Claire Waxman OBE, the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, has responded to the government’s announcement of proposed changes to the Courts and Tribunals Bill. She said:
“Sir Brian Leveson was commissioned to examine how our courts could be modernised and made fit to meet the demands of a 21st-century justice system, capable of delivering swifter justice for victims, both now and years into the future.
Sir Brian concluded that investment and operational improvements alone cannot fix a system designed for a different age. Structural reform was necessary not only to relieve immediate pressures, but to address the underlying causes of delay and build a system fit for the future. Ministers accepted that diagnosis and made it the foundation of their plans to reform the courts.
If a central element of that reform package is now being removed, victims are entitled to ask whether what remains will be enough to meet the challenge. Indeed, they are being asked to place their faith in a plan that ministers themselves previously argued would not be.
The lessons from the prisons crisis should be clear: postponing difficult decisions rarely solves problems. More often, it simply stores them up for the future.
Victims need hope. They need to know this is genuine reform that matches the scale of the challenge: reform that will alleviate their prolonged suffering, rather than an easy compromise that delivers only marginal improvements today while leaving both the justice system, and the victims who rely on it, vulnerable tomorrow.”
In a press release on 4th October 2026, the Justice Secretary, Alex Norris, announced:
- Plans for some criminal trials to be heard by judge alone to be scrapped under changes to court reforms;
- Wider changes to criminal courts to cut the record number of cases waiting to be heard will be fast-tracked;
- [that] ‘Victims will not be waiting endlessly for justice’.
To read the press release in full, click here.
