It’s amazing how quickly the government can get hold of cash in the event of an emergency. Following a summer of bad publicity surrounding the early prisoner release scheme, and a decision to let out fewer inmates, the Ministry of Justice announced this week that £110m would be 'fast-tracked from existing budgets' to increase prison capacity.
The £110m is not new cash and we’ll have to wait for the Ministry of Justice's annual report to find out which budgets the money has been taken from. But how is it that the government can accelerate funding to avert a crisis in the prison system yet - as far as I'm aware - never accelerated funding to avert a crisis in the legal aid system.
Days before Andy Burnham ordered a review of the early prisoner release scheme, the House of Commons justice committee published a damning report on the state of the legal aid sector. Legal aid, the committee said, was vital to ensuring people with limited means can enforce their rights. However, the criminal duty solicitor scheme was in a ‘dire state’, the wider criminal legal aid sector was ‘financially unsustainable’, frozen eligibility thresholds within civil legal aid had created a ‘justice gap’ and the civil legal aid provider base was under ‘severe strain’.
The committee found that the financial position of criminal legal aid providers had deteriorated so much that the Bellamy review’s £135m recommendation in 2021 as a first step to nurse the sector back to health was now ‘outdated’. The lord chancellor, the committee declared, was failing in his statutory duty on legal aid.
The government is rightly treating prisons as an emergency. It needs to do the same with legal aid.
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