Court Closures: Access to Justice

I beg to move,

That this House has considered court closures and access to justice.

I am pleased to have secured this debate. It concerns a topic of extreme importance, the rule of law and justice in our country. One of the underlying tenets of our legal system is that there should be equality before the law. I shall shortly explain how the piecemeal way in which the Government have implemented the court closures, coupled with the cuts in legal aid, has undermined that principle and left vulnerable people, disabled people and those with low incomes trying to gain access to justice with the scales firmly tipped against them. Our legal system can only deliver justice if everyone can access it fairly and engage with it, but the fact is that those pursuing local justice now find that it is not so local.

My first charge against the Government is that the court closure programme, since 2010, has been disjointed and fragmented, and is not logical. Cambridge magistrates court is a fine modern court, purpose-built in 2010. It is close to the railway and bus stations in central Cambridge, has modern facilities, and is ideally placed to serve the needs of the local community. Last year, it somehow found its way on to a list of eight courts that were due to be closed this year for—allegedly—being underused, dilapidated or close to other services. Of those eight, seven have been or will be closed by the end of the year. The Cambridge court survived only because it was on a long finance lease with restrictions. Had that not been the case, it would surely have closed a mere nine years after it had opened. This bizarre situation demonstrates the inconsistent decision making of Ministers.

Then there is the chaos and confusion surrounding the closure of Lambeth county court, in a prime location in Cleaver Square in Kennington. In 2015, it was announced that the court would close, despite overwhelming consultation responses opposing the move, and that all housing possession cases would be transferred to Camberwell magistrates court. Then Camberwell was earmarked for closure, and so a new plan was hatched. In early September 2017, Lambeth closed, but some court users were told that it would remain open to deal with some possession cases, while others would be dealt with at Stratford and at Clerkenwell and Shoreditch county court. Then court users were told that the Inner London Crown court would deal with Lambeth’s possession cases. Finally, it was settled that they would be dealt with at Clerkenwell and Shoreditch. That just shows how ill prepared Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service is to deal with its own court closures.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate.

Oldham magistrates court was closed a few years ago. What is so disappointing is that there has been no compensation in the form of reasonable adjustments to accommodate disabled people—for example, those with agoraphobia who want to give evidence via a video link. Is that not an absolute travesty? Disabled people already face a host of difficulties, and this is yet another.

That is an excellent point. It typifies the piecemeal way in which the closures have been implemented. The process has not been joined up. I believe that it has been driven by cost-cutting measures rather than an overarching view. I shall say more about that later.

According to the Law Society, there are now no youth courts in the boroughs of Southwark, Lewisham or Greenwich. All the cases from those boroughs now go to Bromley youth court. The four boroughs have a higher total population than the cities of Leeds and Manchester combined, yet they have to make do with one youth court for all their needs.

The closure of 258 courts over the past nine years has been nothing less than shambolic. It is not part of any master plan, but is rather a slavish knee-jerk response to the Treasury’s demands for more cuts from the Ministry of Justice. Worse still, it has taken no account of the impact on disadvantaged people and people on low incomes, who are disproportionately affected by the closures. That brings me to my second point. According to the Magistrates Association, since 2010 more than half the 323 magistrates courts—a total of 162—have closed. In some cases, defendants, witnesses, police, lawyers and magistrates are now travelling 50 miles to obtain local justice. I do not believe for one minute that the cost of making all those court users travel such distances has been factored into any court closure programme.

When the closure programmes began in 2010, the initial proposal behind the closures was that 90% of all court users would be able to reach the court within one hour. Since then, the goalposts have moved, and the overwhelming majority of court users are expected to reach the court by public transport between the hours of 7.30 am and 7.30 pm.

The Government have completed no equality assessment of the impact on those with protected characteristics, the disadvantaged and people with low incomes. In its evidence to the Justice Committee in March 2019, the Equality and Human Rights Commission stated that it had been told by Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service that it did not hold comprehensive data on court users on which to assess the impact of court closures, but that instead it compared the local population with the regional population to establish whether certain groups were over-represented. No account has been taken of the cost of travelling by public transport at peak times, or the need for additional childcare costs to accommodate longer journey times.

Will the defendant give way? [Laughter.] I am so sorry for calling the hon. Gentleman a defendant. He is not a defendant at all; he is an honourable and upstanding Member of the House.

The hon. Gentleman has made an important point about defendants attending court, and he has made an important point about travel costs. However, we must keep our feet on the ground. If acquitted, the defendant will ordinarily be entitled to the reimbursement of his travel costs. Only guilty defendants will be required to pay. Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that that, too, is an important point?

I plead not guilty to being a defendant.

While what the hon. Gentleman has said may be the case, the fact remains that those costs are incurred initially by the person making the journey, which causes hardship in the short term.

Is it not also true that people often do not know exactly what the procedures are and are deterred by uncertainty about the costs that they will face?

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Many people do not obtain the legal advice that they need to make such informed decisions, and that, too, is part of the problem.

The hon. Gentleman made a wrong career move at some point. [Laughter.] At the risk of attempting to cross-examine him, may I suggest that the answer to that point might be that, while it is perfectly true that the acquitted defendants will be entitled to apply for the return of their costs, there is a broader public interest in bringing the guilty defendants to court so that they can be convicted and justice can thereby be done?

