Home Office and Ministry of Justice

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Monday 29th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (North Cotswolds) (Con)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee, Mr Speaker, and yourself, Madam Deputy Speaker, for granting the debate, and the Minister for being here—I hope she will find it useful.

We often speak in this Chamber about defence spending, and rightly so. Defence keeps our nation safe, but justice is what keeps the public safe, ensuring that victims receive justice and that offenders are removed from our streets. According to the National Audit Office, the Ministry of Justice’s total expenditure for 2024-25 was £15.5 billion, with an income of £1.9 billion, resulting in a net cost to the taxpayer of £13.6 billion. To put that into perspective, it is the equivalent of just two weeks of welfare spending.

When I refer to one justice system, I mean the police, the courts, prison officers and the Probation Service working together as a single interdependent system. When one part underperforms, it creates a domino effect across the entire system. Since the beginning of this parliamentary term, the Public Accounts Committee has published a number of critical reports on the criminal justice system, covering Crown courts, police productivity, probation efficiency, violence against women and girls, MOJ reports and prison estate capacity. These are not separate issues; they are interconnected pressures within one system, and they must be analysed, funded and reformed accordingly, not in isolation. I suggest that the PAC is a very useful Committee for considering these types of cross-cutting issues.

It is clear that the criminal justice system has considerable weaknesses. A central issue is the lack of usable integrated data. The police, courts and prisons operate on separate systems that do not effectively communicate with one another. This fragmentation makes it difficult for the system to function efficiently as a whole and increases the risk of serious administrative errors. That is reflected in the number of erroneous prisoner releases. In the last 12 months to March 2025, 262 prisoners were mistakenly released—an increase of 128% compared with the previous years.

Let me turn first to the estimates themselves—after all, that is what the debate is about. It is striking that even identifying a clear, unified figure for the system is difficult because of the fragmented way in which the funding is structured and assessed. The House of Commons Library has confirmed that the Ministry of Justice 2026-27 main estimate for resource departmental expenditure limit—running expenditure—is £12.69 billion, and capital departmental expenditure limit is confirmed at £2.36 billion. That represents a 4.4% and 2.6% increase compared with last year respectively. By contrast, the Home Office main estimate for RDEL for 2026-27 was £19.5% billion, representing a 10.8% increase on last year.

The Prime Minister has said that governing this country is about choices, so the question is: are these the right choices? Although the Government have committed to increasing the Ministry of Justice budget by more than 2% per year, the Department faces mounting pressures, as the Minister will know. Half its running costs are spent on staff, and it has experienced rising demand, inflationary pressures, and higher than expected costs. It has responded by transferring £695 million from underspent capital budgets into day-to-day expenditure, largely due to delays in the prison expansion programme. At the same time, it has committed to delivering at least 5% in savings, reducing administrative costs by 15% by 2029-30, and introducing AI to drive efficiencies. Those are all good things, but they do put pressure on the current budget. These ambitious targets must not come at the expense of frontline services, and they must come with the data to back up the ambition.

Let me turn to some of the issues in more detail. Police officers are on the frontline, and too often they face criticism without proper recognition for the vital work they do to keep our communities up and down the country safe. Although their funding has increased, with a £535.8 million uplift in 2026-27, forces are dealing with the growing complexity of crime, sustained financial pressure and persistent productivity challenges. In Gloucestershire, the Government are not delivering sufficient funding through the police grant to invest in any new digital IT, which would enable the police to be more efficient, and such pressures inevitably feed into the courts, which are already under severe strain.

The rising population in this country is bound to mean that more people will be going through our court system. Around 4 million new cases are now entering our courts and tribunals each year in England and Wales, and the average time to resolve a case has risen dramatically, from 481 days to 685. The backlog in the criminal courts remains exceptionally high, with an unprecedented 88,200 Crown court cases open as of December 2025—it might have come down a little since then. The median time from an offence being committed to the case being completed is 355 days, with some rape and other serious sexual offences—the so-called RASSO cases—taking three years or more, and some being postponed up to six times. Many victims simply give up before their cases come to court in order to try to put the trauma they have suffered behind them.

Is the system any better in the magistrates courts, where there is a backlog in excess of 310,000 cases? Through the Courts and Tribunals Bill, the Government propose to increase magistrates’ sentencing powers to up to 36 months. However, we have a huge problem with the recruitment of magistrates, meaning that the system is likely to be overwhelmed if more cases are diverted to them. It cannot be right that we have empty courtrooms and burgeoning waiting lists. The Government’s changes to legal aid have also led to inefficiency, with more people now representing themselves; I do not blame them at all, but it means that each case takes longer because people often need the court procedure explained to them.

