Think tank Policy Exchange has called for the senior leadership of the Ministry of Justice and HM Prison and Probation Service to be removed as part of proposals for a reboot of the criminal justice system.
The right-leaning organisation is calling for a £5bn-a-year boost in spending on prisons, courts and policing as part of a whole-system crime reduction drive. Its proposals include the delivery of an additional 53,000 prison places – more than double the planned increase to deal with the current prisons capacity crisis.
However, the report argues that the current leadership of MoJ and HMPPS are “simply inadequate to the task” of overseeing the implementation of its plans and “should be dismissed entirely” from the civil service.
Policy Exchange says MoJ and HMPPS need “a cadre of leaders who will focus on empowering governors to run their establishments effectively” and on holding them to account alongside publicly-available performance measures.
Report authors Roger Bootle, David Spencer, Ben Sweetman, and James Vitali said there was a need to “entrench greater accountability” among civil servants in the criminal justice system.
“There are undoubtedly large numbers of individuals who work hard, demonstrate remarkable courage and deliver to the highest standards for the public," they said. “For too long, however, there has been a culture of impunity for failure, a lack of strategic prioritisation, a degree of mission creep, and a corresponding decline in the ability of the police, prisons and probation services to discharge their core duties effectively."
The report authors said the current leadership of MoJ and HMPPS had “overseen a culture of micro-management and bureaucratic expansion which has done little to improve the condition of prisons or the safety of the public”.
“This can be particularly observed in the dramatic expansion in the size of the Ministry of Justice and HMPPS bureaucracies – where huge increases in those working in non-operational roles in the five years between 2018 and 2023 have been the norm,” they said. “This trend contrasts with pitiful increases in the number of operational staff actually working and leading people on the prison and probation frontline.”
Policy Exchange estimates the impact of crime on UK society to be £250bn a year – made up of £170bn in “tangible costs”, such as losses to individuals, business and the public sector, plus an additional £80bn in “intangible effects” resulting from the fear of crime.
It said police-recorded shoplifting was up 51% relative to 2015 and police-recorded robberies and knife crime offences were up 64% and 89% respectively over the same period, while the cost of fraud in the benefits system has increased “almost eightfold” since 2006.
Policy Exchange said such areas of “acute growth” were “obscured by the aggregate downtrend in crime since 1995 that the Crime Survey of England and Wales reports.
The think tank praised the new Labour government’s inclusion of halving serious violent crime and raising confidence in the police among its five core “missions”. But it said prime minister Keir Starmer should go further by “explicitly rejecting the permissive approach to crime that successive governments have allowed to develop”.
In addition to calling for a change of leadership at MoJ and HMPPS, and a dramatic expansion of the prison estate, Policy Exchange is also proposing sentencing and courts reforms, and “smarter” policing.
The recommendations include minimum two-year custodial sentences for what the think tank describes as “hyper prolific offenders” and for those criminals to be the subject of mandatory individual intervention plans for the duration of their time in prison. It said the plans could cover treatment for drug addition, education or skills tuition, depending on their needs.
Policy Exchange is also calling for the amendment of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 and the UK Borders Act 2007 to allow foreign nationals convicted of criminal offences to be deported immediately at the end of their sentence.
In an introduction to the report, former home secretary Sir Sajid Javid described Policy Exchange’s work as “excellent”.
Robert Eagleton, national officer for the FDA union, took a different tack. He said the think tank's suggestion that senior leadership at MoJ and HMPPS should be sacked was “not credible”.
“Policy Exchange is championing an unserious proposal to address a serious problem,” he said.
“Crime has a detrimental impact on the British public as well as the economy, and we need a serious conversation about law enforcement and the funding it receives. Successive governments have failed to invest in the prison estate and the issues we see today are a direct result of years of underfunding. These are political decisions which require political will to resolve.
“The government would be better served drawing on the experience and expertise of staff working in MoJ and HMPPS, who have first-hand experience of the huge challenges facing the justice system.”
Home Office minister Dame Diana Johnson listed a range of current initiatives aimed at reducing crime.
“In the next decade, this government plans to halve violence against women and girls and knife crime, and restore public confidence in policing and the criminal justice system, as part of the Safer Streets Mission,” she said.
“Through the Plan for Change, we will also bring visible policing back to communities, with 13,000 extra neighbourhood police officers, PCSOs and specials. Alongside this, the government will build 14,000 more prison places by 2031 to lock up dangerous offenders.”
The Home Office added that a £5m investment will fund the deployment of specialist staff to speed up the removal of foreign national offenders. The programme, which is creating 82 roles to oversee removals from jails, is due to be fully operational by the start of next month.
Civil Service World sought a response from the MoJ on Policy Exchange's proposals. It had not provided one at the time of publication.
This story was updated at 15:10 on 4 March 2025 to include a Home Office response