Protecting the next Zara Aleena means paying higher taxes

One of the dangers of the media-politics interface is that sensational news stories make bad policy. It is generally a bad idea for governments to legislate to deal with headlines that are shocking, precisely because the horrors they convey are so rare.

The murder of Zara Aleena by a violent offender on probation does not fall into this category. It attracted a great deal of attention, and was raised by Sir Keir Starmer in the House of Commons on Wednesday, but sadly its unusual prominence was not due to the rarity of such murders – it was probably because she was a young woman with a career as a lawyer ahead of her, who had felt safe walking home on her own at night.

As we report today, someone is killed every three days on average by an offender on probation in England and Wales. The errors that led to the release of Aleena’s murderer may not be common, but they are common enough to constitute a crisis in the criminal justice system.

Justin Russell, the chief inspector of probation, told a press conference last week: “It’s a core function of the probation service to protect the public from these risks, and they’re not getting it right at the moment.” Heavy workloads and high vacancy rates are making it impossible to monitor released prisoners to the expected standard, he said.

Rishi Sunak responded to Sir Keir’s questions by saying that the government was spending more, but by the time he had finished speaking, inflation had probably robbed any increase of its value.

Another danger of the media-politics interface is that commentators are inclined to believe that the solution to any problem is more public spending, but in many cases that is true, and this is one of those cases. The Independent has argued for some time that public spending is too low, and we have pleaded with politicians of all parties to be honest with the voters about the need for higher taxes to pay for better services.

That argument has been complicated by what Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, on Friday called “a decade of black swan events”, which have forced the government to raise taxes to deal with three external shocks: the financial crisis, the pandemic, and the rise in global energy prices.

While those crises have been playing out, the government has also belatedly realised that the NHS and social care need big injections of additional money. That money started to flow before the pandemic, but was swallowed up in it.

Now the time has come for honesty about the need for a permanently higher level of taxes. Unfortunately, a large section of the Conservative Party has been so scarred by recent crises that it has taken precisely the wrong lesson from them. It regards the temporary tax rises required by unexpected (“black swan”) shocks as an undesirable trend that strengthens the case for lower taxes.

In fact, the extra borrowing that led to tax rises was necessary to protect people’s jobs and living standards, which is what people rightly expected their government to do.

The people also rightly expect their government to supply them with good public services. Instead of claiming that “our ambition should be to have nothing less than the most competitive tax regime of any major country”, as Mr Hunt did in his Bloomberg speech, he and his Labour opposite number should be straight with people by saying that adequate public services (they can drop the “world-class” rhetoric for the moment) have to be paid for.

That means a lot more spending over time, on the NHS and social care above all. But there are a number of smaller-spending services that also need more resources in a civilised society. The asylum and immigration system is one of them. But the probation service – and, indeed, almost the whole of the criminal justice system – is another.

There are no shortcuts, as the government discovered with its botched privatisation of the probation service in 2014. If we are serious about minimising the risks to the Zara Aleenas of the future, we must pay to do so through higher taxes.