That’s Not Justice

There is a word for the merger of State and corporate power to the point of physical violence. As the indefatigable Tristan Kirk writes:

Magistrates are sitting in secret to allow utility companies to break into people’s homes, granting warrants based on applications they have never even seen, a London Standard investigation has found.

Energy firms and the courts were rocked by scandal in late 2022 when it was revealed that hundreds of thousands of warrants – including for the homes of some of Britain’s poorest people – were being “waved through” by magistrates.

The government promised a clean-up of the practices, including more help for vulnerable families, and a new court process was designed to deal with applications for warrants.

But a year-long probe by The Standard has uncovered disturbing practices at courts across England and Wales, with magistrates now doing their work almost entirely in secret and handing out hundreds of warrants at a time without ever looking at the applications.

Huge amounts of trust is being placed in debt agencies working for energy firms, and when failures to abide by the law are actually uncovered, they are swiftly brushed aside.

Magistrates also appear to be allowed to carry out the work from home, rather than in court, with officials having no clue whether they are even in the country as they dial in to hearings.

“It makes us furious that this is still going on”, said Simon Francis, who leads the campaign group End Fuel Poverty Coalition.

“It’s not just about people getting behind on their energy bills, it’s getting a warrant to break into people’s homes.

“We know there is pressure on the court system, but having your home broken into without a magistrate having looked at the documents – that’s not justice.”

The original utility warrants scandal broke in late 2022, when the i newspaper reported on vulnerable families, many of whom had been hit by the cost-of-living crisis, having agents for energy firms breaking into their homes and fitting expensive pre-paid meters.

It emerged that magistrates courts across the country were approving mass batches of warrants for debt agencies acting for the utility companies.

Hearings that were observed in open court lasted just a few minutes as large bundles of warrant applications were simply rubber-stamped.

In response to the scandal, a temporary halt was placed on the fitting of pre-paid meters, energy firms have been made to pay out £70m in compensation, and regulator Ofgem has opened investigations into the practices of British Gas, Utilita and Ovo.

A new court system for the approval of warrants was drawn up and approved by Chief Magistrate Paul Goldspring in April 2024, intending to create greater safeguards in the system.

These included requirements for energy firms to give at least ten days’ notice of a warrant being applied for, to make at least ten attempts to contact someone before asking a court to approve the fitting of a pre-paid meter, and only going to court after a month has passed since the last bill went unpaid.

The judge also opened the door for uncontested warrant applications to be deal with en masse in private court sessions, by writing into the rules that “there is no requirement for applications to be heard in open court”.

Flaws in the process

The Standard was granted permission to watch one of the private session at Uxbridge magistrates court in November last year, as a magistrate and a legal adviser went through the process on an Microsoft Teams call, with an agent for the utility companies unable to be seen while joining by phone.

Following the Chief Magistrate’s rules, the agent swore on oath to tell the truth and answered general questions about all 131 applications he was presenting, suggesting all those affected by the warrants had been visited, properly informed of their human rights, and there is justification for entering the premises.

Then ten applications were selected at random and checked in detail. However, two failed as the agent accepted that one of the rules on giving time to respond had not been complied with.

Those two warrant applications were withdrawn and two more were selected at random, and they passed.

With a total of ten now satisfactorily scrutinised, the magistrate then approved the rest of the warrants in a stroke, bringing the hearing to a close.

No attempt was made to check if any of the other applications had suffered the same failings as the two that were scrutinised and then withdrawn.

The Standard asked officials at Uxbridge magistrates court to see the paperwork that underpinned the hearing, to independently check if the process is working as intended.

After being put through a legal disclosure process that lasted a staggering ten months, it was revealed that the court does not even hold the full written applications for warrants, even though the Chief Magistrate had directed that courts must receive a “file which comprises the written information for each case”.

At the hearing The Standard attended, the magistrate was able to see names and addresses of the proposed subjects of the warrants, together with a copy and paste justification to enter premises “in order to inspect the fittings, pipes, lines or plant, to ascertain the quantity of fuel conveyed to the premises, to cut off or discontinue the supply, to ascertain whether the supply has been reconnected following disconnection, to remove or replace any meter or other fitting, or do any other such thing for which they have a right of entry under Schedule 6 of the Electricity Act 1989 if needs be by force.”

