Sir David Davis has called the prohibitive cost of court transcripts ‘a travesty of justice‘ and made the case for them to be freely available as they are in some US states. The former conservative minister who has been campaigning on behalf of Lucy Letby challenged the justice secretary Shabana Mahmood over an issue that has been highlighted by miscarriages of justice campaigners for years – see, for example the 2017 Open Justice charter to which the Justice Gap was a signatory and which featured in PROOF 2.
‘When I asked for a transcript for a major trial recently Manchester Crown Court told me it was £100,000 – when I pressed them it went down to £9000, but it’s still way beyond the reach of most people,’ said Sir David, who was talking about his experience with the Letby trial. ‘This is a travesty of justice.’ The Conservative MP went on to say ‘other countries including American states have free transcripts available now’. ‘When is she going to sort this out?’ he asked.
Shabana Mahmood said that the government was looking at introducing AI technology to provide a transcription service. ‘We hope to be able to find a model that gives us the requisite level of accuracy and the speed to be able to publish transcripts and to do so accurately.’ At the moment transcripts have to be ‘physically transcribed by a human listening back to what was said and done in court’. ‘Previously speech-to-text transcription has been piloted by the previous government,’ she said. ’It was not accurate enough.’
Transcripts of court trials should be freely available.
For a recent major trial, I was initially quoted £100,000 for the transcript!
This is a travesty of justice.
It must be put right.
My question to the Justice Secretary 👇🏻 pic.twitter.com/jvmVjt3Ln8
— David Davis MP (@DavidDavisMP) April 22, 2025
The problem of the expense of transcripts has long been identified as an impediment to those claiming to be wrongly convicted – compounded by a court retention policy which mandates the destruction of transcripts after five years. In 2017, we reported a prisoner’s experience with the Cardiff Innocence Project claiming to have paid £11,000 for his trial transcripts and an APPEAL client quoted £19,000 for the transcript of a three-week trial.
Transcription companies denied their rates were exploitative. They charge according to rates set out in their contracts with the MoJ according to a 72-word ‘folio’. According to one (Cater Walsh) the rate worked out on average as £150 per court hour plus VAT. ‘It takes about five times as long to type, as it did to listen to,’ they explained.
