A system under pressure
During the last decade, as budgets fell across all governmental departments, crime in the United Kingdom increased, putting an extra burden on the criminal justice system. Sexual offences in particular grew significantly, from 53,599 in 2012/13, to over 164,288 by 2018/19. While this is 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.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 thousand in late 2014. While the Crown Court managed to reduce that number to around 33.8 thousand by the third quarter of 2019, the restrictions brought about in the Coronavirus pandemic caused these cases to increase dramatically from 2020 onwards. At the same time, it is also taking longer for trials to reach conclusion, with cases taking an average of 708 days in 2021 to go from offence to completion, compared with 392 days in 2010.