All the warrants were sought by Blackthorne Utilities, a company which specialises in administrative support to the energy sector. The utility companies whose bills are said to have gone unpaid were not even named on the court papers.

While Blackthorne’s agent had sworn an oath to tell the truth, the information provided orally to the magistrate about the 12 scrutinised warrants could not be independently checked by the court, as there was no detailed paperwork uploaded to the system.

It is understood that the same system is used at courts around the country every week, and in an October 2024 memo, magistrates court legal advisors were advised by a senior figure at HMCTS that while some District judges ask to “see the Information… seeing it isn’t necessary”.

Tom Franklin, chief executive of the Magistrates Association, said whole batches of applications should be rejected if there are concerns that failures to comply with legal requirements go beyond isolated cases.

“Experience has shown that the relevant evidence is the same in the vast majority of cases, so the court selects a random sample of applications from the batch and scrutinises them”, he set out.

“As long as the magistrates are satisfied from the sampled cases that the correct procedures were followed by the utility company – including ensuring that vulnerable people haven’t been unfairly treated – the rest of that batch of applications would be granted, following confirmation of the information on oath.

“If any of the sampled applications do not pass scrutiny, the magistrate should reject that application and continue sampling until they were satisfied that the failure was isolated or a one-off, in which case they can approve the batch.

“If however, the magistrate is not satisfied after this further sampling (ie: they find more failed applications), they should reject the whole batch of applications.”

Secret justice

When utility companies seek warrants to enter homes and businesses, because of unpaid bills, suspected faults, or suspicious activity, the subjects are usually written to in advance. A small number contest the warrant, but most do respond before a court is asked for approval.

The Standard’s attempts to observe and scrutinise the uncontested warrants system has been met with unprecedented levels of secrecy and misdirection, lasting more than a year.

At the conclusion of the hearing in Uxbridge last November, the legal advisor was asked whether what had just taken place was in open court, and neither she nor the magistrate could provide a firm answer.

A court official later said the hearing had not been conducted in open court.

Before the paperwork for the hearing could be disclosed to the media, a District Judge at Uxbridge insisted that all the utility companies involved and every single one of the 131 subjects of the warrant applications had to be contacted to check if they objected.

That process lasted five months, turning up a handful of replies. There was then an unexplained further five month delay before a judge released the papers, confirming that since the information they contained amounted to little more than a list of names, addresses, and debt figures, there was no issue with providing it to a journalist.

“This to me, although on an excel spreadsheet and therefore in a slightly different format, is no different to any other court list which would be available to the press”, wrote District Judge Kathryn Verghis, in her judgment.

Members of the public are blocked from watching the private hearings, and while journalists can ask to observe uncontested warrants being granted, they must do so with no advance information of the types of cases being handled.

In reality, that means that few – if any journalists – will speculatively seek to watch the hearings.

HM Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) has refused to provide the lists of warrants granted in the early part of the year, insisting it would take too long.

In the hunt for information, The Standard was put through a fruitless month-long Freedom of Information process to try to access the court lists, only to then be told that they are exempt from FOI laws.

And a HMCTS spokesperson cited security concerns for refusing to provide lists of warrant applications in London on a rolling weekly basis.

“The procedures for utility warrant applications are set out by the independent judiciary, which all courts must follow to ensure appropriate scrutiny”, they said.

“There is no legal requirement for uncontested warrants to be heard in open court. Often warrants involve highly sensitive information that can’t be shared publicly or may put police investigations at risk. We try to accommodate press attendance for hearings where possible.”

As a result, the hearings that take place are effectively secret, and it is impossible to determine how many thousands of warrants are granted by the courts each week.

The scandal has strong echoes of concerns around the Single Justice Procedure, which is similarly allowed to operate behind-closed-doors, avoiding proper scrutiny of the work of the magistrates court.

In 2023, it was reported that magistrates could determine as many as 1,000 warrant applications at a time, in hearings lasting just 15 minutes. And the i newspaper found evidence of more than 500,000 warrants had been granted in the space of a year and a half.

In November 2023, when the new court process was being developed, End Fuel Poverty Coalition wrote to Ministers to raise concerns that a “cloak of secrecy” appeared to have remained in place, pointing to uncertainty over journalist access to information.

