Speeches by Fox.

“Mr Miller, you are here on behalf of the Law Society and Ms Brimelow is here on behalf of the Bar Council. Effectively, they are the trade unions of the legal profession. I do not blame you for advocating for a lot more money to be spent on legal services—that is your job—but I do not detect any appetite on behalf of t…”

“Do you have a figure for me, or not?”

“I assume we are talking of tens of millions of pounds.”

“Yes.”

“Good afternoon. I am Ashley Fox, Member of Parliament for Bridgwater. I am a former solicitor and my interests are as on the register.”

“Mr Miller, can I take you back to the cost of the updated means test? You said that the Ministry of Justice did some work and came up with a scheme in 2022. If that had been introduced, do you have any idea what the cost would have been to the taxpayer?”

“If you could try to answer the question, that would be appreciated.”

“The question was: do you have any recommendations for improving access to justice that do not involve large amounts of taxpayers’ money?”

“When the Lord Chancellor made his statement on jury trials last week, he said that an impact assessment would be published with the legislation. Given how powerful a defender of jury trials he has been in the past, will he publish the evidence and the modelling that he has seen since coming to office that caused him to…”

“23. What assessment he has made of the potential impact of the proposal to restrict the right to a jury trial for certain offences on the rule of law.”

“You say that it is an operational decision for the police, but in the case of Kebatu I understand that your Department did not even tell the police for seven days that he was on the run. I put it to you, Minister, that actually it is just too embarrassing for your Department, because so many prisoners are released by m…”

“When Kebatu was released in error, the Ministry of Justice published his photograph, his name and his offence, which was just as well, because it was actually a member of the public who located him and phoned the police. Why do not you do that for all releases in error?”

“You said last month that you had introduced the strongest release checks that have ever been in place for prisoners, which included mandatory checklists and the physical presence of a governor for certain releases. Why have there been subsequent mistaken releases since then? Where does responsibility for those mistaken…”

“But that happened in 2023-24.”

“Lord Chancellor, you referred to the last Government being responsible for 800 prisoner releases. I assume you are talking of the cumulative figure over 14 years. In 2021, the year you referred to, 54 prisoners were released in error. I am taking these numbers from your webpage. In 2023-24, it was 115. That figure doub…”

“Two-hundred and sixty-two is an all-time high.”

“In which year was that?”

“You have talked about a paper-based system and how it was very complex. Given that the number of prisoners released by accident doubled between 2023-24 and 2024-25, would you accept that your Government’s early release schemes made the system even more complex and unmanageable, and that is partially responsible for the…”

“But it would be reasonable for me to assume that that figure is no longer accurate and there have been more accidental releases since then.”

“Lord Chancellor, I would like to ask you about prisoners released in error. On 2 December, you announced that 12 prisoners had been released in error since your statement on 11 November, with two prisoners still at large. Is that still accurate?”