Bars to progress

I won a good few quid betting on the Conservatives to win the 2015 general election. Pollsters forecast that Ed Miliband’s Labour would edge it, but there was a whiff of 1992 in the air. Before John Major prevailed over a prematurely triumphalist Neil Kinnock, ‘shy Tories’ skewed the numbers. History repeated itself, to the acute embarrassment of the psephologists.

With the Conservatives at 40-1 this time, I won’t be revisiting my bookmaker. It would seem positively eccentric to suggest that a former DPP will not be prime minister in three weeks. So how must we read the runes for justice?

Few are optimistic. According to independent thinktank the Institute for Fiscal Studies, unprotected departments – of which the MoJ is one – face real-terms cuts of between 1.2% and 2.9% under Labour. They will need a top-up of between £6-16bn by 2028/29 for this to be avoided. This compares to the 1.9% and 3.5% each year and £10-20bn cuts that the IFS estimated under the outgoing government’s plan detailed in the spring budget.

IFS director Paul Johnson has accused Labour of joining the Conservatives and the Lib Dems in a ‘conspiracy of silence on the difficulties they would face’.

There is, of course, no fat left to cut. In real terms the MoJ’s day-to-day spending was 12% lower in 2023 than in 2011. A procession of lord chancellors has scythed through the sinew and down to the bone.

In sharp contrast, however, capital spending climbed 227% over the same period. There are no prizes for guessing why – more prison places.

Herein, perhaps, lies at least partial relief from never-ending austerity. Over half of the MoJ’s cash goes on prisons and probation, compared with 19% on our crumbling courts and 17% on legal aid. In the absence of new money, a Labour lord chancellor will have to consider creative ways of keeping non-violent offenders out of jail.

Reform charity the Centre for Justice Innovation – patron Lord Falconer – may be on to something in its newly published criminal justice manifesto. The centre’s 10-point action plan includes emergency measures to ease the prisons crisis, along with joined-up proposals to keep numbers down. The reforms could make a real difference – and quickly, too. But is Labour – if it is to be Labour – bold enough? Our esteemed columnist Joshua Rozenberg agrees with me that it must not flinch.