The perennial tolerance of delays in civil justice is giving way, as Tony Guise explains
The pandemic has laid bare the deficiencies of civil justice, family justice and the tribunals that had built up over the preceding years through underinvestment – and too slow deployment of what we still quaintly call ‘modern technology’. In the three jurisdictions that make up the UK, the experience of a backlog was not really an issue. There were delays but nothing on the scale of say, the backlog in Greece of some 250,000 cases, or in Nigeria where it stands at 500,000. Many other jurisdictions around the world tell similar tales. But not in the UK, largely because we tolerated delays as they did not amount to backlogs; and because, despite the delays between issue and trial growing longer, we love a good queue.
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To see one of our forecasts being shown to be pretty accurate would be pleasing if the circumstances were other than they are
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