Tax on justice: Victory in our campaign to repeal the atrocious criminal courts charge

If there is one phrase that David Cameron does not like to see in the headlines, it is “government U-turn”. The Prime Minister believes it is a sign of weakness, of not sticking to your guns. Yet we have seen two significant about-turns by cabinet ministers in the past nine days.

First, George Osborne wisely ditched his £4.4bn of cuts to tax credits that would have hurt Britain’s low-paid “strivers”. Now, Michael Gove, the Justice Secretary, has dumped the controversial criminal courts charge introduced by his predecessor Chris Grayling – who would have been better described as the “Injustice Secretary”.

The move followed a sustained campaign by this newspaper against the pernicious “tax on justice”, and complaints from magistrates, judges, lawyers and MPs. They warned that defendants could be encouraged to plead guilty to offences they did not commit in order to avoid a charge of between the flat rate £150 and up to £1,000 if convicted after pleading not guilty. The charge led to the resignation of more than 50 magistrates who felt they could not conscionably impose a counter-productive fine on individuals who had committed minor crimes, often motivated by poverty.

We wholeheartedly welcome Mr Gove’s rethink and take pride in our part in securing it. Mr Gove argued that the intention behind the policy was honourable, while admitting it had “fallen short”. That is an understatement. Mr Grayling must have been well aware of the likely effect of his policy. The lesson is that austerity should never mean balancing the books on the backs of the most vulnerable.

Mr Gove has now announced a review of the financial sanctions and penalties courts can impose, with a view to bringing greater simplicity and clarity. That sounds sensible; the current regime is very complicated. But Mr Gove, under Treasury pressure to cut costs in a department not protected in last week’s Spending Review, should not undo his good work by finding other ways to hit people on low incomes when reducing the taxpayer’s share of running the criminal justice system.

Mr Gove has also wisely ended Mr Grayling’s attempt to ban books for prisoners. He scrapped the Ministry of Justice’s bid for a £5.9m prisons contract in Saudi Arabia, saying it should not help a regime that uses beheadings, stoning and beatings. He is held up by Mr Osborne as a model moderniser for his plans to reform prisons, which will see inner-city sites sold off for housing and could result in a net gain for the public purse. He is looking at radical ideas to tackle underlying causes of criminality following the example of initiatives which have cut the prison population in parts of America. There might just be the seeds here of a revolution that would finally address our high reoffending rates and stop our jails being “universities of crime”.

The Justice Secretary’s new broom is welcome. He should go further by looking again at another aspect of Mr Grayling’s legacy: the contracting out of much of the probation service to private firms, which now monitor low- and medium-risk ex-offenders. This has led to hundreds of jobs being lost, an exodus of 1,800 experienced probation staff and complaints of extra bureaucracy. No doubt the Treasury would be nervous about rewriting contracts with private providers, which could be expensive. One key test of Mr Gove’s credentials will be whether he can mitigate the crisis in the probation service.