The CBA Briefing: 5th October 2026

Courts and Tribunals Bill

Plans for Judge-only trials abandoned

On Sunday 4th October 2026, the Government announced its position in advance of the Third Reading of the Courts and Tribunals Bill, which returns to the Commons on 13th October.

The Government has withdrawn its proposal for Judge-only trials in thousands of Crown Court cases. This is a huge victory on a major part of the Bill, but our campaign continues against the other parts of the Bill which would undermine trial by jury.

A copy of the Government’s announcement is here. News coverage of the decision can be seen at the BBC, the Manchester Evening News, the Guardian and the Times.

The CBA are pleased that the Government has taken the decision to abandon the proposal for Judge-alone trials for the thousands of cases which would have fallen within scope. The Government have also rejected the suggestion of a Crown Court Bench Division of Judge and two magistrates.

We are grateful to the Lord Chancellor, Alex Norris MP, and Justice Minister, Sarah Sackman MP, for engaging with the CBA and other organisations in this discussion. This is a win for all sides.

There have always been voices against trial by jury, who think that the wisdom of a single, professional judge is preferable to the verdict of 12 people drawn from a cross-section of society. There are also those who think that the summonsing and accommodation of juries is an unnecessary expense on the system.

It has been healthy to have this debate, but the verdict is clear. Juries are just as relevant and important to our modern society as they have ever been. Public trust in the criminal justice system is central to its functioning. Nothing inspires more public trust than a verdict arrived at by 12 people discussing the case together and deciding the facts.

It was David Lammy MP himself who wrote that “Juries are the success story of our justice system” and that they carry public confidence because “the debate of 12 people deters and exposes prejudice and unintended bias”.

The justification for the proposal was that radical action was required to tackle the backlog of cases in the Crown Court, and to bring down the delays which have a huge toll on victims of crime. The CBA recognises those problems. Our members both prosecute and defend. We speak daily both with victims and with defendants, and we see the effect on both sides. The CBA were raising concerns about the rising backlog as long ago as 2019, when the Government was closing courts and placing a cap on sitting days. The point is that juries were not the cause of the backlog, and replacing trial by jury with Judge-only trials was never going to remedy the systemic problem of delay.

The campaign against these changes has been an amazing coalition of voices. Many individual barristers have given a great deal of time to support our campaigning, whether in writing to or meeting with MPs, attending our lobby days or in spreading the message. We have been supported by many former Judges, most notably the eminent HH Geoffrey Rivlin KC, HH Chris Kinch KC and Sir Stephen Mitchell, by Circuit Leaders, by our colleagues at the Bar Council, Law Society, Justice and many other campaign groups. There has been strong support from backbench MPs, opposition parties and members of the House of Lords from all parties and none. We are grateful to all for their support, and in particular to our former Chair Riel Karmy-Jones KC who led the campaign so brilliantly.

Above all, the unity of the whole Bar has been central to this work.

Appointment of an Independent Reviewer

A further important change, which has attracted fewer headlines, is that the Government will now make a statutory commitment to consider any impacts of the structural reforms on ethnic minorities and people of different backgrounds, led by an independent reviewer.

This is an important provision. One of the major criticisms of the Bill was that it was not adequately supported by proper impact assessments. An independent review provision will mean that we can take steps to reverse any changes which may have disproportionate effects on minority groups. We look forward to seeing the details of this proposal.

The remaining threat: removal of the right to elect and the increase in sentencing powers

There remains a significant threat to existing rights to trial by jury. The Government is intending to go ahead with Clauses 1 and 2 of the Bill, which remove the right to elect Crown Court trial, and Clause 6, which would grant the Government the power to double magistrates’ sentencing powers to two years’ imprisonment.

The Government’s own assessment is that the combined effect of these proposals will be to move 25,000 cases a year, including 5,500 trials, from the Crown Court to the magistrates’ court. Their intention is to free up capacity in the Crown Court to concentrate on the more serious cases and bring the backlog down.

The CBA, the Bar Council and Circuit Leaders are united in continuing to oppose this plan. It is not a minor change. In its report on the Courts and Tribunals Bill, the House of Commons Justice Select Committee said this:

Clause 6 is one of the most radical measures proposed in the Bill. It would give the power to the Government to double the sentencing powers of magistrates from the current maximum of 12 months to 24 months through a statutory instrument with limited parliamentary oversight.

