09/08/2021
Police Oracle
Work with offenders looks at the evaluation of the pilot schemes
In September 2019, the Ministry of Justice decided to pilot flexible operating hours in courts as part of their modernisation programme, or, in official language to look at: “maximising the use of time in specific court and tribunal hearing rooms to support a more flexible, efficient and effective justice system”. The pilots involved late sittings (4:30pm to 7pm) for civil and family work at Manchester Civil Justice Centre and early (8am to 10:30am) and late sittings (4:30pm to 7pm) involving civil work only at the County Court at Brentford for six months.
Having closed more than 200 courts in the previous decade, the MoJ was keen to use the remaining court estate more effectively and was concerned about the growing backlog of court cases. Of course that backlog has been severely exacerbated by the coronavirus lockdowns. So the publication of the evaluation of these pilots last week was more newsworthy than had been anticipated at the start of the project.
In bald terms, the evaluation concluded that while there were benefits for members of the public, legal professionals and court staff had a lot of worries about changing their work patterns.
The benefits for members of the public were that court cases could be heard at more convenient times which made it easier for those in work to organise, since they need to take less time off work. However, it was not clear whether these benefits would also be felt by people with childcare responsibilities, those who are financially vulnerable or who do not live near the court. Overall the researchers said that members of the public reported some positive effects with case outcome, their perceptions of quality of justice, and reduced average waiting times.
However, legal and court professionals expressed a wide range of concerns including that the longer working hours demanded by the pilots had affected legal professionals’ energy and concentration levels (members of the judiciary did not agree that their own energy and concentration levels had been affected, however).
The pilots had little effect on working hours and workloads for judges and the majority of lawyers reported no impact on their time. But some lawyers’ hours were extended and their workload increased.
The researchers said that legal professionals with young children reported increased contingency planning with colleagues, friends and family, adding to their workload, and making work/life balance even more challenging. They found that professionals who opted out of the pilot often did so because of their childcare responsibilities and this prevented them from having the time and capacity to accommodate displaced workloads.
Overall, legal professionals’ reported experiences of the pilots’ effects on their working lives also tended towards the negative, and there were indications of negative equality and diversity effects on women (because they are typically primary child carers) and junior barristers.
In terms of the assessment of whether these longer operating hours meant that a greater proportion of court time was devoted to productive uses, with less time where the court is not in use, the researchers concluded that the pilots appeared to have had a broadly neutral effect on efficiency of court room use. That is to say that the additional out of hours sessions were found to be “at least as efficient as the pre-pilot sessions”. The evaluators concluded that the pilots could feasibly lead to increased productive court time, if the out of hours sessions are undertaken in addition to business as usual. Of course, this would require additional judicial and staff resource to be put into the flexible hearing times.
This was very much a preliminary study and the researchers said more information is needed. They did however suggest that if these extended court hours became more common, participation in them might need to continue to be a matter of choice for some members of the public and legal professionals. There has been a lot of discussion about the operating hours of the additional “nightingale” courts set up to address the backlogs caused by the pandemic.
The evaluation’s main message was the importance of getting the legal profession onside to make extended sittings a success:
“This is likely to require further consultation and engagement with solicitors’ firms and barristers’ chambers, to encourage them to adapt their expectations of working hours, and their processes for allocating cases to individual legal professionals, to FOH sessions (particularly to ensure that legal professionals work time-shifted hours where they can, rather than extended hours).”