Crown court sitting days have not kept pace with demand, despite offers from the Lady Chief Justice to increase capacity, which have not been taken up fully by the Government. Around 11% of courts are inactive on any given day. Delays of that scale are unacceptable for victims, defendants and public confidence in the system. These delays have the direct impact on the prison population, with more people being held on remand due to the backlog, as well as increased time for preliminary hearings and the granting of bail.

We are also seeing an increase in the number of people received into prison, driven by tougher sentencing and a rising remand population. Currently, between 16,600 and 18,000 people are held on remand in UK prisons, meaning they have been denied bail or are awaiting trial. Many of those people have been on remand for over six months, which is the target for maximum remand. That accounts for nearly 20% of the prison population. The increased flow of untried defendants and extended waiting times due to court backlogs is leading to that unacceptable increase in the prison population. If dealt with more efficiently, it would help with overcrowding in our prisons, but without sufficient capacity or staffing, the trend is unsustainable. The prison population reached a record high of 98% capacity, or 88,000, in August 2024—the highest ever. Overcrowding is driving violence, placing staff at risk, and undermining rehabilitation efforts.

As we know, the Government have committed to creating 20,000 new prison places, yet progress has been slow, with repeated delays and underspending. In a recent accounting officer assessment, there were significant delays in awarding new contracts at both HMP Forest Bank and HMP Rye Hill. The AOA does not set out the cause for those delays or for the additional costs incurred.

At the same time, retention of prison officers remains a serious challenge, affecting safety and stability across the prison estate. To give just one example of what is going on in the prison system, at our hearing on HMP Dartmoor the issue of radon was raised. The Ministry of Justice has signed a lease that cannot be broken until 2033, yet no sooner had that lease been signed, the prison was deemed unsafe because of radon. It is costing £4 million a year for an empty prison. HMP Dartmoor is an example of a Department making a decision under pressure and at speed, leading to a complete waste of public money.

In March 2025, approximately 242,000 individuals were under probation supervision. Vacancy rates in the probation service have risen from 14% in 2021 to 21% in 2025. Staff are routinely working beyond capacity, estimated at 118%, although the figure is likely to be higher, particularly in London. That workload will be increased further with the Government’s early release scheme. We heard deeply concerning evidence describing a culture of emotional strain and trauma among probation staff. This is not just a workforce issue, but a public safety issue, because when probation fails, reoffending rises, placing additional burdens on the police, courts and prisons.

The cost to this country of reoffending alone stands at a staggering £20.9 million, but the human cost to victims and communities is immeasurable. In part that is because our prisons are so overcrowded that prisoners are not being given meaningful activity, for example work training, so that when they are released they have developed skills that could help them to find work and reduce the reoffending rate.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that when prisoners are engaged in retraining or rehabilitation, they can then return to the community they were brought up in, but that is often where their problems started? The report might be able to recommend things that can be done in prison, but when people get back to their community, that takes over and they start where they left off. Does he agree that such issues must be sorted out in the location, in the community, and in the place people come from, to ensure that they do not go back to their bad habits?

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

The hon. Member makes an interesting point, and the Government must consider in the round how they can give people useful training, work and leisure in prison, so that they come out with some skills. Where people go, how they are housed and what employment offers they get are issues that the Government need to consider seriously—it is a really big problem.

The number of recalls to prison is now at an all-time high, demonstrating a system under severe stress. Planned reforms, including early-release schemes, risk placing even greater pressure on an already overstretched probation service. Well-run probation is not optional; it is essential. It is what enables people to reintegrate into society and prevents the cycle of crime from continuing.

In conclusion, the criminal justice system must be treated as one system. The Home Office and the Ministry of Justice need to work much more closely together to resolve some of the serious problems that I have outlined. Investment, reform and accountability must reflect that reality. Fixing one part in isolation will not solve the wider problem. As I have said, democracy is founded on an effective and properly functioning criminal justice system to keep its citizens safe. Serious criminals need to be removed from society by imprisonment, but the system must help itself by taking strenuous steps to reduce reoffending, which I repeat costs this country £20.9 billion a year. It is a well-thumbed maxim that, whatever the cause, justice delayed is justice denied.

