Protecting the Public and Justice for Victims

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Wednesday 9th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab) [V]]

The Select Committee on Justice, of which I am a member, is working on reports on court capacity, legal aid and the withering of access to justice, probation, recovery from the disastrous privatisation experiment, the long-unresolved failings of the coroner system, and our crumbling prison system, in particular its effect on women, young people and the mental health of those in custody.

The Lord Chancellor’s priorities seem rather different: at the behest of a Prime Minister who has little respect for the rule of law, he is busy interfering with the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the independence of the courts—dangerous constitutional tinkering while the justice system grinds to a halt. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill undermines fundamental civil liberties, while the further review of judicial review looks like an obsession in avoiding scrutiny, as we have seen again today with the findings of the judicial review of the Cabinet Office Minister’s conduct and yesterday with the exposure of that same Minister’s secret “clearing house” for freedom of information requests: bad priorities, and the wrong priorities.

We have heard about the backlog of cases in the Crown and magistrates courts and there are similar logjams in the civil court and tribunal systems although they are less well recorded. It is true that the Crown court backlog has been this high before, but then the court system was operating at a much higher volume and numbers of outstanding cases fell quickly. They rose again before the pandemic because of deliberate Government actions in closing courts and reducing sitting days. With the acceleration of the backlog in the past year, they lack the means to tackle it. Belatedly they introduced testing at court on a purely voluntary basis. They set up Nightingale courts, but perhaps a tenth of the number required, and a fraction of the number closed in the last decade. There are insufficient judges or lawyers to cope with the needs of the justice system because cuts in both legal aid and the CPS have left a skeleton service. Victims are waiting up to four years from offence to disposal. This is a question not just of quantity but of quality of justice. Memories fade, witnesses get cold feet, victims want to move on with their lives, trials collapse.

There is a lack of urgency and direction at the Ministry of Justice. The decision to spend £4 billion on new prison places while letting existing prisons decay, and the lack of facilities, of training and education, of proper healthcare and of basic living conditions in so many of our Victorian prisons are a disaster for inmates, for underpaid and overworked staff and for all of us. The failure to rehabilitate prisoners and to reintroduce them to society with housing and employment support is a recipe for recidivism.

It is only possible in these debates, and with the time we have, to skim the surface of these issues, but the inquiries of the Select Committee and some of the APPGs, such as the all-party group on legal aid, show the depth and complexity of the challenges we face. Unless the Secretary of State starts to look critically at his Government’s record, he will be just another Tory Lord Chancellor who has presided over the further decline of a justice system that once was admired and copied around the world.