Performance Tracker 2026: Criminal justice system: Overview and recommendations

When the Starmer government took office in July 2024, it inherited a criminal justice system in England and Wales that was fundamentally unable to cope with the level of demand it faced. Nowhere was this more visible or more acute than in prisons, which were at the point  of total shutdown due to a lack of spaces. 

Within a week of the election, the new government was forced to announce emergency early releases to free up space. But the situation in prisons was by no means unique. The probation service and criminal courts were also failing to fulfil their basic functions, leading to inadequate supervision and risk assessment in the former and spiralling case backlogs and years-long delays in the latter. Policing was managing the best out of the criminal justice services – but while crime had been generally falling for years, fewer than half of people saying their local police were doing a good job and frequent claims of ‘lawlessness’1 still left little to celebrate in terms of performance. 

The Starmer government launched major reform programmes across policing, criminal courts and sentencing to try to address these linked capacity crises and so improve performance. But the programmes had mixed results, and some of them might have been more effective if they had been launched sooner after the government took office. Reforms were often uncoordinated, with the new police performance framework likely to drive up demand on criminal courts just as court reforms tried to bring it down.

But there has been significant progress on critical issues, including prison capacity, the criminal legal workforce and police oversight. Moreover, the Starmer administration deserves credit for tackling a set of thorny and often neglected problems. Addressing these is unlikely to win many votes; no prime minister wants to be known as the person who released criminals early. But these problems are corrosive to a functioning justice system and a fair society.

In some of his first moves as prime minister, Andy Burnham rowed back on some planned reforms, pausing early prison releases and casting doubt on whether he would push ahead with planned changes to jury trials. Ultimately, he continued with sentencing changes, with some additional exceptions. But restoring the criminal justice system to order is likely to require further politically difficult decisions, whether that is restructuring police forces, spending more on legal aid or investing in community provision for offenders. Burnham’s broad agenda for more devolution in public services may help reduce demand and improve outcomes for the criminal justice system in the long term.2 But it will not let him avoid further political pain in the coming months and years.

This chapter looks at the police, criminal courts, and prisons and probation. It draws on analysis of publicly available data, 21 semi-structured interviews with policy experts and staff working in these services and visits to two prisons, one crown court and one probation office, speaking to frontline staff and people interacting with the services.

Key findings

Across the criminal justice system:

• Successes and challenges in one part of the criminal justice system continue to shape challenges elsewhere. Demand on criminal courts rises and falls in response to police charges, delays in the courts put serious pressure on prisons, and poor rehabilitative support and risk management within prisons and probation spill over into the community, often cycling back round as demand on the police.
• Staff shortages are an ongoing issue that require continuous recruitment and investment in training new staff – putting a significant burden on existing staff. Where sustained efforts have been made to increase particular workforces – police officers and PCSOs in neighbourhood roles, criminal lawyers – these seem to be effective. But maintaining staff numbers is difficult and requires steady effort and investment, as shown by the drop in prison officer numbers since March 2024. Without this, stop-start recruitment waves put serious pressure on staff and harms performance.
• Reform programmes have not been joined up and risk working against each other. There is still not enough effort being made to connect reform programmes and priorities across services. The police reform programme, for example, runs counter to efforts to devolve more power and make services more preventative and integrated – goals supported by both Starmer and Burnham. There is little evidence that the Criminal Justice Board is providing strategic oversight and connection across criminal justice.

Policing and crime

• Starmer’s government made good progress on increasing police officers and community support officers in neighbourhood roles, with 3,800 more against a first year target of 3,000.
• Knife crime and neighbourhood crime have both fallen, with offences using a knife down 10% since the general election.
• Action plans on knife crime and violence against women and girls set out bold preventative agendas solidly backed by evidence, but will rely on substantial, ongoing investment to succeed.
• The new police performance framework has more teeth, but is likely to draw focus away from local policing priorities and oversight in favour of Home Office priorities – working against Andy Burnham’s devolution ambitions.
• Little progress has been made so far on restructuring local police forces or creating a National Police Service.

