The criminal courts are facing their biggest cash crisis in decades after a warning to judges and magistrates of a £90 million shortfall in the budget for the justice system. Judges and magistrates in England and Wales have been told of the emergency, which is likely to result in trial delays, cancelled court sittings and redundancies.

The shortfall over three years — which has arisen because of a deficit in income derived from fees paid by court users — was described as a bombshell by one senior judge.

Huge fee rises from May of up to 2,500 per cent are thought to be deterring people from using the courts: applications in care cases by local authorities, for instance, have dropped by 25 per cent since May.

Local authorities were faced with a rise in the cost of bringing care applications from £150 to £4,825 and it is feared that they are being more cautious about taking cases to court or waiting longer before seeking the court’s help — which could put children at risk. But the Government is determined to charge full-cost fees so that the courts become self-financing.

Some judges, already frustrated with the shoestring operation of the courts, which can find them sitting without ushers or clerks, may now refuse to sit if there are further cuts to the service.

Henry Bellingham, the Shadow Justice Minister, said yesterday: “Once again, this Government’s incompetence has led to a crisis in the justice system.” He added: “If court sittings are cancelled and trials delayed, the public will be put at risk and justice undermined.”

The shortfall arose after ministers ignored Conservative warnings this year that the fee rises would cause a fall-off in work in the courts, he said.

A letter has gone out from Lord Justice Leveson, the senior presiding judge for England and Wales, to 2,000 judges and 28,000 magistrates. It says that the Courts Service has identified a £27 million shortfall in fee income for 2008-09, with shortfalls of £46 million and £17 million in 2009-10 and 2010-11 respectively. His letter comes after a memorandum from the Courts Service to court managers that says: “No part of HMCS [HM Courts Service] will be protected from having to find savings.” A plan identifying ways to find the savings is to be put forward to the board that runs the Courts Service and to the Ministry of Justice this month.

The memo adds that it is too early to say what impact the cuts will have on specific courts. But it says: “Some parts of our budget are fixed costs which are difficult to cut (eg, rent on buildings) so we have to find savings from parts of the budget where we have control, such as salary costs, sitting days, building works.” A redundancy scheme “is something we may have to consider for the future”.

Judges are furious about the proposed cuts, which come only months after a new partnership was agreed between the judiciary and the Courts Service for running the courts and protecting their budget. Judge Keith Cutler, honorary secretary of the Council of Circuit Judges, said: “We are very unhappy. Under the new arrangement from April, we expected to have independence of finance once the courts had been allocated their budget. Then we get this bombshell.”

Judges had accepted that the justice system could not be immune from public spending cuts across the board of about 3.5 per cent a year for three years. They had been told that any savings would not be at the front line, he said. “In turn, judges fully accepted that they had to make their own efficiency savings through working patterns and productivity. So the agreement was that we would do our bit. Judges are already facing not having ushers in courtrooms or clerks to staff courtrooms — they must be protected from this. We are not asking for more money or new things. But we do actually want the nuts and bolts to run the courts and do the job.”

Judge David Radford, the senior judge at Snaresbrook Crown Court, which handles 22 per cent of the capital’s crown court trials, said his court had a backlog of 1,900 cases. “We are already unable to fix trials before July next year so we are under great pressure,” he said.

Cindy Barnett, chairman of the Magistrates’ Association, said that it was too soon to see how the cuts would bite. “All we can say is that we hope and expect every effort to be made to protect the actual frontline service, which in some places is on a very tight thread. It is not right for justice to be delayed, or affected by this — it is a service not for us, but for the public and society.”

John Howson, deputy chairman. added: “Magistrates deal with over 95 per cent of all the criminal cases and are very concerned that any further cuts to the Court Service will hinder [or] prevent them from delivering good quality justice and providing a decent service for all court users.”

“We are particularly concerned that the decline in fees in civil work must not impact on the criminal justice budget — this simply is not right.” At the start last year magistrates gave warning that the criminal courts were facing a severe cash crisis and were being hit by closures, crumbling and rat-infested buildings, staff shortages and funding cuts.

Judges and magistrates are opposed to making the courts self-financing.

In his letter to judges, Lord Justice Leveson makes clear that judges have not changed their view about the policy of recovering the full cost of the courts through fees from litigants.

A Courts Service spokesman said: “We need to find savings but will work to ensure they are not made at the expense of effective delivery of justice.”

This year the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, said that the maintenance backlog in the courts had risen from £38 million in 2000 to £200 million now and would remain at that level for the next three years.

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