Criminal Justice

Pam Cox Excerpts

Wednesday 25th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Pam Cox (Colchester) (Lab)]

I rise to speak as the Member of Parliament for Colchester and as a member of the Justice Committee. I also declare an interest as the recently elected chair of the all-party group on penal affairs.

The estimate for the Ministry of Justice proposes a 6.5% increase in day-to-day spending and a 20.8% increase in capital investment. Those are welcome figures. They are necessary because this Government inherited from the previous Government a crisis across the criminal justice system: in our courts, our prisons and our probation services.

Let us begin with our courts. As my hon. Friend the Chair of the Justice Committee outlined, the Crown Court backlog stands at more than 74,000 cases—double the number in 2019. Victims are waiting years for justice. The increase in sitting days and the investment in digital infrastructure are a necessary first step. As a member of the Select Committee, I have visited our courts where dedicated public servants are working hard, despite the challenges, to deliver justice for victims. We need bold reform, and I look forward to the recommendations of Sir Brian Leveson’s review later this year. We all hope that they will indeed be bold. The justice system too often appears to be stuck in a bygone age.

In our prisons, we all see the failures of the last Government laid bare: failure to plan for the long term in prison places, failure to rehabilitate prisoners, and failure to prevent reoffending. The prison population now exceeds 87,000, with projections of more than 100,000 prisoners by 2028. Overcrowding is rife, with 24% of prisoners held in crowded conditions. The maintenance backlog has ballooned to £1.8 billion. There cannot be effective rehabilitation in a prison system that is so overcrowded.

Time and again, the Select Committee has heard about poor contract management, and a failure around transparency and value for money across a range of contracts, from education to maintenance to drug and alcohol services. I hope that the Procurement Act 2023 will tighten up those essential processes. The Act has to be fit for purpose. If procurement is not fit for purpose, prisons will not be fit for purpose.

The Government’s 10-year prison capacity strategy promises 14,000 new places, compared with just 500 under the last Government over those 14 wasted years. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Riverside (Kim Johnson) said, we cannot just build our way out of this crisis. We need a smarter approach to sentencing and rehabilitation. I welcome the Justice Secretary’s commitment to the earned progression model and the expansion of community-based alternatives. Earned progression must be matched with access to decent prison programmes, health, education, wellbeing and so on, so that progression is indeed earned and helps offenders to turn their life around, thereby protecting the public and victims from harm.

Those reforms must be matched by investment in probation. The Probation Service is under severe strain, with many local services rated as inadequate and staff turnover still too high. The £700 million earmarked for probation reform is a start, but we must ensure that it delivers real, measurable improvements in reoffending rates.

Expenditure on legal aid is down 31% in real terms since 2010. That hollows out access to justice. The recent commitments to increasing funding for solicitors and youth court work are welcome, but I echo Labour colleagues’ comments that we need to go further on legal aid where possible. A justice system that works only for those who can afford it is no justice system at all.

The estimate reflects a Government who recognise the scale of the challenge. The Secretary of State and her ministerial team have worked hard to deliver the increase in funding. The last Government lost control of the courts, prisons and probation. These measures will go some way towards putting that right so that we can all have faith in our justice system again.