'It’s 9c in courtroom five, I can hardly feel my fingers and water is dripping from the ceiling on to one of the seats' - the sad truth about the state of Nottingham Crown Court
“I hope the story of the day is going to be that the cells are too cold to take prisoners?” So said Judge James Sampson when he looked at me on Friday of last week ahead of taking a guilty plea from a defendant.
His ire - and that of other judges, barristers and court users at Nottingham Crown - is that underfunding of the criminal justice system for years has left the building in a general state of disrepair. This has culminated over the past few days in trials and hearings involving those in custody having to be adjourned as the holding cells are too cold to accept them.
This week, a hugely serious attempted murder trial, which dates back to last summer and was due to begin on Monday, was adjourned for exactly this reason. That particular judge - a different one - also expressed his frustration and although it did eventually begin the following afternoon, this morning - Wednesday, January 8 - I arrived and was told that the same issue had arisen again and the prison van bringing the defendant to court had to be turned back.
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The judge even adjourned the case until later on Thursday in the hope that by then some heating would have been fixed and the cells sufficiently warm enough to take him then.
This is, of course, unfair on everyone. The alleged victims, the defendants, their families and loved ones. Not to mention the barristers, one of whom told me it took him two hours to get to Nottingham to defend his client due to the snow, rain and plummeting temperatures.
Another case which did reach a conclusion on Monday was, thankfully, not a custody case but a bail one, but even that had to be adjourned last week because of the temperature. Handing that man a suspended sentence, Judge Philip Head told him: “You turned up on Friday and we were told the cells at Nottingham Crown Court were not fit for their purpose. That is to say they were freezing cold.”
As I sat and typed this opinion piece out, a barrister I have known for the best part of two decades popped his head around the door of the press room and told me “It’s 9c in courtroom five, I can hardly feel my fingers and water is dripping from the ceiling on to one of the seats. It just needs some money spent on it.”
The huge backlog of criminal cases in England and Wales is well-documented elsewhere, but what might not be in the open as much is the state of some of the buildings. Those of you who walk down Canal Street might notice scaffolding on the outside of Nottingham Crown Court where work is ongoing.
But as the vast majority of you will, hopefully, never set foot inside the building, you will probably be unaware of the leaking main roof which sometimes forces the closure of the stairs to the top floor.
You won’t see, as I do each day, the missing roof tiles and the aforementioned buckets that catch the dripping water inside the courtrooms. At the time of writing, the men’s toilets on the top floor has an “Out of Order” sign on the locked door and has had since November. The lock has been missing from the cubicle for weeks.
One of the two lifts that service the building has been out of operation for weeks and last year there was an incident where it jammed between floors trapping a diabetes-suffering barrister inside for almost an hour.
Airing this has been something I have been reluctant to do for a variety of reasons until now. The state of the building - and anecdotally I understand many courtrooms in England and Wales are in similar states of disrepair - is not the fault of anyone who works inside it.
Take it from me when I tell you the judges, barristers, solicitors, probation team, clerks, ushers, listing officers, backroom staff, cleaners and security guards are all conscientious and hard-working people.
But serious amounts of money need to be invested or the confidence the public should have in the criminal justice system will continue to crumble in the same manner as the bricks and mortar the Crown Court is made from currently are.