Introduction

On 2 December 2025, the Deputy Prime Minister announced plans to modernise the criminal courts. The government presents these reforms as necessary to stop defendants ‘gaming the system, prioritise victims and reduce delays’ (Ministry of Justice, 2025). Central to this announcement is the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts, commissioned by the Lord Chancellor. The Leveson review proposes a significant restructuring of the British criminal justice system, including the removal of the right to trial by jury for thousands of offences and the creation of a new ‘Crown Court Bench Division.’

The backlog of Crown Court cases reached 74,651 at the end of 2024, an 11% increase from the previous year and 17% above Ministry of Justice projections (Ministry of Justice, 2025). For young people, such delays are catastrophic, disrupting education, damaging job prospects, and harming mental health. The Leveson Review’s reforms offer a pragmatic response to this crisis, as this article assesses the Leveson reforms not by whether they eradicate the backlog, but by their potential to promote diversion and restorative justice for young adults. It is argued that any efficiency savings be spent on diversion mechanisms such as the Deferred Prosecution Scheme, so that reductions in jury trials are offset by gains in rehabilitation and quicker, less damaging conclusions for young people.

Civil libertarians and the legal profession are mobilising to defend the right to a jury trial, viewing it as a fundamental feature of the UK’s constitutional tradition because it introduces lay perspectives, elements of diversity and collective deliberation, potentially reducing bias and constraining state power. Yet for young adults, the Leveson Review may unexpectedly offer benefits, and the question is whether preserving an idealised ‘gold standard’ jury trial justifies maintaining a chronically underfunded system that is failing them.

The Right to Wait

The constitutional right to jury trial has, in practice, become a right to wait in a system undermined by decades of underinvestment and structural inefficiencies. Supporters of jury trials sometimes overlook productivity shortfalls in the Crown Court system, believing the issue is solely due to funding and a lack of sitting days. Yet, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that, despite a 29% increase in court sitting days between 2019 and 2024, disposals rose by only 17% (Domínguez et al., 2025), with disposals per sitting day falling from 1.16% pre‑pandemic to 0.90% in 2022–23 before recovering to 1.05% by late 2024. Productivity remains below 2019 levels, which is insufficient to tackle the backlog.

The Leveson Review recognises that speed is essential to justice. For young people, a prompt resolution is preferable to a perfect trial that comes too late. Eisenberg and Clermont (1996) observed that bench trials are much faster than jury trials; given the current backlog, this speed is crucial.

For young adults, prolonged legal processes are as punitive as formal sentences. The National Audit Office (NAO) reported a 302% increase in cases waiting over a year between March 2020 and June 2021 (NAO, 2021). Court closures, failing court infrastructure, and chronic staffing problems underpin how underinvestment perpetuates delays. Such delays disproportionately impact young people, for whom a year is a significant period of development. Supporters of jury trials argue for its preservation despite delays, overlooking the importance of young adulthood in identity formation. Keeping young people on bail or remand for years hinders their development and transition to adulthood.

The Children’s Commissioner warns that custody is increasingly being used as a ‘waiting room’ for unconvicted children, a concern reflected in Leveson’s observation that the remand population has risen by 94% since 2018, with hundreds of young people ultimately receiving no custodial sentence or seeing their cases dropped (Children’s Commissioner, 2025).

In this context, waiting for a jury trial does not preserve justice for young people; it allows it to decay while their lives are put on hold.

The ‘Swift Court’

The government proposes establishing the Crown Court Bench Division (CCBD), rebranded by the government as ‘Swift Courts’, in which a judge and two magistrates would hear either-way offences. This has prompted controversy due to the removal of juries. The question for Youth Justice is whether a jury trial or even the court system in its entirety is best suited for young defendants.

We often romanticise the jury trial as a judgment by peers, but a young Black man from a London council estate is unlikely to see the twelve randomly selected jurors as peers; they are strangers whose social worlds may be far removed from his. Even if his circumstances are presented through defence counsel, there is a disconnect. The defendant’s counsel, who is a university-educated and often from a privileged background, cannot authentically convey the full reality of growing up as a black child on a council estate in just one or two sentences to a jury at trial.

Juries give no reasons for their decisions, an anomaly in modern decision-making (Coen and Doak, 2017), and this opacity can leave young defendants alienated and unsure how to respond. If the Leveson Review’s proposals are fully implemented, a judge and magistrates in the CCBD would provide a reasoned judgment. For young people who feel alienated by the system, this transparency supports procedural justice more than a jury trial. It clarifies the decision and, if flawed, enables better preparation for appeal. The Leveson Review’s proposals more effectively uphold democratic principles of accountability and transparency than the current jury trial system.

