A British band were robbed at gunpoint on the first day of their US tour.

Frontman of the band Sports Team, Alex Rice, told Sky News that they had stopped in their tour bus at a Starbucks in Vallejo, California, on Tuesday – the morning after landing in San Francisco.

While he and his bandmates were ordering breakfast, they heard someone say “has anyone got a white sprinter van outside? It’s being robbed”.

“Natural reaction, you sprint towards it and try to stop it, and immediately [one of the robbers] pulls a gun,” he said.

“He pulls a gun, he sort of points it at our tour manager Lauren, there’s another guy loading stuff out and a third guy in getaway car.

“We all sprint back into the Starbucks. They’ve taken a huge amount of personal stuff and musical equipment from the middle of our van.

“So, haven’t played a note yet, one minute in, we’ve got our stuff taken.”

Rice added that the “really shocking bit… is we called the police straight away,” but found “their reaction to an ‘as it’s happening,’ ‘live gunpoint event’ was ‘okay if you could just file the report online’.”

He added: “People say ‘get down’ as if the rains just started coming down outside, as if the weather’s changed so people should go inside.

“That’s been the saddest bit to see, the level of resignation, the fact that people take this in their stride now.”

Laptops, in-ear monitors, cameras, and other personal items were taken in the robbery, but the band’s instruments were safe “because the back of the van is fortified”.

“The most immediate concern for us is passports, to be honest,” Rice told Sky News. “Three of us had our passports taken.

“It’s a ‘try to get to the consulate and get that sorted for Christmas’ sort of situation.”

The band are promoting their forthcoming third album, Boys These Days, and will continue their US tour despite the incident.

“We’re really lucky in that we’re able to do that,” Rice said. “We’ve got a lot of friends in San Francisco. People have been incredibly supportive.

“It’s a terrible thing to have happened but we’re lucky not to have had our actual instruments taken – which has happened to us in the past.”

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Sports Team were nominated for a Mercury Prize in 2020 for their debut album Deep Down Happy, which went to number two on the UK Albums Chart.

Their 2022 follow-up Gulp! marked their second top 10 record, reaching number three in the charts.

Are you free on 9 March 2026?

You might be a traumatised victim of crime, you may be the suspect accused of wrongdoing, either way you’ll be waiting for the next 460 days… and probably beyond.

That’s exactly what we have just seen inside Leicester Crown Court. Not just once, but case after case shunted into 2026.

The judge in court four isn’t doing it by choice but necessity.

“It is sad because it happened a very long time ago,” he says of the next case, as he consigns everyone involved in an already long-running saga to a further two-year wait.

The judge then turns to us, two Sky News journalists sat making notes on his rather mundane case.

“Can I ask why you are here?” he asks directly.

We’d been told the delays in crown courts across the country are becoming intolerable and the system is breaking down – causing enormous stress, anger and dismay to all concerned.

The judge then takes the unusual step of addressing the crisis to us in open court.

“I have cases day in, day out that I am having put over. It can be years, if you lose a date in 2025 it is 2026.

“All these cases you have to decide who gets priority… fraud cases are being put on the back burner. In my position I have cases put over for months, even years.”

As a rule, judges don’t do interviews, so this is as close as we’ll get to hearing what he thinks.

He is clearly exasperated and remarkably candid: “I don’t know where things are going to go but they aren’t going to get any better,” he says.

It is a small audience – two court administrators, two barristers, a defendant and two Sky News journalists – but the judge has had enough of this incredibly slow justice.

He is asking victims, defendants, families on both sides, witnesses, the police, court staff, barristers and solicitors to just keep waiting. Every week the backlog gets bigger.

‘Broken’ system

Leading barrister Mary Prior KC is sad at the crumbling system she navigates every day.

“People are still having trials. People are still having their cases heard. It’s the speed that that’s happening…

“I don’t like saying it’s broken,” she says. “But it is broken because it’s not effective. It’s not functioning in the way it used to function.”

She is the chair of the Criminal Bar Association which represents 3,600 barristers – many of them now exasperated by the gridlock.

“There’s this old saying, isn’t there? Justice delayed is justice denied.

“It’s incredibly difficult to have to look people in the eye and say ‘I’m sorry your trial is going to be adjourned until 2025, 26, 27 and now 2028’,” Ms Prior KC adds.

Between cases, a defence barrister in court four leant backwards to us in the public gallery after the judge’s monologue and said: “Well, what do you expect if you close so many courtrooms?”

Every day around 15% to 20% of court rooms remain idle in England and Wales – cases can’t proceed if there are not enough judges or barristers to run them – but that’s one part of a multi-faceted problem.

The police are charging more people who then need to go to court and on the other side the prisons are backing up and releasing inmates early.

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Some barristers have had enough and are moving away from criminal law to work in less chaotic areas of the legal profession.

