MINISTRY OF JUSTICE — House of Commons, 2018-07-02
Topic: Law and Crime
Robert James MacGillivray Neill (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to start this debate. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for having facilitated it, my colleagues on the Select Committee on Justice for the work that they have done on the estimates and, more broadly, the work of the Ministry of Justice during this Parliament so far and beyond This is an important debate because although the Ministry of Justice is one of the smaller Departments in budgetary terms, its work is fundamental to the nature of a civilised society. Ultimately, justice is not a transaction; it is something that underpins the way in which we live our lives and the way in which we treat each another in a civilised society. Perhaps it should be measured more by its impact than purely in monetary terms. It has to be said that in that regard, frankly, we get our justice system pretty cheaply. Overall the Ministry of Justice is about 12th in terms of spending Departments. Its total expenditure, on the current form, is a resource departmental expenditure limit—a resource budget, in effect—of £6.9 billion. To put that in context, it is less than 2% of total Government resource DEL and about 1% of total public spending across the UK, which amounts to some £800 billion. We are talking about a small amount of money The problems that the Ministry faces are twofold. Within that amount of money, the Ministry has to deal with key issues. Some 50% of its budget goes on prisons and probation, some 20% goes on the courts services and related matters such as legal aid, access to justice and so on, and the rest is spent on a number of key agencies. The two biggest issues—prisons and probation, and courts and legal aid—are very much demand-led. At the same time as being a Department most of whose work and services are demand-led, the Ministry also has to cope with the difficulty of being an unprotected Department in terms of our necessary approach to reducing the deficit and public debt. That places particular pressures on those who work in the Department and its agencies. I will be frank; as a former Minister, I know that it also places particular pressures on the Ministers, to whom I pay tribute. Over the years, many of them have been friends and they work really hard to deal with a difficult situation, but Parliament needs to take a look at whether we give adequate resource to the task required of them It has been very clear that the resources have been reduced considerably—and more than many other Departments—because of the Ministry’s unprotected nature. The upshot has been that the resource DEL for 2016-17 is 29% lower in real terms than it was in 2010-11. The prison population has not declined since 2010-11. In fact, it spiked up initially and then stabilised only over the past couple of years. That is a significant cost pressure that has gone on. Because we do not seek, naturally, to inhibit the sentencing decisions of individual judges in individual cases, there is limited control over what can be done In addition, for reasons that we will perhaps touch on, there are costs to the public purse that go beyond some of the failures in our prison system. We imprison a higher number of people than many of our comparators, and unfortunately we have worse rates of reoffending. As the Department and the Government accept, reoffending has an economic cost to the United Kingdom of some £15 billion a year. So not only is there a squeeze on the attempts—the genuine attempts —that are being made to reduce reoffending, to rehabilitate and reform, but we are not getting the outcomes that we need from that. Equally, the failure to achieve all those outcomes creates a further cost pressure at the other end of the scale as well. That is why the reforms that the Government and Ministers are seeking to make are all the more important Moreover—other members of the Select Committee will touch on this in more detail—there are real pressures and difficulties within different parts of the prison system. Over the years that we have been a Select Committee, both in this Parliament and its rather short predecessor, we have delivered a number of reports on matters such as prison safety, the way in which we treat younger adults in the prison system—where there are real and specific difficulties—the recruitment and retention of prison staff, and morale within prisons. These issues are all interlinked Because the number of prisoners remains stubbornly high and because the resource available has declined, there has been a concerning deterioration in a number of key areas. Prison safety is an obvious example. Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons, whose work we should all pay tribute to, has produced a number of reports that show, regrettably—despite a number of initiatives by Ministers to seek interventions to remedy the position—a considerable increase, over a period, in assaults, both inmate-on-inmate assaults and assaults on members of staff. There has been a 44% increase in prisoner assault incidents since 2015. The rate of assaults, which is perhaps the most telling figure, has increased from 190 per 1,000 in 2007 to 344 per 1,000 in 2017. Assaults on prison staff have increased from 43 per 1,000 in 2007 to 98 per 1,000 in 2017 That has an impact on staff morale and staff retention. It also means—because of the need, naturally, to keep the prison regime safe—that only a very small percentage of prisoners are being unlocked for the 10 hours that is the expectation of Her Majesty’s chief inspectorate. That is a problem because restricted regimes make it much harder to carry out the reform and rehabilitation work that Ministers—and, I believe, every one of us in this House—want to see. Further budgetary pressures that currently seem to be the case for the Department can only make that harder without some radical change. We have to bear in mind not only that there are past budgetary pressures, but that the Ministry needs to reduce its annual spending by £500 million from 2015-16 levels to 2019-20 to meet the 2015 spending round That, in my judgment and that of many others, can be done in only two ways. Either we change those spending levels and put more money into prisons, at great expense to the taxpayer, or we—as a society and as a Parliament—seize the bull by the horns and make a determined resolve to reduce the prison population. That can be done, in particular, by releasing prisoners who are not a threat to society in a physical or serious financial sense and by finding robust and credible alternatives to custody that enable sentencers to deal with many more offenders in the community without the need for the extreme cost of imprisonment—some £23,000, on average, but much more for certain classes of offender, particularly young offenders. Unless we want to have a permanent bottomless pit, we have to make investment to make savings in the long term, not only in economic terms but in social and human terms.