Perspectives
Beth Mooney, Head of Research | Harry Ogden, Senior Analyst
Thursday 31 October 2024
The new government’s first budget was unveiled yesterday and billed as a “budget to rebuild Britain”. So what does it tell us about the direction of public spending for policing and the criminal justice system?
On the face of it, there is some good news. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) receives a boost with a £1.9bn total departmental increase for 2025-26, equivalent to a 5.6% real-terms rise. Of the total settlement, £2.3 billion has been earmarked for prison expansion across 2024-25 and 2025-26, £500 million across prisons and the probation service in 2025-26 to recruit thousands of new staff and an extra £49 million to address prosecution demand pressures for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) (although only for 2024/25). Combined, these target current barriers to justice and help alleviate some short-term pressures.
Yet the Government is right to note that this budget only “begins” to repair the justice system. The Home Office has been somewhat sidelined - surprising considering “Take back our streets” is one of the government’s missions - with funding increasing from £20.3bn in 2023-24 to £22.1bn in 2025-26, representing a real-terms decrease of 2.7% (the government notes savings should be made by cancelling the Rwanda scheme). Although the settlement mentions an increase in the core government grant for police forces, this is likely to be diminished by the new employers NI charge. The 13,000 new officers and PCSOs are to be funded through “tackling waste”, while the additional £150 million to tackle national security threats and serious organised crime, while welcome, is likely to be insufficient to meet the scale of the threat (as set out in the report we recently co-authored with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change).
Fundamentally, the settlement across crime, justice and policing still falls far short of what is needed. Knife-enabled crime remains high and police-recorded violence against women and girls (VAWG) offences have risen by 37% between 2018 and 2023 (see the NPCC VAWG Statement, supported by Crest). Crime is also increasingly complex: the average days for an outcome to be assigned increased substantially since 2018.
Meanwhile, charge rates and public confidence in the police have plummeted and the courts face persistently large backlogs. The prison system is on the brink of collapse - only surviving because the government released thousands of prisoners early - and the probation service struggles to fulfil its core function of keeping the public safe. The Lord Chancellor wasn’t wrong when she referred to the “impending collapse of the criminal justice system”.
Given this crisis, bold thinking is required. The recent announcement of a sentencing review “to provide long term solutions to the justice system” and further confirmation in the budget that the Government intends to bring forward “a wider package of measures to rebuild confidence in policing” and examine “tough alternatives to custody” (something Crest has previously written about here) are welcome. However, in the absence of significant investment, further clarity is required from the Government on how they plan to fulfil their manifesto commitments to halve knife crime and VAWG.
In the meantime, while money alone is no guarantee of better outcomes, given the criminal justice crisis, it is vital as short-term life support to keep the sector afloat. Agencies across the criminal justice system will now look to the next phase of the Spending Review, and start pushing for a settlement appropriate for the nature of the crisis.
Our in-house think tank, Crest Insights, the UK’s only think tank for the whole criminal justice system, has published plenty of reports which illustrate how large the challenge is - from the courts backlog to the deep-rooted causes of serious violence - and provide viable solutions. Our consultancy - Crest Consulting - works directly with criminal justice partners to address key issues, supporting changes and improvements in service outcomes. You can find them at www.crestadvisory.com/reports.