Justice for some

But we must all pay £4 million a year for a prison that cannot be used

The Ministry of Justice should consider changing its name to the “Ministry of Justice (for Certain People)” if it refuses to “wake up” on the subject of legal aid, the chair of the Commons public accounts committee suggests in comments published this morning.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, a Conservative MP since 1992, said the so-called LASPO reforms to legal aid introduced in 2013 “are now at serious risk of going down in history as an extinction event for the entitlement to access to legal advice in large parts of the country”.

Dartmoor prison in 1815, shortly after it was opened

Dartmoor

In a report published this morning, the public accounts committee finds that the prison service, a Ministry of Justice executive agency, is spending around £4 million a year of taxpayers’ money on keeping Dartmoor prison in Devon empty because of its failure to negotiate a good deal for the lease. The prison, in use for more than 200 years, has high levels of radon gas.

Clifton-Brown said:

The issue of HMP Dartmoor is an absolute disgrace, from top to bottom.

We heard claims that the leasing of this unusable building, known for years by HM Prison and Probation Service to be choked with radon gas with all the health risks that entailed, was sensible, driven by the need for prison places. Our committee rejects this excuse outright.

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.

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.

Today’s report says that levels of radon in 2020 were nearly 10 times the acceptable limit in the prison kitchen. Despite that, the prison service signed a new lease in 2022.

The report says:

HMPPS acknowledged that it would have been helpful to have more information on the density of radon at the Dartmoor site prior to the lease negotiations.

However, it bizarrely maintained that signing the lease without undertaking a recent survey was sensible, given the prison capacity crisis at the time.

It argued that in the context of needing to spend over £600 per cell per night to temporarily hold prisoners in police cells under Operation Safeguard, £1.5 million a year for 640 prison places felt like good value for money…

Under the terms agreed, HMPPS cannot terminate the new lease until after December 2033.

Legal aid

A previous report by the public accounts committee in May 2024 had raised concerns about access to publicly-funded legal advice in areas of the country lacking face-to-face provision of legal aid.

The committee stressed that so-called legal aid deserts, large geographic areas without legal aid providers, risked disproportionately penalising groups who could access remote advice, such as people with disabilities or those with limited access to technology.

In today’s report, the committee says:

For a decade, this committee and its predecessors have urged the Ministry of Justice to get a better understanding of the wider costs of its legal aid reforms. A 2015 report noted the lack of analysis the Ministry of Justice had undertaken of the wider impacts of the reforms on itself and other government departments and stressed that it needed to do more.

In its 2024 report, the previous committee noted that while the Ministry of Justice acknowledged that the removal of most early legal advice via its reforms was likely to have led to additional costs to the public sector, its progress in measuring the scale of these costs was disappointing.

The Ministry of Justice and the Legal Aid Agency acknowledged that a cyberattack on the agency’s online digital services had begun in December 2024, four months before it was detected on 23 April 2025. It took action in April to boost security, informing legal aid providers that their bank details might have been compromised. However, the agency did not discover the full extent of the attack until 16 May 2025, at which point it took its systems offline

The risk of a cyberattack on the Legal Aid Agency’s systems had been rated as “extremely high” since 2021, it added.

Responses

Welcoming today’s report, solicitors’ representatives said that nearly 70% of the population were denied access to a community care legal aid provider in their area.

The Law Society said it had “long warned about the Legal Aid Agency’s antiquated computer systems”.

Their fragility had prevented vital reforms, including updates to the means test that could help millions more access legal aid. It called on the Ministry of Justice to publish a timetable for implementing all the means test changes.

The Ministry of Justice will respond in due course.

On today’s edition of the Double Jeopardy podcast, Ken Macdonald KC, Tim Owen KC and I discuss what we regard as the most significant legal developments of 2025 and look ahead to what 2026 has in store. Click the ► symbol below to listen (free of charge) to our thoughts and concerns. This was just a guest appearance by me but a new edition of Double Jeopardy is released each Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts.