Record 14,507 People Being Held on Remand in England and Wales During Court Backlog, Say MPs

Tory MP urges magistrates and judges to consider 'better alternatives'

UK Justice Secretary Dominic Raab with a prison officer at the opening of category C prison HMP Five Wells in Wellingborough, United Kingdom, on March 4, 2022. Joe Giddens/PA

The number of people being held on remand awaiting trial in England and Wales has risen to 14,507, the highest it has been for 50 years and a jump of 44 percent in 18 months, according to a committee of MPs.

The backlog of trials caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and last year’s barristers’ strike have been blamed for the rise in the number of remand prisoners.

The Justice Committee’s report said: “In the first half of the last decade, there was a decline in the remand population. However, recent years have seen a significant increase—as of 30 September 2022, the daily remand population stood at 14,507. This represented a 44% increase from 31 March 2020 when the population was 10,043. The remand prison population is currently the highest it has been for at least 50 years.”

The new figures also showed 770 people had been held in prison for two years without trial, a jump of 60 percent from December 2021.

The report said many of those 770 would be acquitted or would be given sentences shorter than the period they had spent on remand.

There are currently 60,000 cases awaiting trial and it is taking an average of 280 days before cases come before crown court trials.

‘Custodial Remand Is a Necessary Tool’

More than half of those on remand were being held for non-violent offences and Sir Bob Neill, the chair of the Justice Committee, said: “Custodial remand is a necessary tool in the justice system for protecting the public from dangerous offenders or ensuring those at risk of absconding are brought to trial. But too often it is being used as an easy option in cases of low-level repeat offending or social problems, with little thought for the lasting consequences this can have on the individual.”

Neill, who is the Conservative MP for Bromley and Chislehurst, said: “Depriving someone of their liberty under any circumstances can mean losing employment, accommodation, and familial contact. For this to happen when an individual is yet to be convicted of a crime is a serious measure and should not be taken lightly. Yet those subject to remand are not given adequate support to mitigate these effects.”

Almost half of prison suicides in England and Wales in recent years have involved inmates on remand.

In February 2019, Garry Beadle, 36, committed suicide in Durham prison a few days after being remanded in custody for the first time in his life for a relatively minor offence.

In January 2020 Liridon Saliuka, 29, hanged himself in his cell in Belmarsh prison in London. Saliuka had been awaiting trial for a murder he always insisted he was innocent of, and in November 2022 an inquest found there had been “significant and multiple failings” by the authorities.

The inquest heard Saliuka had suffered serious injuries in a car crash in 2018 and suffered from back pain which was exacerbated if he did not have a special mattress.

The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Charlie Taylor, told the committee: “If someone comes into prison, they are not routinely getting the support on things like finance, benefit, debt, housing, direct debits, and bills that they would have expected to have in the past. I went to places like Belmarsh, for example, where almost overnight the rug had been pulled on many of those services. There was a real concern that prisoners were remanded and spending longer periods of time on remand and the population was growing, but some of the services they might have expected simply were not there.”

Remand Prisoners Spending Too Much Time Locked in Cells

Taylor said: “We find too many prisoners spending too much time locked up behind their door. What we often see is that the remand population is last in the pecking order when it comes to things like the allocation of jobs, education, or training, which means that it is the remand population that is likely to be spending longer behind their door every day.”

Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust, told the committee prisons holding remand prisoners were often the ones struggling the most to maintain effective regimes and “as a result there was a lack of meaningful activities for those held on remand to engage in.”

Neill said there were often “better alternatives,” including electronic tagging or conditional bail.

The report said: “Conditional bail is a good alternative to remanding defendants to custody while also placing restrictions on the activity of an individual to help ensure they do not commit further crimes while on bail or abscond before their trial. However, there is no point applying bail conditions that are so onerous that it [is] unrealistic that a defendant will be able to comply with them.”

The report urged the government to “engage with the judiciary on how to improve the consistency of bail conditions, for example, by introducing a framework of guidelines on bail conditions ... to ensure they provide an effective alternative to custodial remand.”

The Epoch Times has contacted the Ministry of Justice for comment.