Haha perils of the character count!

Some extra money would help (eg gov match funding criminal pupillages, increasing solicitors’ legal aid fees) but frankly that’s all pocket change in comparison

Court delays are appalling & I would increase sitting days, but the gov already funded that in the spending review this year. The main constraint on court capacity now (at least for serious cases) is availability of lawyers & that’s hard to increase quickly (you need a pipeline)

I’d go for a big expansion in commissioned services like drug & alcohol treatment, relationship supporting, family conferencing-type work, as well as early preventative work (Sure Start-style) that improves not just criminal justice outcomes but a whole host of other stuff too.

There’s a limit to how much money criminal justice agencies can absorb effectively. By far the biggest chunk of spending is staffing, and recruiting too quickly can worsen performance problems: you have to lower recruitment standards and it takes up too much time for existing staff to train them.

This drives me mad. If the government wanted people convicted of certain crimes to spend longer in prison, they should have increased sentence lengths. Not introduced convoluted and opaque systems that change the % of sentences spent in custody and inevitably lead to screw-ups!

You just need two options: most prisoners get released after x% of their sentence (33/50/66, whatever makes sense). This allows for support & monitoring in the community, subject to recall if necessary. If there is a serious public protection risk, parole board approval is needed. That simple!

Yes — it’s almost like designing a system that needs 144 pages of guidance to calculate a release date was a bad idea!

To be fair, I think it probably is true! It’s hard to overstate the degree to which (some) prisons can’t answer complicated questions like ‘how many prisoners do you have’ and ‘what does your day-to-day regime look like’.

This is a fascinating and frankly extraordinary judgement! At this rate we’ll have to add a chart to Performance Tracker of ‘prison governors held in contempt of court’!!

To be fair, I think it probably is true! It’s hard to overstate the degree to which (some) prisons can’t answer complicated questions like ‘how many prisoners do you have’ and ‘what does your day-to-day regime look like’.

Last week, I chatted to BBC Verify about how this kind of thing can happen

How does it have full fibre fr

Maybe! But I’m not convinced it would have cost them the election. And it would have been a) better for trust in politics and b) a million times better for Labour once they got into government

Fwiw I don’t think NI cuts were principally about making things better for the Tories in 2024, I think they were about making things worse for Labour in 2024-29. As for why Starmer/Reeves went for it…just the wrong political calculation?

I also really do think they missed a trick on the NICs. ‘They’re lying to you, we’re not‘ can work as a line but only if people believe you — promises on tax made that impossible imo

In my defence, I was saying they should do this in Feb 24 and have the receipts to prove it (not that I’m claiming any great foresight)! They clearly were worried they’d have no majority, but I think that was the wrong political judgement/assessment of risks given where they were

Also Hunt’s NICs cut was a golden opportunity to say ‘look, even the Tory party don’t think they’ll still be in government after the election, that’s why they’re making impossible promises’!

The real ‘we’re different’ message would have come from frank honesty about this. don’t need to specify exactly what you’d do, but don’t make promises *everyone* knows you can’t keep.