A new justice secretary is appointed following a change of government. To limit tax rises, the Treasury demands spending reductions. The Ministry of Justice enthusiastically offers to cut £2bn from its annual budget of £9bn.
All this happened in 2010. Writing at the time, I noted that the Conservative justice secretary Ken Clarke was behaving more like the chancellor of the exchequer he had once been than the lord chancellor he had now become. ‘Clarke will cut the core functions of criminal justice at his peril,’ I said.
And so it proved. He lasted just over two years. What I had not predicted was that Clarke’s successor Chris Grayling would make things even worse by privatising the probation service. Reversing his failed policy cost more than £500m. Grayling has recently joined Clarke in the Lords.
Will we see the same mistakes again? Or does the Labour government understand that unrealistic spending cuts may cost more to put right?
Rachel Reeves ordered an urgent audit of public spending on becoming chancellor in July. Although Shabana Mahmood’s MoJ was not required to cancel any specific projects, all departments were ordered to cut administration budgets by 2% and end non-essential spending on communications and consultancy. But Mahmood is coming under growing pressure to increase spending.
‘We have lost 47% of practitioners with 8-12 years’ experience,’ the new chair of the Criminal Bar Association said this week. That reduction would continue, Mary Prior KC predicted, unless there was substantial and long-term investment in what she called the engine room of the criminal justice system. ‘Whether the flight from the criminal bar is tempered or reversed,’ she added, ‘will depend on whether the government implements the recommendations of the independent review bodies set up by the previous government.’
It’s not just crime. How can solicitors afford to do any publicly funded work at current legal aid rates?
And yet for every £1 spent on free specialist legal advice and its outcomes in 2023, the government saved £2.71. That’s the conclusion of a recent 89-page report commissioned by the Access to Justice Foundation and the Bar Council.
The research group Pragmatix Advisory estimated that the provision of free specialist legal advice saved the Treasury roughly £9,100 per case last year. If 500,000 people were receiving free legal advice, that would save around £4.5bn in the first year. Long-term savings would be even higher.
That’s because clients who receive good-quality free specialist legal advice benefit from higher employment rates, improved health and wellbeing, and reduced reliance on benefits.
Their families benefit too. According to the researchers, advising 100,000 clients could lead to 38,900 more people entering the workforce, generating approximately £81m in income tax and National Insurance contributions.
Obviously, these estimates depend on various assumptions. But lawyers working in areas such as employment, housing, benefits and healthcare know that early assistance can prevent clients becoming a burden on the state.
This argument has often been ignored because of failures in joined-up government. Successive justice secretaries have been reluctant to spend money – on legal aid, for example – that will create savings for other departments. That’s less of a problem for the MoJ: if it can cut spending on prisons then it can spend more on courts. But Mahmood cannot reduce long-term expenditure on prisons unless there are fewer prisoners – and criminal justice policy is a matter for the Home Office.
Fortunately, there are signs that the Treasury has some understanding of this. The public spending audit it published last month pointed out that ‘public service performance is at a historic low’. The examples it gave were drawn from local government, the health service, courts and prisons.
As the audit said, ‘through the spending review process, the government will take forward work on a number of priority themes, including a greater focus on long-termism, investment in prevention, managing demand, and increasing devolution and local integration of services’.
Managing demand? Long-term prevention? Could that possibly mean reducing prisoner numbers?
That of course is what the government is starting to do next week. But releasing some prisoners after they have served 40% of their sentences is not a long-term solution. A more radical approach would be to lower all the Sentencing Council’s guidelines by 10%. For that, the prime minister would need the support of an independent review.
Ultimately, the best way of reducing the prison population is to deter criminal behaviour. That can be achieved, as we saw during the riots last month, by prosecuting offenders promptly. It will inevitably produce a short-term rise in the prison population. In the long term, though, implementing a ‘broken windows’ policy of not letting offenders get away with minor offences would pay dividends for us all.
joshua@rozenberg.net
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