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.

Imagine being four years old. One minute your dad is reading you a bedtime story. The next he is lying on the doorstep of your family home, drawing his final breaths.

Blood is seeping from bullet wounds to his face and body, pooling in the hallway, while the innocent eyes of a young boy gaze from the nearby staircase, unable to comprehend he was witnessing an event that would change his life forever.

“I still get that image of my dad in nightmares,” Andrew Wilson, now aged 24, says as he relives the childhood horror he experienced, two decades on from the gangland-style attack that killed his father, Alistair.

Warning: Contains descriptions some readers may find distressing

Andrew is quiet as he shows me a picture of him and his bank manager dad, taken hours before the fatal evening of 28 November 2004.

The beaming smiles of father and son, captured on a grainy film camera, resemble old photos that usually gather dust in well-thumbed family photo albums. The picture was taken during a relaxed walk in the woods, and shows them both wearing blue outdoor jackets, holding hands. Andrew comes up to his dad’s hip and is leaning his head on his arm.

But this is all Andrew has left. It is the last image of his father alive.

The gunman vanished into the night

The contrast between the family fun on a Sunday afternoon with the brutal violence that would follow the same day is eerie.

The murder of Alistair Wilson is one of Britain’s longest-running unsolved cases.

Even the brightest and most seasoned detectives have been baffled by the fact a gunman carried out such a brutal execution in a sleepy Highland town before vanishing into the night, never to be caught.

No motive has ever been established, although in recent years police have zoned in on a planning dispute across the road.

The absence of his father is something Andrew has been forced to come to terms with.

“A lot of my friends’ dads were very good. My uncles all tried to have their influence on me but it wasn’t the same. I remember my grandad teaching me how to kick a football properly… that’s something my dad would have taught me”, he says.

Speaking with a Highland lilt in his voice, he ponders the small but significant moments he missed out on like sharing his “first legal pint” with his dad on his 18th birthday.

“I blanked out a lot of my childhood memories,” he says.

The knock at the door

It all began on Crescent Road, a long side street in Nairn. Victorian three-storey houses sit near a church, while a nearby beach looks out across the Moray Firth. Crime was rare – there hadn’t been a murder in Nairn for almost 20 years.

Alistair was upstairs with his two young boys, getting them ready for bed when there was a knock at the door. His wife, Veronica, answered a stranger who asked for her husband by name.

Envelope with ‘Paul’ written on it

Nothing about that interaction seemed to raise suspicion or cause alarm, and Alistair left the boys to come downstairs.

The stranger handed him an empty blue envelope with the word “Paul” written on it, and he closed the door. But bewildered, Alistair opened it again to ask questions. He was instantly shot in a gangland-style attack.

Andrew talks about the family’s plans to visit his dad’s grave, to commemorate the anniversary of his murder.

“He would have been 50 this year,” he says. His tone of voice is matter-of-fact, but his gaze wanders off.

“The whole family got together and marked it.”

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A planning dispute

Speculation has run rife over the years in Nairn as to the motives behind the murder. Could it have been connected to Alistair’s career at the bank? Could a hitman have carried it out? Andrew says the worst part was when his mum was rumoured to be a suspect.

“It was difficult when people would say it was mum,” he says, emotion audible in his voice for the first time. Sounding protective, Andrew edges forward in his seat.

“I got in trouble at school for fighting because someone would say it was my mum,” he says. “I’d already lost a parent, and my other one was being made out to be something I knew they weren’t. That was my biggest struggle.”

Owner remains a key witness

Andrew is full of praise for how his mother dealt with being the focus of such hurtful gossip, while being both mother and father to her two sons. “She has done an amazing job,” he says.

In more recent years, police thought a possible motive could be linked to a planning objection Alastair had to a large decking area being built at the pub across the road from his house. His opposition was made public three days before he was killed.

Could a planning grievance really trigger such violence?

Police have stressed the then owner of the venue, who now lives in Canada, is a key witness and not a suspect.

‘Murkier and murkier’

Relations between Alistair Wilson’s family and Police Scotland were typically strong. There was no reason to question the strategy and the abilities of officers to do their jobs properly. When detectives told them, 18 months ago, that they were going to make an arrest, they were elated – finally it seemed justice might be done. But it wasn’t to be – the police went silent, and after chasing them for an answer, they found out the arrest had been cancelled.

From there it got “murkier and murkier”, Andrew says, with no explanation given. He and his family feel “let down” by the police, he says, and have no confidence they will ever catch the killer.

They are now calling for Police Scotland Chief Constable Jo Farrell, who was appointed in October 2023, to resign and take responsibility for her “callous” approach, after she refused to meet the family on multiple occasions.

‘Committed to answers’

“If her force has let us down for 20 years and she can’t get a hold of it, how are they going to get us somewhere?” Andrew asks. Police Scotland did not address questions from Sky News about the future of the chief constable.

Sky News confronted Jo Farrell as she arrived at a meeting in Glasgow on 1 December.

“I won’t be resigning, she said, when asked if she would quit over “failing to get a grip” on this.

“I am committed to us getting answers and finding the people responsible for the murder.”

She walked away when questioned further about her competence, or lack thereof, as the Wilson family see it.

New senior detective in place

The new senior detective reinvestigating the murder from scratch has said she is determined to find the answers to crack the case.

Detective Chief Superintendent Suzanne Chow, who has met the family face to face, admitted she is currently “not in a position” to arrest anyone and conceded the various inquiries over the years have been “protracted”.

DCS Chow defended her boss’ decision to cancel the arrest.

“The chief’s not being callous,” she said.

‘We are a tick box’

While this row between the family and police continues there are questions about whether Andrew and his family will ever find closure.

“All we can do is wait,” Andrew says. “We are a tick box to police. Ever since the arrest was pulled it is clear we are just a number to them.”

Photos from the Wilson family