House of Commons - The work of the Committee in the 2010-2015 Parliament

The work of the Committee in the 2010-2015 Parliament - Justice Contents

1 Introduction

1. This report contains a description of the work which we have undertaken in the 2010-2015 Parliament, the first fixed term Parliament, now very close to its end, along with our assessment of the effectiveness of that work. We hope that our explanation of our approach to our work will improve understanding of how a select committee seeks to discharge the scrutiny responsibility placed upon it by the House, and enable others to come to their own judgment of our effectiveness. Importantly, we also hope that our reflections on our activities and achievements will prove helpful to our successor Committee in the next Parliament when it comes to plan its work.

2. Under Standing Order No.152 departmentally-related select committees are given the task of examining the expenditure, administration and policy of relevant principal Government departments and their associated public bodies. In our case the Standing Order sets out in detail that our responsibility covers:

Ministry of Justice (including the work of staff provided for the administrative work of courts and tribunals, but excluding consideration of individual cases and appointments, and excluding the work of the Scotland and Wales Offices and of the Advocate General for Scotland); and the administration and expenditure of the Attorney General's Office, the Treasury Solicitor's Department, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Serious Fraud Office (but excluding individual cases and appointments and advice given within government by the Law Officers).

The list of associated public bodies as it stands at the end of the Parliament is set out in Annexes 6 and 7.

3. Like all other departmentally-related committees, our standard working method is to agree on the terms of reference of an inquiry, to seek written submissions and oral evidence from interested parties on the issues covered by those terms of reference, and then to agree and publish a report containing our conclusions, along with specific recommendations for action, normally addressed to the Government, associated public bodies or other authorities. In addition, we have made extensive use of stand-alone or one-off evidence sessions as ends in themselves to ventilate issues in public concerning the work of the Ministry of Justice, the Law Officers, associated public bodies, the judiciary and others, without following up to agree reports on those issues.

4. Over the course of the Parliament we have sought to scrutinise all the major areas of policy and expenditure falling within the responsibilities of the Ministry of Justice, its Executive Agencies and the other bodies which we monitor. In the field of prisons and probation, we have held major inquiries into the Probation Service,[1] into crime reduction policies[2], into provision for women offenders[3] and o.lder prisoners[4], and into prisons planning and policies.[5] On the court system, we reported on the operation of the family courts[6] and on court interpreting services.[7] On legal aid we examined in depth the Government's proposals to reduce the scope of civil legal aid when they were published for consultation,[8] and we returned to the subject to consider the impact of the proposals a year after they came into effect. We undertook substantial inquiries into the operation of the Freedom of Information Act 2000[9] and into EU proposals for data protection legislation.[10] In less extensive but still highly important work we inquired into controversial areas of law such as joint enterprise,[11] presumption of death,[12] mesothelioma claims[13] and manorial rights.[14] We followed up our predecessors' 2010 report examining the Ministry of Justice's handling of its relationship with the Crown Dependencies - the Isle of Man; Jersey; and Guernsey, Alderney and Sark.[15] In addition to our work on major inquiries, we have made it our aim to scrutinise the work of as many of the Ministry's bodies and the other principal players in the justice system as possible, mainly through one-off evidence sessions and through correspondence with Ministers, senior officials and organisations working in the field. We have looked in detail at the Ministry's own fitness for purpose and performance through an inquiry into its budget and structure,[16] as well as through scrutiny of the Ministry's Annual Reports and Accounts, Estimates, and, latterly, its Mid Year Reports.

5. That, in brief, is what we have done. How we have done it is by seeking to reconcile quite pronounced differences of political principle and ideology between members of the Committee through an approach which is based firmly on consideration of the evidence submitted to us in order to create a "safe space" in which to foster rational and fundamental debate on justice policy. At the same time, we are not an academic body or a think-tank. We are elected representatives subject to direct democratic accountability and public scrutiny, with all the pressures and challenges which that brings. In our work we have combined the strategic objective of raising the quality of debate on justice with responsiveness to significant developments as they occur. On a number of occasions we have taken up subjects brought to our attention through representations made to us by campaigners, pressure groups, or individuals, whether those representations have come to us directly or via constituency MPs. There are two caveats to that: we are precluded from looking into individual cases or grievances, which can come as a disappointment to people who think we may be able to assist or advise them; and we only have the capacity to pursue a small fraction of the large number of suggestions which are made to us.

