The government says it has responded to all 180 recommendations in Lord Leveson's criminal courts review. Thirty get neither a yes nor a no, just a pointer to a document that never names them.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
In short. The Ministry of Justice published its response to Lord Leveson's two-part Independent Review of the Criminal Courts on 12 October 2026, telling the press it "responds to all 180 recommendations" and "accepts, or accepts in principle, the overwhelming majority" [[1]]. Read against the response document itself, page by page: 150 of the 180 get an Accept, an Accept in principle or a Reject. The other 30 get none. Twenty-five carry the identical line, "Please see the judicial response to the Review's judiciary-related recommendations" [[2]], a document the 61-page response never names, dates or links. Found independently on judiciary.uk, that document turns out to address recommendations by theme, not by number, so nothing public states what happened to any of the 25 [[4]][[5]]. The remaining five are handed to the Law Society, the Bar Council, the Criminal Procedure Rule Committee, CILEX or the Judicial Appointments Commission, again with no cited response from any of them [[2]]. Two documented mistakes: four stars.
Lord Brian Leveson's Independent Review of the Criminal Courts ran in two parts: 45 recommendations in July 2025, 135 more in February 2026, 180 in total, commissioned to tackle a Crown Court backlog the government's own response puts at "almost 81,000 cases," with "nearly 24,000" waiting over a year [[2]]. The government's 61-page reply, presented to Parliament as Command Paper CP 1682, goes through them one at a time. Each recommendation is quoted, then answered: Accept, Accept in principle, or Reject, with the document defining each term up front [[2]]. It is, on its own terms, a model of structure. Count the actual verdicts against the 180 recommendations the contents page promises a response to, and a sixth of them never get one.
The claims, tested
| The response's own words | What the document itself shows | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| "Government responds to all 180 recommendations in Criminal Courts Review," and the response "accepts, or accepts in principle, the overwhelming majority of all 180 recommendations" [[1]] | Leveson's Part 1 and Part 2 reports total 180 recommendations, 45 and 135, confirmed on page 9 of the response [[2]]. Of those 180, 50 are marked Accept and 81 Accept in principle; 19 are marked Reject. The remaining 30 carry none of the three verdicts defined on page 17 [[2]] | "All 180" get a numbered entry in the document; a sixth of them get no decision at all |
| Twenty-five of those 30, including recommendations 1, 92 and 180's near neighbours, carry the identical sentence: "Please see the judicial response to the Review's judiciary-related recommendations" [[2]], with no title, date or link given anywhere in the response's 61 pages or on its gov.uk publication page [[3]] | The only matching document found by searching judiciary.uk directly, "Response to recommendations for the judiciary in the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts," was published by the Lady Chief Justice on 17 July 2026, three months before the response that cites it [[4]]. Read in full, 21 pages: it is organised by subject, Listing, Remote Participation, Pre-Sentence Reports, AI, and states only that the judiciary has "carefully considered" the recommendations in each; no recommendation number appears anywhere in it [[5]] | The document a reader is sent to 25 times does not answer, by number, any of the 25 recommendations it is cited for |
| Recommendation 30, to create a "Crown Court Bench Division" for judge-only trials in either-way offences carrying up to three years, is marked "Reject" on page 24: "The Government has subsequently decided to lay an amendment to the Bill to remove the Bench Division provisions" [[2]] | The Bench Division was the government's own proposal, "brought forward" in the Courts and Tribunals Bill [[2]]. The press release announcing this response does not put the reversal in its three headline bullet points; it surfaces only in the closing paragraph, framed as a gain: "the Government will amend the Bill to remove proposals to limit jury trials, ensuring almost all Crown Court cases continue to be heard by a jury" [[1]] | A reversal of the government's own live Bill, recorded on page 24, reaches readers of the press release as one line at the very end, framed as a win rather than a U-turn |
The mistakes, counted
Thirty recommendations get no decision, and the document they are pointed to does not decide them either (1). The response defines three verdicts on page 17, Accept, Accept in principle, Reject, and applies one of them to 150 of Leveson's 180 recommendations [[2]]. Twenty-five of the remaining 30 carry an identical deferral, "Please see the judicial response to the Review's judiciary-related recommendations" [[2]], repeated word for word at recommendations spanning the full length of the document, from the first page of individual responses to the last. No footnote, appendix or hyperlink in the 61 pages says what that document is called, who wrote it or where to find it. A direct search of judiciary.uk turns up a plausible match, the Lady Chief Justice's "Response to recommendations for the judiciary," published 17 July 2026 [[4]]. Reading it does not close the gap: it answers by subject heading, not recommendation number, and the phrase "recommendation 92," or any of the other 24 numbers it is supposedly covering, does not appear once in its 21 pages [[5]]. A further five recommendations, addressed to the Law Society, the Bar Council, the Criminal Procedure Rule Committee, CILEX and the Judicial Appointments Commission, get the same treatment: acknowledged, redirected, never resolved in any document this response cites [[2]]. A reader working only from the government's own 61-page account of its response to Lord Leveson cannot find out what happened to a sixth of what he recommended.
