court and conclude that poor productivity performance in the period since the pandemic has been a major factor behind the growth in the backlog of outstanding cases. Although productivity appears to have markedly improved in the most recent months of data - especially after adjusting for increases in the average complexity of cases - this has not (yet) been sufficient to start to reduce the backlog.