Wow, lets just think about that for one cotton pickin minute. Supposing he wasn't talking about social care at all, but instead the criminal justice system? Whilst expanding on his social care hypothesis ahead of his big speech on Tuesday, he convincingly made the case for the commonsense approach of spending money upstream rather than downstream as a "preventative" measure. Isn't that the ethos of encouraging healthy living as a way of preventing ill health? A good education system as a way of preventing illiteracy and poor life chances? A criminal justice system that encourages rehabilitation rather than increased prison population? A probation service that is part of a solution rather than part of the problem?
Well, by a stroke of good timing, a recent contributor pointed us in the direction of not one, but two recently published reports that expand on Andy Burnham's "preventative" hypothesis within the criminal justice system. Interestingly they don't seem to address either prison or probation directly, but do highlight the entirely predictable effects of scrapping upstream funding in the form of a functioning youth service, together with Sure Start.
Lets hope Andy is a quick learner and appreciates his enthusiasm for the concept of upstream funding being "preventative" can be equally applied in other area's of social policy and in fact could be classed as an investment. I'm reminded that Prof Rob Canton is on record as saying quite recently that " Perhaps the best way to enforce, rehabilitate and protect the public is by advising, assisting and befriending."
The justice system's problems are not just about money
Higher spending, without attention to how resources are used, may not translate into better outcomes
The justice system is under visible strain. Crown Court backlogs stand at over 80,000 cases. A record 330,000 tribunal cases were open in early 2026. Since 2010, over 300 magistrates' court sites have closed and Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) reforms have significantly reduced the scope for legal aid, and the number of providers. Prisons are almost at full capacity, with high levels of violence. These are not abstract statistics: they represent real delays, unresolved disputes, and people left further away from services they may need.
When performance falls short, our first instinct is usually to look at the budget. And the budget does matter. Ministry of Justice day-to-day spending fell 33% in real terms between 2007-08 and 2016-17, compared with a 3% reduction across all departments. Spending per person remains around 17% below its 2002-03 level. Spending has recovered somewhat in recent years, though delivering on the scale of reform needed across backlogs, prison capacity and access to justice remains a significant challenge.
But new research from the IFS Transforming Justice programme finds that budget alone will not fix the system's problems. Across policing, courts, prisons and legal aid, how resources are used, where they are located, and what pressures arrive from outside the system are all important determinants of performance. This means that higher spending, without attention to how resources are used, may not translate into better outcomes.
Take the Crown Court backlog. Sitting days rose 32% between 2019 and 2024, yet case closures (disposals) increased by only 20%. Had pre-pandemic productivity been maintained, even when adjusting for changes in the complexity of caseloads, the backlog could almost have been cleared by the end of 2024, without additional resources. This shows that investing in more court time alone has done little to clear the backlog. Doing so requires every part of the system to be working effectively together: judges, barristers, court staff, prison transport and case preparation.
The same is true when we look at management more broadly. In the Metropolitan Police, the effectiveness of individual borough commanders accounts for around a quarter of the variation in policing productivity across London divisions. In prisons, independent inspections by HM Inspectorate of Prisons reduced violence by around 12 incidents per 1,000 prisoners per month over the 15 months following inspection, without any increase in staffing or expenditure. In other words, good leadership and management can deliver real improvements even when additional resources are not on the table.
Where services are located, and who can reach them, is another important dimension of how the justice system performs. Magistrates' court closures have more than doubled the average distance to the nearest court for many communities. Police station closures increased violent crime in surrounding areas by around 9%, a rise that the evidence suggests could have been avoided had different stations been selected for closure. And funding changes in legal aid have reshaped where private providers operate, leaving 12% of local authorities with no active civil legal aid provider. Behind these changes lies a pattern of uneven geographic impact that deserves closer attention.
