Home Office and Ministry of Justice

Jess Brown-Fuller Excerpts

Monday 29th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sir Ashley Fox]

I do not believe that information was provided, certainly not when it was presented to me, but if the hon. Lady has it, no doubt she will send it to me.

Jury trials and staff absence are not the only areas where the Government are focusing on the wrong issue; a similar problem emerges in the management of our prisons. The Government seem to believe that recklessly releasing many thousands of criminals early will address the crisis of overcrowding, instead of investing in measures to ensure that they do not reoffend. I fear that releasing so many criminals so early in their sentences risks a wave of reoffending in the future.

It is well established that when prisoners engage in meaningful educational or vocational courses, there are sizeable reductions in reoffending. More than 50% of adult prisoners have the literacy skills of an 11-year-old or lower; knowing this, one might think that the Government would seek to address the problem. The earned progression model should surely ensure that participation in education and training is compulsory to secure the very early releases that the Government are proposing. Instead, this Government are choosing to reduce the provision of prison education, astonishing though that might seem.

That is of huge concern, because investment in prison education is cost-effective. Research in 2018 showed that the economic benefits of lower reoffending and higher levels of employment after release outweighed the costs of prisoner education by a ratio of 5:1. In this instance, the problem is not that the budget has been cut, but that the cost of supplying that education has risen so significantly that the volume of core education delivered this year will be cut by 20% to 25%. Instead of addressing why those costs have increased or exploring more competitive and flexible commissioning models to incorporate smaller providers, the Government’s response has been to cut provision. That is short-sighted. If the MOJ is so poor at entering into contracts, may I recommend to the Minister that that budget is entirely devolved to prison governors? I believe they would be better at bringing together local businesses to provide the education they need for the prisoners in their care. It would certainly be better than paying Serco, Capita or whoever £100 million a year to deliver less education each year.

[Jess Brown-Fuller (Chichester) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent point about the ability of prison governors to spend money. I was speaking to a prison governor recently, who said that because of the amount he is allowed to spend, when the washing machine breaks, he cannot purchase a commercial one. He keeps buying ones from the high street, which naturally break after a week or so because of the level of washing his prison has to do. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that giving prison governors some more flexibility so that they can make decisions for the prisons they know best would actually save the MOJ money in the long run?

[Sir Ashley Fox]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and I agree with her. Members of the Justice Committee hear that all the time when we visit prisons. For example, broken security netting cannot be repaired or replaced until some very long and convoluted process goes through Whitehall and comes back six months later, no doubt after many drones have flown in with however many packages of contraband goods. It is absolutely hopeless. We have to devolve proper responsibility and financial management to prison governors. Sitting on the Justice Committee, I have seen and heard at first hand the reality of how reduced educational opportunities are putting rehabilitation at risk, yet despite awareness of these dangers, the Government only partially accepted our formal recommendation to prioritise the delivery of core education provision.

Estimates day debates allow the House to hold the Government to account, not just for how much they spend, but for how well they spend it. Curtailing jury trials for marginal gain and cutting back on prison education are not the reforms of a system focused on long-term effectiveness. If we are serious about delivering timely, fair and sustainable justice, we must prioritise the right kinds of investment that will deliver the reforms the justice system needs to protect victims as its No. 1 priority, to deliver justice and to get good value for money for the taxpayer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jess Brown-Fuller (Chichester) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to speak in today’s estimates day debate on criminal justice, and I put on the record my thanks to the three Chairs of the Select Committees that suggested this debate to the Backbench Business Committee: the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown); the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley); and the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter). I also thank all hon. Members who have stuck it out in the Chamber on a Monday evening, who clearly care about criminal justice.

Politics is all about priorities, and so often the justice system falls a little short. Unless members of the public have had experience of the criminal justice system, have been victims of crime or have a loved one who has had the experience of going through the system, it does not necessarily appear in their top five priorities for the Government, but I thank all those who work to keep the criminal justice system functioning despite the lack of investment, the often crumbling infrastructure and the huge amount of pressure on them to ensure that justice is served.

The system as it stands lets down victims and defendants alike. It fails to rehabilitate offenders, and so many never see the justice that they deserve. The Crown court backlog is clearly unacceptably high, and that opinion is shared across the House. It is the biggest challenge that the justice system faces, as the hon. Member for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox) said in his contribution. Its exponential growth requires urgent action, but the fix does not lie in taking a sledgehammer to jury trials. Jury trials provide a fundamental safeguard of fairness and liberty, and they are not the cause of the backlog.

We on the Liberal Democrat Benches do not fundamentally believe that the Government have successfully made the case that their reforms will reduce the backlog or make any cost saving to the Department. The modelling has still not been made available, and the estimates behind the claimed time savings have been widely questioned. Even accepting the Government’s own estimates, it will take a decade for the backlog to fall below current levels. Indeed, the backlog is currently predicted to continue increasing and to surpass 100,000 cases by the end of next year.

What has been proven to reduce the backlog across the country is the very welcome uncapping of sitting days, and we are pleased that His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service has been allocated a £143.1 million uplift, including the funding for uncapped sitting days. With the previous increases in sitting days that the Government announced in the last round, Crown court backlogs are beginning to fall. The Old Bailey reduced its backlog in 2025. In Chelmsford, it fell by 10%, and Maidstone saw a 5% reduction in its backlog. Across the country, the overall Crown court backlog in the last quarter fell for the first time in three years. So the truth is that proper funding for our courts and open sitting days are bringing down the backlog, and we are yet to see the result of the full uncapping of sitting days, which came into place only in April.

Given the scepticism that the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) has expressed about jury trial reform, I hope the Government will give serious consideration to changing course. He told BBC Radio Manchester that the Government should

“pause…this and take a step back and have proper consideration”,

as the hon. Member for Congleton (Sarah Russell) mentioned.

