Shabana Mahmood said at a fringe event at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool that the government would ‘restore and reform’ justice.
She agreed that more funding was needed to fix many of the problems that the Criminal Justice System is currently facing and said that talks were ongoing ahead of the spending review due to take place next month.
Mahmood prefaced this by stating that people should not expect any major spending changes this time around. She said:
“We are not a party of austerity and we do not believe in running a smaller state – we have not come in to cut the size of the state.
“We have to make difficult choices in this early period and go for growth. We believe in public services and funding public services and we want to go further but [only] when the economic circumstances allow us to do so.”
Labour’s Lord Chancellor also believes that, despite investment matching that of the Conservative administration for now, there was already a clear difference between the parties’ stances on justice.
“[The Conservatives] saw justice as expendable as a department and a set of services that could be cut and nobody would notice.
“That is not the position of the Labour party, not our values and not who we are as a political party. We will do things differently. We signalled almost immediately upon our entry into government that the rule of law was back and the government doesn’t get to trash the law – that is a statement of intent and you can take confidence from that.’
No detail was shared on potential justice reforms, but Mahmood said that the actions taken to ease prison overcrowding were not the peak of her ambition.
