Scathing report blames MoJ for wasting public funds and failing justice system
A new scathing Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report on the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) revealed that a cyberattack last year at the Legal Aid Agency gave hackers access to sensitive providers’ and data for four months.
There was a cyberattack on the Legal Aid Agency last year that took the services offline for some time and left lawyers struggling to get paid.
The PAC stated that vulnerabilities in the systems had been on MoJ’s risk register since 2021, and even though the department invested over £50m to “transform and stabilise” the systems, it was “insufficient” to prevent the hackers.
“Following the attack, MoJ reviewed all of its systems to identify where vulnerabilities exist, but addressing these vulnerabilities will depend on its internal decisions on how it allocates its Spending Review settlement.”
The report was also critical of the reforms the MoJ made to the agency 10 years ago when it removed access to most early legal advice.
However, a decade after these reforms, the report stated that the MoJ still cannot account for the “shunting” of costs onto the NHS and local councils.
The Parliamentary committee finds that by stripping away early legal advice, the government has triggered a surge in “litigants in person” who are clogging the courts and driving up taxpayer costs in other departments, such as healthcare and housing.
This comes after a leading medical defence organisation criticised the Chancellor in November for failing to seize the opportunity to tackle the ‘eye-watering’ NHS clinical negligence bill.
The NHS spent more than £800m on legal fees relating to clinical negligence claims last year.
The report also found that the government is “disproportionately penalising” the 24 per cent of the population who are digitally excluded.
It concluded that by relying on remote advice rather than face-to-face meetings, the MoJ is effectively creating “legal aid deserts” for the disabled and those in poverty who cannot access online services.
Law Society president Mark Evans stated, “Legal aid is a vital public service. It is key to ensuring everyone has the right to justice and for their voices to be heard, irrespective of their circumstances.”
“Despite some recent improvement, the government has not done enough to put legal aid on a sustainable footing,” he added.
Taxpayers out over £4M a year on ghost prison
The PAC reveals that the government is spending £4m annually on HMP Dartmoor, a prison it cannot use due to dangerous radon levels.
It was outlined that despite the MoJ being warned about dangerous radon levels in 2020, officials signed a decade-long lease in 2022 without negotiating a rent reduction or an exit clause.
As a result, taxpayers are now locked into paying rent, rates, and security for an empty building until 2033.
This comes at a time when prison overcrowding in England and Wales is a major crisis, with system-wide strains leading to emergency measures like early prisoner releases.
“We do not accept that the prison capacity crisis excuses such poor commercial decisions, which have resulted in this needless waste of taxpayers’ money.”
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the PAC, said, “The issue of HMP Dartmoor is an absolute disgrace, from top to bottom.”
“Dartmoor appears to the Committee a perfect example of a department reaching for a solution, any solution, in a blind panic and under pressure. This is, obviously, not how policy should be delivered.”
“[The] government must now respond to us on what it has learned from this catastrophic failure, and how nothing like it will ever be allowed to happen again,” he added.