Steve Reed speech on anti-social behaviour proposals to prevent crime, punish criminals and protect the public

Steve Reed MP, Shadow Justice Secretary speech on plans for "end-to-end" reform of the criminal justice system

"Good morning. 

It is a great pleasure to be here speaking to you today.

And a particular honour to be here at Middle Temple. 

History and tradition reverberate in these walls. 

A place where the law has been practised since King Edward III brought the nation’s courts from York to Westminster. 

And home to Benchers and Members whose names history will never forget: 

Walter Raleigh. Edmund Burke. Charles Dickens. John Dickinson. 

I have also been told that in 2009 the Inn elected to the Bench an ambitious young human rights lawyer called Keir Starmer. 

I wonder what happened to him? 

Middle Temple embodies a history that extends far beyond these walls. 

Our system of justice and the common law is a beacon to the world. 

Before modern nations were born, when much of the world was ruled by kings, here in England we started to shape the rights of man – of humankind.

At Runnymede, the Magna Carta curtailed the absolute power of the monarch and started the long march towards democracy and civil rights. 

In Westminster Hall, we established the first courts where disputes were settled fairly. 

We established the Bill of Rights that led to the primacy of our elected Parliament, where I now have the honour to sit. 

Individual rights took root here – and spread across the world. 

Across the Atlantic, they shaped the United States. 

It was Winston Churchill who said that England’s Magna Carta, Bill of Rights and the right to trial by jury found fresh expression in America’s founding documents. 

These great principles, hard won by those who came before us, are today the pillars of our modern democratic and free society. 

The Rule of Law. 

This foundation ensures that arbitrary power cannot be placed in the hands of a despot. 

It is the noblest of histories. 

A beacon we must safeguard as we pass it on from the last generation to the next. 

I’m not a lawyer. I’m not here to serve the legal profession, but to ensure our justice system always serves the public interest.

The duty of a Lord Chancellor is to defend the Rule of Law. 

That is the public interest.  

But the Conservative Government is failing in that duty. 

The rule of law is not the same as the rule of the government. 

The executive must be subject to the rule of law just like any ordinary citizen.

Boris Johnson is the only Prime Minister whose attempt to dissolve Parliament was declared unlawful by the highest court in the land. 

During the lockdown, he contemptuously broke laws he enacted and expected the rest of us to follow. 

He and his colleagues covered up for flagrant breaches of Parliamentary standards.

Even condoning and keeping in office ministers who admitted breaking the law.

Britain’s reputation abroad is built on our commitment to international law. But this Government has threatened to break legal obligations in treaties they freely signed.  

There is no excuse for any breach of international law, not even in “a very specific and limited way”.  

This Government’s actions must concern us all. 

A casual disregard for the law.

A casual disregard for the history that this building, this profession, and this country embody.  

The next Labour government, with a lifelong campaigner for justice at its head, will never allow these great pillars of our freedom to fracture.  

As Lord Chancellor, I will stand with you to defend them.  

That begins with the very foundations of our legal system: respect for the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary.

It extends to the proper functioning of our criminal justice system in its entirety. 

And it ends with a defence of the principle that must always underpin justice.  A principle fought for throughout our proud history: human rights. 

Each of these is under threat. 

But each, a Labour government will defend. 

Let me take each of them in turn. 

The Lord Chancellor’s oath includes an obligation to defend the independence of the judiciary.

Not long ago a Shadow Lord Chancellor stating their commitment to this would have been unremarkable. 

Today, it’s a necessary corrective to the actions of the Government. 

The attacks on the Court of Appeal judges as they defended the ancient rights of our people and their Parliament went way beyond irresponsible journalism. 

 The ‘Enemies of the People’ slur took on a disturbing resonance because the Government sided with it.

For the first time in his career, the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, was forced to consult with the police out of fear for judges’ safety.  

As Lord Chancellor at the time, Liz Truss stood by in a silence that resonated with meaning.  

In breach of her oath, she said and did nothing. 

A Labour Government led by Sir Keir Starmer KC, will always stand up for the rule of law 

The rights and freedoms of the British people depend on it. 

To maintain the highest possible respect for the judiciary, we must make sure that our judges reflect the diverse, modern society in which we all live. 

Many parts of the profession have made real effort to increase diversity – particularly in their junior ranks. 

But this must go further.

It can’t be right that our highest court currently has only one woman serving on it and has never had a judge from an ethnic minority. 

I will work with the judiciary and the professions to extend non-traditional routes.

