Criminal Justice

Debate between Tessa Munt and Josh Babarinde

Wednesday 25th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Tessa Munt (Wells and Mendip Hills) (LD)]

On that point, we are clear that the money that goes into the probation system may not be enough to deal with the scale of the added pressures on the probation system. I think the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), talked about contract management. The example of Serco is a really good one; there will be so much more reliance on electronic tagging. Will the money actually allow that to happen?

[Josh Babarinde]

I agree with the point that my hon. Friend makes. This is about much more than just the spend: it is about the efficiency of the spend. Taxpayers deserve far better than what they are getting at the moment from the Serco contract, under which, as I said earlier, many offenders are being left without the proper, robust monitoring that victims, survivors and our communities need and deserve.

Let me come on to reoffending. The Gauke review offered many recommendations to unlock supply in our prisons, but it was fairly light on what can be done to stem the demand going into our prisons. Preventing crime and reoffending was the Cinderella of his review. It may be out of scope in some respects, but it is critical that our criminal justice system is reformed in a holistic way. That is the true means of being able to make our criminal justice system more efficient.

When it comes to victims and survivors, commitments around reversing the damaging impact of the national insurance increases for employers were missing from the spending review. Victims’ charities have written to me to say that the increase in those taxes, as well as cuts to police and crime commissioner core budgets, are tantamount to a 7% real-terms cut in their budgets. This means that victims’ services—services not dissimilar from the independent sexual violence adviser services that I once accessed at SurvivorsUK—will be compromised. I urge the Government to look again at this issue.

The status quo of more reoffending at an exponentially high cost to the taxpayer is both immoral and unsustainable. While this investment will go some way towards reducing backlogs, increasing prison capacity and improving our probation services, vital challenges are still unmet. As I have said just this week—in fact, it may have been yesterday—directly to the Minister, Liberal Democrats stand ready to work constructively with the Government. We will scrutinise their measures, but also give credit where it is due in order to help achieve more justice for victims, survivors, and our communities.