UK dangers complete breakdown of regulation and order on account of justice failures, PM warned
The leaders of six justice sector unions and royal colleges have issued a bombshell warning to Andy Burnham – telling the PM their members have had enough of being ‘set up to fail’
Andy Burnham has been given a dire warning about the state of the justice system(Image: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images)
The UK is at risk of a total breakdown of law and order, chiefs at several of the UK’s biggest justice sector unions and royal colleges have warned Andy Burnham.
In a bombshell intervention, leaders told the Prime Minister that prisons, probation, police and courts are unable to perform their key functions and keep the public safe. The dire warning from the heads of six national bodies – including the Prison Officers Association (POA), the National Association of Probation Officers and the Police Federation of England and Wales – calls for a Royal Commission to carry out a top-to-bottom review.
In a letter to the PM they said: “Our members have had enough of being set up to fail and blamed when things go wrong.” They warned that the controversial early prison release scheme, expected to free up around 5,000 spaces in England and Wales, will fail if probation services are not made fit for purpose.
Their letter states: “From arrest to trial, incarceration to release, the cycle of reoffending continues to spiral out of control, in part because rehabilitation is simply impossible in violent, squalid and overcrowded jails.
“Sticking-plaster solutions such as early release schemes are doomed to fail unless probation is made fit for purpose, while plans to restrict jury trials are a dangerous and wrong-headed response to case backlogs caused mainly by cuts and mass court closures under the last Government.
“Despite early warnings by the new Labour Government they had inherited a ‘ticking time-bomb’ in our prisons and that failure to act would mean the prospect of a total breakdown of law and order, the response by ministers since has been piecemeal, timid and contradictory.”
Mark Fairhurst, national chair of the POA, said: “The entire Criminal Justice System is in meltdown, from Prisons to Probation from Courts to policing. Our call for a Royal Commission is appropriate and will prove how brutal the cuts to these vital public services has ended in a perpetual crisis that clearly puts the public at risk. You cannot have justice on the cheap.”
The leaders, also including the heads of the University and College Union, the Public and Commercial Services Union and the Royal College of Nursing, said the government must establish a royal commission to look at the problems running through the justice system.
The move was promised by the Tory manifesto in 2019, but was never delivered. The letter states: “As leaders of trade unions, Royal Colleges and staff associations representing workers in prisons and the wider criminal justice system, we hear daily from our members about the dire state of the vital public services they deliver.
“Years of underinvestment, organisational failures and an obsession with outsourcing have left prisons, probation, police and courts in crisis, unable to perform the core functions of state needed to reduce crime and keep the public safe.”
A commission would be required to take evidence from a range of experts – including judges, lawyers, frontline workers, prisoners and ex-prisoners.
The government is grappling with the state of the justice system. As well as the early release of prisoners to tackle the capacity crisis in British jails, fomer Justice Secretary David Lammy proposed reducing the number of jury trials to tackle enormous backlogs.
A government spokesman said: “We inherited a justice system on the brink of collapse, and while there is more to do, we are already taking action.
“We’re building 14,000 more prison places, cutting court backlogs, imposing the toughest-ever controls on offenders, and investing record sums in probation and victim support. That’s on top of putting thousands more police officers into communities and delivering the biggest reforms to policing in 200 years.”