A further dimension concerns pressures that originate entirely outside the justice system. Several pressures are driving tribunal backlogs: disability and social security cases make up the largest share, while SEND and asylum and immigration appeals have seen the sharpest recent increases. Youth club closures following cuts to youth services raised offending in their vicinity by around 14%. Evidence from Sure Start suggests that early years interventions can reduce more serious offending later in life. More broadly, decisions made in other parts of government, often years earlier, shape the demands placed on the justice system. The introduction of mandatory reconsideration by DWP shows this clearly: designed to resolve more disputes before they reached tribunals, it directly reshaped the flow of cases into the system.
Funding matters, and the cuts of the 2010s had a significant and lasting impact on the system. But it is not the full story. The evidence base being built as part of the IFS Transforming Justice programme suggests that better use of existing resources, more efficient allocation of services across geography, and a clearer understanding of how other departments affect justice outcomes could all make a material difference. The question is not only whether the justice system is adequately funded, but whether the resources it has are being used as well as they could be, and whether the pressures it faces are being understood and addressed at their source.
Magdalena DomÃnguez is a senior research economist at the IFS, working on its transforming justice project and the education and skills sector. Imran Rasul is professor of economics at University College London, co-director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and research co-director of the Entrepreneurship Research Group of the International Growth Centre. They are co-authors of a new report on the pressures and challenges facing the UK justice system
Executive summary
The justice system in England and Wales is a significant area of public spending (£11.8 billion in day-to-day spending in 2025–26) and touches on almost every aspect of economic and social life. It has also seen many important changes and reforms in recent decades. Despite the scale of change and the central importance of justice in underpinning economic and social relations as well as trust in the state, economists have paid relatively little attention to these developments.
In this report, we bring together insights developed through the IFS Transforming Justice programme, established in 2024 and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, to respond to this relative lack of quantitative economic analysis. These insights emerge from a range of studies undertaken to date that examine different parts of the justice system. The programme is interested in all areas of the justice system, but the examples we draw on reflect the areas in which our analysis under the programme is most developed. We organise the evidence presented in this report around one connecting theme: the importance of understanding the role of resources for the functioning of the justice system, where resources refer not only to financial spending, but to a fuller set of inputs that shape the justice system’s capacity and performance, including infrastructure and management. The studies presented demonstrate why it matters to understand how resources are deployed within the justice system, whether the system is allocating and using resources efficiently, and how resources shape justice outcomes and outcomes outside the justice system itself. While the important role of resources forms the backdrop of much existing legal and social science research on justice systems, our studies show how economics research can advance understanding of how justice systems work and how they may work better.
Key insights
2. Pressures on justice system resources are shaped by demand on the system. For example, the number of open cases in party-to-state tribunals reached a record 330,000 in early 2026, driven largely by rapid growth in the number of appeals. As a result, average waiting times have risen substantially: asylum and immigration appeals were taking 61 weeks to resolve in early 2026, compared with 23 weeks in 2013, while social security appeals (predominantly for disability benefit applications) were taking 35 weeks, compared with 18 weeks in 2013. These delays – in part a result of increasingly stretched resources – appear to reflect rising demand more than a recent deterioration in the productivity of tribunals.
3. Productivity, management and organisation can, however, have large effects on outcomes in the justice system, helping to determine how effectively justice institutions convert existing resources into results. We provide three examples. In the Crown Court, sitting days increased by 32% between 2019 and 2024, but case disposals rose by only 20%, which helps explain why backlogs continued to grow despite increased court capacity. In policing, differences in the characteristics and operational practices of Borough Commanders explain around one-quarter of the variation in crimes solved per officer across London police divisions. Finally, in prisons, independent inspections reduced violence by around 12 incidents per 1,000 prisoners per month in the 15 months following an inspection, without requiring an increase in staffing or expenditure. Instead, inspections appear to work by changing how existing resources and practices are managed.
4. The geographic allocation of justice resources can affect access to justice and outcomes. Since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, volumes of civil legal aid cases have fallen by around 57%, and the number of providers has fallen from roughly 3,000 in 2010 to 1,400 by 2024, leaving 38 local authorities with no observed civil legal aid provider activity in 2023. In London, police station closures increased the average distance for households to the nearest station from around 1.3 kilometres to 3 kilometres and were associated with a 9% increase in violent crime in affected neighbourhoods. Court closures have similarly increased travel distances, with the average distance for households to their nearest magistrates’ court more than doubling, from 5.7 kilometres to 12.1 kilometres.
