How can Shabana Mahmood clear the courts backlog without knowing the numbers?

You cannot solve a problem if you cannot measure it. Nick Emmerson, the president of the Law Society of England and Wales, goes to the nub of the crisis in the criminal justice system. “Without robust, rigorous and comprehensive data collection the government cannot hope to understand what is going on in our courts or be able to address the huge backlogs,” Mr Emmerson tells The Independent.

The Ministry of Justice has failed to publish any figures on the activity of the criminal courts this year because of inaccuracies in the statistics, leaving the new government unsighted on how to begin to tackle the backlog of trials that it has inherited from the Conservatives.

The Independent reports that on arriving in office Shabana Mahmood, the new justice secretary, ordered a “complete audit” of the quarterly information that had been due to be published in June, before the election, and which was cancelled. That means that the performance of the courts for the past nine months is a mystery, although the backlog of cases is likely to have soared to 70,000, up from 33,000 five years ago.

This is as serious as the alleged shortfall in in-year funding across government, about which Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has complained so volubly. Not only has Ms Mahmood inherited overflowing prisons and a criminal justice system at its lowest ebb in modern history, but her department does not even have the basic tools of information that it needs to start to repair this vital public service.

She was forced to take emergency action to cut prison numbers, which has been criticised by the Conservative leadership candidates in a show of brazen hypocrisy. It was their government that left prisons in a dangerous state.

Alex Chalk, the former justice secretary, pleaded with Rishi Sunak in the days before the election to order the early release scheme that Ms Mahmood was forced to announce in the days after it. If any of the candidates for the leadership of the opposition want to be taken seriously, they should be apologising for this negligence, rather than attacking Labour for trying to deal with it.

At least Ms Mahmood has reliable real-time numbers for the prison population, so that she could know how close we were to telling the police to stop arresting people. Without information on the number of court cases, however, it is impossible to be sure where the bottlenecks are in the system and where attempts to improve performance should be focused.

As a spokesperson for the Criminal Bar Association told The Independent, “victims of crime and defendants experience this lack of grip on the detail daily – they are the lost humans who are in the lost data”.

Anecdotal evidence is of a system blighted by staff shortages, witnesses failing to appear, hearings cancelled at short notice, such that any of the advantages of the Covid lockdowns, such as the greater use of video links, have been wiped out in the administrative chaos.

All the basic lessons of public service delivery seem to have been neglected by the Conservative government, which meant that as public spending restraint in what was seen as a non-priority department started to bite after several years, it became harder to manage the backlogs.

Sir Michael Barber, the guru of delivery in the New Labour years, is making a welcome return to government to advise Sir Keir Starmer in No 10. Sir Michael’s first rule is to ensure the provision of reliable real-time data so that problems can be identified and quantified.

Naturally, the Ministry of Justice will argue that it needs more money. This is almost certainly true, but before it can have money, it must have reliable data. This is an early test of the new government’s seriousness if it is to claim a return to competence.