Cassia Rowland from the Institute for Government sums up overall government performance.
Each year, the Institute for Government’s Public Services Performance Tracker takes a data-driven look at public services, examining spending, staffing, demand, productivity and performance. In criminal justice, we cover the police, criminal courts and prisons. Over the last three weeks, I’ve summarised the key findings from each of those. For my final post, I’m taking a broader look across criminal justice and beyond.
We all know that crime does not exist in a vacuum, and many people who come into contact with the criminal justice system have previously been involved with other services. So how are services as a whole performing? How does performance in one service affect others? And what progress have Labour made since coming into government?
Labour inherited services struggling with underinvestment, undeliverable spending plans and inexperienced staff
Labour have been keen to emphasise the difficult inheritance they received from the Conservatives on public services – with good reason. Many services experienced deep cuts to day-to-day spending in the early 2010s, and police and courts spending was still below 2009/10 in real terms. Capital spending – investment in buildings, IT and so on – fell even more steeply. The vague spending plans left by the Sunak government implied further deep cuts to ‘unprotected’ departments, including the Home Office and Ministry of Justice, from April 2025.
Services have also been dogged by workforce problems. Several have seen recent increases in frontline staff, including police officers, doctors and nurses in hospitals and pharmacists and physiotherapists in general practice. But staff now are much less experienced. This is particularly acute in prisons: more than half of band 3-5 prison officers had less than five years’ experience in 2023/24, compared to under a quarter in 2009/10. There are also widespread shortages in key back-office roles, from local authority analysts to hospital managers to police staff. These positions are often characterised as wasteful by ministers, but play a critical role in service performance by improving productivity and freeing up frontline staff for public-facing work.
These problems, coupled with generally rising demand, meant almost all the services we look at saw performance decline over the ten years before the pandemic, often dramatically. After that, things only got worse. From waiting lists in hospitals to backlogs in the criminal courts to children meeting reading, writing and maths standards, at the 2024 general element the key performance metrics were all heading in the wrong direction.
‘Failure demand’ has become a major source of problems across services
Public services have become trapped in negative performance spirals, where problems in one part of the system make things worse elsewhere. This creates ‘failure demand’: demand created by services’ failure to provide sufficient support earlier. Struggles to access housing, benefits, mental health services and drug and alcohol support are all driving demand and harming productivity in other services. Meanwhile, almost half of the increase in homelessness duties since 2019 has come from people released from institutional settings such as prisons, hospitals or asylum accommodation. Cuts to preventative services – such as in children’s social care and youth offending – have driven rises in acute demand, which is often more expensive and harder to address.
Examples of this abound in criminal justice. The number of prisoners on remand, who are waiting for trial or sentencing, has shot up, driven almost entirely by delays in the crown court. 30-40% of these people will either be acquitted or will not get a prison sentence. This is a major source of capacity problems in prisons – to say nothing of the human cost for the people unnecessarily spending time behind bars.
Labour has stabilised immediate crises but made limited progress on longer-term problems
The government has made more progress in some services than others. On taking office, they acted quickly to stabilise the most serious crises in public services, including the prison capacity crisis and failing local authorities. At the 2024 autumn budget and 2025 spending review, they provided urgently needed funding to some of the services struggling the most, especially in criminal justice.
They have also tackled some of the most difficult long-term policy problems, setting out serious reform proposals on sentencing, local government finances and children’s social care. Further reform plans are expected on special education needs, policing, homelessness and child poverty over the next few months. They have set out three principles for public service reform – service integration, prevention and devolution – which provide a positive cross-cutting vision, and line up with previous Institute for Government recommendations.
But progress has been slower than it could have been and too many services still lack a meaningful plan for improvement. It took the government a year to set out these principles for public service reform – work which could and should have been completed in opposition. As a result, the principles were not embedded in the spending review or the programmes being pursued by different departments, creating a disjointed and sometimes incoherent approach. For example, funding reforms in local government will support greater autonomy for local and strategic authorities, in line with the devolution principle – but at the same time, the Home Office, health and education departments are all centralising decision-making or performance management.
Labour’s missions have also failed to transform the approach to public services in government. There has been little evidence of cross-government working or joint submissions to the spending review. Many of the mission ‘milestones’ – 13,000 more police officers in neighbourhood roles, 92% of patients waiting less than 18 weeks for elective care – don’t align with the ultimate goal of the mission, or the government’s public service principles. This might sound a bit academic. But it really makes a difference to where services are directing their attention and energy and how much they can improve.
There are still more than three years left in this parliament. We have five key recommendations for how the government can make best use of them to deliver lasting improvements in service performance:
- Establish a cross-cutting approach to public services
- Operationalise and scale up public service reform plans
- Support services to use their capital budgets more effectively
- Develop deliverable workforce plans
- Fix data problems and gaps.
Public Services Performance Tracker has been funded by the Nuffield Foundation, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the Foundation.
