Autumn Budget 2024

Lord Bishop of Gloucester Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Gloucester]

My Lords, I will focus on the Budget in the context of criminal justice, and declare my interest as the Anglican Bishop for HM Prisons in England and Wales.

I was encouraged to hear from the Chancellor that the Government intend to

“begin to repair the justice system”,

and I welcome the extra investment in the Ministry of Justice—although how that will be spent is vital. We need to ensure that the aim is not to finance our way out of a prison capacity crisis. Let us first address the purpose of prison and then put the resources in the right place, with a long-term vision of enabling strong and healthy families and communities. As a Christian, I hold fast to hope and transformation. Reoffending continues a pattern of broken relationships and is costly, not only to the fabric of society but in financial terms: it costs approximately £18 billion per year. Let us not increase funds simply to do more of the same, because all the evidence is that it is not working.

I am delighted that the sentencing review will look at alternatives to custody. As we know, a prison place costs more than £40,000 a year. A community sentence costs about 1/10th of that and with better results, yet the use of community sentences has been falling over the last decade. Incidentally, we are currently haemorrhaging money through the dysfunction and delays in courts and the record high numbers held on remand. In the Crown Courts, approximately 14% of people on remand are subsequently acquitted. Over 15% are then given a non-custodial sentence, but by that point a costly pressure has already been placed on prison capacity, as well as the impact on victims, families and wider communities, with monetary implications for health, care and education. Funding additional Crown Court sitting days is only scratching a symptom rather than addressing a cause.

Returning to the sentencing review, I hope that it will shape a criminal justice system that better delivers for victims as well as offenders, such that offenders are enabled to desist from crime, which will in itself have financial benefit. I reiterate that many offenders are also victims—often as children—and I do not believe that we can talk about a justice budget without looking up stream. How I long for us to look at financial resources in a person-centred way, rather than through a departmental lens.

What we spend on education, health, and social care—not least in the early years—has a knock-on effect for who does and does not enter the criminal justice system, and all that that means for subsequent generations, the wider community and, of course, public finance. For a child born today, how will the whole Budget, across departments, enable them to flourish as an individual within a network of relationships?

Then there is the issue of how money is spent on prisons so that they can be places of transformation, including purposeful activity, therapy, education and developing healthy relationships. We do not need more prisons: what we do need is to replace and repair much of what we already have. Let us not forget that, for many people, prison is a place of work. I pay tribute to the committee of prison officers, governors, chaplains and all those who work in prison, often out of sight and too often out of mind. I note a minimum additional investment over the next two years of £500 million to recruit new prison and probation staff. Yet extra resource for recruitment will work only if it is coupled with resources for staff training, development and boosting morale, not least so that existing staff are retained. Unless there is good and adequate resourcing and valuing of probation, it will not be possible to have alternatives to custody or to reduce reoffending through community-focused solutions.

With spending front-loaded for the first two years of this Parliament, I fear we run the risk of short-termism. Reforming the criminal justice system is a long-term and overdue project, but the financing cannot be separated from areas of spending in other departments. We must ensure that our approach is well co-ordinated and far-sighted. In the meantime, this Budget is a step in the right direction for criminal justice, and I look forward to engaging with the Government further on this vital work.