“The same old magistrates’ practices seem to have continued”, they wrote. “Distant hearings, nodding through batch applications, not checking for vulnerability and a failure to inform customers that they are due to have their case heard. No one can be confident of getting justice under the current system.”

Mr Francis said this week that the system appears to be a “kangaroo court”, and said their 2023 concerns were never answered.

Tom Franklin from the Magistrates Association told The Standard: “We are very concerned by the suggestion that in some instances these procedures are not being followed by utility companies, and that your reporter had such difficulty gaining access to see these cases for himself.

“We firmly believe that justice must not just be done, but that it must be seen to be done, and know the immense value of accredited journalists being able to attend cases heard in the magistrates’ courts”.

Work from home?

The Standard also questioned the arrangements for the hearings, using an Microsoft Teams link instead of the Cloud Video Platform (CVP) which is in widespread use across the courts.

In the 2024 rules, the Chief Magistrate allowed that “uncontested hearings will be held by live link”.

HMCTS says Teams is permitted for use in these hearings, and relies on a 2021 version of the Magistrates Court Rules that says a livelink can be agreed to “on application or on the court’s own initiative”.

When questioned, it asserted that there is no need for an actual application or court direction for each hearing.

Rules were drawn up during the pandemic that allowed magistrates to dial in to court hearings from home, but that law was repealed in 2022.

HMCTS said it does not know where each magistrate is located when they deal with warrant applications online, directing questions instead to the judiciary.

The Standard has asked the Judicial Office for clarity on whether magistrates are permitted to do their work from home, their regular place of work, or even from a different country.

A judicial spokesperson said: “The Chief Magistrate is investigating concerns raised, and we will respond fully in due course.”

The 2022 utility warrants scandal prompted a national firestorm over the behaviour of energy firms, particularly towards vulnerable customers, and the way the courts were operating.

Promises of reform and better practices were made, but the outcome appears to be a process that is even less transparent than before, is harbouring potential flaws, and as a consequence will lack credibility with the public.

And:

Dashing for the lift at Southwark Crown Court is a barrister late for his first hearing of the day. Juggling a gown, a half-drunk coffee, and a horsehair wig, he has just seven minutes before court is due to start.

“Don’t worry, don’t rush”, says a fellow barrister, holding open the lift doors. “Van’s not here.”

Three words that are depressingly familiar to lawyers and court users across the country.

The behind-schedule barrister knew in an instant that he need not worry about holding up court proceedings and risking the wrath of a judge. But he also knew it would be yet another day marred by delays.

The “van” is the secure transport which brings prisoners from jails to courts on days when they are due in the dock. Without the defendant, there is precious little that can be achieved.

The official statistics paint a positive picture of defendants in custody being brought to court punctually almost all the time. More than 99 per cent of the time, in fact. But those in court know that in reality there is a chronic problem, now brought into sharp relief when the government is contemplating scaling back jury trials in its search for ways to speed up the justice process.

The Labour government’s controversial plans come as the case backlog in the Crown Court reaches 80,000, with some trials now being listed in London as far away as 2030.

The idea of juryless trials in the Crown Court – first floated in the summer following an independent review by retired judge Sir Brian Leveson – has been embraced by Justice Secretary David Lammy.

Writing for The Standard, Mr Lammy argued the change is needed to “confront an emergency” in the criminal courts, as victims are withdrawing from cases in droves due to the chronic delays.

But his plans have been met with fierce opposition from the legal community, with lawyers pointing out daily failures in the courts system which have nothing to do with juries.

They say fixing the system and utilising the courts at maximum capacity should be tried first, before there is any attack on the ancient right to jury trial.

“David Lammy is missing solutions one to 99, and jumping to solution 100,” said criminal barrister Joanna Hardy-Susskind.

“I sit in murder trials and the defendant is being held in custody. And somebody needs to drive a van from the prison to the court. And they don’t manage it, on day one, day two, they don’t manage it for weeks. And we sit there waiting and time is lost.

“I sit in courtrooms where we have to send the jury home and they are sitting there in hats and scarves, and they can’t decide the verdict.

“We deal with cases where the air conditioning won’t work and the cells are too hot to keep human beings in them. So we waste another day. It is endless.”

