The spending review and criminal justice

Work with offenders digs into the detail of the Chancellor’s statement

Last Thursday Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak unveiled the government’s spending plans for the coming year. The Spending Review included details on public sector pay, NHS funding and money for the devolved administrations as well as setting out the extent of the damage done to the UK economy by the coronavirus pandemic. This article focuses on the decisions relating to the justice sector.

The Ministry of Justice chose to focus on the Chancellor’s headline figure of almost £4.4 billion which is to be invested in the justice system over the coming years. It is important to note that more than 90% of this amount – £4 billion – is capital spending dedicated to making “significant progress” on providing 18,000 additional prison places. The prison places are needed to meet the projected increase in the prison population of almost 20,000 – to 97,800 by 2026 (full details of this projection are covered in this recent Work with offenders article).

Crime agenda 

The Chancellor has earmarked £337 million of extra funding to support the government’s crime agenda, most of which – £275 million – is designed to manage the impact of 20,000 additional police officers (one of Boris Johnson’s government first policy announcements) and reduce backlogs caused by the pandemic by increasing capacity in our courts, particularly the Crown Court. The backlogs are certainly pretty staggering, the latest official MoJ data (for August this year) identified 47,255 outstanding cases at the Crown Court and 444,177 at Magistrates’ Courts. The MoJ says that this funding is additional to the £83 million committed in September to make courts “covid-secure”, support remote hearings, recruit 1,600 additional staff and create new Nightingale courts – of which there are now 16 in operation across the country.

On top of this £337 million for the criminal justice system, Mr Sunak announced £76 million to further increase capacity in the Family Court and Employment Tribunals and an additional £43 million to go towards measures to reduce COVID transmission in courts and prisons.

One announcement which did not feature in the general media coverage was an additional £63 million to tackle economic crime, including support for the National Economic Crime Centre (NECC), along with £20 million for Companies House reform. The NECC was launched just over two years ago (31 October 2018) and is a multi-agency partnership between the National Crime Agency, Serious Fraud Office, Financial Conduct Authority, City of London Police, HM Revenue & Customs, the Crime Prosecution Service and the Home Office. The NECC uses a wide range of criminal, civil and regulatory investigations to tackle the illicit finance that funds and enables serious and organized crime. It relies on relatively recent powers such as Unexplained Wealth Orders and Account Freezing Orders to tackle money laundering, large scale fraud and bribery and corruption.The government says it has already recruited 6,000 extra police officers this year and expects a further 6,000 officers to be in place by the end of March 2022.

Pay

One much less welcome announcement is that the Chancellor intends to try to mitigate some of the damage that the pandemic has wreaked on the economy by freezing public sector pay. While NHS workers will receive pay rises, pay rises for the rest of the public sector will be “paused” in 2021/22 which the Chancellor justifies by saying that it will allow the government to protect public sector jobs and investment in public services to respond to spending pressures from Covid-19.

Many in the criminal justice system would question why we need additional prison capacity given the drop in crime rates in the last twenty five years and the fact that we already imprison a greater proportion of our population than almost every other country in Europe. It seems likely that many police, prison and probation officers would prefer to see some of this £18 billion diverted into their pay cheques – especially since it is not long since the last public sector pay freeze.