No inspectorate sees the whole criminal justice pathway, and none inspects the courts at all

Four separate inspectorates cover police, prosecution, prisons and probation. Their joint inspection programme under the Police and Justice Act 2006 is periodic, consensual and topic-based, and no body holds a standing statutory remit to follow cases end to end from arrest to release or to hold the system, rather than the agencies, to account. Court administration is entirely uninspected: HM Inspectorate of Court Administration closed in December 2010 and was formally abolished by a 2012 order, leaving HMCTS, running a record backlog with a quarter of courtrooms unused on some counts, accountable only to internal audit. The Law Commission has separately proposed bringing even the CCRC under an independent inspectorate.

The Crown Court backlog is a system failure in which police charging, CPS readiness, courtroom availability and prison transport all interact, and no inspector owns the interaction. Victims' experiences fall between four remits. An uninspected HMCTS ran the Common Platform rollout with no independent scrutiny beyond NAO value-for-money studies.

A statute creating an HM Chief Inspector of Criminal Justice with a cross-agency, end-to-end remit, absorbing or sitting atop the joint programme, and restoring inspection of court administration, within the new inspectorate or by re-establishing one under the Courts Act 2003 model.

// State-led: Instrument: primary legislation creating HM Chief Inspector of Criminal Justice and restoring court-administration inspection.

No inspector tracks cases end to end and court administration has been wholly uninspected since 2010, and no dated trigger forces action.