A chronicle of delay

On that Monday morning this month at Southwark, one of the defendants stuck in the back of the delayed prison van making its way through London is a suspected drug dealer accused of a serious assault and carrying a knife.

His case is listed for 10am, but news filters through the court staff that he’s unlikely to be in the building before 11am.

This means the hearing must go to the back of the queue, after another plea hearing scheduled for 10.30am and two sentences which will fill out the rest of the morning.

The prosecutor and the alleged drug dealer’s defence lawyer start the familiar process of shuffling their diaries. Having hoped to be on to the next case by mid-morning, this one is now going to occupy half a day at least.

Upstairs in court 10, lawyers, court staff, the judge, and jury are all sat around waiting for a defendant on trial for voyeurism to arrive.

“Maybe it’ll come on at 11am”, says the clerk, wearily, through a grimace. Nearly an hour of court time has been lost by the time the trial actually gets going.

Downstairs in another courtroom a judge sends out his jury to continue their deliberations on a trial, despite one of the three defendants not yet even being in the building.

“The defendant is not here, we’re not sure why”, observed the clerk, succinctly summarising a familiar situation for courts around the country.

The judge’s decision - that the jury’s deliberations over verdicts did not need to be held back by the prisoner transport failings – is typical of the spirit within the courts: Overcome the hurdles and take pragmatic steps to keep the wheels of justice turning.

The judge himself then got on with hearing legal argument in a different case.

Delays have become so endemic in the courts that staff, lawyers, and judges are accustomed to coping. Official reports simply are not drawn up to record every single delay - staff are already buried under heavy workloads, the bureaucracy is an extra burden, and there is scepticism that anything will actually change.

How big is the problem?

The problems with prison transport are evident in court, but determining the scale of the crisis is harder - and the government does not look likely to help with public understanding any time soon.

Last month, Justice Minister Jake Richards answered a Parliamentary question and claimed that 99.8 per cent of prisoners were “delivered on time by the Prisoner Escort and Custody Service (PECS) contractors” in the last year.

He said this figure equated to 2,151 reports of delayed prisoner arrivals at court, with 832 blamed on problems at the prison, 200 pegged on “wider system issues”, and the private PECS contractor at fault in just 1,119 instances.

When the official data is set against there being hundreds of courtrooms across 70 crown courts of England and Wales, all sitting for 50 weeks a year, it would appear that there is barely an issue to talk about. 

However, The Standard has seen official data which shows that there are very limited instances when prisoner delays are actually officially recorded.

A detailed analysis of Ministry of Justice data also shows alarming increases in the numbers of Crown Court trials having to be adjourned because a defendant in custody was not brought to court.

A total of 177 trials in London could not happen in 2023 and 2024 due to a missing defendant, and another 20 in the first three months of this year. This represents around a five-fold increase on figures from 2019.

It is commonplace in court for the prisoner transport – the notorious missing “van” – to be blamed for an absent defendant. But repeatedly in Parliament, Ministers questioned about the PECS contracts have insisted that the companies responsible – Serco in the South, GEOAmey in the North – are meeting expectations more than 99 per cent of the time.

Does the data match reality?

Earlier this year, The Standard obtained MoJ data on the performance of the prison transport service at courts around London.

Private contractors are supposed to face penalties of just over £600 in the Crown Court and £375 in the magistrates court when a defendant is at least 15 minutes late for a scheduled court hearing, and when the company is found to be at fault.

In May, across London’s crown court estate, there were 40 penalties imposed for delayed hearings. The following month, 11 penalties were imposed.

The figures are low, when compared to the scale of the problem that is known to exist. The data reveals there were no penalties at all across May and June for lateness of prisoners at the Old Bailey, Wood Green crown court, and Isleworth crown court.

HM Courts and Tribunal Service says courts themselves are supposed to report incidents of delay, and the contractor itself can also submit a report. It says performance of the contract is monitored, including with site visits to courts.

But the lack of penalties does not necessarily indicate everything is fine. Instead, it could mean delays were simply not recorded, or the transport provider was not thought to be to blame when things went wrong.

Importantly, though, a penalty may have been avoided thanks to the diligence of court staff and patience of lawyers, rearranging the hearing schedule until the prisoner has arrived so that - technically - there was no delay.

