We are witnessing the slow death of public participation in criminal justice:
- Fewer lay benches;
- More remote and administrative hearings;
- Less open-court scrutiny;
- District Judge-dominated lists;
- Increasingly complex cases removed from the reach of volunteers.
This is not modernisation – it is democratic erosion.
For centuries, the magistracy ensured that justice was rooted in community standards and local knowledge. When I served, the value lay not just in legal decision-making but in bringing ordinary experience into the courtroom. That is exactly what the new reforms sideline.
As legal scholar Andrew Ashworth argues in Sentencing and Criminal Justice, justice loses legitimacy when divorced from public accountability. We are heading precisely in that direction.
The Lammy law change will send more cases to district judges
A systematic replacement of lay benches (Magistrates’ Courts) with district judges (DJs) has been happening quietly for a decade. In 2013, DJs handled 6% of magistrates’ work; by 2023, it was almost 20% . This is not accidental. It is a slow, seemingly deliberate centralisation of judicial authority. DJs are highly skilled, but the trend represents a philosophical shift away from public justice toward professional justice.
Now, with the Lammy law change, more either-way and complex cases are being funnelled to DJs. Officials claim this is about ‘efficiency’, but the long-term effect is unmistakable:
- the erosion of community participation
- the disappearance of civic oversight
- the hollowing-out of the magistracy’s democratic purpose.
When David Lammy published his 2017 review, the intent was to increase fairness and transparency. Yet the so called ‘Lammy reforms’ proposed will of course need new legislation , but they contradict his findings. Lammy explicitly warned against reforms that “Courts are too distant from the communities they put on trial. As I have consistently recommended, we desperately need to find more black judges, particularly females, who are chronically underrepresented in our courts across London and the UK.”
The real crisis: a court system starved of investment
The government claims the courts are struggling because of case volume, leniency, or inefficiency. But the evidence is unequivocal: the crisis is structural and political.
1. Court closures
Since 2010, more than half of magistrates’ courts have closed. The National Audit Office reported in 2019 that closures increased waiting times and created access barriers for defendants, victims, and witnesses (NAO, 2019, p. 34, table 13). Some defendants now travel hours for hearings – and still arrive to find the case cannot proceed.
2. Backlogs at breaking point
The Crown Court backlog exceeded 67,000 cases in 2023 – the highest since records began. This was affected in part by the Covid pandemic and barristers’ industrial action in 2022, but by December 2023 the backlog had increased again with a very high number of receipts. Victims sexual offences were particularly impacted, with an average wait of 839 days from charge to outcome.
Longer magistrate sentencing powers do nothing to fix this.
3. Digital failures
The Common Platform digital rollout has been described as “dangerous and unfit for purpose” by the PCS union (2022). That is not hyperbole. During my time on the bench cases collapsed mid-hearing because files vanished, evidence bundles failed to load, digital statements were duplicated or corrupted and legal advisers spent more time troubleshooting than advising.
In early 2019, major technology failures in the courts across England and Wales repeatedly disrupted thousands of cases, leaving staff unable to access files or register jurors and forcing prosecutions and trials to be adjourned, in what was widely reported as an “IT meltdown” that exposed the fragility of the courts’ digital infrastructure.“daily basis”. The technology simply does not work – yet the ministry continues to rely on it as the backbone of the modern court.
4. Staff shortages
Probation collapsed after the disastrous Grayling-era part-privatisation. Legal advisers are burned out; their union warned of a “mass exodus” if conditions do not improve. Court clerks and administrators are equally overstretched. A justice system cannot function without its people. And right now, those people are exhausted.
Why I left the magistracy
I didn’t resign because the work was difficult. It always was. I resigned because the system had become unworkable.
When defendants travelled for hours only to be told the case could not proceed because the computer system crashed – that was not justice.
When victims broke down crying because their third listing had collapsed – that was not justice.
When magistrates spent half the morning waiting for legal advisers to receive documents that should have been accessible instantly – that was not justice.
And yet the government’s response is to hand volunteers more sentencing power.
What real reform would look like
If policymakers truly cared about justice, they would:
- reopen shuttered courts
- fully fund a functioning digital system before depending on it
- increase staffing across legal advisers, probation, and administration
- support magistrate recruitment with realistic training and workloads
- restore the principle that justice should be public, participatory, and local.
None of that is controversial. All of it is necessary. But investment is expensive, and political optics are cheap. The Lammy law change is not meaningful reform. It is a political manoeuvre designed to look decisive while avoiding the real crisis: a justice system degraded by austerity, digital failure, and chronic underfunding.
It is driven by optics, not evidence, lengthening sentences for the sake of headlines. The result is overburdening a volunteer workforce, professionalising the lower courts without debate, excluding the public from justice and ignoring the structural rot beneath it all.
This is not the future the 2017 Lammy Review envisioned. It is not the future the magistracy deserves. And it is not a future in which justice can flourish.
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