On another area of the criminal justice system, we Liberal Democrats have put forward several amendments, such as training for court staff, so that the victim experience is better, because victims often report feeling unsupported or unheard. The Government must do more to continue their journey to ensure that the court system centres victims’ experience. Part of that experience is the processing after a criminal case, and access to court transcripts for victims. I acknowledge that the Government have made steps to improve access, after robust negotiations in both Houses on various Bills since July 2024, most recently the Sentencing Act 2026 and the Victims and Courts Act 2026.

I put on record the exemplary effort made by my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney), who has been campaigning to ensure that court transcripts are made available for free to victims of crime, after a constituent of hers was quoted thousands of pounds to access the transcript of her own court case. Nobody should be priced out of seeing their own story in black and white after they have gone through a Crown court experience. Charlotte Meijer and the campaign Open Justice for All have been campaigning incredibly on this issue. They have published a letter calling on the Deputy Prime Minister to go further and faster, and that includes ensuring that magistrates courts are recorded and sentencing remarks are made available for free in all courts.

We are not here to discuss the Courts and Tribunals Bill, but it does not seem to be progressing currently or coming back to the House in any rush. I would be quite happy for clauses 1 to 8 to never appear again, but other clauses that do really important things—introducing recording in magistrates courts, repealing the presumption against parental responsibility—are key to strengthening our justice system and our family courts.

We repeatedly hear stories of failings in infrastructure such as roofs collapsing, IT systems not working, and evidence being shared on a memory stick and being lost during a hearing. The Ministry of Justice must get a grip of this chance to change that and to improve the environment for those working in the courts and those attending them.

I will briefly move on to prisons, which continue to run very hot. They are overcrowded, understaffed and increasingly unable to rehabilitate offenders. Violence is rife, with an average of 28 assaults on staff every day across the prison estate. On the point made by the hon. Member for Bridgwater about higher sickness levels, I think that is in large part due to the stress experienced by prison staff. We see the same in the Probation Service, which has a much higher sickness rate than other civil service departments, and I think it is also largely due to stress.

The Liberal Democrats believe that rehabilitation must be at the heart of any approach within our prison system. That means investing in better education, alongside introducing a through-the-gates mentoring programme to support prisoners as they transition back into society. Education is a key area. I recently raised it with the MOJ, because Government analysis shows a significant decrease in core education hours in public sector prisons. That has been felt most acutely in women’s prisons, where there has been a 30% fall in the number of hours for which women can access prison education. The Government urgently need to set out a plan to reverse that trend, otherwise the cycle of reoffending will simply continue for far too many people. Reoffending, as mentioned by the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, is estimated to cost taxpayers £20.9 billion every year.

I sat down with a group of ex-offenders earlier this year, working with the organisation Revolving Doors. One of the ex-offenders I was chatting to had been in prison 17 times on short sentences. He explained that drug addiction was ruling his life; when he was released from prison, in order to fund a drug addiction that was costing him £250 a day, he would commit theft to the value of £750 a day. He would re-sell the stolen items so that he could afford his drug habit. This shows that there is a cost to our businesses as well. If we do not get the criminal justice system working, and if we do not invest in people and stop the cycle of reoffending to fund addiction, those people get trapped in the criminal justice system. Nowhere in our system is the “investor save” principle stronger than in our criminal justice system.

A well-functioning Probation Service is indispensable to rehabilitating ex-offenders. A dysfunctional Probation Service fails victims. Probation officers are expected to manage ever larger caseloads while receiving less training. Combined with poor pay, it is little wonder that many leave, despite wanting to help. A probation officer said to me, in one of my surgeries, that when she first started in probation 30 years ago, she spent 30 minutes with an offender she was managing. When she came out of the meeting, her boss said, “Why on earth did you only spend 30 minutes with that person? How on earth could you get to know them in just 30 minutes?” She said that if she spends 30 minutes with somebody now, she is told she needs to speed up because she has spent far too long with them and has far too many people to get through. She has stuck it out—she is still in the Probation Service—but so many people leave. We have a real retention crisis, because nobody goes into probation to tick boxes; they go in because they truly believe that they can change people’s lives.

In February this year, the Public Accounts Committee published a report on the efficiency and reliability of the Probation Service. It concluded that

“the Probation Service in England and Wales is failing”,

that it is

“teetering on the edge of collapse”,

and that its performance has significantly worsened since the MOJ and His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service brought probation under full public control in 2018-19. The failure of the system is epitomised by record numbers of prisoners being recalled to custody. At the end of March 2025, recalled prisoners accounted for 15% of the entire prison population—a 49% increase since 2021. I recognise that the Government will have invested £700 million in probation by 2028-29, but we are yet to see a significant step change to show that that investment has stabilised the service. It is not just about the investment, though; it is about the culture shift that is desperately needed in probation. I have had many conversations with the Prisons Minister in the other place on this topic and I know it is something he feels passionately about.

Keeping the public safe also requires improvements to policing, a return to visible neighbourhood policing and an end to the scourge of officers stuck behind desks completing administrative work. Even though policing has received an uplift, cases are, as the hon. Member for North Cotswolds said, far more complex and require far more police time. This situation—alongside the alarming reduction in police front counters and stations—has left communities, especially those in my constituency, feeling abandoned. I should not see constituents turning around with shock when they see a police officer walking down the street with me in areas like Selsey; they are so not used to community policing people acted like they had never seen a police officer before when they saw us. The Government should commit, as part of their upcoming police force reorganisation, to embedding a dedicated rural and coastal crime team in every police force, ensuring that rural crime does not go unpunished.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call the shadow Minister.