5. The justice system can be affected by decisions made about resource allocation outside the system. For example, following a 71% real-terms reduction in youth service spending between 2011 and 2019, around 40% of youth clubs closed, and young people in London who lost access to nearby clubs became 14% more likely to commit an offence. Evidence from Sure Start similarly suggests that early years interventions can reduce more serious offending later in life. These examples show that spending on services for children and families can generate substantial downstream effects on crime and reduce pressures on justice institutions, meaning the returns to such spending may be larger than conventional assessments imply.
6. How we measure the benefits of justice interventions can substantially affect assessments of value for money. We illustrate this with an example using the fact that conventional estimates of the social costs of crime primarily focus on victims. However, evidence presented in this report suggests that crime also imposes high costs on witnesses. Accounting for these wider effects increases estimated social costs of individual crimes by around 25% on average and by around 28% for violent crime. Over time, victimisation rates fell by 25% between 2003–04 and 2014–15, yet once the costs borne by witnesses are included, the aggregate social costs of crime are estimated to have remained largely unchanged. These findings suggest that the returns to policies that prevent crime – from being witnesses to reducing victimisation – may be substantially larger than conventional measures imply.
7. Together, these findings point to a broader conclusion. Budget levels alone do not capture all the constraints facing the justice system. How resources are used and how different parts of the system interact matter as much as how much is spent, and decisions about resource allocation made outside the justice system can shape its outcomes too.
Higher spending, without attention to how resources are used, may not translate into better outcomes
The justice system is under visible strain. Crown Court backlogs stand at over 80,000 cases. A record 330,000 tribunal cases were open in early 2026. Since 2010, over 300 magistrates' court sites have closed and Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) reforms have significantly reduced the scope for legal aid, and the number of providers. Prisons are almost at full capacity, with high levels of violence. These are not abstract statistics: they represent real delays, unresolved disputes, and people left further away from services they may need.
When performance falls short, our first instinct is usually to look at the budget. And the budget does matter. Ministry of Justice day-to-day spending fell 33% in real terms between 2007-08 and 2016-17, compared with a 3% reduction across all departments. Spending per person remains around 17% below its 2002-03 level. Spending has recovered somewhat in recent years, though delivering on the scale of reform needed across backlogs, prison capacity and access to justice remains a significant challenge.
But new research from the IFS Transforming Justice programme finds that budget alone will not fix the system's problems. Across policing, courts, prisons and legal aid, how resources are used, where they are located, and what pressures arrive from outside the system are all important determinants of performance. This means that higher spending, without attention to how resources are used, may not translate into better outcomes.
Take the Crown Court backlog. Sitting days rose 32% between 2019 and 2024, yet case closures (disposals) increased by only 20%. Had pre-pandemic productivity been maintained, even when adjusting for changes in the complexity of caseloads, the backlog could almost have been cleared by the end of 2024, without additional resources. This shows that investing in more court time alone has done little to clear the backlog. Doing so requires every part of the system to be working effectively together: judges, barristers, court staff, prison transport and case preparation.
The same is true when we look at management more broadly. In the Metropolitan Police, the effectiveness of individual borough commanders accounts for around a quarter of the variation in policing productivity across London divisions. In prisons, independent inspections by HM Inspectorate of Prisons reduced violence by around 12 incidents per 1,000 prisoners per month over the 15 months following inspection, without any increase in staffing or expenditure. In other words, good leadership and management can deliver real improvements even when additional resources are not on the table.
Where services are located, and who can reach them, is another important dimension of how the justice system performs. Magistrates' court closures have more than doubled the average distance to the nearest court for many communities. Police station closures increased violent crime in surrounding areas by around 9%, a rise that the evidence suggests could have been avoided had different stations been selected for closure. And funding changes in legal aid have reshaped where private providers operate, leaving 12% of local authorities with no active civil legal aid provider. Behind these changes lies a pattern of uneven geographic impact that deserves closer attention.
