A man accused of breaching a restraining order related to Jess Phillips will not have his case heard in the crown court until 2028, the Labour minister has revealed, as she urged MPs to back measures to scrap some jury trials.
Phillips said the courts and tribunals bill had her “100%” support, saying personal experience showed the “broken” court system was used to delay trials and exert control by those who were violent against women.
“I am a victim of the backlog, and I know what it feels like to be a victim of crime,” Phillips told the Guardian. “I see the court system used to control victims all the time; it is a tactic that is well known among those who study stalking, and it has to change.”
Phillips said she believed the alleged breach of the order should have been dealt with at the magistrates court, and did not know why it had been sent to the crown court.
“It’s OK for me. I’ve got extra security, I’ve got other safeguards,” she said. “But imagine that was a breach of an order against a violent ex- husband, and it’s going to be heard in more than two years’ time. Are you joking? That’s absolutely mental.”
Phillips said that without the measures limiting jury trials the bill stood little chance of reducing the growing crown court backlog, which has reached record levels of 80,000 cases and means some defendants charged today may not face trial until 2030.
“Attrition means baddies get away with it. It leaves rapists on the street,” she said. “It’s awful for a victim of rape who has had the bravery to come forward to be left waiting for years, but if they drop out of the system it also means that person might go on to rape somebody else.”
The government is facing the prospect of one of its most serious backbench revolts since coming to power on Tuesday, as MPs vote on the overall principles of the measures in the courts and tribunals bill during its second reading.
Plans to limit the number of jury trials in England and Wales were described as “unpopular, untested and poorly evidenced” by thousands of lawyers in a letter to the prime minister this week. Efforts by David Lammy, the justice secretary, to change the mind Karl Turner, a bankbencher and one of the leading Labour figures opposed to the plans, failed after they met on Monday night.
Lammy has also come under pressure from Jo Hamilton, one of the former post office operators wrongly convicted in the Post Office’s Horizon IT scandal, who told him that his plans would “further erode trust in the establishment”.
Lammy and the justice minister Sarah Sackman are understood to be determined to push ahead with plans – proposed by Brian Leveson – in their current form, including proposals for a new criminal court where judges will hear cases on their own, magistrates-only hearings for offences that carry a maximum sentence of two years or less, and judge-only trials for complex fraud cases.
The bill, if passed, would also remove the automatic right of appeal from magistrates courts, which Phillips described as a “weapon” that had been used against her and other survivors of gender-related crimes.
Describing a previous case, Phillips said she had been “genuinely flabbergasted” that a man who had been found guilty of harassment and making death threats against her “could control me in this way”, after he appealed against the decision in the crown court.
“This is a man who has wished me dead who gets to say, you can’t go to work today. You can’t pick your children up from school. Today you are going go where I say you go. That felt like a horrible power over me,” she said. “It was horrible, and I hated it and I was really upset by it. And that is me – what if this is happening to women who have been abused by their controlling ex-partners?”
A group of 40 female Labour MPs, including the former women and equalities minister Anneliese Dodds, wrote to Lammy on Monday, urging him to “remain steadfast” with the reforms.
“The agonising and rising waiting lists in our courts, which mean that a woman reporting domestic abuse or coercive control today may be told her trial won’t come to court until 2030”, they wrote. “That is intolerable”.
Natalie Fleet, the Labour MP for Bolsover, who was a victim of grooming and rape, said the “status quo” in the courts needed to be disrupted. “This is a difficult bill, but its going to pass and the difference it will make to women and girls is massive,” she said.
