Now that our system of justice is emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for further reform, building on the progress I made in office, is clear.
The current Spending Review is an opportunity for the Treasury to allow the Ministry of Justice to build on the increases in revenue and capital budgets since 2019, making sure that recovery in our Crown and family Courts and our tribunals is maintained and making further investment in measures that will reduce reoffending by making sure that newly-released prisoners have accommodation, employment or training opportunities or addiction support. When it comes to the amount of investment needed, we are talking a fraction of what is being spent by the NHS.
How to spend resources is the key question. We have made huge progress in recruiting more prison, court and probation staff but it is technology that will enable the most radical changes. Technology was the vital factor that kept the wheels of justice turning during those months of lockdown and restrictions. In our courts and tribunals, the use of remote hearings soared from only a few hundred each week in early March 2020 to around 20,000 hearings per week, with digital facilities being rolled out to more courtrooms than ever before. These gains must be made permanent.
In our prisons, the use of virtual links for time with prisoners’ families became the norm, and there is no doubt that the ease and improved frequency of contact has been good for everyone. In-cell technology has also made its mark, with huge potential for the delivery of skills and training courses remotely. Technology helps make prisons safer places, which is why continued expansion of IT must be part of prison reform. I want to see time in prison to be time well spent, and we simply cannot achieve this without technological innovation.
Punishment and rehabilitation isn’t just about prison regimes, too. The rapid scale-up of electronic tagging in the community had been part of my agenda from the beginning, but COVID made it an absolute no-brainer. In combination with longer curfews and other stringent conditions, the use of tags for people who would otherwise serve short, ineffective prison sentences, will be a better and more effective punishment. Sobriety tags, which are being rolled out nationwide, already show very high degrees of compliance. We need to increase their use even further, moving towards what the Centre of Social Justice has termed in a recent report, the “virtual prison”. Coupled with a renewed Unpaid Work programme, those convicted of criminal offences could and should be visibly putting something back into our communities.
A criminal justice system that is fully firing on all cylinders is within our grasp. The Government has the vision; all it now needs to do is to follow it through.