As we walk to the next court we pass a trolley used to shift paperwork around which has been shoved under some stairs. There’s a handwritten sign taped to it reading “DO NOT USE – BROKEN TROLLEY.” It feels symbolic.

Another KC explains to us in the corridor that the nationwide computer system they use for tracking cases and finding the details they need has gone down again. For a few hours, it’s making it impossible for him and his colleagues to effectively represent people.

To cap it off, the prison van for his murder case is two hours late. Again. The two teenagers he is prosecuting for murder arrived just before lunchtime – it happens most days.

The KC is waiting, the judge is waiting, the twelve members of the jury are waiting, the accused teenagers are waiting – the victim’s family is waiting. It’s them who must be suffering the most.

‘The whole system is f***ed!’

We were invited into the barrister’s robing room – which you might think would be quite a grand serene space – it isn’t.

There’s an electrician trying to fix another fault in a box on the wall.

The shared wood topped desk is full of barristers looking harassed with laptops open, their wigs sat next to them – most don’t have the preparation time they need for their next case.

It’s mid-afternoon when a stressed court clerk rushes in.

“I need someone to defend and someone to prosecute right away,” she says apologetically.

The case should have already started but it can’t without barristers to represent both sides. The chaos means there’s no point working out why nobody has turned up, it just happens.

Annabelle Lenton, a young barrister, rolls her eyes, sighs and volunteers.

“I’ve got no idea what is going on today,” she tells us exasperated at having to pick up another case with no time to look at it beforehand.

After the chaos she tells us why it matters to her they keep going.

“If you think about it, if we don’t have a functioning criminal justice system, we are in a position where you have people roaming the streets who are committing serious offences and there’s no retribution for that.

“People aren’t getting justice quick enough and if they’re not… what’s the point in any of it? People will start to give up.”

It’s also one of the reasons why significant numbers of young barristers are moving away from criminal work to other less stressful areas of law.

“It’s f***ing s**t. The whole system is f***ed!”

‘Like the wild west’

Understandably the straight-talking prosecutor we meet next doesn’t want us to use his name but he invites us into one of the tiny and tatty consultation rooms.

“People are now getting away with crimes because of the delays – cases that never actually go ahead because people pull out or there’s nobody to take them. I’d say that’s happening most weeks now.”

He prosecutes big cases in crown courts in the Midlands and the southeast of England.

“It’s bad here in Leicester, Snaresbrook (east London) is like the wild west – biggest court house in Europe with twenty courts, some of them are always empty and the delays are ridiculous.”

In Leicester they even have a ghost court – it’s called courtroom 99. It doesn’t exist – it’s just somewhere to move the cases that won’t get heard on the day they were supposed to.

It leaves victims of crime cast adrift and questioning whether or not to pursue their case.

The chief executive of the charity Victim Support, Katie Kempen, said: “The anxiety, the pressure, the despair, the long waits actually become unbearable for victims, especially when their court date keeps moving, keeps being lost.

“They really prepare themselves… if they find that the case is then adjourned on the day we see real acute distress and despair, sometimes we find that victims just can’t go on and so their opportunity for justice is lost.

“When they can’t actually get that day in court and they can’t actually see justice done for the wrong they’ve been a victim of, it is just absolutely devastating.”

As we leave down the newly gritted steps of the court building in Leicester another man who works for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) stops to chat – also intrigued by our presence.

“It’ll take years to fix,” he says gloomily. “Actually probably a decade.”

As many as 300,000 children aged five to 15 were missing from education in England last year, a report from the Education Policy Institute (EPI) has found.

The figures – which compare GP registrations with school enrolment data – mark a 40% increase in unaccounted absences since 2017.

According to the EPI, an estimated 400,000 children are not in school, a 50% increase in seven years. Of these, nearly 95,000 are registered for home education – double the number from 2017.

More than 50,000 students were also found to have left the state education system by Year 11, with no clear records explaining their exits.

Associate director at EPI Whitney Crenna-Jennings said: “Many thousands of children are missing or go missing from education in England – this is a critical issue that demands our attention.”

The data shows that dropouts peak in Year 10, just before students take their GCSEs, making up about a fifth of all exits.

The report also states that vulnerable groups, particularly teenagers, are disproportionately affected.

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Ms Crenna-Jennings added: “These children, often the most vulnerable, face increased risks of harm and poor outcomes.

“The government must work across departments and data systems to ensure every child receives their legal entitlement to education.”

The EPI says schools should document reasons for de-registering students to improve oversight and prevent illegal exclusions.

Campaigners had previously welcomed the register for missing children in the King’s Speech, but this is still not compulsory.

The EPI also recommends that there is a mandatory register by integrating data from education, health and other administrative data sources.

Data from the report uses GP registrations as there is currently no data source able to provide a definitive number of children in England.

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The new data suggests that better links between different sectors such as education, health, and local authorities are needed to track vulnerable children better.

The report also says more research is needed to develop interventions for preventing disengagement and support for the missing children.