The Government has presented this as a moderate measure which simply modifies an existing power. However, there are good reasons to question this. In Part 1 of the IRCC, Sir Brian recommended removing the power to vary the maximum sentencing power of the magistrates’ court and permanently setting it at 12 months. Clause 6 is diametrically opposed to what Sir Brian recommended.

Enabling lay magistrates to impose a custodial sentence of 24 months represents a significant shift in criminal justice policy, and we are not convinced that this has been sufficiently justified.

Doubling the maximum custodial sentence will lead to more serious and complex cases being tried in the magistrates’ courts, and this will further increase workload pressures on a court which is already experiencing capacity issues.

House of Commons Justice Select Committee

The CBA’s position is that this change is wrong in principle. Until recently, magistrates’ sentencing powers were capped at six months. Volunteer magistrates undertake an important public service in deciding the relatively straightforward cases which fall into that cohort of work.

The cases which would fall in the 12 months to two year cohort are not only more serious but more complex and more sensitive. Most of these trials would typically last for between two and five days. Magistrates are asked to commit to at least 13 days sitting a year, and often will sit only one day a month. They are not geared up to try multi-day cases.

The Justice Select Committee’s report on the Courts and Tribunals Bill can be found here.

The backlog in the magistrates’ courts is worse than we thought

The Government’s proposal does not remove the backlog or produce swifter justice. It simply moves the case from one queue to another. Magistrates’ courts simply do not have the capacity, the resources or the structure to take on 25,000 more serious, more complex cases.

The backlog of cases in magistrates’ courts now stands at 380,230 cases. When the latest Criminal Courts Statistics were published last week, the Government noted that the backlog of cases had risen by 9.5 per cent. However, the reality of the figures is far worse.

The headline backlog figure is a combination of two different sets of cases. It includes the cases which have been allocated to the Single Justice Procedure, which are straightforward, non-imprisonable offences such as speeding, watching television without a licence and railway fare evasion. They are cases where a guilty plea has been entered by post, or no response received. They are processed by a single magistrate sitting in front of a computer. There are 184,241 cases in the Single Justice Procedure backlog, up by 3.3 per cent on the year.

The more significant figure is the backlog of open court cases, which require either a bench of magistrates or a District Judge. The backlog of those cases stands at 195,969 cases, an increase of 16 per cent in the year.

Within that figure, some regions and courts are performing worse than others. Central London and South London have seen increases of more than 40 per cent. In Merseyside the increase is 25 per cent, and in Cheshire it is 40 per cent. In Wales the increase was 27 per cent.

When the Government first put these proposals together, the central concern was the rising backlog of trials in the Crown Court. However, through effective action by the judiciary, the professions and the Government itself, that has now been brought under control. Since December last year the Crown Court backlog has only risen by 367 cases; effectively it has stabilised. By contrast, the magistrates’ court backlog has surged upwards.

The Government is trying to recruit and train more magistrates, but that has not happened yet. The Justice Select Committee’s verdict was this:

We are not convinced that the capacity of the magistrates’ court can be expanded sufficiently to deal with the potential increases in workload that could result from the changes in the bill. The decline in the number of magistrates and legal advisers is part of a long-term trend which we do not believe can be reversed simply because the government has decided that allocating more cases to the magistrates’ court is the preferred solution to the crisis in the Crown Court.

House of Commons Justice Select Committee

Changes to appeals to the Crown Court

The Government is also currently pressing ahead with its plans to introduce a permission stage for appeals from magistrates’ courts to the Crown Court. Following on from our survey last year, the CBA supports this change for sentence appeals, but not for conviction appeals.

The right of appeal to the Crown Court is an extremely important safeguard. In the year to June 2026, there were 2,418 appeals against conviction lodged, but 672 of them were later withdrawn. Of the appeals which were actually contested, 976 were successful and 770 dismissed, a success rate of 56 per cent. That is an astonishingly high rate of success and clear evidence that the current right of appeal is not being abused. Far from it.

A permission stage for appeals against sentence would not be too onerous a requirement. In the era of sentencing guidelines, the process is more predictable and it is not difficult to identify sentences where something may have gone wrong.

However, the proposal for appeals against conviction is going to place additional burdens at all stages of the process.

