Sarah Sackman

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Efford. I thank the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) for securing a debate on this crucial subject, and for the typical expertise and measured, analytical tone that he brings to it. I thought, until the speech of the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Dr Mullan), that something of a consensus had broken out among us. To quote the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam, “something must be done about it”—I think we can all agree on that. In the opening words of part 1 of Sir Brian Leveson’s review, he tells us that “Criminal justice is in crisis.” Indeed, it is. This Government inherited a record and rising courts backlog. As of June 2025, the open Crown court caseload stood at over 79,000 cases and it is rising. Other hon. Members have spoken to the human impact of that. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Leigh Ingham) for raising her constituent’s case. It is a graphic illustration of the impact of the Crown court backlog bequeathed to us by the previous Government, and particularly the impact of the appalling delays on victims. The backlog not only places a psychological strain on victims, disrupting their ability to function, work and maintain relationships; it corrodes justice, because many of those victims—and indeed witnesses—pull out of the process, meaning that trials become ineffective. As the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam said, it also has an impact on defendants—those who are accused of a crime—as well as on our prisons, and on all those who serve within the system. It creates increasingly perverse incentives to exploit the delays and ultimately undermines the public’s confidence in justice. As many hon. Members have said, justice delayed is justice denied. I reject the suggestion of the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle that this Government have sat idly by. Far from it. We inherited a crisis, in both our prisons and our courts, and we have gripped that crisis. It is a fact that, as of today, the Government have added record, historic numbers of sitting days for our courts: 5,000 sitting days more than the number allocated by the previous Government. As other hon. Members have pointed out, we have invested in the workforce crucial to running our criminal courts, and in our solicitors, with an additional £92 million in legal aid on top of a £24 million investment in our duty solicitors. We also, of course, commissioned Sir Brian Leveson, one of our greatest jurists, to undertake his review. If the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle had bothered to read beyond the first couple of paragraphs of the 388-page report—