London’s new tribunal centre will offer 30 hearing rooms, 40 judicial chambers and a better address than most of the people who have been waiting for their cases to be heard.
The centre is due to open at the end of February, with employment hearings beginning in March. The Ministry of Justice says it will speed up justice. This is welcome news for anyone whose case began ageing before smartphones were mainly used to play Snake.
More than 66,310 tribunal cases are waiting. The building can support up to 60 judges, giving the queue enough legal expertise to form a pub quiz team, provided every answer is “please take a seat”. The backlog has apparently achieved the rare distinction of having more history than some of the buildings intended to clear it.
Martin Adjournment arrived with a folding chair, three witness statements and the calm expression of a man who has learnt not to trust a calendar. He laughed when he saw the new lobby. “My case may be heard in a room with windows,” he said. “That feels almost like a ruling.”
The government is investing £148.5 million to repair and modernise tribunal buildings across England and Wales. It plans to recruit up to 1,000 judges and tribunal members. Britain has reached for its classic emergency solution: hire the people, repair the corridors and arrange a meeting about hiring the people.
The centre will bring employment, social security, child support, war pensions and armed forces cases together under one roof. It is the legal equivalent of putting a label on the drawer marked “things we urgently needed last Tuesday”. Its flexible rooms and new technology are meant to increase the number of hearings, which should be reassuring to anyone who has spent years watching capacity behave like a rumour.
There is no doubt that more rooms, judges and functioning buildings could help. The comic difficulty is that the announcement presents basic capacity as a turning point after thousands of people have been left discovering that justice is not only blind but apparently unable to find the diary.
For now, London has a modern home for justice and a queue long enough to furnish it. The first hearing may settle whether a case can be adjourned until the grand opening ceremony has finished congratulating itself on finally finding Room 14.
Source: Ministry of Justice.
