Some cuts have already been identified – many are peanuts amounting to petty posturing by the ConDem administration such as cutting the number of appeals available in immigration cases. The closure of 150 magistrates and county courts already on the cards will also not go a long way towards filling the hole.
Several more substantial areas have been identified. One is £500 million off the £2 billion legal aid budget. That is effectively nearly halving legal representation in criminal cases or getting rid of all legal representation in family and child cases. It is a very real and substantial cut to a fund that has remained static for most of the Labour years. It can only be achieved by changes in the way cases are conducted such as reduced jury trial, virtual justice with hearings conducted remotely from prison cells, and an increase in summary justice. There is, of course, only so far that you can go in shortening the criminal justice process without it threatening the fairness of any verdict or prison sentence.
Another area that Ken Clarke has talked about is reduced short prison sentences and increasing community sentences. This simply won’t save money. Community sentences were encouraged by Labour, but sufficient money was never invested to make them work properly. There are no signs of any increased investment in this area now. The international comparators are not good – the best outcome, in Canada, would be a reduction in the prison population of about 10 per cent. This will not allow for any significant savings in the prison establishment that the secretary of state seeks. I cannot see this working even if the government were able to get such a plan past their backbenchers.
A final area identified so far is £500 million from “administration” – whatever that means – in a department that is relatively light at the centre.
£2 billion from the overall ministry of justice budget of £9 billion is of course less than the 25 per cent lower end of the range which the chancellor is said to be imposing on all non-ringfenced departments. However, it is very difficult to see how this cut can be achieved without real cost to our system of justice and, ultimately, to our own safety, let alone to the livelihoods of the 15,000 civil servants likely to be sacked.
Perhaps the general secretary of the PCS, Mark Serwotka, will be a little more circumspect the next time he thinks to castigates a Labour government as “the worst government in history”!