Court Closures and Reform

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) on securing this debate and on his excellent introduction to the overall subject.

It will perhaps come as no surprise to you, Mr Gray, that I will mainly concentrate my comments on the potential closure of the magistrates court in my constituency of Cambridge. I should say that I am grateful to the Minister for the discussions that we have had. I understand that she will not make the decision about Cambridge in particular, although I am sure that she is in a position to pass the comments made in this debate to whoever will make that decision and to respond to some of the points that are made today.

The reaction in Cambridge to the news that our very expensive court, which was newly created just a few years ago, was up for closure was one of universal astonishment and dismay across the board. We have heard from court users and magistrates. There has also been an open letter from 39 very senior academics, as one would probably expect given that there are a lot of experts in penal injustice issues in Cambridge. They made many of the points that have been made very eloquently today by my hon. Friend and they also reflect the fact that the justice system is changing. No one is denying that the world is changing; the question is whether this is the right pace of change and the right way to change it.

Some of the opposition has come from quarters that would not normally be expected to provide opposition. The police and crime commissioner for Cambridgeshire, Jason Ablewhite, is a Conservative, of course, and I do not always agree with him on everything, but he has produced a very detailed response to the proposed closure, with many sensible points. He describes himself as being “deeply concerned”, and he finds it “surprising” and “disappointing” that the Ministry of Justice is making these suggestions about Cambridge, and he needs to be convinced that the proposals have been fully thought through.

The latter is the point that I wish to develop, because I hardly need to point out to the Minister, who knows this very well, that Cambridge—and Cambridgeshire—is one of the fastest growing parts of our country, and it has huge problems in terms of its local transport infrastructure. With one of the fastest-growing economies in 2018, the combined authority assumes that the population will grow by more than 100,000 by 2031, and we have seen the Government’s enthusiasm for promoting such growth, with their ideas about east-west rail and so on. Obviously, we would all hope that such growth would produce a record number of well-behaved citizens and that there would be no further problems and no need for a justice system but, sadly, I do not think that likely. At a time when our city is growing so fast, it seems absurd to suck out of it modern facilities that were provided at huge cost only a few years ago. A particular irony is that the consultation talks about the capital value that may be unleashed but there will be no capital savings because the building is leased—the value might not even exceed the £1 achieved when Ely magistrates court was sold a few years ago.

A final point on the Cambridge position is that I am grateful to local blogger Antony Carpen for digging out the history of the city’s justice system. He tells me that Professor Helen Cam found out that Cambridge’s first courthouse was established in 1572. So here we are, 450 years on, and I hope that the Minister will not be the one responsible for undoing that long tradition of local justice in Cambridge.

In the details that underlie the proposal to claim Cambridge magistrates court, the basic case is that it is underutilised. When I visited the court a few months ago, and when I talked to people involved, that was the crux of the issue. Sadly, it has taken freedom of information requests to drag out some of the detailed figures that one would hope would shed more light on the claim of underutilisation: why is this modern court underutilised? When we look at those numbers, an even more puzzling story begins to emerge. Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service management system tells us that in 2014-15 just over 7,000 cases had their first hearing at Cambridge magistrates court. The following year, the number jumped dramatically to more than 14,500 but the year after that it lurched back to 8,000. That is not about virtual courts, nor is it about changes in the number of people brought to and from court; I am afraid it is about a system that is woefully understaffed and effectively in chaos on a daily basis. I am told that listings are currently running seven or eight months away. It is not underutilisation; it is a building that does not have enough staff in it.

The comparison would be running a village shop with nothing in it—Government Members love the village shop analogy when talking about economics. If there is nothing in the shop there is nothing for people to buy, so it gets into trouble and the answer is to either close the shop or stock it properly. I would say that we have a very modern facility that should be used properly. I understand that there is an issue with the configuration; we have three court buildings in Cambridge and others around the county. The question is how best to do this.

