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

Four separate inspectorates (HMICFRS for police, HMCPSI for prosecution, HMI Prisons, HMI Probation) inspect their own agencies. Their Criminal Justice Joint Inspection programme (Police and Justice Act 2006) is periodic, consensual and topic-based; no body has a standing statutory remit to follow cases end-to-end from arrest to release or to hold the system, rather than agencies, to account. Worse, court administration is entirely uninspected: HM Inspectorate of Court Administration closed in December 2010 and was formally abolished by a 2012 Public Bodies Act 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 that even the CCRC be brought under an independent inspectorate, underlining the oversight vacuum.

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

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

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

an accountability vacuum leaves no inspector tracking cases end-to-end and court administration wholly uninspected since 2010, but no dated trigger forces action right now.