It is also understood that prison transport contacts, last signed in 2020, do not necessarily lead to penalties when a prisoner is being brought from a jail that is not local to the courthouse.

A second MoJ data release to The Standard focused on performance at Southwark crown court in June, showing there were 249 “scheduled prisoner movements” to the central London courthouse and 11 of them officially ended in a delay.

However none of those incidents led to a penalty being imposed on the PECS contractor.

Barristers have spoken to The Standard about enduring chronic delays while sitting on trials across London in the last year.

But attempts to widen the data release beyond Southwark, to examine the official records when there were known delays that derailed trials, were rejected by the MoJ.

When it was suggested that refusing to release more data would thwart proper scrutiny of the system, the MoJ took exception to this being characterised as “blocking”. But it did confirm that Freedom of Information requests had indeed been rejected, albeit with “a clear explanation of why some detailed information cannot be disclosed”.

“The vast majority of prisoners are delivered to court on time, with fewer than one per cent of criminal trials delayed due to late arrival where the PECS contractor is responsible”, the spokesperson insisted.

“Where delays do occur, they can stem from a range of factors – including processes within prisons and wider system pressures – and we are working across the justice system to reduce these.”

The Standard’s requests for data were turned down due to “commercial sensitivities”, as the MoJ believes that giving the public a fuller picture of prisoner delays and penalties incurred would “prejudice” the interests of its contractors.

It added that it has “detailed arrangements in place to hold suppliers to account for their performance against the contract”, including quarterly private board meetings and private reports delivered to Ministers.

When Lord Foster of Bath made a Parliamentary request for the penalties imposed on the PECS contractors broken down by courthouse and date, a Minister did not assert the need to protect commercial interests. But he refused to provide the data, blaming instead the “disproportionate cost” of answering the request.

The government’s move towards jury trial reform has not, so far, been supported by an argument that it would improve the court process itself.

It is a plan for a radical re-organisation of the justice system, to include loading more cases on to magistrates courts, blocking the right to elect a Crown Court trial for some types of crime, and switching a jury for a single judge in trials where the expected penalty would be less than three years in prison.

The strongest argument for Justice Secretary David Lammy is that the system itself is falling apart, failing victims who either endure chronic delays or walk away from the system.

Backbencher Karl Turner, MP for East Hull and a qualified criminal barrister, is among the leaders of a rebellion within Labour ranks. He has taken to sharing daily updates on social media of the scores of Crown Court rooms which sit empty every day.

The Labour government has increased sitting days to record levels since taking office last year. But last week, between 63 and 71 courtrooms sat empty each day at courts around England and Wales.

Some lawyers are talking of strikes, and Mr Lammy faces an uphill challenge to convince them and his own backbenchers that cutting down on jury trials will fix a court system where courts and docks consistently stand frustratingly empty.

‘It’s not good enough’

At Inner London crown court this month, a judge walked into his courtroom - sweltering hot due to a flawed heating system - to tackle a day’s list that included three different jury trials and two sentencing hearings.

The first 20 minutes of the day were taken up with why a man who has been continually breaking his restraining order cannot be sentenced as planned. Lawyers in the case knew before they arrived that a further hearing about the basis of his guilty plea would be needed. But the hearing was still mystifyingly listed by the court.

At 10.23am, lawyers for the first trial trooped into court, and it swiftly became obvious that the case was not ready yet.

The defendant is accused of possessing an array of drugs, the Crown Prosecution Service has decided to abandon more serious drug dealing charges, and the prosecution barrister does not know why that decision has been taken.

The 29-year-old defendant, who is in custody, has not been delivered to court on time, and misses much of the discussion as the barristers and judge pick over what should happen next.

The accused man claims to be a victim of modern slavery, exploited by criminal gangs in the drugs trade. But the key reports on this point - which will form a centrepiece of the trial - have not yet been produced.

“It’s not your fault, but it’s not good enough”, the judge tells the prosecutor, before adjourning the trial until July next year.

Next up is a man suspected of sexually assaulting a woman on the Tube last December.

The judge knows the third trial in his list takes priority, so lawyers in the case of the alleged Tube groper are sent away to see if another courtroom can host the trial.

Eventually, they realise there is simply no judge and no courtroom free to take them, and the case goes off until February next year.

