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1.10 am
Mr. Paul Tyler (North Cornwall): I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett) and to the Minister for allowing me to make a short contribution to the debate. I must first declare a special interest. Not only is my area greatly affected by the proposals, but my wife is a justice of the peace, so I am particularly well briefed on the subject.
I wish to underline two points that my hon. Friend made. As he said, the Minister was gracious enough to receive a deputation of representatives of benches from Devon and Cornwall and a number of Members of Parliament from all parties in the area. She spelled out in no uncertain terms what the Department considered to be efficiency savings. I want to explore that a little further.
I should first explain that Cornwall has been through this process before. In my own part of Cornwall, under the Conservative Government, eight courts were closed and similar arguments were used at the time. We know all about trying to make efficiency savings. They have been made with great difficulty. Preventing any deterioration in the service has placed great strain on the magistracy and the clerks. However, there comes a point when one can go no further.
Let me briefly illustrate the sort of savings that are being considered. The closure of the court facilities at Launceston, in my area, is estimated to result in savings of some £13,500. However, in a letter to some of us in the area, the magistrates courts committee has already acknowledged that, of that £13,500, an additional cost of £9,000 will immediately be incurred by the magistracy and the clerks, thereby reducing the figure to £4,500. As my hon. Friend has said, that takes no account of the costs of all the other services to the court. Even before one starts talking about those who give voluntarily of their time to attend court as witnesses, or in any other capacity, the added costs of the police, the probation service, the Law Society and legal aid come to a great deal more than £4,500. So the savings are not merely notional, but non-existent.
What does the Department mean by efficiency? Is it more efficient if witnesses are not prepared to come forward when they know that there is no public transport to the new court house to which they are summoned? Will it be more efficient justice that more and more lay JPs will simply not be prepared to serve? That is already the case in my area. A working farmer cannot give up the amount of time necessary to go a longer distance to the court house. Most importantly, how can we guarantee that the quality of the justice dispensed from a more remote court system will mean that we will get real justice?
Efficiency is a word that is much thrown about in the Chamber. When it comes to providing local justice, if it is not truly just justice, it is clearly not efficient. In those terms, efficiency savings are simply a chimera. They do not exist, because we are not providing the service to the community.
Devon and Cornwall are at the forefront of the problem. That may be as well, because when the chairs of the various benches came to see the Minister, along with my hon. Friend and myself, it was made clear that Devon and Cornwall are special cases. The Minister has told me previously that the Department is prepared to be flexible in terms of the efficiency savings and the consequences for particular rural areas. Devon and Cornwall will require that flexibility. It is already inevitable that people will have to travel very long distances.
The Minister said at our meeting that she wanted a higher standard of court facilities. She wanted to prevent, if necessary, a witness and a defendant from being in the same part of the building together for any length of time. The chair of one of the benches pointed out to her and to us that if that witness and that defendant had already spent two hours on a bus together getting to the court, it was complete folly to worry about what would happen in the building.
Sometimes seeking perfection means that we do not make any real improvements at all, and that is the case that we are putting before the House tonight.
1.15 am
The Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department (Jane Kennedy): Just over two months ago--in replying to a debate on magistrates courts initiated by the right hon. Member for East Devon (Sir P. Emery) and attended by the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett)--I said that I expected to return to this subject. Since that debate, I have met hon. Members from Devon and Cornwall constituencies and have written to them. I have also answered two parliamentary questions--one from the hon. Gentleman himself.
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. I welcome the opportunity to return to this important issue, and to set out clearly the Government's position. I want also to challenge the assertion that the efficiency targets for the Lord Chancellor's Department are cuts. In doing so, I will return to ground that has been very well trodden over the past few weeks. The hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler) will have braced himself with regard to that fact.
First, I should remind the House of the responsibilities of magistrates courts committees. MCCs are made up of magistrates drawn from local benches in their area. The committees are selected by local magistrates. They have a statutory responsibility for the effective and efficient management of the courts in their area.
That means that magistrates from Devon and Cornwall manage the courts in Devon and Cornwall; magistrates from Merseyside, where my constituency lies, manage the courts on Merseyside; magistrates from London manage the courts in London; and so on. Parliament has set a national framework within which the courts are run. However, the Lord Chancellor does not manage the courts, and does not tell MCCs how to manage the courts.
Decisions affecting the magistrates courts and the services that they provide, the way that they are staffed and the location of courthouses are taken by local magistrates--not by central Government. It is local people who are best placed to consider these issues from a local perspective.
Mr. Burnett: We are aware of the points that the Parliamentary Secretary has made. We are anxious to find
out exactly what the Government's policy is on central Government spending; the impact of closures on other services; and the illusory savings that the Government think they will make.
Jane Kennedy: I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman is seeking to elucidate that point, and I hope to be able to satisfy him on it.
The Lord Chancellor, as the Minister responsible for magistrates courts, has certain specific functions. One of them--which I exercise on his behalf--is to determine appeals by the paying authorities, the local councils, against MCC proposals to close courthouses. That is why, in debates and exchanges with hon. Members, I do not and cannot comment on individual MCC proposals. In the event of an appeal, each case will be carefully considered on its merits. It would be wholly wrong of me to prejudge the quasi-judicial decision that I must make should an appeal be lodged.
Beyond those specific functions, the Lord Chancellor is concerned with the performance of the magistrates courts and the contribution that they make to the criminal justice system. That has a high priority, in accordance with the Government's aims for the criminal justice system. Those aims are: to reduce crime and the fear of crime and their social and economic costs; to dispense justice fairly and efficiently; and to promote confidence in the rule of law.
Accordingly, and rightly, performance standards and targets are set for the magistrates courts. Users of the courts are entitled to no less. It is for MCCs to decide how they achieve the targets. The Lord Chancellor does not dictate how they should do it.
Of course--this brings me specifically to the question of funding--MCCs, like every other public sector organisation, must operate within the budgetary allocations that they are given. I emphasise that they are not given any instructions about how to do that, and I hope that that answers one point made by the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon.
There has been some debate during the past weeks about the efficiency targets set for magistrates courts, which have been represented as cuts in funding. It is quite right that we should continue to seek better value for the money provided for running magistrates courts. The amount that we spend on magistrates courts is very significant. Before I give some figures, it may help if I remind the House that MCCs are funded by local authorities, and that the Lord Chancellor provides grants to those authorities to cover 80 per cent. of the cost.
For the year that began on 1 April, we expect total spending on magistrates courts to be in the region of £372 million, a figure already known to the hon. Gentleman. That includes the contribution from local authorities. Of that, £343 million is for the revenue costs of running the courts, and £29 million is for capital expenditure on buildings and information technology. In 2001-02, under current plans, we expect to spend £379 million, an increase of more than 5 per cent. in the three years covered by the 1998 comprehensive spending review.
Mr. Burnett: Why, therefore, do magistrates in Devon and Cornwall, the areas that I know best, labour under the
impression that they must reduce expenditure by 3 per cent. a year for at least three years? Other MCCs are under the same misapprehension.
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