Criminal Justice

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Wednesday 25th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith and Chiswick) (Lab)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing time for this important debate on the spending of the Ministry of Justice on criminal justice.

An effective criminal justice system is vital to the proper functioning of a democratic society. An ineffective criminal justice system presents grave risks for both social and economic stability. We are at a pivotal moment for the health of our criminal justice system, with prisons operating at close to full capacity, coupled with a backlog in the Crown courts of over 74,000 cases. Investment and reform are required.

The Ministry of Justice suffered some of the most severe budget cuts of any Department during the years of Tory austerity. In 2023-24, its resource expenditure level was 11% less in real terms than it had been in 2010-11. I therefore welcome the Labour Government’s investment in the criminal justice system, announced through the main estimates and the spending review. The main estimates confirmed that the MOJ’s day-to-day spending is set to increase by £793 million or 6.5%, which includes further investment in the Prison and Probation Service and the Courts and Tribunals Service. The MOJ’s investment capital spending is also set to increase by £351 million or over 20%, largely driven by investment in creating new prison places and major projects to maintain court capacity and invest in digital systems and security measures.

The spending review also announced £7 billion to be allocated between 2024-25 and 2029-30 to support the delivery of 14,000 urgently needed new prison places by 2031, and an increase of up to £700 million a year for the Probation Service by 2028-29 compared with 2025-26. This is especially important given the recommendations made by David Gauke’s independent sentencing review, which I will come to in a moment. The spending review also announced up to £450 million a year of additional investment for the courts system by 2028-29, aimed at increasing Crown court sitting days and implementing the forthcoming recommendations from Sir Brian Leveson’s independent review of the criminal courts, which is set to deliver its first report next month.

Combining the estimates and the spending review presents a largely positive picture for investment in the MOJ. The estimate for resource expenditure in 2025-26 is 14% more than the spending plans for 2024-25. This increase may help to offset some of the underfunding that the Department was subject to in the 2010s. The estimate for capital expenditure in 2025-26 is 32% more than the plans for the year 2024-25. This will be a record high level of capital expenditure for the MOJ over the course of a financial year. It remains to be seen whether the funding will be enough to address the challenges that the criminal justice system faces.

In the interests of time, I will focus on three key areas: prisons and probation, the courts and legal aid. His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service is the largest body within the MOJ in terms of expenditure. It makes up 47% of the MOJ’s day-to-day spending budget and in the 2025-26 main estimate will make up 82% of its planned capital spending. The prison population has more than doubled over the last 30 years and stands at around 88,000. It continues to grow year on year and is at a record high. If things continue as they are, the prison population will be at 93,500 by September 2026 and over 100,000 by September 2028, and there will not be sufficient places.

The MOJ cites the following reasons for the increase: an increase in police charging activity and flow into the courts; an increase in people on remand, who now make up an astonishing 20% of the prison population; and changes in sentencing policy, which keeps the more serious offenders in prison for much longer.

I welcome the Lord Chancellor’s commitment to build 14,000 prison places by 2031, and I hope that will ensure that emergency measures such as SDS40, which last year saw prisoners released automatically having served 40% of their sentences, do not have to be used again. In the context of the prison capacity crisis, the Government commissioned a sentencing review, which reported last month, by David Gauke, who gave evidence to the Committee last week. Many of the review’s recommendations have been accepted in principle by the Government. They include a recommendation for a new model of sentencing called the “earned progression model”, which could see some prisoners serving fixed-term sentences released after a third of their sentence, dependent on their behaviour. That recommendation and others in the review are aimed at making greater use of non-custodial sentences and therefore attempting to reduce the prison population. I look forward to seeing the detail of how those recommendations will be implemented in the forthcoming sentencing Bill.

Non-custodial sentences will place an additional burden on the already struggling Probation Service, to which I will turn. But, before I do that, could I issue a cautionary note? Even if David Gauke’s recommendations are wholly successful, prisons will still be full, and that has unintended consequences. It means, for example, that prisoners have to be slotted into places where those become available, and rehabilitation is more difficult. As Sky News reported recently, some prisoners are put into lower category prisons—category C and D prisons—years before they should be with regard to their sentence planning, and the prisoner escort service, which is already in a pretty parlous state, often brings prisoners late to court because it is not available at local prisons. Therefore, anything that can be done for effective community punishment and rehabilitation is clearly good.

[Catherine Atkinson (Derby North) (Lab)]

With 80% of offenders being reoffenders, does that not show that our current system is really broken and that we need a different approach? Does my hon. Friend agree that we have an opportunity with the sentencing review to keep our communities safer by properly addressing reoffending?

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend, who is knowledgeable on these issues, is absolutely right. We are relying on the implementation of the Gauke review’s recommendations to do two things: to ensure there is capacity in the prisons for the growing number of people being sentenced in our courts; and, in the longer term, to reduce prisoner numbers through effective rehabilitation. That can take place in prisons—not in overcrowded prisons on the whole —but it can take place more effectively in the community by way of getting people back into normal daily life, which prison certainly is not.

