When the TaxPayers’ Alliance criticise a Conservative justice secretary for going too far with public spending cuts, you know something is wrong. But that’s exactly what Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, did a few weeks ago in a blogpost that criticised the Legal Aid cuts that will end up costing the taxpayer more in the long term than they’ll save.
It’s symptomatic of how this government has got this the wrong way round. Making huge short-term cuts and forcing our justice system to cope with rising prisoner numbers and reduced frontline services before reform has even begun to take place is very risky. As we can already see, the results are chaotic and expensive. Prison numbers reach record levels each week, with no credible long-term plan in place for dealing with what it is becoming a major crisis for our criminal justice system. As Matthew Elliott rightly pointed out, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill is a mess; for every £1 cut in providing early stage legal advice through Citizens’ Advice Bureaux and Law Centres the taxpayer loses £2.34 in debt advice, £8.80 in housing advice and £7.13 in employment advice. Bad policy is expensive policy.
As Labour and progressives we should be proud of what we achieved over 13 years of government. Our record – an unprecedented 43 per cent drop in crime on our watch – speaks for itself. Our overarching approach of being ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ made a key contribution to this. In a debate about who controls the centre ground on criminal justice policy I would argue there is no question as to which party is best able to deliver an effective and fair criminal justice system that can cut crime and protect the public: Labour. Our way was working; the other way is taking a huge risk. Less prevention, fewer police, fewer prison officers and fewer probation officers. This may save money for individual government departments in the short term, but they will lead to an increase in costs displaced across other government departments as well as local government, with additional social costs.
This doesn’t mean we got everything right or that our record is perfect. We can’t ignore the fact that the reduction in fear of crime failed to match the record drop in crime itself, that re-offending rates remained stubbornly high, that victims of crime could often feel as brutalised by the criminal justice system as those who wronged them in the first place, or that legal aid was in need of further reform.
Crime creates social volatility that affects us all, damaging communities and society as a whole, and costing money at every stage. According to the National Audit Office, youth offending alone costs us £11bn a year. The annual cost of imprisoning an adult is approximately £50,000 a year. There are health and social costs the state incurs when a family is made homeless because they didn’t have access to basic legal services at their Citizen’s Advice Bureau. Money cut up front can lead to a big bill for the taxpayer down the line. And when money is short in the current economic climate, we owe it to our fellow citizens to make sure we’re spending every penny wisely.
This doesn’t mean being soft on crime, it means being tough on crime and also ruthless in tackling the conditions that foster criminal behaviour. As a former solicitor and now a member of parliament for an inner-city constituency, I’ve seen firsthand the effects crime has on clients and constituents, and as shadow justice secretary I’ve met with and listened to the men and women working in our justice system to deliver, with limited means, those key objectives: to catch, convict, punish and reform offenders; protect the public; support victims.
Victims must be at the heart to any approach to criminal justice. They deserve our respect and care, particularly as their cooperation and trust is vital if system is to function effectively and criminals brought to justice.
And we owe it to our communities to stop crime reoccurring, so our penal system must successfully punish and rehabilitate offenders. It is vital that those who commit offences are properly punished, through custodial sentences or tough community orders. Violent and serious offenders should go to prison for a long time, and only be released when they no longer pose a threat to the public.
But prison also has to rehabilitate, and reoffending is still too high – 61 per cent of prisoners who have served a sentence of less than 12 months are reconvicted within a year of release, prolific offenders who have served 10 or more custodial sentences have a reoffending rate of 79 per cent. The rehabilitation challenge is considerable, and cannot be ignored. The majority of prisoners currently serving sentences will be released within the next ten years – so we need to address this problem now for the sake of our communities, and their victims.
The last Labour government made some inroads on bringing reoffending down, and preventing first time offending, particularly amount young people through the Youth Justice Board, but the scale of illiteracy, mental health and drug addiction in the prison population is still considerable, and needs to be addressed. Proper investment in mental health, drug and alcohol treatment, education, skills training and proper resettlement back into the community will actually bring down the long-term cost to the country, and protect victims and our communities from the long-term misery that repeat offenders can inflict. Part of this is looking at the evidence of what works in reducing reoffending – sometimes this might be forms of community based punishment. The public, not unreasonably, lack confidence in community sentences as they stand, so we must make a robust case for tougher community sentences, where appropriate, as an alternative to custody.
This is our challenge now as progressives – to build on our legacy and achieve the right balance between deterrent, punishment and rehabilitation and to create a justice system that ensures crime levels are even lower and communities are even safer; and one in which the cycle of reoffending is broken.
In the current economic climate, tough decisions have to be made and savings need to be found. Labour has already offered up savings in the Ministry of Justice budget that can be made without taking risks with public safety. We need to be ready to examine the evidence and combine these with our values to see what works when it comes to providing our own solutions to the challenges our country faces. We must be willing to examine our record in government, build on what worked, and ditch what didn’t. The key is to have a justice policy fit for purpose that reflects the challenges faced by communities and neighbourhoods the length and breadth of the country. This will demonstrate that we are in touch with the law abiding majority and help us to regain the confidence of the electorate.
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Sadiq Khan MP is the shadow justice secretary and shadow lord chancellor
Sadiq will be speaking on the new centre-ground at our event in Cambridge on Thursday 23 February. Sign up for your place here.
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