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[Dr Mullan]

My hon. Friend is right, and I will discuss his point in more detail. My hon. Friend said, “words to the effect”, but that was the exact wording that Ministers used in this Chamber, on the Government website and in press releases: the Government said that the most serious offenders would be excluded. When we challenged that, behind the scenes—and even on live television, on Sky News—Ministers said that what we were saying was not true; as we now know for sure, it was.

Labour tells us that this move is necessary. I imagine that Labour Members who genuinely care about these issues have been told by Ministers that here is nothing else they can do—that they have no choice and it is all because of the prison overcrowding crisis. I want to tackle that in detail, because that is not true. There are always different choices to be made.

The estimates before us, explaining the spending that is planned on prisons and prison spaces, highlight that most of the Department’s capital budget is allocated to the prison programme, which was awarded £7 billion up to 2030 in the recent spending review. Ministers know that their planned prison space numbers are essentially the same as ours were. The Minister also knows that the prisons that the Government have opened were paid for and started by the last Government. I share the frustration that Ministers at the time felt with the challenges in prison building; this Government already know how that feels at first hand, considering they have failed for more than a year to do anything significant about a major prison building contractor going bust. Nevertheless, more spaces are due to come online. So what we are managing is a short-term challenge.

I have spoken before about my preference for the justice system to be a greater public and political priority, which the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller), also spoke about. Others, including the hon. Member for Congleton (Sarah Russell), talked about the long-term lack of prioritisation of this issue. As a result, early prison release is absolutely not new. The previous Labour Government released 80,000 prisoners early, and the previous Conservative Government also operated the same early release programmes; Labour has used the exact same programme that the previous Government used and then implemented one of its own. These programmes allow for a Government to manage prison capacity in order to tackle the sorts of challenges mentioned by Ministers and Members on the Government Benches.

Previous projections are also unreliable and have forecast much higher prison populations than is currently the case. In fact, the prison population was projected to reach 90,000 by June 2019, but it did not hit that figure —it never has. So is the plan to release rapists and child groomers an essential short-term measure? No, it is not. It is a permanent long-term change to our sentencing laws that will have a profound impact on victims and the ability to secure justice. It is also being done in a fundamentally different way from other early release programmes.

Early release schemes have historically excluded serious violent and sexual offenders, but this Government are deliberately and specifically choosing not to do that. We warned the Government repeatedly that their exclusions based on sentence type were flawed, but they simply said again and again that the most serious offenders would be excluded. That was always untrue, because the criterion for this—the use of an extended determinate sentence—was never a criterion related to the seriousness or type of offence. During the passage of the Sentencing Act, I told the Government that every year, more than 60% of rapists and 90% of child groomers receive standard determinate sentences, and would therefore not be excluded and could be released early, but they did not listen. Instead, they sent Ministers on to the airwaves to say that it was not true. Now, finally, after victims themselves have been written to, the Government can no longer escape from what they have done.

Those victims include Fiona Goddard, who went public in sharing her letter last week. Live on “Good Morning Britain”, after explaining what her perpetrators had done to her—about the rapes and sexual assaults that she suffered—she was told the Government line: that they had excluded the most dangerous offenders. Susanna Reid, who was interviewing her, saw immediately how insulting to Fiona that response was, saying that it did not address anything that she had been saying. Fiona said that it was

“actually quite offensive, because they are basically trying to say that sexual crimes against children aren’t some of the most serious.”

She is right, isn’t she? How can anyone justify an early release programme that includes rapists and child sexual predators by saying it excludes the most dangerous offenders?

The use of the word “dangerous” is in itself a deceitful change in terminology. Up until last week, the Government said that the programme would exclude the most serious offenders, despite, as I have said, me telling them repeatedly that this definition was not aligned to the sentences they were excluding. Finally, just weeks before serious criminals will be let out, they have realised that they were wrong—not that “dangerous” is any better than “most serious” if, either way, rapists are included and are being released early.

We know that more than 7,000 victims have been written to; we know that many more are not registered for updates and will not be told. But how many perpetrators are getting out, and what offences have they committed? We do not know. We have an idea. We know that every year, as I mentioned, more than 5,000 rapists, paedophiles, child groomers and seriously violent offenders are sent to prison on a standard determinate sentence. That is every year—we can therefore assume that thousands of such offenders are in prison at any one time.

The Government are today happy to present to us their estimates on their spending on the prison population and prison building, but they will not and cannot tell us how many of those offenders they will be letting out.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

As my hon. Friend and the House will know, the reoffending rate is around 50%. Given the numbers he has just announced, it is inevitable that serious crimes will be committed. If the Government are committed to this policy, which I hope they are not, and want to release people early, which I do not agree with, they should not release these serious criminals. They should instead release the less serious criminals.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. I will remind the shadow Minister that this is a debate on the estimates—perhaps we could return to them.

