(CN) — Her Royal Majesty's courts are disappearing — and going online. Sold-off Victorian courthouses have become swanky cocktail bars and high-end cafés. Less appealing concrete-clad courthouses are simply gone — razed to the ground and replaced by new developments. Others have been turned into apartments, and people sleep and eat where once judges, solicitors and court recorders worked.
In the past decade, about 250 courts and tribunals in England and Wales have been closed and sold off as officials in London push a sweeping, and controversial, effort to centralize and modernize Britain's justice system, and cut costs.
Still more courts are expected to be sold off as Britain dismantles a system of courts put in place during the second half of 1800s meant to allow everyone to have a county court within 7 miles of home.
The closings include about half of the magistrate courts in England and Wales. These are lower courts that deal with a variety of criminal offenses and some civil matters. In some places, the nearest magistrate court is now more than 50 miles away. The closings are forcing defendants, witnesses, police, lawyers, judges and court workers to make long and costly trips back and forth.
The government is using profits from the sale of the courthouses to fund a $1.2 billion plan to digitize the court system. The sales have raised about $281 million so far. At the same time, about 4,500 court staff have been laid off, and about 2,000 more are expected to be axed by 2023.
This major overhaul of one of the world's most vaunted, and respected, justice systems is giving many in the world of justice in Britain pause. There's mounting evidence this push to modernize is hurting many of the same people who end up in the justice system: the poor and the vulnerable.
“The bottom line is that I don't think the government cares about the people I represent using the courts,” said Sue James, a lawyer who specializes in housing cases and a critic of the court closings, in a telephone interview with Courthouse News.
The closings and push to put court matters online is now the subject of a review by the House of Common's Justice Committee in London.
On May 21, the committee held its first hearing and witnesses who appeared before it painted a picture of a court system that has become overburdened and less efficient since the Ministry of Justice began selling off courts in 2010.
“My first recommendation is to stop closing more courts until we know the impact and see how it is actually affecting people, so that the questions that are being asked now have proper answers, based on statistics and research,” John Bache, the chairman of the Magistrates Association, told the committee.
He said the Ministry of Justice does “not seem to have any idea of the endgame” and that it has not done a thorough assessment of how the closings are affecting the justice system.
The problem, he said, is that the changes could hurt “the most vulnerable” because they face traveling long distances to get to court and may not be “digitally competent.”
The Ministry of Justice aims to steer about 2.4 million cases that take place every year in courtrooms into virtual online courtrooms. It is common now for lawyers to speak with defendants by video and for people to enter pleas to minor offenses — such as driving violations and not paying train fares — via a computer screen. Recently, the government made it possible to file for divorce online.
The government claims the changes increase “access to justice” and make the system more efficient. It says many courthouses were underused and that falling crime rates have made it unnecessary to have so many courts.