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Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order. I hope that we shall not have too much of a replay of the Courts Bill, although clearly some reference to it is acceptable.
Jim Knight: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will refrain from that.
I am grateful for the opportunity to raise the issue. Access to justice is at the heart of much of the Government's good work. It is no doubt apparent that I expected to use a different tone in the debate when I first applied for it. I expected to be pleading for improved access to justice for Dorset in the medium to long term and for common sense in relation to the western circuit in the short term. As a result of receiving the highly efficient fax from the Minister's office last Thursday, I have been able to make a different speech. He can tell that I am excited about the potential of his proposals for Bournemouth. He has listened to the representations on Winchester. I now ask him to listen to them on behalf of Dorset, to press ahead with those proposals and to use this opportunity to give the House more detail than he gave in last week's statement.
7.15 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs (Mr. Christopher Leslie): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Jim Knight) on his success in securing this timely debate on the organisation of the courts and the western circuit. He explained why he needed to change the debate's title from Wessex circuit to western circuit. I could spend some time delving into the different definitions of what is Wessex and whether it is the same as the south-west and so on, but I do not want to waste time.
My hon. Friend noted that faxes winged their way to him on the day his Adjournment debate was selected, but I assure him that the timing of the debate was unconnected to the decision taken. However, his advocacy of the case was very much part of the process.
His arguments to me, the Lord Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs were important and it is right to respond to them. Responding positively reflects the quality of his arguments. As my hon. Friend observed, we reached a decision on the organisation of the south-west region of the planned new courts agency. I am glad that our decision meets with his approval. I suspect that it will also meet with the approval of hon. Members on both sides of the House who have raised the issue in the Chamber and privately with me, as well as with many members of the judiciary and the legal services community, who have been vocal in their arguments on the subject.It might help if I set out a bit of the history of how we went about planning the structure of the proposed agency. In our White Paper "Justice for All", the Government set out their intention to establish a new organisation responsible for the administration of all the courts in England and Wales below the House of Lords. We are implementing a programme to integrate those courts in England and Wales into a single executive agency, as my hon. Friend explained. That will be a major change programme, creating an agency of 20,000 staff engaging with a judicial work force of more than 30,000 and with a budget of about £1 billion. Bringing 43 separate organisations into one with a common management and culture will be a major leadership and change management challenge.
There are many benefits to the new agency. Briefly, it will involve better performance, better management and better use of resources; a more joined-up criminal justice system; a narrowing of the gap between offences recorded and offenders brought to justice; and a more developed stronger focus on the standards of service and modern methods of delivering services in all courts. The focus of our work is to create an organisation that is more responsive to better public service objectives and the needs of the courts' customers, victims and witnesses.
There are, of course, organisational issues to settle. In the court service, the Crown court and county courts are located in six different regions, known as circuits, each headed by a regional manager, called a circuit administrator. Magistrates courts, on the other hand, are run by 42 independent magistrates courts committees. They are coterminous with criminal justice, police authority and Crown Prosecution Service areas.
We have decided that there should be 42 local management units when the agency is first established. That is because all the other criminal justice agencies are configured in that way. However, in the new unified courts agency, we want a regional management tier, similar to the circuit arrangements. A regional tier will help to facilitate a more collegiate approach between areas and the handling of local and regional issues. It will also enable the dissemination of best practice to raise standards and provide a strong leadership capacity, which will be especially important during the transition to the new agency, when we will have to forge a new organisation and culture.
Civil trial and family care centres, as well as specialist jurisdictions such as chancery and mercantile business, draw work from across criminal justice boundaries to
provide specialist facilities and a critical mass of cases. There is a need for the mechanism to be regionally based to move such work across the boundaries of the 42 areas.Compared with the magistrates courts, the case load of the Crown court, county courts and specialist courts is more complex and volatile, so a regional tier is needed to provide an overview to match resources to need. That would be much more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve from national headquarters. In addition, deployment of the full and part-time professional judiciary will be better managed at a level above local management units.
Having decided the principle that it is necessary to have a regional level of organisation, we then had to think about the boundaries of those regions. Of course, as my hon. Friend rightly pointed out, the Government's clearly stated policy is that regional boundaries should match those of the nine Government office regions and Wales, unless there are compelling reasons to the contrary. The Government last reaffirmed that principle in last year's White Paper on the regional agenda, and we believe that it will impact more and more on the work of the courts because they are a part of the wider public service community.
The regional offices will increasingly be joined up with other Government services at a regional level. We do not want the courts to be left behind in that, and many of our justice partners—the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, the national probation service, the Prison Service and, informally, the Crown Prosecution Service—are already aligning with the Government office regions. The courts have been an anomaly, and that is one reason that the issue has evolved in this way.
The Crown and county courts are currently organised around the circuits, which had their origin in the historic tours of duty that judges, their key officials and members of the Bar undertook, setting out from London at regular intervals to oversee the different regions. Over the centuries, the circuits varied from time to time, but until the Beeching reforms and subsequent Courts Act 1971, they continued to be based on groupings of counties. The reforms left the circuit boundaries relatively untouched, and the current court service organised itself on a regional basis corresponding with them.
The circuit boundaries are coterminous with those of the Government office regions, with two exceptions. First, the Wales and Chester and the western circuits broadly correspond with Wales and the south-west region, but the former also includes Cheshire, from the north-west region, and the latter includes Hampshire from the south-east region.
Dealing first with Wales and Chester, there are practical issues concerning the way in which court work is administered in north Wales and Cheshire, so we have decided to keep the link between them for now. We would like, however, to review that position in the financial year 2006–07 as part of a general post-implementation review of the agency's working arrangements. We believe that at that point there may well be compelling reasons for moving Cheshire into line with the region covered by the Government office for the north-west and to align the courts in Wales with the National Assembly.
For Hampshire, which is largely the subject of the debate, we had to decide whether it should be included in the south-east, in line with the Government office, or with the south-west, in line with the current western circuit. We focused on what produces the best justice system for the public in those two regions. I am aware that the western circuit of the Bar is strong and plays an important role in providing training for members of the Bar, among other things. The circuits work well for the judiciary and the Bar, but we wanted to ensure that the public were best served by the arrangements, and were at the centre of our thinking. We received and considered carefully a number of representations about the location of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight in the structure of the new courts agency.
I acknowledge that making a change now may raise a number of difficult issues for the judiciary and the Bar that could impact on the administration of justice for the public. Moreover, we received representations, as my hon. Friend pointed out, from partner criminal justice agencies locally to the effect that, from their perspective, change would not at present bring significant benefits. On balance and after a great deal of careful thought, there is insufficient merit at this time in adopting the policy of realigning the western circuit with the regional government boundary. Although the policy of aligning the courts administration with the boundaries of other government services is important and can have significant benefits for the administration of justice, we have concluded that, for now, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight should not be aligned with the south-east.
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