The hon. Gentleman has made an excellent point. He is quite right: that is indeed the case.

Women’s Aid has highlighted that fact that, in rural areas in particular, survivors of domestic abuse must travel long distances to reach family courts. Apart from the question of childcare arrangements and the cost of travel, there is a serious safety concern, as the perpetrators of the abuse may be travelling on the same route at the same time, owing to the infrequency of public transport services in those areas. That has the potential to make an already stressful and harrowing experience even worse. I note that Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service has confirmed that it is considering whether to pay for taxis to ferry defendants and witnesses from the most remote parts of the country to hearings. This just goes to demonstrate that little or no consideration has been given to the impact of court closures on court users.

As alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), there is a court modernisation programme and most people are broadly supportive of this £1.2 billion programme and making best use of technology to help alleviate the pressures on courts and tribunals, but this is not the panacea for court closures. There are those who will be digitally excluded due to difficulty in reading or writing, but even those who can navigate their way through the technology will still need proper advice.

Many litigants in person do not understand the legalities in their case. This can lead to unintended consequences such as pleading guilty to something they have a defence to, or choosing a path that may lead to them being penalised with costs. The cuts to legal aid funding and the lack of access to legal advice leads to a raw deal for some. They should be getting justice. The Public Accounts Committee said in its report “Transforming courts and tribunals” that

My hon. Friend is talking about the impact of court closures on access to justice. If we look in a cumulative way at all the different cuts—for example, to legal aid—as well as what he is describing now, we see that the lack of access to justice that many of our constituents are facing is profound. Does he agree that this is a real indictment and shows the impact of this Government’s policies on the justice system?

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. She is certainly right about the cumulative effect of cuts to legal aid and court closures making it harder for the most disadvantaged to access justice as they should be able to.

Local justice and fairness and equality before the law need to apply to everyone equally. The court closures programme has fundamentally failed and skewed things against those on low incomes and the disadvantaged. This has to stop and has to stop now: justice must be for everyone, not just those who can afford it.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous), my fellow Justice Committee member, and I congratulate him on securing this debate on a very important topic. I was happy to have been a supporter of his application for the debate, and I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for giving us this opportunity.

Access to justice is a fundamental issue. It is not just a transaction issue between the parties to a case; it is fundamental to the running of a civilised society. It ought to be regarded as not just a transactional matter between individuals either, but as something that is the warp and woof of the checks and balances that make our society work. Therefore, the right to have access to justice is a fundamental civic right of every individual and it is important that we aim to produce a system that achieves that without unreasonable obstacles.

Of course, we are obliged to garner public funds with care and make sure they are spent wisely, but it is equally important that the state has an obligation to provide an accessible justice system as part of its duties to protect its citizens. Therefore, we perhaps need to take a step back and look at what we do in relation to courts and other justice issues in the context of that overarching principle.

The issue of court closures has been of real concern to Members in all parts of the House, and for legitimate reasons. I do not say that every court closure is an unreasonable step, and I do not say that every court that was in existence when I started at the Bar is viable now. I appeared in some pretty unsatisfactory old magistrates courts and county courts up and down the country, where there was no means of separating witnesses from defendants for example. In some cases there might have been victims of crime present, and the facilities for having a conference with a client in any sort of confidentiality were non-existent. I actually had a conference in a lavatory once in an old magistrates court in East Anglia because there was nowhere else where we could not be heard by either the prosecutor or prosecution witnesses. It was pouring with rain outside so that seemed to be the easiest way to do it—I did not charge any extra, not even a penny. Courts like that should not be in use.

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. In the course of this debate we have talked about convenience for defendants and witnesses, but ought we not also to consider convenience for magistrates? Magistrates give of their time to help in the community and perform an invaluable role, but if they have to travel huge distances that will inevitably provide a disincentive. The Government should be very alive to that in making these changes.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and as he will know the Committee, of which he was for a time a distinguished member and for whose work I am very grateful, recently published a report into the magistracy that deals with a number of challenges facing the magistracy. It is convenient that I refer to this point, given that 90-odd% of criminal cases are dealt with by magistrates, who, as he says, are unpaid—they are volunteers; they are the bedrock of the criminal justice system. The point of a magistrates system is that they are lay people—mini juries, in effect—delivering local justice. Defendants are thereby judged by one’s peers, not only in the sense of one’s status in society, but in the sense that they come broadly from the community from which they themselves come.

That has always been fundamental to our system in criminal work. The difficulty has been the number of pressures on the recruitment of magistrates, and one, which was identified to us by the Magistrates Association and other witnesses, is the effect of court closures. Where they become as drastic as they have in some cases, they act as a disincentive to magistrates to continue on the bench, as travel times are much longer than they were. They can also skewer recruitment patterns for new magistrates. A number of studies indicate that the drop-out rate for magistrates in rural areas, where courts often sit only in the county town, is more marked and that there is a tendency in areas where the court has moved to an urban centre for magistrates to be recruited predominantly from the surrounding town areas rather than the rural areas.

I wonder if my hon. Friend remembers, as I do, the very powerful evidence we heard from Welsh magistrates in our work on the Justice Select Committee about the difficulties they are having recruiting magistrates in rural parts of Wales.