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Barristers have attacked the outsourcing giant Serco for worsening the backlogs in Britain’s criminal courts, warning that judges are “powerless” in punishing private contractors.
Mary Prior KC, the chairman of the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), hit out at the private contractors who run prison transport services in England and Wales over repeated failures to bring prisoners to court on time.
Ms Prior said: “Every court user is frustrated. Sometimes it causes a trial to be adjourned. At other times it means that witnesses are left waiting for hours at a time. Every other participant has to be at court on time except for the person that the court cannot start without – the accused.”
Richard Atkinson, the president of the Law Society of England and Wales, added: “The last thing victims, witnesses and defendants need is for further delays to be created by a failure to deliver a defendant from prison to court on time.”
Serco Group was awarded the £800m contract to run prison escort services in the south of England in 2019. GEOAmey was awarded a similar 10-year contract, worth £632m, to run the same service in the North, the Midlands and Wales in 2020.
Analysis of Ministry of Justice (MoJ) data by the CBA shows 125 trials were fully adjourned in the first nine months of 2024 alone, because of contractors failing to deliver prisoners to trial.
Trials that are delayed also have major knock-on effects across the courts. In one recent case relating to the death of a child, delays in bringing the defendant from a prison in the north of England to a court in the Midlands led to significant delays at three entirely separate trials.
A separate rape trial at Guildford Crown Court lost six hours of court time in a single week, with the defendant appearing at least an hour late each day from HMP Wandsworth.
Meanwhile, Ms Prior said the contracts worth more than £1.4bn that were signed by the MoJ have left outsourcers unaccountable for the vast majority of the worst delays, with few requirements for Serco and GEOAmey to report delays on journeys longer than 100 miles.
The MoJ’s contracts impose strict conditions on prison escort contractors for journeys less than 100 miles, with heavy fines for delays that hold up trials. However, delays on journeys more than 100 miles are subject to significantly less scrutiny, despite the fact they are usually much longer and more disruptive.
Ms Prior said: “For the significant number of prisoners who are unable to be held locally, the terms differ and prisoners are produced hours late for a hearing without any sanction to the private profit-making companies who deliver them.