The Magistrate Problem

Magistrates are disproportionately older, white and middle-class: in England and Wales, 49% are aged 60 or over, and only 1% are under 30; 13% identify as from an ethnic minority background (Magistrates’ Association, 2020), close to national averages, but not reflective of the young minority populations within the criminal justice system.

Placing thousands of young defendants before ‘Swift Courts’ risks reinforcing their sense of appearing before a demographically and culturally distant tribunal.

As proposed, CCBD panels will contain a trained judge. However, even with a judge, if ‘Swift Courts’ rely on drawing on the pool of current judges who are still unrepresentative of the current population (Ministry of Justice 2025) for decision-making, they risk maintaining the flawed system and perpetuating the alienation felt by young defendants. The CCBD must contain more diverse panels, meaning alongside ‘Swift Courts’, there must be a concerted drive for greater diversity within the judiciary to match the population of defendants in the criminal justice system. Without a representative bench, the CCBD risks becoming an authoritarian and populist measure rather than a genuine improvement.

Reinvesting in Diversion

For Youth Justice, the most important aspect of Leveson is not court structure but diversion from court altogether, a point the judiciary has broadly welcomed. Leveson attributes the backlog to underfunding, poor coordination across agencies and the over-criminalisation of minor offences; ‘Swift Courts’ cannot fix underfunding or fragmentation, but can, if implemented correctly, reduce unnecessary prosecutions.

The HM Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP) found that Out-of-Court Disposals are fragmented and inconsistent, creating a ‘postcode lottery.’ In some areas, police use ‘Outcome 22’ to divert children into support services without requiring an admission of guilt, while in others, children are criminalised for the same behaviour (HMIP, 2025).

In Recommendation 9, Leveson suggests extending the Deferred Prosecution Scheme (DPS). This allows the case to be paused, and if the defendant engages with support and stays out of trouble, the prosecution is dropped. This is different to a judge’s current powers of suspended sentences or deferred sentencing, as these do not require a guilty plea, and an individual can partake in a DPS and not have a criminal record.

A criminal record can be a lifelong barrier to employment and housing, particularly for young people entering the labour and rental markets for the first time. Deferred Prosecution Schemes address why a young person offended, with structured support around mental health, substance misuse and education instead of immediate criminalisation. This shift from a punitive to a restorative approach has an evidence base: Shapland et al. (2008) found that restorative justice conferencing led to significantly fewer reconvictions over two years than in control groups and produced net savings for the criminal justice system.

If the government insists on implementing ‘Swift Courts’ and ending jury trials, that trade-off is only justifiable for Youth Justice if the savings and efficiencies are reinvested in diversionary schemes such as DPS and high-quality out-of-court disposals, rather than extra funds being absorbed into general budgets.

The Future for Justice

A fair argument made by Donnellan KC et al. (2025) is that resources should first be directed to reopening courts, restoring judicial control and fixing the system’s basic operational failures. Yet if ministers remain committed to ‘Swift Courts’, it must be ensured that any savings are spent on diversion mechanisms such as DPS, so that reductions in jury trials are offset by gains in rehabilitation and quicker, less damaging conclusions for young people. The priority for activists should therefore shift from opposing the Leveson reforms to insisting that they are implemented in full and tied to a serious expansion of diversion and restorative justice.

For those who find themselves in the ‘Swift Courts,’ the composition of the bench is crucial. There must be a concerted effort to recruit younger, more diverse magistrates who understand modern youth culture.

Finally, understanding this new system is essential. Social workers must inform young people about the new system. If the ‘right to elect’ is removed for some offences, young people need to understand the importance of the Plea and Trial Preparation Hearing and the implications of early guilty pleas, which Leveson incentivises at Recommendation 27.

Conclusion

The Leveson Review was commissioned in response to populist rhetoric and approaches the justice system as a matter of optimisation and efficiency. For young people facing long delays, efficiency is vital. A system that leaves young people on remand for years is not delivering justice; it is neglect. Any approach by the government must be long-term and forward-looking, not focused on short-term headlines to boost approval ratings before an election.

The fantastical ‘gold standard’ of a jury trial no longer exists; defending a system that warehouses young people in prison for years. ‘Swift Courts’ is the pragmatic compromise we need. Leveson offers this by replacing jury trials with the certainty of swift conclusions in the Crown Court Bench Division. For young adults, whose lives are shaped by rapid development, the end of jury trials can only be seen as a positive. However, as the government is currently overlooking diversionary and restorative measures, and without these, ‘Swift Courts’ risk accelerating injustice. If the government fully implements the review with a balanced approach to both restorative and punitive justice, Youth Justice may have just found an unexpected solution.