In that vein, let me turn to the Probation Service, which will receive an additional £700 million a year to support the reforms in the sentencing review. That is a substantial increase in funding, which is intended to enable probation to supervise more people in the community and expand electronic tagging.

The Probation Service currently manages 240,000 individuals on court order or licence. Worryingly, in last year’s annual report, HM inspectorate of probation labelled 10 local probation services as “requires improvement” and 14 as “inadequate”. It identified staffing challenges, unmanageable workloads, deficits in casework and insufficient management of risk, public protection and safeguarding. However, it also found outstanding statutory victim work, commitment and vision from staff and some good partnership working. The Committee has seen that itself on its visit to probation services.

I will however raise my concern about the ability of Serco, the current electronic tagging provider, to deal with the dramatic increase in demand on its services that will inevitably result from the sentencing Bill. The Committee has been in frequent correspondence with the Prisons Minister to raise our concerns regarding Serco’s poor performance, which has also been highlighted by Channel 4 and its “Dispatches” programme.

The Committee has identified several issues with management of the tagging contract, including substantial delays to the fitting of tags, even to serious offenders. We were shocked to learn that financial penalties have been levied on Serco every month since it took on the service in May 2024. It is unclear how Serco will be able to deal with increased demand given its unacceptable performance in managing the electronic tagging service at its current level.

I turn briefly to conditions in the prison estate. In 2023, HM chief inspector of prisons Charlie Taylor said that one in 10 prisons should be closed down. He stated that about 14 Victorian jails were so poorly designed, overcrowded and ill-equipped that they could not provide proper accommodation for prisoners. Last year, 63% of prisoners reported overcrowding. That is often with two or more prisoners in a cell that was designed for one person, with no private toilet facilities.

Drugs are an increasing problem in prisons. The Committee has covered that extensively in its “Tackling drugs in prisons” inquiry, which is due to report shortly. Between April 2023 and April 2024, almost 50,000 adults aged 18 and over were in alcohol and drug treatment in prisons and secure settings, which was a 7% rise compared with the previous year. In the 12 months to December 2024, there were 10,600 assaults on prison staff—violence is also on the increase in prison, which is partly a result of the unpredictable environment created by the abundance of drugs available—which is equivalent to 122 assaults per 1,000 prisoners, an increase of 13% from the previous year and the highest number of assaults on prison staff recorded in one year. The use of force by prison officers and rates of self-harm among prisoners have also been increasing in recent years. Self-harm was 10% higher in 2024 than in 2023.

Overcrowding, increased drug use, violence and self-harm contribute towards a distressing environment in prisons such that the vital function of prisons to rehabilitate offenders can be almost impossible in some institutions. We are undertaking a major inquiry into rehabilitation and resettlement, which I hope will shed more light on these troubling pictures.

Beyond all that, we have the continuing scandal of IPP prisoners—those imprisoned for public protection. I recommend to the Minister the proposals published this week by the Howard League on a new approach to IPP prisoners, which would serve to reduce the numbers continuing in custody substantially.

Let me turn to His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service, which is the second-largest body in the MOJ. In the Government’s main estimate for 2025-26, spending on HMCTS accounted for 21% of planned resource spending and 12% of capital spending. The current backlog of outstanding cases in the Crown court stands at about 4,000. That is a result of a number of factors, one of which is the shortage of criminal lawyers, driven by low legal aid pay rates and poor working conditions. The backlog in the courts is detrimental to the lives of thousands of people. Victims, witnesses and defendants alike are forced to wait in limbo for justice.

[Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst (Solihull West and Shirley) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point about court backlogs. Another factor is having the appropriate magistrates, legal advisers and so on to hear these cases. The Magistrates’ Association has raised concerns that the spending review allocation is insufficient to tackle that. Does he share those concerns?

[Andy Slaughter]

I do share those concerns. I want to take only a few more minutes with my speech, so I do not have time to go into what is happening in the magistrates courts as well—that is a debate for another day—but the shortage of magistrates, the shortage of legal clerks and low pay rates across HMCTS are clearly some of the factors that prevent us from getting to grips with the backlog, even though I have no doubt the Government wish to do that.

I welcome the Lord Chancellor’s allocation of 110,000 sitting days in the Crown court for 2025-26: the highest sitting-day allocation made since HMCTS was created and the biggest financial settlement ever made for the Crown court. I hope that that is enough to bring about some reduction in the backlog. However, I note that the allocation is below the 113,000 days that the Lady Chief Justice told the Committee the Crown court could sit for in the last financial year, and there have been similar increases in sitting days for other courts, including the magistrates court, which will sit for up to 114,000 days a year.

The Government have acknowledged that the allocation of days is not enough on its own to severely reduce the backlog in the Crown courts and that more radical reform is required. I therefore welcome Sir Brian Leveson’s independent review of criminal courts, which will propose options for both short and long-term reforms aimed at ensuring cases are dealt with proportionately in the light of current pressures on the Crown court and explore how the courts could operate as efficiently as possible. I look forward to the first report of the review, which is due to be published next month.

