Sentencing Reform/Legal Aid

David Mowat Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I have to admit that I thought that was a rather extraordinary way of reorganising the Departments when it was first done, and so did the judges. They greatly resisted going into the Ministry of Justice because they could see that the vast explosion of expenditure on prisons would crowd out the budget for the courts. The Ministry of Justice is a bit like a nest with a cuckoo in it—[Interruption.] It is not me. The previous Government kept feeding the Prison Service—exploding the Prison Service—and then cutting expenditure on every other aspect of the Department’s activities as it was thrown out of the nest. We need to stabilise the prison population, get the costs under control, use it more effectively and have a more intelligent way of working with the rest of the Department to deliver things.

The long-term future of the Department will be looked at. In my experience, the reorganisation of Departments hardly ever achieves any worthwhile objectives, whatever the Prime Minister of the day thought he was achieving. Too much confusion is caused by moving them all around and it is best to stick with the structure that we have, but I would not have gone for the present structure in the first place, if I had had anything to do with it.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

Even after these changes, we will be spending between four and 10 times as much on legal aid as other countries, some with similar jurisdictions to ours. Does this not imply that there is a structural issue in parts of our legal system, and is there not more that we could do to address this structural issue in the years ahead, in which case we would make real savings?

[Mr Clarke]

My hon. Friend talks common sense about where we are with the legal aid system. I still think it is important to have a legal aid system to enable vulnerable people and people at serious risk to protect their rights, even when they cannot afford a lawyer, but there are plenty of other things wrong with the justice system. We are bringing forward proposals to try to improve the efficiency of the courts. At present the courts provide a daunting experience to any member of the public who finds himself unlucky enough to have to go through any form of litigation. The delays, waste of time and cost are almost endemic in the system.

We are tackling the efficiency of the criminal justice system—that applies to the civil justice system just as much—to try to ensure that the whole legal process becomes part of the public service and is there to be used by people who have to use it, or have to do justice, with rather more efficiency and rather less daunting waste and inconvenience than is often the case at present. The costs must be brought down through large parts of the service.