A further dimension concerns pressures that originate entirely outside the justice system. Several pressures are driving tribunal backlogs: disability and social security cases make up the largest share, while SEND and asylum and immigration appeals have seen the sharpest recent increases. Youth club closures following cuts to youth services raised offending in their vicinity by around 14%. Evidence from Sure Start suggests that early years interventions can reduce more serious offending later in life. More broadly, decisions made in other parts of government, often years earlier, shape the demands placed on the justice system. The introduction of mandatory reconsideration by DWP shows this clearly: designed to resolve more disputes before they reached tribunals, it directly reshaped the flow of cases into the system.
Funding matters, and the cuts of the 2010s had a significant and lasting impact on the system. But it is not the full story. The evidence base being built as part of the IFS Transforming Justice programme suggests that better use of existing resources, more efficient allocation of services across geography, and a clearer understanding of how other departments affect justice outcomes could all make a material difference. The question is not only whether the justice system is adequately funded, but whether the resources it has are being used as well as they could be, and whether the pressures it faces are being understood and addressed at their source.
Magdalena DomÃnguez is a senior research economist at the IFS, working on its transforming justice project and the education and skills sector. Imran Rasul is professor of economics at University College London, co-director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and research co-director of the Entrepreneurship Research Group of the International Growth Centre. They are co-authors of a new report on the pressures and challenges facing the UK justice system
--oo00oo--
Transforming justice : the interplay of social change and policy reforms
Resources and the justice system
Executive summary
The justice system in England and Wales is a significant area of public spending (£11.8 billion in day-to-day spending in 2025–26) and touches on almost every aspect of economic and social life. It has also seen many important changes and reforms in recent decades. Despite the scale of change and the central importance of justice in underpinning economic and social relations as well as trust in the state, economists have paid relatively little attention to these developments.
In this report, we bring together insights developed through the IFS Transforming Justice programme, established in 2024 and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, to respond to this relative lack of quantitative economic analysis. These insights emerge from a range of studies undertaken to date that examine different parts of the justice system. The programme is interested in all areas of the justice system, but the examples we draw on reflect the areas in which our analysis under the programme is most developed. We organise the evidence presented in this report around one connecting theme: the importance of understanding the role of resources for the functioning of the justice system, where resources refer not only to financial spending, but to a fuller set of inputs that shape the justice system’s capacity and performance, including infrastructure and management. The studies presented demonstrate why it matters to understand how resources are deployed within the justice system, whether the system is allocating and using resources efficiently, and how resources shape justice outcomes and outcomes outside the justice system itself. While the important role of resources forms the backdrop of much existing legal and social science research on justice systems, our studies show how economics research can advance understanding of how justice systems work and how they may work better.
Key insights
1. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ)’s day-to-day budget – £11.8 billion in day-to-day spending in 2025–26 – is a key input into the financial resources of the justice system. It saw large reductions in the early 2010s, followed by a partial recovery in recent years. Between 2007–08 and 2016–17, this budget was reduced by 33% in real terms, compared with a 3% reduction in total day-to-day departmental spending. MoJ spending began to recover from 2016–17, and by 2025–26 the day-to-day budget stood 2.4% below its 2002–03 level in real terms. Current plans imply real-terms growth in day-to-day justice funding of around 1.8% per year between 2025–26 and 2028–29, faster than the 1.2% per year average for overall departmental spending. Recent increases are expected to undo, in aggregate, the spending reductions of the early 2010s, but spending per person in 2025–26 remains 17% lower than its 2002–03 level.
2. Pressures on justice system resources are shaped by demand on the system. For example, the number of open cases in party-to-state tribunals reached a record 330,000 in early 2026, driven largely by rapid growth in the number of appeals. As a result, average waiting times have risen substantially: asylum and immigration appeals were taking 61 weeks to resolve in early 2026, compared with 23 weeks in 2013, while social security appeals (predominantly for disability benefit applications) were taking 35 weeks, compared with 18 weeks in 2013. These delays – in part a result of increasingly stretched resources – appear to reflect rising demand more than a recent deterioration in the productivity of tribunals.