I will briefly touch on the role of the Legal Aid Agency. In terms of expenditure, the LAA is the third largest body within MOJ. Its day-to-day budget was around £0.9 billion, which comprised 8% of the MOJ’s total resource budget. Between 2009-10 and 2023-24, resource expenditure on legal aid decreased by 2% in cash terms and by 31% in real terms. I was surprised to see that the spending review did not include a specific funding allocation for the Legal Aid Agency; the only reference to it was in the context of potential efficiency savings that the MOJ will make in the review period.

Concerns have been raised about the sustainability of the criminal legal aid sector, given the number of legal aid firms and of solicitors and barristers practising in this area. In March 2025, the Law Society said that the number of criminal duty solicitors had fallen by 26% since 2017 and that that may, in future,

“leave many individuals unable to access their right to a solicitor and free advice.”

Even though I welcome the MOJ’s announcements in December 2024 of an additional £92 million per year for criminal aid solicitors, and I look forward to seeing the results of its consultation on that, it may well not be enough. Indeed, the 15% uplift in criminal barristers’ fees as a consequence of the Bellamy review took so long to come in and was so far overtaken by other increases in cost that that again needs to be looked at in the near future if we are to sustain the criminal Bar.

[Linsey Farnsworth (Amber Valley) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the lack of legal aid solicitors and barristers will only compound the problems of the court backlog? That is because cases will either have to be adjourned as a consequence of lack of legal counsel or they will take longer when defendants appear without legal counsel because those defendants will need more time and support from the court and other court services. Is my hon. Friend concerned about that?

[Andy Slaughter]

That is already happening. Non-availability of counsel, whether Crime Prosecution Service or defence counsel, is already one of the main reasons for ineffective trials. I therefore hope we will hear something about that and the Government’s plans to alleviate it when the Minister responds.

I briefly mention the cyber-attack that the Legal Aid Agency was subject to in April. The attack revealed serious concerns about the robustness of Government-managed digital services and the protection of sensitive data, and holds risks for the day-to-day operation of the justice system. We need the further statement that the Courts Minister promised on the steps being taken to recover that position—not today, perhaps, but soon—and the Committee will conduct its own inquiry into access to justice, beginning with a call to evidence this summer.

I reemphasise the importance of the role the criminal justice system plays in the proper functioning of our society. Out of sight should not be out of mind, in that respect. I appreciate the steps that this Government are taking and the struggle and the tasks that they have going forward. However, there is so much to do that we need to get on with it in a speedy fashion.

Finally, let me thank all those who work in the criminal justice system: those who risk their lives and their safety as frontline prison officers and probation officers, and those who keep the system running—judges, barristers and court staff. Across the piece, we see people going above and beyond because of the situation in which the system has been left. I am sure this is one point that will unite both sides of the House: we all appreciate the work that goes on every day to keep people safe and to ensure that justice is done.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Slaughter]

I do not need to add anything to my opening speech, because the inevitable gaps have been filled eloquently by the subsequent speakers. Let me just take two minutes to thank those who have contributed to the debate.

I thank the hon. Member for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox), my hon. Friends the Members for Colchester (Pam Cox) and for Amber Valley (Linsey Farnsworth), the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt), the hon. Member for Solihull West and Shirley (Dr Shastri-Hurst) and the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde). They are all members of the Justice Committee, although the hon. Member for Eastbourne was wearing his other hat today as the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, and I thank them for being here today. Indeed, I thank all the Committee members. With the exception of the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills, who resumed a distinguished parliamentary career after a short gap, they are all new Members, and they all give a great deal of time to this role in addition to everything else that new Members have to do.

I also thank the other Members who have spoken. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) for his forensic dissection of the last Government’s failings in this area, and I thank, in particular, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Riverside (Kim Johnson), who covered ground that I did not have time to cover in relation to the Criminal Cases Review Commission and miscarriages of justice. I am grateful for her work in chairing the all-party parliamentary group for miscarriages of justice, as I am to my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Catherine Atkinson)—who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on access to justice—for her work on that and to other APPGs in this field.

I even thank the Front Benchers for their contributions. The hon. Member for Eastbourne is always very critical but very constructive. Perhaps the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Dr Mullan) would like to adopt that approach.

[Dr Mullan]

indicated dissent.

[Andy Slaughter]

No, I thought not. However, I very much enjoyed our time together on the Justice Committee, and I also enjoy his taking every bad point during these debates—although he should have been kinder to the distinguished former Lord Chancellor David Gauke, who, in my view, produced a very good report. As for the Minister, he is a very good friend of mine, and I thank him for his contributions. We know what a difficult job he has, but that will not stop us being on his back all the time to ensure that the many problems that have been identified today are resolved.

Question deferred (Standing Order No. 54).