A system under pressure
Throughout the 2010s, as budgets fell across all governmental departments, crime in the United Kingdom increased, putting an extra burden on the criminal justice system. In England and Wales for example, sexual offences grew significantly, from 53,599 in 2012/13, to 163,358 by 2019/20. While this was partly due to the emergence of historical allegations of sexual abuse, there has also been a cultural shift in the way such crimes are handled by the justice system, with previous sexual offence figures likely only showing a fraction of actual crimes. These types of crimes are among the most serious and carry the highest average prison sentence length in England and Wales. Overall levels of crime have continued to increase into the 2020s, with the crime rate for England and Wales reaching 93.6 in 2022/23, the highest it has been since 2006/07.Due to these developments, the court responsible for serious crime cases in England and Wales, the Crown Court, has struggled with a backlog of cases, which peaked at 55,000 in late 2014. While the Crown Court managed to reduce that number to around 33,800 by the third quarter of 2019, the restrictions brought about during the COVID-19 pandemic caused these cases to increase dramatically from 2020 onwards, with outstanding cases reaching a new peak of 62,764 in 2022. At the same time, it is also taking longer for trials to reach conclusion, with cases taking an average of 676 days in 2023 to go from offence to completion, compared with 366 days in 2020. Even when cases result in convictions there is evidence that the current prison system is also struggling with capacity problems. In September 2023 for example, the number of spare prison places in England and Wales fell to just 768 places, compared with around 2,414 one year earlier.
