Work of the Crown Prosecution Service

Status / emerging findings

• Crown court backlog has swollen to 82,000 defendants—85% above pre-COVID levels—with some trials listed into 2027; only 40% of scheduled trials actually proceed on their set date.
• CPS is missing charging timeliness targets across the board: 67.3% for custody cases (target 3 hours) and 61.6% for bail cases (target 28 days), with significant regional variation masked by national averages.
• Defence fee structures create financial incentives against early guilty pleas: cracked trial fees are 27–100% higher than guilty plea fees, despite 70% of Crown court cases ending in guilty pleas anyway.
• Director Parkinson (one year in post) has positioned delay reduction as his highest priority and tabled reform proposals including early guilty plea mechanisms, defence fee restructuring, and intermediate sentencing courts.

Why it matters

An 82,000-person backlog and collapsed trial schedules mean real people wait years for justice; the discovery that defence fees actively discourage guilty pleas suggests the system's financial architecture is broken and needs rewiring.

Tone arc

Committee opened inquiry in June 2021; latest December 2024 session shows cooperation from leadership but escalating urgency around systemic dysfunction—Parkinson framed the backlog not as staffing crisis alone but as a structural incentive problem requiring fundamental fee and court reform.

Key witnesses

Stephen Parkinson, Director of Public Prosecutions