This includes employed barristers, legal executives and others.

We will identify barriers to retention and progression in professional life for women, black and other ethnic minority groups.

We must create a wider and deeper pool of candidates for the highest judicial positions.  

Always based on merit and reflecting the diversity of our society.

We must also end racial disproportionality that runs through the justice system and leads minority groups to feel that it does not treat them fairly. 

Labour will implement all remaining recommendations of the Lammy Review. 

We will ensure that the justice system is equal for everyone.

We will put and end to the use of SLAPPs to silence critics. 

These strategic lawsuits enable the super-rich including Russian oligarchs to weaponise their wealth to silence their critics. 

We cannot let our legal system be abused to gag ordinary citizens, journalists and public servants from asking legitimate questions. 

Dominic Raab promised to act but has done nothing.

At the same time, his cabinet colleague Nadhim Zahawi was using these very devices to threaten journalists who were questioning him entirely legitimately about his tax affairs.  

Labour will give judges the power to swiftly dispose claims and back tough penalties against abusive litigation.

We will protect those who have been unfairly targeted from excessive costs.  

We will show that freedom to scrutinise, freedom to investigate and freedom to speak truth to power is not for sale.

I will work with the legal professions and the Judicial Office to promote our system of justice.

Both at home and abroad, we will celebrate the significant financial contribution the commercial legal sector makes to our economy. 

Labour celebrates the fact that our legal firms and King’s Counsel are world leaders in the provision of advice, in steering transactions and in dispute resolution.

They bring tens of billions of pounds into this country each year, paying taxes that benefit all of us.

They support tens of thousands of jobs. 

Labour backs business, growth and wealth creation.  

We understand that global firms need access to the best global talent, and that prosperity here at home depends on it.  

We understand that the reputation of British law as the best in the world depends on a government that respects its international treaty obligations.

A government that does not rip up regulations in a blind ideological frenzy, for reasons of short-term party management.

That leaves gaping holes in the legal framework and by-passes the sovereignty of Parliament.  

The very opposite of “taking back control”.  

I want us to work together through an extension of the pro bono work that is a hallmark of the legal profession.

It took the Conservatives 13 years to break our country.

The work of renewal will take time.  And it cannot be done by government alone. 

Many global law firms have a home here. In any home, the inhabitants must recognise their shared obligations to each other.  

We need those businesses who benefit the most from the great social, cultural and economic advantages of this country to do more to help those who have been left furthest behind.  

While times, needs and resources have changed, our underlying commitment is to ensure that everyone has equal access to justice irrespective of means.  

Just as we did under Tony Blair through Conditional Fee Agreements, we will we look creatively at how that can be achieved.

We will halt the slide into unaffordable civil justice.

But a thriving commercial legal sector cannot exist alongside a struggling criminal justice system. 

The scales of justice must be even.

A broken criminal justice system means crime is not prevented, criminals are not punished, and communities are not protected. 

It leaves parents worrying about their children playing in the park.

It leaves pensioners worrying about online fraud that targets their savings.

It leaves communities feeling the wrong people are in control of their streets.

This is exactly what we are seeing in modern Britain. 

With the biggest court backlog on record, long trial delays, and a shortage of police.

Prosecution rates are so low that crimes as serious as robbery, burglary, fraud, and even rape have effectively been decriminalized.

Three-year trial delays are now the average not the exception for rape cases. 

Barely one in every hundred reported rapes is ever prosecuted, a shocking decline from just a few years ago. 

This Government has left the law-abiding majority feeling weak, while criminals feel emboldened.

The criminal justice crisis extends beyond the courts. 

The Government broke the probation system with a botched privatisation then a panicked renationalisation.

Every week on average one murder and two rapes are committed by offenders under the supervision of probation.

Violence and drug abuse is escalating in our prisons.

We’ve run out of prison cells. 

And prisoners who leave prison fired up by violence and high on drugs pose a greater threat to the public. 

Eight out of ten crimes are committed by someone who has offended before.  

This broken system is not stopping criminals, it’s breeding them.  

Our criminal justice system is failing in its central mission to keep people safe by breaking the cycle of offending and reoffending.

As Justice Secretary in the next Labour government, I will a prevent crime, punish criminals and protect communities.  

That is what the public expects a functioning criminal justice system to do. 

As a first step, I will increase the number of staff employed by the government to serve as Crown Prosecutors by one half. 