6. In addition to the overall philosophical approach described above, we have sought to maintain coherence and continuity in our work by following up on subjects of inquiry and recommendations we have made in our reports. Our report on crime reduction policies returned to our predecessors' substantial work on justice reinvestment, looking amongst other things at the extent to which justice reinvestment principles have been adopted by criminal justice policy makers and practitioners. Towards the end of the Parliament we followed up our previous reports on the doctrine of joint enterprise and on Crown Dependencies with further inquiries into the subjects; and we held follow-up evidence sessions with Ministers to probe steps which had been taken to implement recommendations we had made in our reports on women offenders and older prisoners.

7. In their work departmentally-related select committees are enjoined by the Liaison Committee to fulfil 10 "core tasks" which that Committee has set out.[17] We have had regard to those tasks in planning and carrying out our work, and they afford a sensible structure for us to account in more detail for our activities over the course of the Parliament. Chapter 2 of our Report describes and assesses the impact of our main work in respect of each of those core tasks. Inevitably much of our work shades across more than one of the tasks. Other components of our work, such as our consideration, as a statutory consultee, of draft sentencing guidelines, or our relations with the judiciary, do not neatly fit into any of the tasks, so we consider them separately. During the course of the Parliament the Liaison Committee produced a number of recommendations for select committees to adopt in their working practices[18] and we refer as appropriate to steps we have taken to respond to these recommendations, drawing upon memoranda which we submitted to the Liaison Committee.

8. We include Annexes to this Report which pull together information already published on the Committee's webpages or in annual Sessional Returns on -

· Members who have been members of the Committee for part or all of the Parliament, with their dates of membership

· Committee Reports and, where relevant, Government and other Responses to them

· Debates on Committee Reports and debates to which Committee Reports were tagged, in Westminster Hall and the main Chamber

· Expenditure in each financial year on the Committee (excluding staff costs)

· All visits by the Committee or by individual members of the Committee in a representative capacity

· The associated public bodies of the Ministry of Justice and the Attorney General's Office as at the end of the Parliament

· The ministerial appointments which are subject to pre-appointment scrutiny by the Justice Committee.

Our webpages contain much more information on the Committee's work. They hold correspondence and other written material which the Committee has ordered to be published, and transcripts of evidence sessions, including one-off evidence sessions which did not lead to reports.

1 Eighth Report from the Justice Committee, Session 2010-12, The Role of the Probation Service, HC 519-I Back

2 Twelfth Report from the Justice Committee, Session 2013-14, Crime reduction policies: a co-ordinated approach? Interim report on the Government's Transforming Rehabilitation programme, HC 1004; and First Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2014-15, Crime reduction policies: a co-ordinated approach?, HC 307 Back

3 Second Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2013-14, Women Offenders: after the Corston Report, HC 92 Back

4 Fifth Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2013-14, Older prisoners, HC 89 Back

5 Ninth Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2014-15, Prisons: planning and policies, HC 309 Back

6 Sixth Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2010-12, Operation of the Family Courts,, HC 518-I Back

7 Sixth Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2012-13, Interpreting and translation services and the Applied Language Solutions contract, HC 645 Back

8 Third Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2010-12, Government's proposed reform of legal aid, HC 681-I Back

9 First Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2012-13, Post-Legislative Scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, HC 96-I Back

10 Third Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2012-13, The Committee's opinion on the European Union Data Protection framework proposals, HC 572 Back

11 Eleventh Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2010-12, Joint Enterprise, HC 1597; Fourth Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2014-15, Joint Enterprise: follow-up, HC 310 Back

12 Twelfth Report from the Justice Committee of Session 2010-12, Presumption of Death, HC 1663 Back