The Crown Court: Unified Structure or Local Justice?

Abstract

The Crown Court was created in 1971 and replaced the old system of assizes and quarter sessions. Reform followed recommendations in a Royal Commission on Assizes and Quarter Sessions (1969), which referred to the previous arrangements as ‘a patched, antiquated, and fragmented network of courts’. The new Crown Court was to be regarded as a single entity, which could sit at any designated population centre, staffed by a new permanent bench of circuit judges and administered by a unified court service (see, further, Rock, 1993). These changes were promptly implemented in the Courts Act 1971, but against the views of the judiciary and the legal profession more generally. They also departed from the earlier conclusions of the Streatfeild Committee (Home Office and Lord Chancellor’s Office, 1961), which had argued against a specialist criminal court. Streatfeild had warned that it would be ‘dangerously monotonous’ for judges to sit only in criminal cases and that it would lead to staleness and to judges becoming case-hardened and ‘prosecution-minded’. The Royal Commission dismissed these concerns, in what has been described as a triumph of ‘managerial efficiency’ over ‘traditional professional values and local loyalties’ (Bottoms and Stevenson, 1992).