Oral Answers to Questions

Nick Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Edward Argar]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight the importance of a range of purposeful activity for those in prison, from skilled industrial work in workshops to outside work. A good example mentioned recently on “ITV Racing”, of all things, was about getting farriers and those working in the equine world into prisons—the example was a prison in Solihull—to teach prisoners about job opportunities in the equine world. There are a range of opportunities out there, and it is important that they are available to those in our custody.

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

8. What progress his Department has made on reducing the backlog of cases in the Crown court.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mike Freer)]

We remain committed to reducing the Crown court outstanding case load and have introduced a range of measures to achieve the same. We funded over 100,000 sitting days last year and plan to deliver the same again this year. We have recruited over 1,000 judges over all jurisdictions and plan to do the same again this year. Thanks to the intervention of the Lord Chancellor, we have secured £220 million for essential modernisation repair work over the next two years. As well as retaining Nightingale courts, the investments will also see 58 new courtrooms.

[Nick Smith]

The fact is that the Crown courts how have a backlog of over 65,000 cases. If that is not bad enough, experts say the courts’ capacity to deal with processing cases will not keep pace with demand. Does the Minister agree that that leads to too many victims unfortunately giving up on our justice system?

[Mike Freer]

No, I do not accept that that means we are giving up on the system. The Government continue to invest in every single lever that we can pull to increase capacity in our criminal justice system. Given the additional work that the judiciary is doing, the disposal rate in our Crown courts is up and we are seeing record levels of disposals, so we will start to see the criminal justice system heal, because we are still recovering from covid and the Criminal Bar Association strike.