The senior presiding judge for England and Wales, Lord Justice Edis, is now reviewing 181 cases, some of which entail retrials and some of which feature children as the alleged victims.
A delay that the judge deemed “an unacceptable state of affairs from the point of view of the complainants, the witnesses, the defendants, and justice generally” has resulted in the cases being heard in crown courts throughout England and Wales from 2021.
He continued: “The system suffered some shocks over the last four years because of the pandemic, we didn’t used to have this problem, and the current situation is the product of those shocks.”