First, it places a greater burden on the magistrates themselves to provide reasoned judgments showing how they arrived at their decision. A failure to provide adequate reasons would of itself be an arguable ground of appeal. Magistrates will therefore have to be trained to produce appeal-proof decisions, and take the time to draft them.

Second, it places a greater burden on the person drafting grounds of appeal. There is an access to justice issue: who is going to pay lawyers to review transcripts of a magistrates’ court trial to assess whether there are arguable grounds of appeal?

Third, where an appeal is lodged it places an additional burden on Crown Court judges, who will now have to assess the grounds of appeal, the transcripts of evidence and the other materials advanced in support of the appeal.

Finally, if an appeal is heard in the Crown Court and is successful, that is not the end of the matter. Instead of simply quashing the conviction, the result of a successful appeal would almost invariably be that the case is remitted to the magistrates’ court for a re-trial.

You do not make a system faster or cheaper by making it more complicated, with more stages. The current system of automatic right to a rehearing is simple, straightforward and successful.

Changes to fraud and other complex and lengthy trials

Also remaining is the proposal in Clause 4 that the Crown Court should have the power to try complex and lengthy cases without a jury. The Bill suggests that this will initially apply only to fraud cases, but there would be a power to expand this to other forms of complex or lengthy cases by statutory instrument. The only excluded offences are homicide and sexual offences. It would not be difficult to envisage cases such as drug trafficking or people smuggling being brought within scope. This may represent the thin end of the wedge.

The CBA’s position is that this change is wholly unjustified. In 2025, the Government commissioned Jonathan Fisher KC to produce an Independent Review of fraud in the digital age. In his report to the Government, published in July this year, he was clear that there was no justification for removing the right to trial by jury from fraud cases. His discussion of the issues cannot be bettered. Jonathan Fisher concluded as follows:

Fraud prosecutions turn on dishonesty. The modern test assesses dishonesty by the standards of ordinary, decent people, not by professional or market custom. This points squarely to the jury as the proper tribunal of fact: if criminal liability depends on what the public would call dishonest, the soundest arbiter is a representative cross-section of the public applying clear directions and a structured route to verdict.

The efficiency case remains unproven. Any perceived saving may be illusory: reasoned criminal judgments take time to craft to the criminal standard, and they would invite appeals comparing fact-finding methodologies across different judicial approaches, creating a new field of litigation and simply shifting delay and cost upstream.

Public confidence matters. Trying fraud without a jury risks the perception of opacity or special treatment, particularly in high-profile economic cases of political interest. Jury trial keeps proceedings intelligible in open court to defendants, victims, the media and the public. Remove the jury, and that civic ownership of criminal justice is undermined. Also, it would feed the narrative that powerful defendants are judged behind closed professional doors.

Judge-only trials also carry practical hazards. In our adversarial system, judges routinely see prejudicial material when ruling on disclosure, bad character, hearsay and public-interest immunity; the same judge then becomes the sole fact-finder to the criminal standard. However professional the effort to compartmentalise, the appearance of bias is harder to dispel, and justice must be seen to be done. There are security and reputational risks too: a single named judge is indelibly associated with the verdict and cannot answer public criticism; a jury, by design, absorbs that heat.

Finally, the retention of jury trial for the most serious offences in the criminal lexicon but not for fraud would devalue the importance of fraudulent misconduct and reinforce the historic ambivalence towards fraud as a civil matter rather than a serious public wrong. This would be the wrong message for Parliament to send, in circumstances where the case for fundamental change in the manner of trial is not made out.

Jonathan Fisher KC, Independent Review of Disclosure and Fraud, second report

Jonathan Fisher KC’s report can be found here.

The Judicial Finding of Domestic Abuse: in force from today

Alex Davies-Jones MP, Minister for Victims, Violence Against Women and Girls, and International Justice, has written to the Association to confirm that section 6 of the Sentencing Act 2026 comes into force today, 5th October 2026. It inserts a new section 56A into the Sentencing Code and places a statutory duty on courts to determine and record when an offence involved domestic abuse.

The reasoning is that domestic abuse is not a single offence, and is routinely charged as assault, harassment or criminal damage. That has made it difficult to identify domestic abuse offenders consistently or follow them through the system. The new finding creates a single identifier on the court record which does follow them.