Back into the hotbox of a courtroom, the judge starts his trial at 11.49am, deals with some preliminary legal argument, and then it takes eight minutes to select and swear the jury.

“Sometimes it’s too hot, sometimes it’s too cold, but it’s never just nice”, the judge tells the assembled jury of 12 members of the public, in a reference to the courthouse which has decayed in the face of years of underinvestment from government.

Along the corridor in one of Inner London’s grand old courtrooms, temperatures are similarly fiery and staff have thrown open the windows to let in the cold December air. It’s a makeshift solution to their daily problem, but also a powerful visual display of waste.

The government contends that trials can be shortened by as much as 20 per cent without a jury. Judges would no longer need to deliver an opening speech about how the trial will be conducted and they can avoid summing up the evidence at the conclusion of the case.

The main part of a trial – the evidence and legal submissions – would have to remain intact, even if only a judge was overseeing the case.

The deliberations of a jury are widely assumed to take longer than that of a judge, although there is an expectation that judges will deliver written reasons for their verdicts, a document that will take time to prepare and take them away from sitting on other court hearings.

‘The interpreter is not here’

Since the government announced its court reform agenda, some judges have made pointed comments about the value they see in the jury system.

“We cannot try cases without you. We really can’t. You are a valuable part of the system”, said Mrs Justice Norton, as she concluded a manslaughter trial at Maidstone crown court.

“The jury system is the best and fairest way of deciding the outcome of trials”, said Judge David Herbert at Northampton crown court, as he set a jury their tasks.

Lawyers have taken to social media in their droves to highlight the problems they see each day that grind the system to a halt.

Judges are given “quick” procedural hearings to deal with at 10am, ahead of their trial resuming at 10.30am, but the short case turns out to be more complex and lengthy than expected.

Equipment deployed in courtrooms to show CCTV and images during trials breaks down, forcing delays while technicians are found to fix the problem.

Cases are not sufficiently prepared by the CPS, then dropped last minute on a prosecuting barrister.

And there is a persistent issue with interpreters. They speak the wrong language or dialect, they are not booked to arrive in time for the pre-court meeting between lawyer and defendant, or they simply do not turn up at all.

Earlier this year, a woman was convicted of stealing a £188,000 collection of paintings from former Premier League footballer Edgar Davids. She maintained her innocence right up to the start of the trial, before pleading guilty as jurors were about to be chosen.

That moment - the start of her trial - was meant to be a year earlier, in September 2024, but did not happen then because something had gone wrong in organising a videolink for Mr Davids to give evidence from Dubai.

It was a basic organisational failure, but one that caused enormous delay and risked the chance of securing justice. In other circumstances, a different victim may have simply walked away rather than waiting another year.

‘Chaos’ in the courtroom

At Woolwich crown court last week, a 17-year-old boy was due to face an allegation of sexual assault. But he never made it into the dock that day.

He was an hour late from Feltham youth detention centre for the 10am hearing, and a Senegalese interpreter had been booked but did not turned up on time.

However before the case could be heard, the boy’s defence barrister revealed that the CPS uploaded the evidence to the digital case system at 5.45am on the morning of the hearing, no indictment had been drawn up, and the prosecutor had no idea who the case worker was.

“It’s like a comedy of errors”, exclaimed the defence barrister, to which the clerk replied: “It’s chaos.”

The judge, wanting to get on with her other hearings, adjourned the case for a month.

The government is telling the public that court reforms must happen to ensure that justice is done in something approaching a timely fashion. Victims deserve a prompt trial, as indeed do defendants.

But the view from many in court is that while juries sometimes take their time to reach a verdict, it is the fundamental and basic failings in the system that are the real causes of the chronic delays.

“It is not juries that cause delays”, says Riel Karmy-Jones KC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association. “Rather it is all the consequences of the years of underfunding that look set to continue: the artificial cap on sitting days, the crumbling courts, the inadequate technology, the failure to deliver prisoners to court on time, the lack of interpreters, and issues with funding of expert witnesses.

Of the legions of barristers she represents, she adds: “We have been holding things together for years. We have been warning that this day was coming, but have been ignored.”

It turns out that the PECS contractors have met their obligations if defendants arrived before 3pm, hence the figures cited by Ministers.