Inside the UK’s ‘wild west’ court system where people may have to wait until 2028 for justice to take place
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.
Leicester Crown Court
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.
Chair of the Criminal Bar Association Mary Prior KC
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.
Read more from Sky News:
‘Justice system is letting us down’
Prisoner released early thanks prime minister
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.
chief executive of Victim Support Katie Kempen
“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.”
The last blast furnaces left operating in Britain could see their fate sealed within days, after their Chinese owners took the decision to cut off the crucial supply of ingredients keeping them running.
Jingye, the owner of British Steel in Scunthorpe, has, according to union representatives, cancelled future orders for the iron ore, coal and other raw materials needed to keep the furnaces running.
The upshot is that they may have to close next month – even sooner than the earliest date suggested for its closure.
Read more: Thousands of jobs at risk as British Steel consults unions over closure
The fate of the blast furnaces – the last two domestic sources of virgin steel, made from iron ore rather than recycled – is likely to be determined in a matter of days, with the Department for Business and Trade now actively pondering nationalisation.
The upshot is that even as Britain contends with a trade war across the Atlantic, it is now working against the clock to secure the future of steelmaking at Scunthorpe.
The talks between the government and Jingye broke down last week after the Chinese company, which bought British Steel out of receivership in 2020, rejected a £500m offer of public money to replace the existing furnaces with electric arc furnaces.
The sum is the same one it offered to Tata Steel, which has shut down the other remaining UK blast furnaces in Port Talbot and is planning to build electric furnaces – which have far lower carbon emissions.
These steel workers could soon be out of work
However, the owners argue that the amount is too little to justify extra investment at Scunthorpe, and said last week they were now consulting on the date of shutting both the blast furnaces and the attached steelworks.
Since British Steel is the main provider of steel rails to Network Rail – as well as other construction steels available from only a few sites in the world – the closure would leave the UK more reliant on imports for critical infrastructure sites.
However, since the site belongs to its Chinese owners, a decision to nationalise the site would involve radical steps government officials are wary of taking.
They also fear leaving taxpayers exposed to a potentially loss-making business for the long run.
The dilemma has been heightened by the sharp turn in geopolitical sentiment following Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The incipient trade war and threatened cut in American support to Europe have sparked fresh calls for countries to act urgently to secure their own supplies of critical materials, especially those used for defence and infrastructure.
Read more:
Car manufacturers fined £461m for collusion
There were no winners from Trump’s tariff gameshow
Gareth Stace, head of UK Steel, the industry lobby group, said: “Talks seem to have broken down between government and British Steel.
“My advice to government is: please, Jonathan Reynolds, Business Secretary, get back round that negotiating table, thrash out a deal, and if a deal can’t be found in the next few days, then I fear for the very future of the sector, but also here for Scunthorpe steelworks.”
British Steel declined to comment.
UK
Prince Andrew’s Pitch@Palace branded ‘crude attempt to enrich himself’ as Chinese spy documents set to be released
Prince Andrew’s efforts to make money from his Pitch@Palace project have been branded as a “crude attempt to enrich himself” at the expense of “unsuspecting tech founders”, as new documents may shed more light on what he and his team have been attempting to sell.
Today is the deadline for documents to be released relating to Prince Andrew‘s former senior adviser Dominic Hampshire and his interactions with the alleged Chinese spy Yang Tengbo.
In February, an immigration tribunal heard how the intelligence services had contacted Mr Hampshire about Mr Yang back in 2022. Mr Yang helped set up Pitch@Palace China, a branch of the duke’s scheme to help young entrepreneurs.
The alleged Chinese spy, Yang Tengbo, has links with Prince Andrew
Yang Tengbo. Pic: Pitch@Palace
Judges banned Mr Yang from the UK, saying his association with a senior royal had made Prince Andrew “vulnerable” and posed a threat to national security. Mr Yang challenged that decision at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC).
Since that hearing, media organisations have applied for certain documents relating to the case and Mr Hampshire’s support for Mr Yang to be made public. SIAC agreed to release some information of public interest. It is hoped they may include more details on deals that he was trying to do on behalf of Prince Andrew.
So what do we know about potential deals for Pitch@Palace so far?
In February, Sky News confirmed that palace officials had a meeting last summer with tech funding company StartupBootcamp to discuss a potential tie-up between them and Prince Andrew relating to his Pitch@Palace project.
The palace wasn’t involved in the fine details of a deal but wanted guarantees to make sure it wouldn’t impact the Royal Family in the future. Sky News understands from one source that the price being discussed for Pitch was around £750,000 – there are, however, reports that a deal may have stalled.
Photos we found on the Chinese Chamber of Commerce website show an event held in Asia between StartupBootcamp and Innovate Global, believed to be an offshoot of Pitch.
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Who is alleged Chinese spy, Yang Tengbo?
Documents, released in relation to the investigations into Mr Tengbo, have also shown how much the duke has always seen Pitch as a way of potentially making money. One document from 21 August 2021 clearly states “the duke needed money at the time, and saw the relationships with China through Pitch as one possible source of funding”.
But Prince Andrew’s apparent intention to use Pitch to make money has led to concerns about whether he is unfairly using the contacts and information he gained when he was a working royal.
Norman Baker, former MP and author of books on royal finances, believes it is “a crude attempt to enrich himself” and goes against what the tech entrepreneurs thought they were signing up for.
Read more:
Who is Yang Tenbo?
Virginia Giuffre says she has days to live
Emails between Andrew and Epstein revealed
He told Sky News: “The data given by these business people was given on the basis it was an official operation and not something for Prince Andrew, and so in my view, Prince Andrew had no right legally or morally to take the data which has been collected, a huge amount of data, and sell it…
“And quite clearly if you’re going to sell it off to StartupBootcamp, that is not what people had in mind. The entrepreneurs who joined Pitch@Palace did not do so to enrich Prince Andrew,” he said.
Rich Wilson was one tech entrepreneur who was approached at the start of Pitch@Palace to sign up, but he stepped away when he spotted a clause in the contract saying they’d be entitled to 2% equity in any funding he secured.
He feels Prince Andrew is continuing to use those he made a show of supporting.
He said: “It makes me feel sick. I think it’s terrible – that he is continuing to exploit unsuspecting tech founders in this way. A lot of them, I’m quite grey and old in the tooth now, I saw it coming, but clearly most didn’t. And a lot of them were quite young.
“It’ll be their first venture and you’re learning on the trot, so to speak. So to take advantage of people in such a major way – that’s an awful, sickening thing to do.”
We approached StartupBootcamp who said they had no comment to make, and the Duke of York’s office did not respond.
With reports that a deal may have stalled, it could be a big setback for the duke – especially with questions still about how he’ll continue to pay for his home on the Windsor estate now that the King no longer gives him financial support.
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