Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollust, and this week we're investigating the crisis in the UK's justice system,

with huge backlogs in Crown and civil courts, a lack of lawyers and judges, along with overcrowded and understaffed prisons.

We'll be to discuss this, we have David Gork, former Conservative Justice Secretary,

Victoria Gathing, head of family law at legal firm Stevenson's,

Rob Priest from the Prison Campaign Group, the Howard League for Peel and Reform,

and Richard Atkinson, Vice President of the Law Society and a criminal defence solicitor.

So I'm going to start with you, Richard.

You know, what's the kind of situation at the moment with the backlogs in the courts?

We know that obviously they were massively increased during the pandemic and obviously

with the barrister strikes last year.

Kind of where are we and where are we with the government's plan to try and bring those

backlogs down?

It's sad to report that we are in a position where the backlogs are growing and not shrinking,

where we have somewhere about 65,000 cases waiting for the Crown Court and somewhere over

300,000 cases in the magistrates court. We've seen a 15,000 increase in cases in the magistrates court over the

past 12 months waiting to be dealt with. So we're in a very parlous position and one that at present

isn't improving. How is it kind of trending essentially and those measures the government

talked about, you know, improving sitting days and that sort of stuff. Is that having any impact so far? It's having an impact in that more work is being done,

but what we are seeing, the other trend that we're seeing is much more work going into the system

than from before the pandemic. And so we're seeing more and more cases going in. So, for example,

in my own particular part of the

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