We will do that by allowing Associate Prosecutors, with proper training, to use their skills and qualifications to get the wheels of justice turning, 

Setting them to work on tackling the backlogs across our magistrate and crown courts.  

I will speed up justice for rape survivors by opening specialist rape courts across the country.  

We will work with the judiciary to list rape cases as a higher priority, and fast-track them through the system.  

With a Labour government, criminals will be arrested, they will be prosecuted, and they will be punished.  

Anti-social behaviour leaves communities feeling broken and powerless.  It leads to a spiral of social and economic decline that a Labour government will not tolerate.  

As Justice Secretary, I will strengthen community sentences to tackle antisocial behaviour and petty crime.  

Under this Government their use has fallen by a half because courts no longer have confidence sentences will ever be carried out.  

I will give victims and community leaders a key role in fixing the system.  

Sitting on Community and Victim Payback Boards, they will choose the work low level offenders carry out to put right the wrong they’ve done.  

They will have eyes on the system to make sure that sentences handed down are swiftly carried out.  

Today I announce two further steps to tackle anti-social behaviour and stop the decline of neighbourhoods. 

An area that looks uncared-for encourages crime and deters investment.  So I will introduce tougher penalties for those who think it’s acceptable to dump rubbish on our streets. 

We will establish clean up squads and make offenders clear up fly-tips, graffiti and vandalism.

Those who cause the mess will clean up the mess.

I will also help parents take responsibility for tackling the behaviour of their own children if they repeatedly commit crime. 

We will expand the use of parenting orders so the courts can require parents of persistent young offenders to attend parenting classes.   

We will support parents to steer their children’s lives back on track before the crime in a young life becomes a life of crime. 

Anti-social behaviour will be met with consequences, because we know how damaging it is for communities that feel powerless in the face it. 

But I want to go further.  We are looking at what has worked in other countries whose governments have not stood idly by as ours has.  

In Australia, community courts bring together community leaders, social workers, school teachers and others to tackle low-level offending.  

They cut reoffending rates by a quarter more than magistrates courts.  

They do this by harnessing the power of the community, of leaders whose authority a young offender respects, and they steer them away from offending with a persuasive mixture of sanctions and support.  

It works.  

Community courts here could speed up justice, cut the courts backlog and let the law-abiding majority take back control of their streets from offenders.   

I will work with the legal and children’s professions to explore how we could introduce community courts as a pre-charge diversion here in the UK. 

It’s time for fresh thinking to tackle the scourge of anti-social behaviour that’s exploded under this Government. 

The criminal justice system is broken from end to end, so it needs reform from end to end.  

I recognise the impact of damaging experiences in early childhood on lifelong offending.  

I recognise it, but I will not accept it as an excuse.  

There is no excuse for an individual who chooses to offend.  

But we must change a system that fails to stop offenders when it has the means at its disposal.  

Thirty years ago, Tony Blair declared he would be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”  He was right.  

But it’s time to update that approach to fit the modern world.  

Today, we have a far better understanding of the science of trauma.

How a young mind damaged by abuse or neglect in childhood can lead to criminal behaviour in adolescence and adulthood.   

We know that severe trauma damages a child’s cognitive and emotional development so they can end up with a warped sense of right and wrong.  

Whether it’s a child growing up with a drug-addicted parent unable to offer the stability, boundaries and love they need.

Or a child witnessing or even the victim of violent or sexual abuse in their home that normalises aggression in their mind.

That trauma can take hold and find expression later in life in criminal behaviour that puts other people and their communities in danger. 

The next Labour government will harness this learning to shape the world’s first trauma-informed criminal justice system. 

That means tackling trauma early in life, in courts, in prisons, in probation services.

Because if we break the cycle of crime we can better protect the public.

We live in an age of rapid technological change.  

Of course technology can’t solve everything. 

And I know governments get it wrong – just look at the cost and waste in the procurement and roll out of the Common Platform. 

But our justice system cannot be immune to appropriate technological change.  

We can use data to speed up justice.

To create the transparency that will help restore public trust.

To avoid catastrophic errors like mis-assessing a prisoner’s risk level on release because the required data isn’t all held in one place.     

You will hear more from me about our plans for reform in the months ahead. 

And I’d like to hear from you as we develop those ideas.  

The Rule of Law cannot exist without an ethical foundation. 

Yes, nations have regulated horrors within a legal framework – Nuremberg, Jim Crow, Apartheid. 

But these are examples of being ‘ruled by law’ rather than living under the ‘rule of law’. 

The latter is distinguished by its moral foundation.

