England keeps jury trials: the government has rewritten its criminal courts reform

England and Wales rewrote their criminal courts reform before it even returned to Parliament. The most contested idea — letting a judge sitting alone decide some serious criminal cases without a jury — has been dropped. Everything else in the package was promised faster.

What exactly has the government dropped?

The plan to expand judge-alone trials in the Crown Court: serious cases will continue to be heard by a jury of twelve. Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Alex Norris said he had “heard the strength of feeling” on the proposals and decided to change course so the rest of the reform could start far earlier. The Ministry of Justice statement calls juries “the cornerstone of British justice”.

Why was the reform needed at all?

Because the backlog has hit a record. Ministry of Justice figures show 80,829 open cases at the Crown Court at the end of June 2026, a series peak and 3% more than a year earlier. Cases open for a year or more reached 23,706, up 22% year on year, and more than half of them are sexual offences or violence against the person. The median age of an open case is now 203 days. The magistrates’ courts have their own queue: 380,230 open cases.

So what does change in the courts?

Four things, each attacking the queue from a different side. First, magistrates will be able to hand down longer sentences — today the ceiling is six months for a summary offence and twelve months for an either-way offence. Second, technical and lengthy fraud and financial cases will be allowed to go before a judge alone, sparing jurors months-long trials. Third, the court will have the final say on where a case is heard, so defendants accused of relatively minor crimes cannot elect a jury trial to game the system. Fourth, millions are promised for court technology, including virtual hearings and AI to help list cases, as Courts Minister Sarah Sackman KC set out.

When does this take effect?

The next date is 13 October 2026, when the Courts and Tribunals Bill returns to the House of Commons. That is not the finish line: the Lords come next, then Royal Assent. Separately, the government promised to publish its full response to both parts of Lord Leveson’s review in the coming weeks, and to write into the Bill a statutory commitment to consider the impact of the structural reforms on ethnic minorities and people of different backgrounds, led by an independent reviewer.

How does this touch an ordinary resident?

Most directly through the jury summons, which keeps landing in letterboxes: if serious cases stay with juries, those twelve seats still have to be filled from the electoral register. The summons does not care where you were born — the law looks at your age, five years of residence and your entry on the register. We explain how that duty works, how long it lasts and what it pays in “A jury summons has arrived”. If a case touches you from the other side, see what to do if you are arrested and how stop and search works.