A man accused of breaching a restraining order relating to Jess Phillips will not hear his case at the Crown Court until 2028, the Labor Secretary has revealed, as she urged MPs to back measures to scrap some jury trials.
Phillips said the Courts and Tribunals Bill had his “100%” support, and said his personal experience showed that the “broken” justice system was being used to delay trials and exert control by those who were violent against women.
“I am a victim of delay and I know what it feels like to be a victim of crime,” Phillips told The Guardian. “I see the court system used to control victims all the time; it’s a well-known tactic among those who study bullying and it needs to change.”
Phillips said he believed the alleged breach of the order should have been dealt with in the magistrates’ court and did not know why it had been sent to the Crown court.
“It’s fine with me. I have extra security, I have other safeguards,” he said. “But imagine it was a breach of an order against a violent ex-husband, and it will be heard in more than two years. Are you kidding me? That’s absolutely crazy.”
Phillips said that without measures limiting jury trials, the bill had little chance of reducing the growing backlog in the Crown courts, which has reached record levels of 80,000 cases and means some defendants charged today might not face trial until 2030.
“Attrition means the bad guys get away with it. It leaves the rapists on the street,” he said. “It’s terrible that a rape victim who has had the courage to come forward has to wait for years, but dropping out of the system also means that person could rape someone else.”
The government faces the prospect of one of its most serious secondary revolts since coming to power on Tuesday, as MPs vote on the general principles of measures in the Courts and Tribunals Bill during its second reading.
Plans to limit the number of jury trials in England and Wales were described as “unpopular, untested and poorly documented” by thousands of lawyers in a letter to the Prime Minister this week. Efforts by David Lammy, the justice secretary, to change the mind of Karl Turner, a banker and one of the leading Labor figures opposed to the plans, failed after they met on Monday night.
Lammy has also come under pressure from Jo Hamilton, one of the former postal operators wrongly convicted in the Post Office’s Horizon IT scandal, who told him his plans would “further erode trust in the establishment”.
Lammy and Justice Minister Sarah Sackman are understood to be determined to press ahead with the plans – proposed by Brian Leveson – in their current form, including proposals for a new criminal court where judges will hear cases on their own, magistrate-only hearings for offenses that carry a maximum sentence of two years or less, and judge-only trials for complex fraud cases.
The bill, if passed, would also remove the automatic right of appeal to magistrates’ courts, which Phillips described as a “weapon” that had been used against her and other survivors of gender-related crimes.
Describing a previous case, Phillips said she had been “truly shocked” that a man who had been found guilty of stalking and threatening to kill her “could control me in this way”, after she appealed the decision to the crown court.
“This is a man who has wished for my death and who can say: ‘You can’t go to work today. You can’t pick up your kids from school. Today you will go where I tell you to go. I felt like he had a horrible power over me,” she said. “It was horrible, I hated it and it bothered me a lot. And that’s me: what if this is happening to women who have been abused by their controlling ex-partners?”
A group of 40 Labor MPs, including former Women and Equalities Minister Anneliese Dodds, wrote to Lammy on Monday, urging him to “remain firm” with the reforms.
“The agonizing and growing waiting lists in our courts, which mean that a woman who reports domestic abuse or coercive control today may be told her trial will not come to court until 2030,” they wrote. “That is intolerable.”
Natalie Fleet, Labor MP for Bolsover, who was a victim of harassment and rape, said there was a need to alter the “status quo” in the courts. “This is a difficult bill, but it will pass and the difference it will make for women and girls is enormous,” she said.
