When I was about eleven years old, my father bought a very in-vogue business book: The Goal.

Being precocious, I read it. And then, about twenty years later I reread it. And then about ten years after that, I read it a third time.

The story is a simple one: a man is a factory manager, and things are going badly, and they’re going badly because the factory isn’t efficient, and all the things he thinks increase efficiency decrease it. The mental leap that the factory manager has to take is that in a sequential environment like a production line, he needs to worry about which machine either operates the slowest, or has the most outages.

No matter what you do to speed up other parts of the chain, if this machine is not operating half the time, or if it operates at half the speed of the rest of the production line, then there will be a ton of (expensive) inventory sitting just before it, waiting to be processed.

Criminal justice is like that production line: there are police, the remand system, the Crown Prosecution Service, lawyers, courts and judges, the prison system, and the probation system. The system can only move at the speed of the slowest part.

Which is why simplistic solutions don’t work.

If you double the number of police in isolation, all you manage to do is increase the number of people awaiting trial on remand. (And if there aren’t enough remand places… well, those people just end up getting released interminably while they await trial.) And if there aren’t enough prison places, then it doesn’t matter how many people the courts sentence, you’ll end up not sending them to prison because there are no places for them. This happens at every step.

In The Goal, the factory manager is told to walk the floor. The constraint will be obvious: where is the inventory building up. Where are the delays? That’s the place you need to solve. (And, by the way, once you know where the constraint is, it usually turns out there are multiple ways to solve it.)

Is there an obvious bottleneck in the UK’s criminal justice system right now? Is there a place where there are a large number of people not being processed?

Yes.

The bottleneck is in the court system. Let me give you some frightening statistics:

• At the end of September 2019, the open caseload in the Ministry of Justice (Crown Court) was about 38,000 cases. By September 2024, it had more than doubled, rising to 73,105 open cases.
  
• By March 2025 the backlog stood at 76,957 open cases, an 11 % increase on the previous year and again a record high.
  
• The median time from offence to completion in the Crown Court was 355 days in Q3 2024, compared with about 253 days in Q3 2019, so about 100 days (nearly 4 months) longer on average. And this is the tip of the iceberg, it ignores all the cases that still haven’t made it this far.
  
• The number of people on remand in prison rose sharply: since about March 2020, the remand population increased by approximately 44% to around 14,591 (in the reference cited) and now stands at about 17,000-plus, representing nearly 20% of the total prison population.
  
• And this is before we even talk about lower courts, where the problems (such as a frequent inability to find barristers to even take on some Legal Aid cases) have resulted in the system grinding to an embarassing halt.

Britain needs to sort out its criminal justice system. If a country is unable to prosecute and convict those who break its laws, then people are incentivized break them.

And that makes life worse for everyone.

What a shame that the man in charge (a former Director of Public Prosecutions, no less) seems so disinterested in a solution.

Robert