Criminal Justice

Neil Shastri-Hurst Excerpts

Wednesday 25th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend, who is knowledgeable on these issues, is absolutely right. We are relying on the implementation of the Gauke review’s recommendations to do two things: to ensure there is capacity in the prisons for the growing number of people being sentenced in our courts; and, in the longer term, to reduce prisoner numbers through effective rehabilitation. That can take place in prisons—not in overcrowded prisons on the whole —but it can take place more effectively in the community by way of getting people back into normal daily life, which prison certainly is not.

In that vein, let me turn to the Probation Service, which will receive an additional £700 million a year to support the reforms in the sentencing review. That is a substantial increase in funding, which is intended to enable probation to supervise more people in the community and expand electronic tagging.

The Probation Service currently manages 240,000 individuals on court order or licence. Worryingly, in last year’s annual report, HM inspectorate of probation labelled 10 local probation services as “requires improvement” and 14 as “inadequate”. It identified staffing challenges, unmanageable workloads, deficits in casework and insufficient management of risk, public protection and safeguarding. However, it also found outstanding statutory victim work, commitment and vision from staff and some good partnership working. The Committee has seen that itself on its visit to probation services.

I will however raise my concern about the ability of Serco, the current electronic tagging provider, to deal with the dramatic increase in demand on its services that will inevitably result from the sentencing Bill. The Committee has been in frequent correspondence with the Prisons Minister to raise our concerns regarding Serco’s poor performance, which has also been highlighted by Channel 4 and its “Dispatches” programme.

The Committee has identified several issues with management of the tagging contract, including substantial delays to the fitting of tags, even to serious offenders. We were shocked to learn that financial penalties have been levied on Serco every month since it took on the service in May 2024. It is unclear how Serco will be able to deal with increased demand given its unacceptable performance in managing the electronic tagging service at its current level.

I turn briefly to conditions in the prison estate. In 2023, HM chief inspector of prisons Charlie Taylor said that one in 10 prisons should be closed down. He stated that about 14 Victorian jails were so poorly designed, overcrowded and ill-equipped that they could not provide proper accommodation for prisoners. Last year, 63% of prisoners reported overcrowding. That is often with two or more prisoners in a cell that was designed for one person, with no private toilet facilities.

Drugs are an increasing problem in prisons. The Committee has covered that extensively in its “Tackling drugs in prisons” inquiry, which is due to report shortly. Between April 2023 and April 2024, almost 50,000 adults aged 18 and over were in alcohol and drug treatment in prisons and secure settings, which was a 7% rise compared with the previous year. In the 12 months to December 2024, there were 10,600 assaults on prison staff—violence is also on the increase in prison, which is partly a result of the unpredictable environment created by the abundance of drugs available—which is equivalent to 122 assaults per 1,000 prisoners, an increase of 13% from the previous year and the highest number of assaults on prison staff recorded in one year. The use of force by prison officers and rates of self-harm among prisoners have also been increasing in recent years. Self-harm was 10% higher in 2024 than in 2023.

Overcrowding, increased drug use, violence and self-harm contribute towards a distressing environment in prisons such that the vital function of prisons to rehabilitate offenders can be almost impossible in some institutions. We are undertaking a major inquiry into rehabilitation and resettlement, which I hope will shed more light on these troubling pictures.

Beyond all that, we have the continuing scandal of IPP prisoners—those imprisoned for public protection. I recommend to the Minister the proposals published this week by the Howard League on a new approach to IPP prisoners, which would serve to reduce the numbers continuing in custody substantially.

Let me turn to His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service, which is the second-largest body in the MOJ. In the Government’s main estimate for 2025-26, spending on HMCTS accounted for 21% of planned resource spending and 12% of capital spending. The current backlog of outstanding cases in the Crown court stands at about 4,000. That is a result of a number of factors, one of which is the shortage of criminal lawyers, driven by low legal aid pay rates and poor working conditions. The backlog in the courts is detrimental to the lives of thousands of people. Victims, witnesses and defendants alike are forced to wait in limbo for justice.

[Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst (Solihull West and Shirley) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point about court backlogs. Another factor is having the appropriate magistrates, legal advisers and so on to hear these cases. The Magistrates’ Association has raised concerns that the spending review allocation is insufficient to tackle that. Does he share those concerns?

[Andy Slaughter]

I do share those concerns. I want to take only a few more minutes with my speech, so I do not have time to go into what is happening in the magistrates courts as well—that is a debate for another day—but the shortage of magistrates, the shortage of legal clerks and low pay rates across HMCTS are clearly some of the factors that prevent us from getting to grips with the backlog, even though I have no doubt the Government wish to do that.

I welcome the Lord Chancellor’s allocation of 110,000 sitting days in the Crown court for 2025-26: the highest sitting-day allocation made since HMCTS was created and the biggest financial settlement ever made for the Crown court. I hope that that is enough to bring about some reduction in the backlog. However, I note that the allocation is below the 113,000 days that the Lady Chief Justice told the Committee the Crown court could sit for in the last financial year, and there have been similar increases in sitting days for other courts, including the magistrates court, which will sit for up to 114,000 days a year.

The Government have acknowledged that the allocation of days is not enough on its own to severely reduce the backlog in the Crown courts and that more radical reform is required. I therefore welcome Sir Brian Leveson’s independent review of criminal courts, which will propose options for both short and long-term reforms aimed at ensuring cases are dealt with proportionately in the light of current pressures on the Crown court and explore how the courts could operate as efficiently as possible. I look forward to the first report of the review, which is due to be published next month.

I will briefly touch on the role of the Legal Aid Agency. In terms of expenditure, the LAA is the third largest body within MOJ. Its day-to-day budget was around £0.9 billion, which comprised 8% of the MOJ’s total resource budget. Between 2009-10 and 2023-24, resource expenditure on legal aid decreased by 2% in cash terms and by 31% in real terms. I was surprised to see that the spending review did not include a specific funding allocation for the Legal Aid Agency; the only reference to it was in the context of potential efficiency savings that the MOJ will make in the review period.

Concerns have been raised about the sustainability of the criminal legal aid sector, given the number of legal aid firms and of solicitors and barristers practising in this area. In March 2025, the Law Society said that the number of criminal duty solicitors had fallen by 26% since 2017 and that that may, in future,

“leave many individuals unable to access their right to a solicitor and free advice.”

Even though I welcome the MOJ’s announcements in December 2024 of an additional £92 million per year for criminal aid solicitors, and I look forward to seeing the results of its consultation on that, it may well not be enough. Indeed, the 15% uplift in criminal barristers’ fees as a consequence of the Bellamy review took so long to come in and was so far overtaken by other increases in cost that that again needs to be looked at in the near future if we are to sustain the criminal Bar.