Being ‘tough on crime’ is impossible when there is no functioning justice system

The country knows that its public services are falling apart. People know it because they have personally spent hours and hours waiting in A&E, or because they are among the millions and millions of people currently on NHS waiting lists. They know it because their children have been kept home from school because their classrooms were deemed unsafe.

It stands to reason that the criminal justice system is falling apart, too, but most people don’t see it. Everybody, or almost everybody, at some point uses schools and hospitals. Most people go a whole lifetime without setting foot in a courtroom or a prison, which unsurprisingly tempts governments to allow the criminal justice system to be the most neglected public service of all.

That trials for the very worst crimes, rape and violence, have been delayed because no judges are available to hear them is shocking, but arguably not surprising. News that a suspected terrorist was seemingly able to escape through the front gates of Wandsworth prison by strapping himself to a food truck (though he pleaded not guilty in court) also drew attention to the clear fact that one of the country’s best-known prisons is not fit for purpose.

It has also not escaped the public’s attention that in high-profile trials, it now takes significantly longer than it ever used to for justice to arrive – in most cases, many years. It is increasingly common for prisoners on remand to spend years behind bars, waiting for a trial.

Invariably, anyone who has ever reported on criminal trials, or been called to serve on a jury, will have their own first-hand stories of a system blighted by administrative chaos and constant delay, with the astronomical costs these issues inevitably accrue. It does not matter if clerks, witnesses, transcribers, government lawyers, and all the other staff that are required to make a court function are present, if there is no judge.

The consequences of trying to run schools and hospitals on the cheap are clear for all to see. The ramifications of a dilapidated justice system might be easier to conceal, but that comes with consequences of its own.

The home secretary has tried to make a very public show of promising to end the growing sense that minor crimes will always go unpunished – for example, the idea that burglary has in effect been decriminalised. But these are promises that cannot be kept without radical improvements to the system through which criminals are punished.

There are no quick fixes for a decade of ever-increasing neglect. But the government would be wrong to think that there are no political and electoral consequences for presiding over dysfunction of this kind.

The Conservatives will inevitably spend the next year trying to talk themselves up as the party of law and order, but you cannot be tough on crime while also being tough on the people whose job it is to bring criminals to justice.