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[The Minister for Courts and Legal Services (Sarah Sackman)]

I associate myself with the remarks of those who have thanked the Chairs of the various Select Committees for securing this important debate, and I thank everybody who made incredibly thoughtful contributions to it, although there was the odd exception.

To govern is to choose, and those on the Opposition—[Interruption.] I am coming to it. The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Dr Mullan) is getting started early. We know what choices the Opposition would make, because the Government’s inheritance in the criminal justice system was intolerable. Our prisons were allowed to run red hot so that the most serious offenders had nowhere to be locked up—a total dereliction of duty from the so-called party of law and order. In our courts, we had record and rising backlogs—there is consensus about that in the House—with both victims and defendants seeing intolerable delays. I could not agree more with the hon. Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) that this is one system, and it must keep the public safe and command public confidence. Yes, indeed, justice delayed is justice denied.

We see the brass-neckedness of Opposition Members—there is no apology—but this Government do not duck the choices. As I will come to, in both areas we have grasped the nettle. We have sought expert advice in the form of the independent review led by Sir Brian Leveson into the state of our criminal courts, and from David Gauke in relation to sentencing. We have heard the conclusions of those reviews, and yes, we have been prepared to make the tough choices required to put our justice system first and to put it on a stable footing.

The context outlined by the hon. Member for North Cotswolds and astutely by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter) is one in which for several decades justice has been relatively sidelined in public policy terms and in investment terms. That has changed under this Labour Government with the uplift in the capital budget, as hon. Members across the House have rightly acknowledged. That is seen in prison construction, the investment in our court estate, the investment in the technology required to bring our justice system into the 21st century and, indeed, in the vital intervention of uncapping sitting days to salvage our courts from the brink of collapse. That is the choice that the Government have made to put justice first and to fix the mess that the Opposition left us with.

Let me turn first to the crisis in our courts. We have taken a multi-pronged approach to this issue, as is set out in the estimates Bill. In colloquial terms, I would say that we have thrown the kitchen sink at it. We have done that in three ways: investment; modernisation and efficiency; and reform. Let me take each in turn.

First, we have taken the choice that the Conservatives failed to take when they gutted our legal aid system, our court workforce and the capital spend in our courts. We have reversed that. Now, £2.78 billion has been agreed in the concordat with our courts, including those uncapped sitting days, and £287 million in capital spend is literally fixing the leaking roofs in Newcastle and right across the country. I was also pleased to see Harrow Crown court reopened when I visited the other day.

On investment in our workforce, the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle speaks of empty courtrooms. Of course we do not want to see empty courtrooms, but that is a reflection of the state of system capacity. We cannot 3D-print judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers or court staff; we have to train them. Those people are skilled. They have to be trained, they have to be remunerated, they have to be retained. That is why this Government chose, early doors, to make the investment of £116 million in criminal legal aid for solicitors, the £34 million pledged to advocates and the record settlement for the Crown Prosecution Service, as well as the investment in our judiciary. It is that that is going to fill and sustain our empty courtrooms.

Many, including the hon. Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller), have rightly spoken about victims. We have made a £0.5 billion investment in victim support services. The transformation in the availability of transcripts and audio recording of proceedings in our magistrates courts is vital not only to improving the victim experience but, given the intolerable delays, to keeping victims and witnesses engaged in the process, because when victims and witnesses pull out of the process and walk away, they do not get justice at all. That is the situation that the Conservatives left us with.

Efficiency and modernisation are vital too, and it is right that Members across this House challenge the system and challenge those responsible for it to improve matters. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) for referring to prisoner transport and the prisoner escort and custody services—PECS—because this issue has been highlighted by the Bar, by the judiciary and by Members in this House. The Minister for Prisons in the other place and I have set up an oversight board to grip our PECS contracts—contracts that were agreed with Serco by the previous Government—to ensure that we are driving out inefficiency in that operation from end to end.

The judiciary is making a step change through a national listing framework, accompanied by AI data-driven tools, to improve the listing and scheduling of cases and make it more consistent. We are seeing investment in blitz courts in London and other places, as well as a case co-ordinator in every single Crown court centre to progress cases more rapidly. The adoption of remote technology is increasing the amount of remote participation, reducing the need for those prisoner transfers and enabling us to get through the easier cases. All of that is being done to drive the efficiency that everyone quite rightly wants to see.

