Hundreds of trials are being derailed because prison vans fail to transport the defendant to court on time, figures show.
A Guardian analysis found 207 crown court trials in England and Wales were declared “ineffective” in 2023 – meaning they were postponed on the day – because the prison escort and custody service (Pecs) failed to produce the accused. That figure was up 44% on the year before and a near trebling of the number from five years ago.
There is growing concern about rising court backlogs, wasted funds and harrowing ordeals for victims and defendants forced to navigate the justice system. Lawyers say the rise in escort delays is both a cause and symptom of an increasingly dysfunctional system. The two private Pecs providers, GeoAmey and Serco, say they are facing increasing challenges, many of which are outside their control.
In the Old Bailey murder trial of the alleged killers of 10-year-old Sara Sharif, the judge, Mr Justice Cavanagh, has expressed his frustration about delays. After a two-hour late start to a hearing last month, he told the jury: “I’m afraid we’ve beaten yesterday’s record for delays, it’s a very late start again… I’ve made my unhappiness clear.”
One of the main challenges facing prison escort services is the sharp rise in the number of prisoners held on remand, often awaiting trial in jails that are not local to the appropriate courts. As of June this year, 17,070 people were being held in prison either awaiting trial or sentence, up 86% since 2019. But the rise in ineffective cases caused by failed transport has outstripped the rise in prisoners on remand.
In 2013, the government reported Serco for potential fraud after an audit found some staff from the contractor falsely recorded prisoners as having been safely delivered to court. The police investigation was later dropped.
In 2019, Boris Johnson’s government awarded Serco a 10-year, £800m Pecs contract with an expanded remit to cover the whole of southern England. GeoAmey’s contract, covering the north of England, the Midlands and Wales, was also renewed.
At the time, the government said that contractual changes, including new vehicles to help track prisoners, would “realise significant benefits during the 10-year term of the contracts such as reducing the number of delays at court”.
Since then escort delays have increased. The figures show 70% of trials postponed because of escort failures under the renewed contract were in London and southern England, the area overseen by Serco, where 51% of trials took place.
Serco pointed to the geographic and demographic challenges of working in London and the south-east, and said a national van driver shortage was especially acute in the capital. It also noted the significant increase in the court backlogs since the pandemic.
A spokesperson said: “The Serco prisoner escort team is working hard under challenging conditions to deliver significantly increased numbers of prisoners between prisons and courts on time. We continue to work closely with the Ministry of Justice and we are recruiting and training more drivers and officers.”
A GeoAmey spokesperson said it had a 99.9% success rate in delivering people to court, according to self-reported figures. They said: “The process of escorting and delivering those in custody to court is highly complex and has multiple dependencies, some of which are outside of our control.”
James Oliveira-Agnew, the secretary of the Criminal Bar Association, said: “It is all a sign of dysfunction in the system. Serco have to be more efficient and get prisoners to court when they say they are going to. That has always been a problem. It has been exacerbated by the fact that we now have so many people coming into the system waiting for trials and trial listings are constantly shifting. We are currently not set up for that.”
Trials listed for five days can now often run to six or seven days because of escort failures, he said, at the cost of tens of thousand of pounds for each day lost.
The Guardian figures underestimate the impact of Pecs failures as they include cancelled trials but not those that are only delayed by a matter of hours, and they also exclude non-trial hearings.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Fewer than 0.2% of criminal court hearings are delayed because of prisoners arriving at court late where Pecs contractors are responsible. But the prison capacity crisis inherited by this government has put pressure on the whole criminal justice system, and we are working with partners to ensure even more prisoners arrive for court hearings on time.”
