Court reform and the future of jury trials
3 min read
Proposed reforms to the criminal justice system promise to tackle mounting court backlogs and improve the efficiency of the justice system. Lord Anderson, Member of the Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee, writes on these reforms put forward, including the controversial changes to trial by jury
This article was commissioned by the Total Politics Impact team.
The Courts and Tribunals Bill was carried over into the new session, having completed 12 Commons Committee sittings in April 2026. Its central objective is to reduce delays in the criminal justice system, currently standing at some 80,000 cases – twice the pre-pandemic level – in the Crown Court alone. It seeks to do this by rebalancing the respective functions of the Crown Court and magistrates’ courts.
The most radical provisions are in clauses 1-7 of the bill. These allow Ministers to expand magistrates’ sentencing powers by regulation to as much as 24 months, to replace automatic appeals from magistrates by a permission-based system limited to appeals on points of law, and to remove defendants’ right to elect jury trial for “either-way” offences in cases where the anticipated sentence is less than three years. Such intermediate level cases, together with complex financial cases, will in future be eligible for trial by judge alone.
These proposals take their lead from Sir Brian Leveson’s Independent Review of the Criminal Courts but go significantly further in a number of respects. In particular, Leveson advised retaining magistrates’ sentencing powers at 12 months, and would have allocated intermediate cases not to a judge alone but to a judge sitting with two magistrates.
The bill also revises the tests for the admissibility of evidence relating to a complainant’s sexual history and previous bad character and changes the rules around the use of special measures (such as screens and video links) to support vulnerable witnesses. It contains provisions on tribunal leadership and judicial deployment and includes family justice reforms such as removing the statutory presumption of parental involvement in children’s cases.
These proposals take their lead from Sir Brian Leveson’s Independent Review of the Criminal Courts but go significantly further in a number of respects
In its report on the 10 June 2026, the Commons Justice Committee regretted the absence of time for pre-legislative scrutiny, particularly given that the bill will not be implemented before March 2028. It pointed to weaknesses in the evidential basis for the anticipated savings of court time and voiced doubts as to whether the magistrature would be able to expand at the rate necessary to cope with the likely increase in their caseload. The report also drew attention to the lack of diversity of the judges who would sit alone in intermediate cases and referred to the conclusion of the Lammy Report in 2017 that juries are one of the few areas of the criminal justice system where Black and minority ethnic defendants do not face disproportionate outcomes.
With some criminal trials now listed as far ahead as 2030, there can be no doubt that decisive action is needed to reduce delays. But the proposed expansion of magistrates’ powers and roll-back of jury trial are controversial with practitioners and judges: there is no consensus that any time-saving benefit will justify their possible negative effects on the quality of justice and public perceptions of fairness. The House of Lords is not short of relevant expertise: Baroness Levitt, the Justice Minister, was a serving Crown Court Judge until she became a peer in 2024. A vigorous work-out may be expected there.
