Courts face having to sit for an extra two hours a day as they struggle with rising workloads coupled with an unprecedented drive to cut costs.

Judges will have to accept more sitting days, and a recruitment freeze is being imposed on all but exceptional posts as part of a cost-cutting drive across courts in England and Wales.

The option of having a two-session court day, starting at 9am rather than 10am and ending at 5pm or 6pm, not 4pm, is likely to be tried at a Crown Court in London, such as Croydon.

Trials involving serious crime are already taking up to a year to be brought to some Crown Courts in London, while delays in children’s cases in family courts are at what judges call unacceptable levels.

Two weeks ago Sir Mark Potter, Britain’s most senior family judge, called for urgent action to tackle growing delays in child abuse cases, exacerbated by a surge in work after the Baby Peter case. He warned that judges and court officials face the “formidable problem” of accommodating the extra work in an “already strained system”.

Yesterday the Public Accounts Committee of MPs said that performance in the courts was patchy and in six of the worst-performing areas only 56 per cent of trials were started within the target period of 16 weeks.

Ministers and the Courts Service have brought in a series of measures to protect “frontline” services and reaped £300 million in “efficiency” savings to ease the most acute backlogs.But the crisis in public spending across Whitehall means that the Ministry of Justice has had to find an extra £70 million in savings next year on top of £1 billion already imposed for the current three-year spending round.

This autumn a fresh round of talks will be held between Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, and the Ministry of Justice and Courts Service to set a budget for 2010-11. John Howson, deputy chairman of the Magistrates’ Association, said that problems would arise if serious crime, which is tried in the Crown Court, rose farther.

“There is a large backlog in parts of the South East and you can’t get a trial on before a year in some places. In the end, if there is no more money, cases would then take longer; suspects will spend longer on remand and then have to be released when sentenced because they will already have served their time.”

An increase in the delays, he added, would result in more defendants pleading not guilty, knowing that by the time their case came to be heard, witnesses’ memories would have faded. “So they reckon on gambling that they will get off altogether rather than taking the 30 per cent discount for a guilty plea.”

Crown Courts are also having to sit nearly 2,400 extra days this year to cope with the rise in work and in some areas part-time judges are being asked to increase their workload to help out the full-time judges. In the family courts there has been what Sir Mark Potter said had been a “dramatic upsurge” in work after the Baby Peter case.

Everyone involved in the family justice system was working flat out to make improvements but they were hampered by a lack of resources and the need for cuts, he said.

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