3. Productivity, management and organisation can, however, have large effects on outcomes in the justice system, helping to determine how effectively justice institutions convert existing resources into results. We provide three examples. In the Crown Court, sitting days increased by 32% between 2019 and 2024, but case disposals rose by only 20%, which helps explain why backlogs continued to grow despite increased court capacity. In policing, differences in the characteristics and operational practices of Borough Commanders explain around one-quarter of the variation in crimes solved per officer across London police divisions. Finally, in prisons, independent inspections reduced violence by around 12 incidents per 1,000 prisoners per month in the 15 months following an inspection, without requiring an increase in staffing or expenditure. Instead, inspections appear to work by changing how existing resources and practices are managed.
4. The geographic allocation of justice resources can affect access to justice and outcomes. Since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, volumes of civil legal aid cases have fallen by around 57%, and the number of providers has fallen from roughly 3,000 in 2010 to 1,400 by 2024, leaving 38 local authorities with no observed civil legal aid provider activity in 2023. In London, police station closures increased the average distance for households to the nearest station from around 1.3 kilometres to 3 kilometres and were associated with a 9% increase in violent crime in affected neighbourhoods. Court closures have similarly increased travel distances, with the average distance for households to their nearest magistrates’ court more than doubling, from 5.7 kilometres to 12.1 kilometres.
5. The justice system can be affected by decisions made about resource allocation outside the system. For example, following a 71% real-terms reduction in youth service spending between 2011 and 2019, around 40% of youth clubs closed, and young people in London who lost access to nearby clubs became 14% more likely to commit an offence. Evidence from Sure Start similarly suggests that early years interventions can reduce more serious offending later in life. These examples show that spending on services for children and families can generate substantial downstream effects on crime and reduce pressures on justice institutions, meaning the returns to such spending may be larger than conventional assessments imply.
6. How we measure the benefits of justice interventions can substantially affect assessments of value for money. We illustrate this with an example using the fact that conventional estimates of the social costs of crime primarily focus on victims. However, evidence presented in this report suggests that crime also imposes high costs on witnesses. Accounting for these wider effects increases estimated social costs of individual crimes by around 25% on average and by around 28% for violent crime. Over time, victimisation rates fell by 25% between 2003–04 and 2014–15, yet once the costs borne by witnesses are included, the aggregate social costs of crime are estimated to have remained largely unchanged. These findings suggest that the returns to policies that prevent crime – from being witnesses to reducing victimisation – may be substantially larger than conventional measures imply.
7. Together, these findings point to a broader conclusion. Budget levels alone do not capture all the constraints facing the justice system. How resources are used and how different parts of the system interact matter as much as how much is spent, and decisions about resource allocation made outside the justice system can shape its outcomes too.
Latest Substack from Kelly Grehan published yesterday:-
ReplyDeleteThe Slow Decline of the Courts - Whatever Happened to the Well-Oiled Machine?
https://kellygrehaninjusticeblog.substack.com/p/the-slow-decline-of-the-courts-whatever?r=dja6b&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
As a young Probation Officer in the early 2000s I would excitedly take my turn doing Court Duty at Woolwich Magistrates, roughly once a fortnight. This meant writing down results and requests for Pre-Sentence Reports. I also gave first appointments to those sentenced and answered questions from the magistrates. It also meant doing ‘stand down reports’, which usually meant finding out if someone was suitable for Unpaid Work (community service).
DeleteWhat I liked was how fast and efficient it was. Cases came in and were dealt with, and the next case appeared as soon as the last one finished. It was a well-oiled machine, and everyone from the list caller to the CPS to the Magistrates played their part in that.
Woolwich Magistrates Court does not exist today. It was closed in 2011as part of the HM Courts & Tribunals Service court estate reform programme. Its magistrates’ court functions were mostly transferred to Bexley Magistrates Court - a bus ride away, but another busy court at the time, and we wondered how it could fit in so many extra cases. Between 2010 and 2024, 166 magistrates’ courts were shut down, which represented more than 50% of the active magistrates’ estate that existed in 2010 (323 courts). This has left approximately 157 operational magistrates’ courts across England and Wales.
