Joined Forces

Inside Time reports:

Parliamentarians, trade union leaders and rank-and-file police officers have joined forces to call on the Government to order a Royal Commission on Prisons and the Justice System.

A joint letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham calling for the move was signed by the officers of the Parliamentary Justice Union All Party Parliamentary Group: Liz Saville Roberts MP (Plaid Cymru), Lord Balfe (Conservative), Richard Burgon MP (Labour) and Lord Woodley (Labour).

They were supporting an approach from Steve Gillan, General Secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association; Jo Grady, General Secretary of the University and College Union; Fran Heathcote, General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union; Ian Lawrence, General Secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers; Nicola Ranger, General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing; and Mel Warnes, acting National Secretary of the Police Federation of England and Wales.

In a joint statement, the unions said: “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.”

The union chiefs said that despite early warnings by the Labour government that it had inherited a “ticking time-bomb” in prisons and that failure to act would mean “the prospect of a total breakdown of law and order”, the response by ministers since had been piecemeal, timid and contradictory. The unions said that narrow reviews into sentencing, courts and prisons had barely scratched the surface of what is needed. They also criticised privatisation within the justice system and last year’s cuts to prison education provision.

The Parliamentarians, in their supporting letter, added: “The current prison overcrowding crisis is just the tip of the iceberg, and it is important to recognise that it is interconnected with other problems – from squalid and violent prison conditions, with ineffective education and rehabilitation programmes, to excessive probation workloads, severe courts backlogs and intolerable pressures facing staff throughout the criminal justice system.

“As the statement (from the Unions) makes clear, the scale and interconnected nature of the problems demand holistic, end-to-end reform, rather than the current piecemeal approach of narrow reviews. We ask you to give serious consideration to this proposal and to engage directly with the unions, whose members experience the consequences of these pressures every day. We would welcome the opportunity to meet with you and relevant ministerial colleagues to discuss the case for a Royal Commission.”

Added to these calls, Nick Smart, president of the Police Superintendents’ Association, also called for a Royal Commission whilst speaking at his organisation’s annual general meeting, which was attended by Policing Minister Sarah Jones. Mr Smart said this had been promised by the then-Conservative government in 2019 but not delivered, and would be the first such examination of the criminal justice system in more than 60 years.