Amongst barristers, there’s a related hollowing out of the center ranks of the career. However on the similar time, very junior barristers are taking up each an increasing number of complicated work. In 2015/16, simply 2% of felony authorized assist work (in worth phrases) went to barristers with lower than three years of expertise. By 2023/24, that had risen to 12%. Authorized advisers, HMCTS attorneys who present authorized data to magistrates, are much more inexperienced. In March 2025, 25% of all authorized advisers have been trainees.
There have additionally been cuts to non-legal courtroom employees, with complete HMCTS employees down 20% since 2010/11, and 12% of the workforce now company or contract employees.
Magistrates’ courts are coping with fewer circumstances, regardless of rising backlogs and rising reliance on the fast-track ‘single justice process’
The variety of circumstances coming into magistrates’ courts is now again to pre-pandemic ranges. However the courts are closing fewer circumstances: 5% fewer than in 2019. And the circumstances they’re coping with are each easier and extra ceaselessly dealt with through the controversial ‘single justice process’, a streamlined course of the place a single Justice of the Peace hears circumstances based mostly on paper submissions behind closed doorways.
Accomplished circumstances for extra critical ‘indictable solely’ or ‘triable both approach’ offences, which generally take longer to take care of, fell 12% from 2019 to 2024. That is even supposing two thirds of circumstances at the moment are closed utilizing the fast-track single justice process, which ought to have freed up time for extra critical circumstances. The variety of trials has additionally continued to tumble, down from almost 80,000 in 2010 to 50,000 in 2019 and simply 34,000 in 2024. This all provides as much as magistrates’ courts doing loads lower than earlier than the pandemic, making a rising backlog of circumstances: this hit 360,000 in June this yr, up 62% since December 2019.
