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.”
In 2019, nine men were jailed for raping and abusing two teenage girls living in a children’s home in Bradford.
One of the victims, Fiona Goddard, says more than 50 men raped her.
When the government began to talk about offering councils money for local inquiries, Fiona hoped Bradford would be one of the first to take up the offer. But there didn’t seem to be much enthusiasm.
The council was quick to point out that there had already been an independent case review into Fiona’s case, along with four other victims.
This, then, was Fiona’s first reasoning for wanting a national inquiry: The council felt it had done all that needed to be done. Fiona didn’t.
The Independent review, published in July 2021, found that while in the children’s home, Fiona “went missing almost on a daily basis”. The police attitude was that she could look after herself – she was “street-wise”.
There was “agreement by all agencies that Fiona was either at risk of Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) or actively being sexually abused and exploited”. But “this was not addressed by any single agency”.
And “when Fiona became pregnant at the age of 15, there was little curiosity or enquiry who the father was”.
So, obvious failings were discovered.
The predictable response was that lessons had been learned and new processes put in place. But no one seemed to be held accountable.
Grooming gangs timeline: What happened, what inquiries there were and how Starmer was involved
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Grooming gangs: What happened?
Ms Goddard told Sky News: “In my serious case review she [Jane Booth, the independent chair] found seven incidences at least, in them records that she found, of them not reporting sexual abuse or rape or assault, from as young as eight years old, and one of the incidences I literally turned up covered in blood and they didn’t report it.
“That is not just misunderstanding a crime, that is making intentional decisions not to report the sexual abuse of a child.”
She adds: “Let’s not forget, these people still work within social services and the police force.”
Not only did this Independent review not satisfy Fiona, but it also didn’t begin to reflect the levels and scale of abuse Fiona had experienced outside of Bradford.
‘I literally turned up covered in blood and they didn’t report it,’ Fiona says
Asked where she was trafficked to, Fiona rattles off a list of cities.
“Blackburn, Rotherham, Rochdale, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Oldham – never Telford, I’d never even heard of Telford until it all came out if I’m honest – Nottingham, Oxford.”
Then she remembers she didn’t go to Oxford – men from Oxford came to her – but the point is made.
Local enquiries can’t possibly begin to explore the networks of men who traffic women, often down routes of drug trafficking being done by the same gangs.
Bradford Council told Sky News it contributed to the national Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) and published more than 70 reports where child sexual exploitation was discussed and has implemented findings from the independent local review which included Fiona’s case.
Fiona believes there are numerous connections leading back to Bradford – but victims from each city often believe their abusers are at the centre of it.
We’ve spoken to grooming victims across the country, and in 2022, a case was reopened in Humberside after a Sky News investigation, where we found diary entries, texts, photos, and school reports all indicating that teenage victims had been abused.
Read more on this story:
Telford child abuse victims speak out
What we know about grooming gangs, from the data
The women who blew whistle on Rotherham
One of them was “Anna”, who also wants a national inquiry. She believes there is a national pattern of police forces not believing victims or even criminalising them instead.
Obtaining her own police records using a Subject Access Request (SAR), Anna found officers’ attitudes towards her were similar to what we heard with Fiona in Bradford, blaming her abuse and injuries on “lifestyle choices of her own”.
Anna said: “Every time I look at my Subject Access Request, I still think it’s shocking.
“It was the same sort of terminology – lifestyle choices, liar, attention seeker, and the majority of it was negative.
“It was really rare that I’d come across something where they were actually listening or they were concerned.”
Humberside Police told us: “As the investigation is active, it is imperative we protect its integrity; as such are unable to comment on aspects of the investigation as this could impact or jeopardise any criminal or judicial proceedings.”
But it is years now since Anna first reported her abuse, and she believes the police have left it too late to gather evidence.
She told Sky News: “I think it’s either happening everywhere, or young people have been taken everywhere.
“I think the attitudes of the professionals, the police, social services, from what I’ve heard and seen, they seem very similar in every area.”
The government-commissioned rapid review by Baroness Casey is due to be published next week and is expected to call for a national inquiry into grooming gangs.
Like Anna and Fiona, many victims will welcome Sir Keir Starmer’s early response accepting the recommendation.
They will want the inquiry to probe into the operations of the perpetrators – who they are and how they are connected.
But they will also want clear accountability of the people and organisations who failed to act when they reported their abuse – and an understanding of why, so often, authorities fail to protect these vulnerable girls.
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