When the Starmer government took office in July 2024, it inherited a criminal justice system in England and Wales that was fundamentally unable to cope with the level of demand it faced. Nowhere was this more visible or more acute than in prisons, which were at the point of total shutdown due to a lack of spaces.
Within a week of the election, the new government was forced to announce emergency early releases to free up space. But the situation in prisons was by no means unique. The probation service and criminal courts were also failing to fulfil their basic functions, leading to inadequate supervision and risk assessment in the former and spiralling case backlogs and years-long delays in the latter. Policing was managing the best out of the criminal justice services – but while crime had been generally falling for years, fewer than half of people saying their local police were doing a good job and frequent claims of ‘lawlessness’1 still left little to celebrate in terms of performance.
The Starmer government launched major reform programmes across policing, criminal courts and sentencing to try to address these linked capacity crises and so improve performance. But the programmes had mixed results, and some of them might have been more effective if they had been launched sooner after the government took office. Reforms were often uncoordinated, with the new police performance framework likely to drive up demand on criminal courts just as court reforms tried to bring it down.
But there has been significant progress on critical issues, including prison capacity, the criminal legal workforce and police oversight. Moreover, the Starmer administration deserves credit for tackling a set of thorny and often neglected problems. Addressing these is unlikely to win many votes; no prime minister wants to be known as the person who released criminals early. But these problems are corrosive to a functioning justice system and a fair society.
In some of his first moves as prime minister, Andy Burnham rowed back on some planned reforms, pausing early prison releases and casting doubt on whether he would push ahead with planned changes to jury trials. Ultimately, he continued with sentencing changes, with some additional exceptions. But restoring the criminal justice system to order is likely to require further politically difficult decisions, whether that is restructuring police forces, spending more on legal aid or investing in community provision for offenders. Burnham’s broad agenda for more devolution in public services may help reduce demand and improve outcomes for the criminal justice system in the long term.2 But it will not let him avoid further political pain in the coming months and years.
This chapter looks at the police, criminal courts, and prisons and probation. It draws on analysis of publicly available data, 21 semi-structured interviews with policy experts and staff working in these services and visits to two prisons, one crown court and one probation office, speaking to frontline staff and people interacting with the services.
Source: www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk
