Blair's midnight courts scrapped after costs soar

Tony Blair's plan to have courts open round the clock has been abandoned because they were 40 times more expensive than daytime proceedings.

The Prime Minister had trumpeted the idea of midnight courts last year in an election speech on how to tackle Britain's "yob culture".

But pilot schemes of the late-night courts in Manchester and London have not been a success and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, is about to drop the plan. An evaluation report on the pilots – which ran from May to September this year in the two cities – will show that they were costly and inefficient.

The London sessions, which ran at weekends from 5.30pm to midnight at Bow Street magistrates' court in Covent Garden, dealt on average with only 10 defendants a day. The Manchester court sat until mid-evening on two days a week.

The evaluation study showed that the average cost of processing a defendant at the night courts was £4,000. During normal hours, a magistrates' court typically costs about £1,600 a day to run and hears on average 15 cases at a cost of just over £100 a case.

Staff working at the night courts had to be paid overtime and were given taxi rides home on expenses. Prisons refused to take late-night admissions and costs were incurred holding defendants in police cells.

Last night Harry Fletcher, the assistant general secretary of the probation union Napo, said the idea had proved a failure because it was modelled too closely on the American justice system.

"US courts have large cell complexes on the premises, British courts do not," he said. "The US system places great reliance on plea-bargaining and quick justice, the British system does not. This expensive experiment should not therefore be rolled out nationally."

The first proposals for night-time courts in Britain were made by Sir John Stevens, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who observed on a visit to America how effective the idea had been in high-crime areas of New York.

Days before last year's general election, Mr Blair signalled his support for the scheme in a speech on crime and justice in which he also pledged to combat "yob culture". When plans for a pilot were announced in September 2001 a government internal paper noted that the "No 10 policy unit is keen for the pilots to commence as soon as possible".

When the pilots began last May, courts found that as few as four defendants might appear at an entire session. Many of the accused were beggars who were cautioned.

Despite the small number of defendants, the courts needed a large complement of staff to operate effectively. Those present typically included a district judge or stipendiary magistrate, a clerk, Crown Prosecution Service staff, a duty solicitor, an usher, two security guards and probation officers.

A spokeswoman for the Lord Chancellor's Department said ministers were still examining the evaluation report and "no final decision has been made".

At the launch of the pilot scheme, Michael Wills, a Home Office minister, said the courts would deal with criminals "swiftly and effectively" and "reassure local communities".

But the Criminal Law Solicitors Association declared in August that the proposal was "misconceived" after initial findings showed it was plagued by delays, costs and difficulties.

Critics say the scheme was fundamentally weakened at the start when the Prison Service echoed the worries of the Prison Officers' Association and refused to take part.