And that begins with the recognition of human dignity.  

One of the last Labour government’s greatest achievements was the Human Rights Act. 

We did so under the banner of ‘Bringing Rights Back Home’.  

It was, in all but name, a British bill of rights.  

But that label has been hijacked by those intent on destroying it.  

The Government’s intention to repeal the Human Rights Act and replace it with a so-called Bill of Rights that seeks to curtail those rights is a distortion of Orwellian proportions.

Let’s call it what it is. A Rights Reduction Act.   

Its proponents seek to distort human rights as somehow alien to the British tradition. 

They ignore the British provenance of the European Convention on Human Rights.

And the role of one its main proponents – that great Conservative, Sir Winston Churchill - after the horrors of the Nazi death camps. 

The rights it enshrines to life, freedom from torture, fair trial and free expression are all tenets of our common law tradition, a history older than this building.  

Yet the Conservative Government seeks to strip many of those rights of meaning.

They intend to remove positive obligations on the state to promote and protect British people’s rights.  

That would remove obligations on public authorities to protect women and girls from violent crime. 

It would remove the legal duties that led to the successful prosecution of John Warboys for multiple violent sexual assaults against women.   

It would remove the legal duties that led to the truth about Hillsborough being exposed.

These are rights that protect every one of us every day.

The Government’s plans would also risk dangerous foreign terrorists walking free, leaving the public in danger.  

The intelligence services can give evidence in secret to secure a conviction in the British courts.  

But if the Government forces cases to Strasbourg, as they intend, evidence in camera is not permitted so cases would collapse to protect intelligence sources.    

And the Government cannot keep ignoring the fact that the Human Rights Act and the Good Friday Agreement that bought peace to Northern Ireland are intertwined. 

The Human Rights Act is the scaffolding that underpins the Good Friday Agreement.   

Scrapping the Act puts peace in Northern Ireland in peril.  That alone should be enough to stop these reckless proposals.

But instead, in recent days, the Prime Minister has gone even further and threatened to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Convention on Human Rights altogether.  

Departure from the Convention would be a disaster.

Not just for this country but for the democratic world.  

And it would happen at the worst possible time with the Rule of Law under sustained threat from resurgent authoritarianism across the world.

If we leave the European Convention, this Conservative Government will find itself in the lonely company of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and his client state Belarus.

At a time when Putin’s troops are brutally slaughtering innocent people in Ukraine as part of an illegal, unprovoked and genocidal invasion. 

At this moment of universal danger, Britain’s Conservative Government would declare that humanity should not be bound together by universal values.

And would deny this country our global role in promoting and protecting them. 

What has become of the party of Churchill if it no longer subscribes to universal values and the rule of law? 

Let me be clear.  The Labour Party will oppose tooth and nail any attempt by this Conservative Government to repeal the Human Rights Act.

We will oppose any attempt to leave the Convention.

In government, we will protect and promote both the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. 

Indeed, we will go beyond this.  

We will continue the conversation started by Gordon Brown’s Commission on the UK’s Future.

We will explore which social and economic human rights require legal protection in the modern world. 

We will debate the next frontier of our human rights and fundamental freedoms. 

Whether it is rights to clean air, or a sustainable climate.

The right to adequate health care and sufficient nutrition.

The right to transparency, accountability and ownership over the use of your personal data. 

The challenges of the modern world do not require us to go backwards on the basic legal protections enshrined in human rights. 

They demand that we strengthen them against new threats to our basic freedoms and ancient liberties.  

For Labour, justice is an ideal we strive for. 

Justice and the rule of law are the cornerstones of our freedom, democracy, and British way of life.  

Justice is our inheritance. 

Justice is our gift to the world. 

But today in Britain, justice is under threat from a Government that casually disregards the independence of the judiciary.

A Government that has let the criminal justice system crumble and stood by as anti-social behaviour overwhelms communities.  

A Government no longer committed to the fundamental idea that sits behind it all: universal human rights. 

Labour will change that. 

We will defend justice. 

We will guarantee the full independence of our courts. 

We will respect the legal profession– and be advocates for advocates, even when we disagree with them.  

We will reform our criminal justice system from end to end so that we:

Prevent crime, 

Punish criminals, 

Protect communities. 

This building symbolises the noblest of traditions: the Rule of Law.

Precious traditions passed to us from previous generations, and that we will pass on intact to the next.   

Britain’s justice system, and our commitment to the rule of law, will be a beacon to the world again. 

Thank you. "