We rightly hear a lot about the Crown Court backlog, but the Magistrates Court is, to my mind, also in crisis. In 2010, the magistrates’ court had 148,000 cases open. today it has 380,000. That is an increase of about 157% over the period. You might conclude cutting courtrooms has been bad for justice speed!
I have visited Bexley Magistrates a few times lately, as an observer, along with a few other Courts in Kent. What I saw had little in common with the well-oiled machine I used to know. For starters the Court List was much shorter than the court lists I had been used to.
I attribute this to the major workforce reductions that took place as part of wider Ministry of Justice savings programs, post-2010, which meant not only reduced staff, but a much less experienced staff group than before. Just like prison and probation, that loss of experience has had diabolical consequences. An experienced list caller would know where a case could be ‘squeezed into’ the list and how long a case needs on the courtroom floor. You learn this through experience, and from experienced colleagues. The benefits of this experience, and with it the culture of efficiency, seem to me to have been lost entirely, and the consequence is the backlog we now see.
But the new culture of inefficiency does not end there. I was genuinely shocked by how much ‘sitting around waiting’ now forms part of the Court day. To give the example of my last visit to Bexley Magistrates Court, in 3 hours I saw three cases seen. These were simply cases, minor offenses where the person pleaded guilty and was dealt with relatively quickly. The rest of the time was spent waiting for: a prison van to arrive, some paperwork to be found, and the duty solicitor to finish at another court. In the meantime, various court staff were left waiting in the courtroom, chatting together (that’s not a criticism of them; they were stuck waiting too), and the magistrates, 3 people who have given up their time to serve the community, were left waiting upstairs.
We often hear the cry in this country that public services don’t work anymore. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Court. This is not a situation without consequences. Every person waiting to go to Court is trapped in limbo, not knowing what their future holds. Approximately 15,386 people are held on remand in prisons across England and Wales. This comprises roughly 18% of the total prison population. Between 10% and 20% can expect to be found not guilty, and up to 30% will not end up with a custodial sentence. Others may be suspended from work pending the outcome, unable to progress in other areas too. None of this is good for rehabilitation. No one considers the extra layer of punishment the backlog now brings.
DeleteWe often talk about backlogs as if they are abstract numbers on a spreadsheet. They are not. They are people waiting to find out whether they will keep their job, keep their home, see their children, go to prison or move on with their lives. They are victims waiting for closure and witnesses waiting to be heard.
Courts are not meant to be places where people sit in limbo. They are meant to deliver swift and fair justice. Looking back on those days at Woolwich Magistrates’ Court, what strikes me is not that the system was perfect. It wasn’t. But it worked.
Rebuilding a justice system that works with that same sense of urgency and purpose should be one of the great public service challenges of our time. We should not accept this inefficeincy like it does not matter.
Kelly Grehan
This opinionated reminiscing on the past doesn’t help. Smaller courts and those outside of busy city centres were always slower moving. Strikes me as someone trying far too hard to style themselves as an “expert”. There’s too much of that as it is.
DeleteSo says the expert eh?
DeletePardon my ignorance, but can somebody answer a genuine question.
ReplyDeleteWhere has all the money gone?
Every public service has been cut to the bone and The tax take is higher than ever,
Services are desperate to secure additional funding, but the people at the head of the queue appear to be the military who have the support of the mass media in looking to fund death and destruction.
The pension system, the triple lock, is under intense scrutiny and there are ominous noises about cuts to benefits. It seems the plan is to make the poor pay yet again.
I keep ‘paying in,’ but it seems that there is less and less to draw out unless of course you are well connected, live in a tax haven or wear ermine to work.
Yet it seems as though most of the cabinet have become multi millionaires…….i wonder how that has happened ?
ReplyDeleteCourt closures in the 2000s is one of the main reasons why the system is backlogged and slow……perhaps they should invoke Nightingale courts in some of the buildings that are still standing and being serviced (ready for civil disobedience I am told ) to try and reduce ONE of the reasons for the backlog !
