Speeches by Caliskan.

“They are very expensive, aren’t they? For example, in Croydon over the past year, almost £3 million has been spent on the Leonardo hotel. I just want to understand because, putting covid aside, there are some longer-term challenges about the existing estate. Is it really the case that the Nightingale courts are tempora…”

“So you view the Nightingale courts as temporary measures.”

“But weren’t Nightingale courts set up to deal with the covid situation? Why have they continued to exist for three years?”

“I welcome the commitment around the everyday improvements. These are just things that should happen well. A well-run organisation—any organisation—does the business-as-usual stuff well. It lays the foundations for trust and confidence that there can be any fundamental change in future for what will be ongoing demand, s…”

“Is the £78 million spend on the Nightingale courts part of the £100 million-odd that you referred to, or is it a different amount as part of the £477 million? Is it in addition to the one-hundred-and-something million that you are referring to now, Nick?”

“Both things can be true. You can plan well, but a Government just does not give you enough resources. Those two things can be true, and if that is the case, it is helpful for you to say that to us. Or, actually, perhaps it did not matter how much we planned, because at that moment in time we did have enough resources, …”

“I understand what you are saying, but there seems to be a contradiction. If there wasn’t capacity—”

“Dame Antonia, forgive me, but the two things that were temporary—the strikes and covid—are over, and the numbers are continuing to increase.”

“If a policy decision is made around policing that would lead to more arrests, that would inevitably mean that more people would be charged and there would be pressure on the courts. Was that not planned for?”

“Given what you have said, do you accept that there is a lack of joined-up thinking between the three levels of justice—policing, courts and prisons—and that one of the impacts has been this huge backlog?”

“They are not temporary measures; they are fundamental policy changes that dictate the number of cases coming in. That is different from a covid period where there would be a temporary demand.”

“The reason I am probing this is that there is such a significant backlog figure and Department officials are being asked to come up with a new way of dealing with it. If it is a temporary issue caused by covid, rather than a longer-term issue caused by a greater flow of cases coming in, that might dictate what structur…”

“But there has been a long-standing issue. It was exacerbated by covid, but there is a view that there was a longer-standing issue. If you don’t agree with that, that is fine; I am just trying to understand.”

“Okay. The reason I ask is that there is a strong view from barristers that by not including or acknowledging the pre-covid figures, there is a false economy—I think that is the phrase they use—so we must recognise the pre-covid trend of the backlog. There was a Guardian article in 2019 and a further article in 2020. Ba…”

“Nick, did you want to add anything?”

“But they are all interlinked, aren’t they?”

“But the trajectory was going up pre-covid. I ask that because £477 million was given to the Department to deal with the covid backlog, and I want to probe that a bit more. I want to understand whether it was just for the covid backlog or whether it was also to tackle an increasing number of cases pre-covid.”

“So there is an acceptance that there was already a trend in train.”

“I guess what I am asking is: are you happy with the approach and the formula that you take when you are commissioning this additional capacity? Fundamentally, it has not worked, has it? There is still a backlog, and you are commissioning them, so while there might be value for money, it is fair to ask: if you were give…”

“Thank you for setting the scene. We know that the backlog in 2019 was just under 40,000 and that it rose by 60% by June 2021. That is pre-covid, so there was already a rise in the backlog of cases.”