Justice Secretary confirms courts backlog reduction despite scrapping judge-only trial plans

The courts backlog will still fall despite plans to curb jury trials being scrapped, the justice secretary has told the BBC.

Alex Norris said introducing legislation for judge-only trials "was always going to be the most complicated to implement" and would have slowed down reforms.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham's decision abandons proposals introduced by Sir Keir Starmer's government to allow judges in England and Wales to make the sole decision on cases that would lead to a sentence of less than three years.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said only complex fraud and financial offences would be judge-only - and it proposes thousands of medium-level crimes should stay with volunteer magistrates, who sit without a jury.

Norris told the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg the backlog would start falling "in this Parliament", but would not say by how much.

He said it would fall significantly over the next decade "as a result of the changes we're making".

The Conservatives said it was a "major victory" for those who fought to defend trial by jury, while criminal lawyers welcomed the decision but voiced concern about the implications of abolishing a defendant's right to ask for a jury trial.

The Criminal Bar Association (CBA) warned this would keep more middle-ranking cases before magistrates and shift 25,000 cases a year onto magistrates' courts.

Former justice secretary David Lammy first announced the plans to curb jury trials in December following a recommendation in a major review of the court system in England and Wales.

The series of radical reforms, including scaling back jury trials, were presented as the best way of turning around record backlogs which, in turn, were exacerbating the prison population crisis.

The backlog - which has led to record delays for defendants and victims - currently stands at nearly 81,000 cases, having rocketed largely thanks to cuts before the pandemic and court closures during national lockdowns.

Official projections have estimated it could reach 100,000 before the next general election and, in a worst-case scenario, climb to double that number by 2035.

There are, however, indications the backlog is now stabilising after the government committed unlimited funding to pay for more judges to sit in courts that were otherwise being unused.

Under the original plans, Lammy had wanted to reserve jury trials for the most serious "indictable" offences - meaning cases that are always sent to Crown Court, including murder and rape.

Less serious offences, where the sentence would be no more than three years, would be decided without a jury in the Crown Court by a judge alone. Even less serious offences than that would stay in magistrates' courts, abolishing the right of defendants to ask for a trial by jury when they feel that is their best chance of being cleared.

The proposals triggered an outcry across many parts of the criminal justice world, with many opponents saying eroding the 800-year-old right to trial by jury would not solve the backlogs.