However, I have to be clear that—just as my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick said, and consistent with the conclusions of Sir Brian Leveson—efficiency and investment alone will not reduce the backlog. It is true that the investment that we have made in sitting days, uncapping them for 2026-27, has resulted in a stabilisation of the backlog, just as we hoped it would, but the backlog continues to sit at over 80,000. Behind each and every one of those cases, there is a victim waiting for justice and a defendant stuck languishing in the remand system, and the public’s confidence in our criminal justice system is waning. That is why we will not duck the necessity of structural reform.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

The Minister is absolutely right: it is necessary to have confidence in our criminal justice system. Will she therefore answer the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Dr Mullan)? Will the Government be letting out rapists and other serious offenders under the early release scheme, and if so, how many?

[Sarah Sackman]

I am talking about courts, but I will turn to sentencing and prisons in due course. However, I must remind the hon. Gentleman that the Sentencing Act provisions, which will come into force in September and to which he refers, were made necessary by the Opposition’s failure to invest in prison places over many years. Over 14 years in government, they made their choice, and they added net 500 prison places. In the first two years, this Government have already delivered an additional 3,000 places, and the biggest prison building programme since the Victorians is set to deliver 14,000 additional prison places.

Let me return to the Crown court backlog. Reform cannot be avoided. To bring the backlog down, it is vital we ensure that the right cases are heard in the right place. It cannot be right that defendants can insist on their right to a jury trial in cases that could be heard by magistrates under even the existing sentencing powers. That is not fair on victims, and it is not fair that those cases are in the same queue as other, more serious cases, which have to have a jury trial, but a timely one. We cannot duck those choices.

The proposals to increase magistrates courts’ sentencing powers, remove the right to elect and create a Crown court bench division are sound. When a triable either-way case is heard in the magistrates court, it moves far faster than in the Crown court. We have to take a proportionate and hard-headed approach that balances the rights of defendants, the rights of victims and the entitlement of every citizen in this country to a timely trial. Timeliness is an essential ingredient of fairness.

As I have said, we inherited a prison system on the brink of collapse. To govern is to choose, and we took decisive action: £4.7 billion invested in the largest prison building programme that this country has seen, more foreign national offenders deported than ever before, 3,000 prison places delivered in the first two years of this Government and the Sentencing Act reforms, which will put our prisons on a more sustainable footing. As others have mentioned, we have also made a vital £700 million investment in probation, which is crucial to keeping the public safe and, as others have said, getting reoffending under control. Punishment can take place in prison, but punishment can also take place outside prison. The tough community sentence regime, the presumption of tagging, and the managed, structured and orderly early release system, as compared with the chaotic and opaque system under the previous Government—that is the choice that we make. That is how we get our criminal justice system under control.

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[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

This has been a constructive debate, and everybody has aired the themes that I raised throughout the debate. The Minister has outlined one or two areas where things are going a little better, namely perhaps a reduction in some of the Crown court backlogs, but that is countervailed by increases in the backlog in magistrates courts. I echo the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Dr Mullan) —as I am sure the Minister would—because we should pay grateful thanks to those police officers, probation officers and court officers who often have to work in incredibly difficult conditions, delivering some of the most difficult tasks in society. We should thank them.

The most worrying thing I heard tonight concerns the early release scheme, and the number of potentially very serious criminals who will be released. The Minister has made very clear that government is about choices. I think this is the wrong choice, but if she and the Government are determined to do this, let us be honest about it. She did not answer my question about numbers, but perhaps if I table a parliamentary question she will—I will do that to see whether she does answer it. I think this is the wrong choice, and I urge her again to rethink it.

I also echo comments made by my colleagues. The reoffending rate is far too high at around 50%, and we must find a way of giving prisoners meaningful education, training and skills, so that when they come out of prison they will, we hope, not reoffend. Finally, the Minister makes great play of measures that will be taken with serious offenders when they come out of prison—tagging and so on. Tagging has a part to play, but as she and I know, and the rest of the House knows, if a prisoner is going to commit a crime, they will commit that crime whether they have a tag on or not—they will probably take it off before they commit the crime, but I do not wish to go too far down that line. I ask the Minister to please reconsider this issue. We all want the criminal justice system to work and for people to have faith in it, but my worry is that if one person who is released early commits a heinous crime, that will destabilise society in a huge way. Otherwise, this has been a constructive debate, and I thank the Government and the Minister for her time.

Question deferred until tomorrow at Seven o’clock (Standing Order No. 54).