Home Office and Ministry of Justice

Sarah Russell Excerpts

Monday 29th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sir Ashley Fox (Bridgwater) (Con)]

The Crown court backlog is the most significant challenge facing the Ministry of Justice. Long delays in cases reaching trial undermine confidence in the whole justice system. I welcome the extra money that the Government have made available to increase the number of sitting days of the Crown court. I also welcome the additional funding to improve the physical condition of our courts and to invest in improved IT systems to make our courts run more efficiently.

While the Government are right to take those steps, I am concerned that they are wasting time, effort and money in curtailing the rights of British citizens to a jury trial. This reform has been presented as a necessary step to improve the efficiency of the courts. However, evidence suggests the contrary. The Government are aware of analysis by criminal justice researchers that indicates that the entire package of Government reforms will save no more than 8% of Crown court time. More striking still, the introduction of judge-only trials is likely to deliver a saving of just 1.5% to 2.5%. That is a marginal efficiency gain compared with the curtailing of our citizens’ rights to a jury trial, and it does not take into account the potential wasted time in determining whether a trial is to be held in a magistrates court or the new Crown court bench division.

I have previously asked the Lord Chancellor to set out the evidence to show how much of the backlog will be cut by his reduction of jury trials, but I have not received a meaningful reply, so I must conclude that he is either unwilling or unable to provide a response. The Labour party has proven of late that it is willing to dispense with the unpopular and the ineffectual, so I hope it will take the same approach to unpopular and ineffectual policy as it does to personnel. I hope that the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) and his new Lord Chancellor will drop this dreadful policy.

If the Government are serious about reducing delays, perhaps their focus should be on addressing why workers in the Ministry of Justice take more days off sick than workers in any other Whitehall Department. The average MOJ employee took 10.7 days’ sickness in 2024-25; that is 30% higher than the civil service average, and double the average in the private sector. The Minister needs to get her Department in order.

[Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Member have any figures disaggregating prison officers from the remainder of MOJ staff? Obviously, their working lives are very different.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

I thank the Government for the considerable progress that has been made on criminal legal aid and other matters within the estimates since we have taken office. The courts system, as we have heard, was in the most dilapidated and decrepit state, and we had a dearth of judge recruitment between 2010 and 2018. The net result was that the entire justice system was on its knees. In that context, the 10% uplift in legal aid expenditure over two years was long overdue.

I will ask the Minister a couple of questions. There have been significant problems with the Legal Aid Agency’s IT systems. Those problems are increasingly in hand, but it appears from House of Commons Library papers that there is a 75% reduction in capital spend at the Legal Aid Agency over the coming period. It is not clear to me whether that reporting is accurate or perhaps not right, because there is a proposal to spend significant money on the Legal Aid Agency’s IT systems, and I do not see how that would not fit within the capital estimates. It would be helpful if the Minister could report back, either today or to the Justice Committee subsequently, on how that has come about. The disparity seems extremely large.

The entire system is still creaking heavily. In an environment in which we know that there may have to be further cuts to other Departments to fund the defence investment that is required, we must remember that the Ministry of Justice has experienced cuts not just since 2010, but since 1997. Legal aid rates have gone up by £1 an hour since 1997, with the exception of the areas that the Government have put up—it is only some of them—since we took office. The result is that legal aid in general is in hugely difficult circumstances, and we see the net effect of that in the number of people representing themselves in the courts.

I have asked in Justice Committee sittings whether there has been an evaluation of the impact on court backlogs of unrepresented litigants in person. I have asked what assessment has been made of the difference they make to trial times in the criminal and civil courts, and therefore the potential implications for the backlogs in those courts. At the moment, the backlog stands at 350,000 in the magistrates court, and the figure is commonly reported to be 80,000 for the Crown court.

The MOJ has not been able to give us those figures, and it cannot say that that assessment has been done. It is speculative to suggest that people not having a lawyer—and large numbers of them do not—is increasing the courts backlog, because we just do not have the figures. In an environment in which every penny counts, and in which spending that money extremely efficiently is vital, it seems a significant omission not to have at least reviewed whether moving up the criteria for entitlement to legal aid significantly might change the dimensions of the court backlog, as all of us want to see.

The nature of the current entitlement is that someone with a total household income of £37,000 or more in the Crown court—they could be facing trial for rape or all kinds of serious offences—would not be entitled to legal aid. I think most members of the public would be shocked that if they were accused of a crime of that gravity, they would get no legal aid if their household income—potentially from two adults—came to more than that. In 1970, about 28 million people in this country were eligible for legal aid. The figure today would be infinitely smaller.

I completely accept that we cannot simply flood money into a system when we do not have that money and when it would not be responsible. There is also the risk that we create waste if we suddenly flush money into a system not set up to accommodate it. I understand why the Government are taking a staged approach, but I should like us to ensure that we are exploring all the potential ways of reducing the Crown court backlog. At present there are some contentious proposals on the table, some of which I do not support. It is pleasing to note that Andy Burnham—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. The right hon. Member for Makerfield.

[Sarah Russell]

Many thanks, Madam Deputy Speaker. My right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) suggested in December that this might be worth looking at again, and many of us in all parts of the House would be grateful for such an approach.