Criminal courts

• Capacity in the crown court has increased significantly, but not enough to keep up with demand – meaning the backlog continues to grow and delays keep getting worse.
• In magistrates’ courts, the backlog is growing even more rapidly and more serious cases are taking much longer to deal with. Courts are still closing fewer, less complex cases than before the pandemic, and an ongoing shortage of magistrates is limiting capacity.
• The Starmer government made little progress on reducing demand on the criminal courts or improving efficiency.
• Growing numbers of criminal lawyers, across the courts service, Crown Prosecution Service and private practice, should boost capacity and efficiency. But progress expanding the workforce may stall as criminal legal aid fees have hardly increased in real terms since their 'unsustainable' 2021 level.

Prisons and probation

• The Starmer government’s good progress stabilising the prison population may have been undone by Andy Burnham’s government.
• Early signs of reductions in violence, self-harm and protest in prisons are unlikely to be sustained if capacity remains extremely tight.
• Ongoing staff shortages in the probation service have left it struggling to manage caseloads, contributing to extremely high rates of recall and potentially putting the public at risk.
• Rehabilitation remains extremely poor, with very limited purposeful activity and time out of their cells for prisoners and little access to support and crucial services for those on probation.
• High rates of recall and problems managing high-need offenders in the community will continue to put serious pressure on prison capacity.

Recommendations

Across the criminal justice system:

• Focus on the recruitment and retention of key staff groups, including:  probation practitioners, criminal lawyers, magistrates and district judges in magistrates’ courts, prison officers and support staff, including in administration and analytics.
• Invest in long-term prevention, including broad family support that targets multiple areas of need (domestic abuse, knife crime, anti-social behaviour).
• As part of the drive to devolve more power to local areas, support established strategic authorities to take a more holistic approach to crime and justice spending, coordinating funding and interventions around substance misuse, domestic abuse, housing and so on. This should include considering devolved delivery and oversight models for probation.
• Provide more joined-up strategic leadership across the criminal justice system at a national level to ensure reform programmes work together and understand how demand and performance operates across the system.

Policing and crime

• Implement the police performance framework flexibly, allowing mayors, police and crime commissioners and policing authorities (once established) to set their own priority metrics and provide meaningful strategic direction for forces.
• Commit to aligning police force boundaries to strategic authorities on a one-to-one basis, even where this means splitting up existing forces.
• Ensure mayors, police and crime commissioners and policing authorities (once established) keep the power to sack the chief constable of their force.
• Maintain the focus on neighbourhood policing and targeting knife crime hotspots.

Criminal courts

• Scrap plans to introduce judge-only trials for fraud trials, and to increase magistrates’ sentencing powers and restrict appeals from magistrates’ courts.
• Reclassify minor ‘either-way’ offences as summary only, in line with Sir Brian Leveson’s recommendation. Allow a maximum sentence of a year in custody for these offences.
• Maintain the right to elect for trial in the crown court for more serious either-way offences. If the government wants to abolish this right for some cases, it should only do so for offences where the maximum sentence is two years or less, as Leveson recommended.
• If the government wants to grow, or even maintain, the criminal legal workforce, it must further increase legal aid fees to a sustainable level and then commit to a means of adjusting fees in response to inflation and demand, such as a pay review body.
• Develop a realistic plan to recruit enough people to deal with the increased workload in magistrates’ courts. This is likely to require a combination of district judges and magistrates.

Prisons and probation

• Avoid imposing unnecessarily restrictive and punitive licence conditions on people on probation, to encourage trusted relationships with probation supervisors and reduce administrative recalls.
• Increase the number of probation practitioners at a steady pace, avoiding large staff influxes (and likely exits) as far as possible.
• Provide probation delivery units with more flexibility to hire or commission specialist services, such as housing and mental health advisers, to provide timely access to specialist support. This could be done using some of the budget currently allocated to increase probation capacity and improve performance.
• Reintroduce home detention as a first-line means of managing the prison population, should it become necessary.
• Develop a sentencing model that is transparent and understandable for the public and victims, with an explicit custodial period. For prison sentences, this should set out time in prison and time supervised in the community. Avoid the use of licence periods with no supervision.
• Emphasise purposeful activity in prisons, to try to drive down violence, self-harm and drug use.