ReplyDeleteIf the need for an NHS style social care is so pressing for the Country and important to him personally, then why feck doesn't he just establish it and crack on. Why wait for the next election, this crap about asking the electorate permission is such rubbish, 90% of what they do once elected was never granted permission. Andy Burnham has so far been too busy crafting his beer loving, everyman image on Instagram to do anything significant, my hopes aren't high at all.
ReplyDeleteWe all know who is going to pay for this tosh. The same people who have paid taxes since they left school/college/university who have paid national insurance, baled the banks out, worked during covid when others got paid to do squat all. Politicians are good at spending our money, starting wars and sending our kids to war but not their own. We then let war criminals such as Blur make millions on after dinner speaking and all the other snot nosed politicians jump on the gravy boat. Nothing is going to be done about probation it is not on their agenda it does not have any political benefit.
Delete"What I liked was how fast and efficient it was. Cases came in and were dealt with, and the next case appeared as soon as the last one finished. It was a well-oiled machine, and everyone from the list caller to the CPS to the Magistrates played their part in that... Courts are not meant to be places where people sit in limbo. They are meant to deliver swift and fair justice."
ReplyDeleteHow terribly convenient for all concerned... except, perhaps, for the individual whose case was expedited without any meaningful consideration.
I do find that many of the contributions in print are about the convenience of &/or from the perspective of the privileged, rarely from those who have suffered injustice.
I worked as a court PO in local mags courts 'back in the day'. I occasionally intervened in cases & asked for sentencing to be further adjourned because reports by colleagues (who were not prepared to amend their reports) were variously inadequate/inappropriate/insufficient/prejudicial. That was the role of 'gatekeeping', i.e. ensuring information supplied to the court was accurate, unbiased & fair.
By way of example, I 'pulled' a report from a court sentencing hearing because it explicitly outed a gay man who did not want to be identified as a gay man at that time. I requested a further adjournment, the clerk suggested three weeks & I confirmed with the defendant that this was possible. I then provided a travel warrant to cover the future appearance. It wasn't his fault that, for whatever reason, the report writer felt that the defendant's sexual orientation was 'relevant'.
The outcome? No idea, as the courts SPO decided to issue me with a written warning & reassign me to a different role.
THAT is when I knew the probation service was fucked up beyond all recognition & repair.
Dunt matter which stream, its all a stream of piss & wind.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001d59f
"in 2019 the home office reported that only 7.8% of all crimes reported to the police resulted in a charge or summons... imagine if the police were a biscuit factory; "we are proud to announce that 7.8% of the things that we make could legitimately be described as biscuits."
Sounds a bit like probation service provision since hmpps took over:
The performance of the HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) Probation Service in England and Wales has worsened significantly since it was brought back under full public control in 2021
Target Achievement: HMPPS met only 26% of its overall performance targets
Risk Assessments: Probation staff were found to be adequately assessing the risk of harm in only 28% of cases
Regional Ratings: Annual community performance updates show that only a small fraction of the probation regions (such as 2 out of 12 regions) received a 'good' rating
"We are proud to announce that 16% of our services could legigitimately described as 'Good'." (where 'Good' means the service meets all necessary standards effectively).
As for the remaining 84%...
Requires Improvement - The service shows significant shortfalls or weaknesses that require targeted intervention.
Inadequate - Severe service delivery deficiencies that put the public or service users at risk.
In other news
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq36lyljwwz7o
"Domestic abuse support workers with Glasgow City Council face wage cuts of more than £11,000 under the local authority's new pay plans.
Staff at Assist, a domestic abuse advocacy service that works with high-risk cases, are essentially being moved down a pay grade after the council carried out an evaluation of jobs.
Workers said the evaluation left them feeling insulted after it suggested their work only required them to pay attention for 30 minutes at a time.
The local authority this week said it intended to sack more than 23,000 staff and re-hire them on new contracts to implement its new pay structure..."
Sounds like probation trusts' strategy.
Upstream or downstream?