David Shipley

Failing institutions don’t like challenge, let alone being shown up. Few institutions are failing more tragically than our prisons – and the situation is getting worse. This is because the officials who preside over this debacle are purging the few people who have actually been making a positive difference. The latest organisation to be banned from prisons is Sycamore Tree, a Christian charity which arranges meetings between prisoners and people who have been the victims of similar crimes to those they committed. It charged prisons nothing and had operated successfully for more than 25 years, running courses for more than 40,000 prisoners. The story of its banning was broken by Inside Time, the prison newspaper read by inmates and staff at jails across the country.

Prisons across the country are slashing education funding. According to the Guardian, public money for prison education courses is being reduced by almost 50 per cent. As a result, basic English and maths courses are being scrapped. This appears to breach Labour’s 2024 manifesto commitment, in which they promised to ‘work with prisons to improve offenders’ access to purposeful activity, such as learning’. If the government hopes to save the justice system from collapse, then it needs to bring down reoffending. The Sentencing Bill and the coming reforms to the court system will significantly reduce the use of imprisonment, and Labour hope that jails and probation will be able to help more offenders reform. Cutting prison education budgets runs directly counter to that goal.

Data published yesterday has piled yet more pressure on the government to change its asylum policy. Analysis by the Telegraph has shown that 211 people living in asylum seeker hotels have been charged with crimes since the beginning of the year. This includes eight who have been charged with 12 sex offences against children, 32 sexual offences against adults and 109 violent offences. A 24-year-old who was charged with ‘attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child’ failed to appear at his trial on 20 June.

Reform are in the headlines again, this time over confusion about their policy on trans prisoners. Yesterday Vanessa Frake, former prison governor and Reform’s UK justice adviser, said that trans women should not automatically be removed from women’s prisons, preferring an individual risk assessment. Nigel Farage seemed to echo this view, deferring to her experience and saying ‘it’s basically about risk assessment’.  This announcement put the party at odds with the recent Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of ‘sex’. It also put it at odds with reality.

The government desperately needs to save the justice system, and it believes that technology might be part of the solution. The Ministry of Justice has announced that it will be using AI to ‘stop prison violence before it happens’. The need is urgent. There were over 30,000 assaults in prisons during the 12 months to the end of March 2025, a 9 per cent increase on the previous year. The reality is that this will all rely on the data provided by prison staff, which is often of very low quality This is now Labour’s problem. As Andrew Neilson, Director of Campaigns at the Howard League said yesterday, ‘these statistics cover most of the government’s first year in power.

However bad you think the rape gang scandal is, it keeps getting worse. Yesterday, the BBC published a detailed investigation which stated that ‘five women who were exploited by grooming gangs in Rotherham as children say they were also abused by police officers in the town at the time.’ The report, based on interviews with the five women, along with testimony from 25 other victims, says that ‘corrupt police officers worked alongside the gangs or failed to act on child sexual exploitation.’  Most of the alleged victims were ‘in their teens but some were as young as 11’.

The people of Epping have a message for Tommy Robinson: stay away. The far-right activist is currently mulling joining protestors in Essex who have taken to the street outside a hotel used to house asylum seekers. While there have been violent clashes between police and demonstrators – and a number of arrests – many of those who have gathered have done so peacefully. They deserve to be listened to. Yet the arrival of Robinson would make it easy for politicians to cast these locals as far right – and ignore them. The people of Epping have a message for Tommy Robinson: stay away Even Robinson doesn't seem able to make his mind up about what to do. On Sunday, he tweeted: ‘Hear you loud and clear, I’m coming to Epping next Sunday ladies and bringing thousands more with me’.

It's hard to disagree with Nigel Farage's diagnosis that ‘Britain is lawless’. The Reform leader painted a bleak image of London in particular, as he unveiled his party's crime crackdown in Westminster. Farage’s message for criminals is that a Reform government would have ‘zero tolerance’ Farage spoke of a city where ‘moped gangs [are] running amok’ and shoplifting has soared. ‘We are facing nothing short of societal collapse,’ he said. He's right: even the Home Office has acknowledged there has been a ‘44 per cent rise in street crime, record levels of shop theft and a million incidents of antisocial behaviour’. But it's debatable whether Reform's proposed remedies for restoring law and order to Britain's streets are the right ones.

Our trees – oak and beech, soft and ancient, sycamores, whose seeds spin and tumble away every autumn – are one of the most beautiful things about England. I love them all – and have nothing but contempt for someone who needlessly destroys a tree which has taken decades, or centuries, to grow and might live for decades, or centuries, more. Despite this, I am deeply concerned by the way our justice system has treated Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers, the two men from Cumbria who hacked down the famous Sycamore Gap tree in September 2023. At Newcastle Crown Court yesterday, the pair were sentenced to four years and three months in prison. How do these sentences compare to recent, high-profile crimes? How do these sentences compare to recent, high-profile crimes?

Our two-tier Attorney General, Lord Richard Hermer, is in the news again. The controversial lawyer and ‘old friend’ of the Prime Minister, has issued new instructions to government lawyers which give him an ‘effective veto’ over all government policy and which also create a network of legal spies within government departments. The Hermer doctrine revealed by these instructions relies on an extreme view of international law, which seeks to limit the power of ministers to govern and parliament to legislate.

The Sentencing Review, published in May, may not have had much to say about sentence length. But now we have the Courts Review, which does. Brian Leveson’s report, published today, is hefty, at 380 pages, with 42 recommendations, many of them sensible. But it is his proposal to reduce sentences for crimes which particularly affect women which are likely to prove most controversial. The problem Leveson is trying to solve is that the courts, like the prison and probation systems, are broken. As of December 2024, there were more than 75,000 outstanding cases awaiting trial in our crown courts, which is double the level pre-pandemic. Last year the crown court system received almost 122,000 new cases, but only managed to conclude, or ‘dispose’ of, around 114,000 cases.