What it means in court

The court determines whether the offence involved domestic abuse, applying the definition in sections 1 and 2 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. That is the assessment a sentencing court already makes when applying the Overarching Domestic Abuse Guideline and treating domestic abuse as an aggravating factor.

What is new is that the finding must be announced in open court, which may be done as part of the sentencing remarks, and then recorded by HMCTS against a dedicated statutory result code. Once entered it forms part of the official court record under Criminal Procedure Rule 5.4, and is visible to the police, probation and prisons through the standard sentencing results pipeline.

The finding is for the court alone. Prosecutors are not required to make it and cannot make it.

It is worth being clear about what the provision does not do, since it will be raised in mitigation within the week. It creates no new offence. It does not alter the sentencing framework, change any guideline, or affect sentence length. It is not part of the sentence. It is a separate statutory requirement to identify and record that the offending involved domestic abuse.

The measure implements a recommendation of the Independent Sentencing Review, and follows the commitment in the Government’s December 2025 strategy, Freedom from Violence and Abuse, to halve violence against women and girls over ten years.

The launch of the Black Barristers’ Committee

The Criminal Bar Association will launch its Black Barristers’ Committee on Friday 6th November 2026, at the De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms on Great Queen Street. Keir Monteith KC chairs the Committee, and The Hon Mrs Justice Obi will be the guest speaker.

The Committee is a standing committee of the Association in its own right, rather than a strand of work within another committee’s remit. As its Chair puts it, it is not a line in another committee’s terms of reference.

Keir Monteith KC, Chair of the Black Barristers’ Committee

The evening runs from 18:00 to 01:00, with wine and canapés on arrival, guest speakers, and a DJ afterwards. A collection will be taken for Kids of Colour and Spark2Life, two organisations working with young people affected by the criminal justice system.

Admission on the night is by named invitation only. The Committee’s work, however, is for the whole membership, and members who would like to be involved in it should write to [email protected].

Child Defendants in the Crown Court

The sixth edition of the specialist bench book Child Defendants in the Crown Court has been published. The authors are HHJ Gareth Branston and Mrs Justice Heather Norton, who is the Judicial Lead for Youth Justice. A copy can be found here.

The bench book brings together not only the law relating to the trial and sentencing of children in the criminal courts but also practical guidance on matters such as facilitating communication and providing support. It emphasises the importance of recognising the individual needs of a child, rather than simply treating them as mini-adults. The guidance is also relevant to cases involving defendants over 18 who are charged with offences committed as a child.

Any advocate who prosecutes or defends a child or children in the criminal courts will need to be familiar with the guidance in the bench book. The importance of both judges and advocates following it has been stated by the Court of Appeal in R. v ZA [2023] EWCA Crim 596, R. v Kamarra-Jarra [2024] EWCA Crim 198 and most recently in R. v X, Y and Z [2026] EWCA Crim 845. It has perhaps never been truer to describe a publication as essential reading.

We are grateful to Judge Branston for bringing it to our attention. We have also asked our Education and Training Committee to consider a talk on the subject, and we will say more about that in due course.

Criminal Pupillage Matched Funding

A reminder to all chambers that applications to the Council of the Inns of Court for matched funding for criminal pupillages close on 17th October 2026. As discussed last week, the Government has provided a fund of up to 1.5 million pounds to support chambers in providing pupillage awards for future criminal barristers.

The scheme has now gone live, and details can be found at coic.org.uk/pupillage-matched-funding. Hayley Dawes of COIC is available to deal with any queries which chambers may have about the scheme and the application process. Contact details are on the website.

A full recording of the CBA’s webinar on the scheme is available here.

Late delivery of prisoners to court: please keep reporting

In July 2026, based on data provided by criminal barristers from over 200 cases, the Bar Council produced its report Observations on the late delivery of prisoners to court.

The key findings included that delays caused by late prisoner delivery are widespread across England and Wales, with barristers reporting delays from all six circuits, including 69 courts and 59 prisons. A quarter of reports said the delay was over five hours, 39 per cent said it was between 30 minutes and two hours, and 34 per cent said it was between two and five hours. Asked to rate the impact on the smooth running of the case from one to five, with five being a significant impact, 69 per cent rated it four or five.

The Bar Council is continuing to collect reports. If you experience a delay in a case, please report it as soon as possible using the form here.