Speeches by Sackman.

“Let me answer that in stages. First of all, we are dealing with an acute crisis, which is a systemic challenge. The Government’s position is that the only way to address that is from multiple angles that comprise structural reform and productivity savings of the sort the IfG outlined, in addition to record investment i…”

“I will address that point in a moment, because it is an important one. It is the interaction of the major reforms that are proposed here—the increase in sentencing power, the removal of the right to elect, the introduction of a permission stage to appeals and the existence of the Crown court bench division. As parliame…”

“I think that is something we have to look at.”

“I think the answer he was giving was in the context of a question around the impact on remand hearings; I think that was the context in which he may have addressed that.”

“That is right, yes.”

“That is the position, because that is the mechanism for pursuing what was needed, which was the urgent implementation of these changes.”

“I can certainly provide a follow-up letter, but just to be clear, I do not know that I regard retrospective as quite the right term here. No one is suggesting that a trial that has commenced or that has gone past PTPH—”

“Yes—”

“If they meet the eligibility criteria, then that is the case.”

“It is a change in relation to the procedure that applies to those cases. They are still getting a Crown court trial under the new proposals.”

“We take as our starting point the model set out in the IRCC review and the conclusion reached by Sir Brian Leveson, albeit with the caveat you have given, that in his view, the CCBD would achieve at least 20% time savings; he actually says that his personal view is that it would save substantially more time. I can brin…”

“As I have said this repeatedly to Parliament and this Committee—I will say it again—of course we will publish the modelling, as is usual practice. The reason we have not done that so far is quite simple: what we need to present to Parliament and the public is a clear, holistic view of how the reforms will work in the l…”

“It is the case that trials are taking significantly longer. I appreciate that the point was made about where you take the starting point. Sir Brian Leveson’s insight is that trials are taking twice as long as they were taking in 2000. Even if one were to take the IfG’s assessment of a 50% increase, that in itself is si…”

“Do you mean in terms of the determination of that?”

“No, I don’t. We anticipate a process whereby, at the PTPH, judges are looking at the case management decisions and therefore need to read into the case to understand its nature and gravity and the factual matrix they are dealing with—albeit they are not determining the verdict at that point—to make the sort of assessme…”

“No, I don’t think that we are moving away from an adversarial position. Under the new process, as Sir Brian and others have articulated, you will have a Crown court trial—because we are in the Crown court, after all—in the usual fashion, where the prosecution will present its case and the evidence will be tested by the…”

“No. I think perhaps politicians are guilty here; we recognise the significance of these reforms, because something significant is required to address the crisis that we are in, but their radicalism can be overstated. This is not a scrapping of all jury trials—far from it. We expect that at least three quarters of the t…”

“One of the fundamental things that we have been seeing for some time now is increased demand. The backlogs really began to run out of control from covid onwards, but they were already beginning to rise before then, due to the increased police numbers, as well as more proactive policing and more proactive charging decis…”

“There are a number of things. We have explored the evidence and the amount of disclosure, so it is the quantum or volume of evidence, as well as the nature of that evidence and its complexity. There will be some of what have been dubbed “inefficiencies”, which were referred to in the previous panel. I do not want the C…”

“Just to complete that point, that is not the only source of inefficiency. We heard from the previous panel that a major constraint and source of inefficiency is lost time and lost sitting days due to the lack of availability in the workforce. That is a major driver, which is why that has been an area of focus for the G…”