A reversal of the government's own Bill is logged in a rejection notice, not announced (2). Recommendation 30 asked for a new Crown Court Bench Division, judges sitting alone on either-way cases carrying sentences of three years or less. The government's own response records that it had already "brought forward proposals in the Courts and Tribunals Bill" to create exactly that division, before reversing course: "the Government has subsequently decided to lay an amendment to the Bill to remove the Bench Division provisions" [[2]], a reversal repeated at recommendations 31 and 32, both rejected as "extraneous" once the Division itself was dropped [[2]]. That is a live Bill, already before Parliament, having one of its own structural provisions removed by its own sponsoring department. The press release covering this response puts three other announcements in its opening bullet points and saves the Bench Division reversal for its final paragraph, where it appears only as "the Government will amend the Bill to remove proposals to limit jury trials, ensuring almost all Crown Court cases continue to be heard by a jury" [[1]], true as far as it goes, but silent on the fact that the government is amending its own Bill.
Credit where due
The backlog figures that frame the whole response hold up. The foreword states "almost 81,000 cases are now waiting to be resolved" in the Crown Court, "including nearly 24,000 that have been waiting for over a year" [[2]]. The Ministry of Justice's own Criminal Court Statistics Quarterly, published separately on 24 September 2026, puts the open Crown Court caseload at 80,829 at the end of June 2026, and records that cases open for a year or more reached "a series high" the same quarter [[6]]. The headline number a government document uses to justify 61 pages of reform is, checked against its own statisticians' release, accurate rather than rounded for effect.
Verdict
Four stars, from two documented mistakes. The structure of this response, 180 numbered recommendations, each matched to a defined verdict, reads like exactly the kind of accountable document a review this size deserves. It mostly is: 150 of the 180 get a real answer, Accept, Accept in principle or Reject, stated in the government's own words and checkable against the Review's own text. What breaks the pattern is the sixth that do not, deferred to a document that, found and read, does not answer them either, and a policy reversal large enough to need its own press release instead getting one sentence at the bottom of someone else's.
The star score counts two documented mistakes. First, 30 of Leveson's 180 recommendations get none of the response's own three defined verdicts, Accept, Accept in principle or Reject; 25 are redirected to "the judicial response to the Review's judiciary-related recommendations," a document never named or linked in the 61-page response, and, once found on judiciary.uk, confirmed not to address any of the 25 by recommendation number; the other five are redirected to professional and judicial bodies with no response from any of them cited. Second, the rejection of recommendation 30 records that the government is amending its own Courts and Tribunals Bill to remove the Crown Court Bench Division it had itself proposed, a reversal the accompanying press release mentions only in its final paragraph, framed as a benefit rather than disclosed as a U-turn. Two falls in the 1 to 3 band: four stars; the bands are on the ratings page. This piece makes no finding about the competence of any named individual; the drafting of the response and the press release is departmental, not any one official's decision. Checked directly against the government's response document, the judiciary's own published response, the press release and the Ministry of Justice's own statistics release, all fetched 15 October 2026.
Sources
- Technology to bolster justice for victims as government responds to Leveson, GOV.UK / Ministry of Justice, published 12 October 2026
- Government Response to the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts (PDF, CP 1682), Ministry of Justice, October 2026
- Government response to the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts, GOV.UK / Ministry of Justice, published 12 October 2026
- Response to recommendations for the judiciary in the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts, Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, published 17 July 2026
- Judiciary of England and Wales response to the Independent Review of Criminal Courts (PDF), Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, 17 July 2026
- Criminal court statistics quarterly: April to June 2026, GOV.UK / Ministry of Justice, published 24 September 2026