Home Office and Ministry of Justice

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Monday 29th June 2026 Commons Chamber

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

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for this important debate. The debate follows a joint application by the Chairs of the Justice, Public Accounts and Home Affairs Committees. There is cross-Committee concern for our criminal justice system, as the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), has just said. I thank my fellow Chairs for their focus on the issue in its widest sense.

As Chair of the Justice Committee, I will focus my remarks on the estimates for the Ministry of Justice. A year ago, the Justice Committee was granted a similar debate on the spending of the Ministry of Justice. I noted at that point the positive settlement that the MOJ had received as part of the spending review, including a £7 billion investment aimed at delivering 14,000 new prison places by 2031 and £700 million a year for the Probation Service by 2028-29, in the light of the Sentencing Act 2026 reforms. Although I welcome many of the actions that the Government have taken over the past year to reform our criminal justice system, there is still a great deal of progress to be made, as those targets indicate.

The Ministry of Justice suffered years of budget cuts during the years of Tory austerity, meaning that when this Government were elected in 2024, MOJ expenditure was 11% less in real terms than it was in 2010. The main estimates for 2026-27 confirm that the MOJ’s day-to-day spending is set to increase by £757 million, or 6.5%, which includes further investment in the Prison and Probation Service, the Courts and Tribunals Service and the Legal Aid Agency. I will come to each of those areas in turn shortly. The MOJ’s capital spending is also set to increase by almost £60 million, or 2.6%. I note that the MOJ anticipates drawing down further funding at the supplementary estimates to support its prison capacity programme, and that must be right.

This year’s main estimates allocate over half its day-to-day spending to the Prison and Probation Service. This is aimed at investment in staffing, opening of additional prison places and paying for prison contract costs. The prison population stands at over 87,000 and it is predicted to increase, with the most recent set of projections forecasting 91,400 by September 2026, and between 97,400 and 102,100 by September 2029. These are the highest numbers we will ever have seen in UK prisons.

Already, 25% of prisoners live in overcrowded conditions. As we have heard, overcrowding reduces safety, increases the likelihood of self-harm and violence, and impairs the rehabilitative programme that prisons are able to offer. The Justice Committee has focused much of its work over the past year on the endemic drugs crisis in our prisons and the poor rehabilitative offer available for prisoners.

The Government’s continued investment in creating new prison places is necessary, but alongside the provisions of the Sentencing Act, some of which have now come into force, I hope that we can begin to see a stabilisation and eventual reduction of the prison population and an improvement in conditions there. I note that deaths in prison custody decreased by 12% from the previous 12 months up to March this year, but any non-natural death in prison is a tragedy. I direct Members to our reports on drugs in prisons and rehabilitation in prisons, which have been tagged on the Order Paper as relevant documents for this debate.

As I mentioned earlier, by 2028-29, the Probation Service will receive an additional £700 million per year to support reforms resulting from the Sentencing Act, including a significant increase in the use of electronic monitoring or tagging. That investment is a substantial and welcome increase for a service that has been under strain for many years. I have raised repeatedly my concerns about the performance of Serco in its provision of the tagging service, and the Justice Committee will closely monitor Serco’s performance moving forward.

I commend the work of the Public Accounts Committee in looking at the probation service and the report it published in February this year. The PAC report stated that the vacancy rate for probation officers increased from 14% in 2021 to 21% in 2025, with probation officers working above capacity for several years. The system has been running hot for an unsustainable period, which impacts on the hard-working probation staff. That cannot be underplayed and I hope to see improvements in this area soon.

The additional funding for the Courts and Tribunals Service is driven by pay increases and an increase in the uncapped sitting days in the Crown courts, which are necessary to recruit and retain staff and to address the backlog. The Crown court backlog continues to sit at around 80,000 cases. The uncapping of sitting days for 2026-27 is a welcome step and has already had a positive impact, but it is widely recognised that it is not enough on its own.

It is against that backdrop of an ever-increasing backlog that the Government introduced the Courts and Tribunals Bill earlier this year. Among other measures, the Bill would shift more cases to the magistrates courts and reduce the use of jury trials. The Justice Committee recently published an extensive report on the Bill, in which we warned that capacity in magistrates courts is unlikely to expand quickly enough to meet this increased level of demand. Our report highlighted the long-standing reductions in the number of magistrates and legal advisers, and described the recruitment target of having 21,000 magistrates in place by 2029 as unrealistic.

The Courts and Tribunals Bill has been carried over to this Session, but a date for its consideration on Report has not yet been set. I would encourage the incoming Prime Minister—whosoever that may be—to consider carefully the Committee’s critique of the Bill, but also to be conscious that reform is desperately needed and cannot simply be kicked down the road to avoid difficult decisions.

[Sir Ashley Fox (Bridgwater) (Con)]

I am grateful to the Chair of the Justice Committee for giving way. What contribution to reducing the Crown court backlog does he believe curtailing the right to jury trials will make?

[Andy Slaughter]

First, one has to look at the Leveson package—the two volumes that Sir Brian Leveson has put together over 1,000 pages. That has 180 recommendations, a very small number of which deal with this issue. It is undeniable that it will be one factor that has an effect. Where I agree with the hon. Gentleman is that it is very difficult to calculate at this stage what effect it will have.

The changes to jury trials—not the abolition of jury trials—are moving the line so that some more cases will be dealt with at a summary level. As I think the hon. Gentleman knows, I prefer to look at the practical problems there may be in replacing some jury trials, with the additional pressures on the magistrates court. As a matter of principle, we can differ; as a matter of practice, I suspect he would agree with me. I ask him to agree with me that there will be some benefit, but I agree that it has not been calculated as yet.

Let me pick up what I was saying. A malfunctioning courts system is bad for victims, bad for defendants and bad for faith in our justice system, which has ramifications for our democracy.

I will conclude by touching on the Legal Aid Agency, which affects civil and criminal legal aid. Legal Aid Agency spending will rise by 10% year on year. That is driven by Government reforms that will result in higher billing in civil representation schemes, fee uplifts in crime lower schemes and additional operating costs. As I said last year, I was surprised to see that the spending review did not include a specific funding allocation for the Legal Aid Agency, with the only reference to it being in the context of potential efficiency savings that the MOJ will make in the review period.

Continuing investment in legal aid is essential to the proper functioning of the criminal justice system and efforts to tackle the Crown court backlog. Access to justice for those who rely on legal aid is reliant on a well-funded and properly functioning Legal Aid Agency, and we are all aware of the difficulties it has had over the past year. The Justice Committee will soon publish a report focused on legal aid as part of a wider access to justice inquiry.

Let me emphasise how important it is that we have a properly functioning criminal justice system if the public are to continue to have faith in our institutions and political system. I implore the incoming Administration not to lose the focus on reforming the criminal justice system. The current system is not fit for purpose, and we cannot afford not to act.