Bans from pubs and social events could be alternative to prison, minister says

Criminals could be banned from pubs, sports grounds and social events under proposals being considered as alternatives to prison, a minister has said.

Sarah Sackman, the courts minister, told the Guardian that such exclusions, as well as mandatory work for offenders, were “very much part of the mix” under a review of sentencing being conducted by the former Conservative Lord Chancellor David Gauke.

Asked about proposals drawn up by the Bar Council of England and Wales to prevent offenders from attending social events, Sackman said they were under consideration.

“The Leveson review [into criminal courts] is running alongside David Gauke’s review into sentencing, which is looking at the issue of prisons, at the question of punishment outside of prisons, and how we reduce reoffending. The sorts of suggestions that you refer to are very much part of the mix,” she said.

“Do we need to make mandatory work part of the picture? All of that will be considered by David Gauke’s sentencing review.”

Keir Starmer’s government is under pressure to tackle a 73,000-strong backlog of court cases and overcrowded prisons.

On Tuesday, ministers announced they would immediately end the placement of girls in young offender institutions following soaring rates of self-harm. Instead, they will be placed in secure schools or children’s homes.

The decision followed figures that showed girls were involved in more than half of self-harm incidents across the youth estate in England and Wales, despite accounting for less than 2% of the children in custody.

In Sackman’s first interview since taking up the role of courts minister in December, she clashed with parliament’s spending watchdog over claims that the government was failing to introduce urgent changes to tackle a backlog of court cases.

A report by the cross-party public accounts committee has accused ministers of becoming “over-reliant” on the Leveson review, which is due to report within months.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Tory MP who chairs the committee, said the department had “simply accepted” the record-high crown court backlog would continue to grow after the recruitment of more than 20,000 police officers and a rise in complex cases.

Sackman, a human rights barrister who was elected in July as the MP for Finchley and Golders Green, said the committee had ignored changes that were already in progress.

“The [committee’s] suggestion that the government doesn’t have a plan is false … We [are] gripping it with the immediate action that we’ve taken on a number of fronts – criminal legal aid, extended courts, magistrate courts sentencing powers and record levels of crown court sitting days.

“If the public accounts committee members who formed part of the previous government had done anything like what this government is doing, we wouldn’t be in the position we’re in today.”

The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, on Wednesday confirmed that crown court judges would sit for a collective 110,000 days in the next financial year – which falls 3,000 short of the government’s stated maximum capacity in August last year.

The lady chief justice, Sue Carr, has been pushing the Ministry of Justice to use the full 113,000 available sitting days to bring the backlog down. She told the justice select committee in November she had been told by the MoJ “that the funding would not be available” to run at maximum capacity.

Another damning report, from the victims’ commissioner, Helen Newlove, has shown the devastating impact of court delays and listings chaos on victims of crime. Almost half of all victims (48%) had their scheduled trial date changed at least once before going ahead. The number of cases rescheduled on the day of the trial also quadrupled over the past four years.

Newlove said the situation illustrated the urgent need to bring back an inspectorate for the courts to maintain standards. “One victim was on the seventh adjournment of a trial – this is appalling,” she said. “It is not acceptable for a victim to have to keep worrying whether the trial day is going to go ahead.”

Labour axed the inspectorate in 2010 and it was closed two years later. Ten years on, the justice select committee recommended that it should be reinstated but the suggestion was rejected by the Conservative government in July 2022.