Criminal Negligence: Reforming the Ministry of Justice

The Adam Smith Institute’s latest discussion paper, written by Tim Ambler, proposes a number of reforms to improve the efficiency and value for money of the Ministry of Justice.

This paper is part of the Adam Smith Institute’s “Reforming the Civil Service” series.

• The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has responsibility for a number of functions that are currently performed inefficiently and represent poor value for taxpayer money;

• There are more civil servants working for the Ministry of Justice than there are prison inmates in England and Wales;

• Blair-era reforms should be continued to their logical conclusion, namely the complete separation of the judiciary and the executive;

  • The roles of Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary should be separated, with the former ceasing to be part of government, while remaining in the House of Lords and a member of parliamentary committees dealing with judicial matters, such as its share of the Consolidated Fund;

  • New judges should be nominated by parliament, not government and parliament should ensure the judiciary’s share of the Consolidated Fund is adequate;

  • The MoJ’s courtroom elements should be transferred to the judiciary, with the associated MoJ staff thereby becoming public rather than civil servants;

• By moving (over a period of ten years) to the Scandinavian model of criminal justice, the vast majority of prisons could be closed and their prisoners could become trainees for their return to law-abiding society;

  • Rehabilitation would take priority over punishment but the latter would remain in the form of removing liberty by means of electronic tagging;

  • Trainees would be allocated to trainers in small groups;

  • Transition should be managed in waves by a small transition team; 

  • Remaining traditional prisons should be prepared for the new vision with greater resources funded by the savings in shifting earlier cohorts to the new regime;

• Other MoJ functions (such as the Office of the Public Guardian and Independent Monitoring Authority) should be privatised or transferred away from the department;

• Without its two main roles of supporting the judiciary and managing the prisons and probate services, the 6,330 core MoJ staff should be reduced to 800;

• Taken together, the recommendations in this report would reduce the civil servant headcount by 87,781; 

  • Some 28,172 of the reduction, however, would simply be reclassification as public servants.