There is also a cost issue. Possibly due to commercial confidentiality, the Ministry of Justice sadly seems unwilling to share this information, but figures are bandied around locally and I am told by some that this is the cheapest court to run in Cambridgeshire and that the private finance initiative court in Huntingdon is extremely expensive by comparison. There may well be contractual issues as to why one might be chosen over the other, but perhaps we ought to know and, particularly at a time of changing lease values in city centres, we ought to look ahead rather than responding in a short-termist way.

We have heard the argument about travel times—travel times will always be discussed in debates on these issues—and the Minister needs no reminding of how difficult it is to travel in and out of Cambridge. Many of the people who have come to me and have written to the local newspaper have explained just how difficult it would be to go to Peterborough or Huntingdon, with the journey sometimes taking much longer than an hour. One person said it took her 40 minutes to get in from Grantchester, which is roughly the time it would take to walk. To get to Peterborough and back in a day is impossible for some people. Those are the same issues as the ones my hon. Friend the Member for Slough raised.

Going back to the fine detail, we also have concerns about the suggestion that non-custodial work might remain in other court buildings in Cambridge. That is to be welcomed, but it might have been useful if the Ministry of Justice had been able to explain at the outset just what the split between custodial and non-custodial work was. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) asked about that in a letter, which was referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough, and a freedom of information request revealed dramatic numbers: 326 of the 14,000 cases in 2015-16 and 481 of the 7,500 in 2016-17 were custodial ones. That rather raises the question of whether it is possible to configure the three courts in Cambridge creatively, to most effectively help everyone.

The consultation has been run oddly, starting with a headline about closing a magistrates court when it should have been about how to make best use of the buildings we have. One of the most useful things I have done, apart from visiting the court and seeing it in action, is to have a conversation with a group of defence lawyers in Cambridge. Their account of what the system is like on a daily basic verged on harrowing. They said that it was extremely pressured, with real issues of access to legal aid in the area and pressure on local defence lawyers, and that there was the possibility, with this kind of change, that people would no longer have access to defence lawyers, because many of the smaller practices would not be able to bear the costs of travelling to and from Peterborough and Huntingdon. I have made an offer to the Minister, which I hope she will pass on to one of her colleagues, to come to Cambridge and sit down with the dozen women lawyers, as I did. They are all friendly, pleasant people and would explain what their daily lives are like and what life is like for defendants. They have very legitimate concerns about what they potentially face.

I conclude by reflecting on a couple of accounts by people who are in and out of the courts. When I visited, it was a long time since I had been in a court and it was pretty much as I remembered from elsewhere—a busy, fraught experience. It was also difficult to organise, and I sympathise with those trying to list cases, ensure that people turn up and deal with what happens when cases overrun or not everything is ready. It is of course hard to run a system to maximum efficiency, but a local journalist, Tara Cox from Cambridge News, who regularly goes to the court, writes:

“Every day there are delays, adjournments, and rescheduling of court hearings at the last minute. If you want to find out exactly how the magistrates’ court operates”

come and see. I extend that invitation to whichever Minister is making the decision: come and see exactly what people are up against.

Another journalist who spent a day at the court talking to its users was told:

“it would have taken me a silly amount of time to get to Peterborough”.

The mother of a teenage defendant said it had taken her an hour and 15 minutes from a village just outside Cambridge and one can imagine how much longer it would take her to get to Peterborough or Huntingdon —it could well be the best part of two and a half hours each way, which is impossible to do. The journalist also spoke to court staff, who told her that in their view the court closure would lead to an increase in the number of defendants and witnesses not turning up, which, they said, was already a significant problem. Surely the extra cost of failures to appear must be balanced against any potential savings—a point the police and crime commissioner makes forcefully in his submission.

I ask the Minister to consider the matter closely and think hard about the best way of configuring services in a city such as Cambridge. I have nothing against considering how to make best use of our existing estate but the overall message should be clear: keep the magistrates court in Cambridge open.