In a famous phrase of Aneurin Bevan, “the language of priorities is the religion of socialism.” By that standard, Keir Starmer’s United Kingdom ought to be a Bevanite paradise. The government never stops devising new language to convey its priorities. There are five missions, each with matching milestones; six priority “first steps”; and, three underpinning foundation stones. Sometimes—as in the chancellor’s Spending Review—snappier wish lists emerge: security, health and “money in the pockets of working people”.
Between these formulations an awful lot of ground is covered, and yet some public services never get a look-in. A case in point is the civil justice system, a striking omission both because of its palpable state of distress, and because the prime minister, a senior lawyer before he arrived in politics, must understand the dangers of its decline. If the justice gap grows, it could strain the harmony of our society, and the effectiveness of its governance.
Civil justice is never going to rank among the “people’s priorities” because it is so poorly understood. The very word “justice” brings to mind criminal proceedings: the stern judge, searching cross-examinations and final verdict of courtroom dramas. Politicians do understand that failing criminal justice cannot be entirely ignored. They’ve recently found a bit more money for it, and are on the hunt for radical fixes. The government commissioned a former top judge, Brian Leveson, to review the criminal courts. He has just reported back recommending a new type of court that would, controversially, avoid the need for juries in trying many offences of middling gravity.
The same attention and interest in reform is not evident in the civil context. We journalists mostly operate with the same biases, which might be why Crown Court delays, collapsed prosecutions and degradation of evidence receive considerable media coverage, while parallel delays between claim and hearing in the County Courts—up from 48 weeks pre-austerity to 75 weeks in the latest data—simply don’t register.
Unlike GP surgeries or schools, courts are a service that most citizens only see rarely; day-to-day experience offers scant direct insight on how they are working—or not. Insofar as the frail condition of our tribunals, courts and legal support services are discussed at all, it is mostly by lawyers, whose language can be baffling. The result is that politics neither confronts the condition of the system, nor reckons with the myriad consequences of its failure.
In an effort to correct this, I have been working with the Nuffield Foundation, a charity that aims to advance social policy. We tasked a number of thinkers—very deliberately including several non-lawyers—to reflect on the dangers that arise in disparate fields when court buildings crumble, tribunal services creak and legal advice withers away. Among others, we consulted the Cambridge economist Diane Coyle, public health expert Michael Marmot, and working lawyer—and Prospect columnist—David Allen Green. Distilling from their assorted insights, my stark conclusion is that although none of Starmer’s five “missions” are explicitly concerned with civil justice, its malfunctioning could yet render them mission impossible.
After the long austerity era, there will be voices arguing that every public service should be first in line for relief. A cogent case can be made that social care or schools or even arts and culture have suffered in particular ways, and that fixing them is a precondition to fixing society more widely. From the point of view of the Treasury, demands to relieve the justice system will inevitably sound like just one more plea for special treatment.
But an analogy with Abraham Maslow’s celebrated hierarchy of needs points to giving the courts a serious hearing. The American psychologist suggested humans effectively ranked their goals: attending first to the physical requirements of their bodies, and moving on only after these were satisfied to worrying about safety, and only after that to seeking love and belonging, and then eventually to esteem and self-actualisation. If we think about the needs not of an individual but a society then the chronology suggests that the justice system fulfils a truly foundational need.
Courts were perhaps the earliest institution of the state to manifest in modern form. Even today, running effective courts is integral to establishing a functional polity; failure to maintain them is part of the definition of a failing state. They have always been needed to keep the peace. This is—and always was—not only a matter of keeping criminals at bay, but also ensuring the orderly resolution of disputes between individuals relating to property, contracts and anything else.
So civil justice matters—and has always mattered. In more recent history, though, its bearing on public policy has grown to a point where it can no longer be safely left to the lawyers.
For one thing, the modern administrative state tries to do so much: its tentacles reach deep into commerce, housing, health and more. Parliament can pass statutes and ministers draft regulations or allocate public funds in line with complex intentions. But as often as not, the way these intentions translate—or don’t—into practical outcomes is through the justice system.
In parallel, the government itself has become more answerable to the courts, thanks to the growth of Judicial Review and public law over 60-odd years. And over the last 25 years, burgeoning human rights jurisprudence has particularly sharpened the legal protections of the individual citizen against the state.
But rising import has not dispelled the sense of the courts as an incomprehensible, alien world. Occasional spasms of populism have damned judges as “enemies of the people”. Politicians have more often simply ignored the courts, treating their workings as a black box, and their rulings as an irritant requiring smart workarounds. The upshot of such disdain has been—at the very same time that tribunals, courts and legal advice services have become more central to life—they have become less able to function properly.
The big squeeze on legal aid began well before 2010; after that, justice budgets were marked as “unprotected” during the long austerity years. The arrival of Keir Starmer KC in Downing Street has not fundamentally altered the pressures. Yes, there was additional capital investment for the Ministry of Justice at the Budget last year, but it was essentially earmarked for extra prison places. This year’s Spending Review gave the department an above-inflation increase in day-to-day resourcing, but—again—a lot of this has already been committed across prisons (which will cumulatively get billions during this parliament) and probation (which is in line for as much as £700m annually). The Spending Review funds extra Crown Court sitting days for criminal trials, but doesn’t make comparable promises for civil courts or tribunals.
The fundamental issue remains: the country has been trying to get justice on the cheap for too long. The day-to-day budget for justice per capita will, by the end of this decade, still be 16 per cent down from where it stood at the start of the last. The contrast with health—where the equivalent number over the same period will actually have risen by 36 per cent—is particularly striking. Legal aid has been remorselessly squeezed, and entirely withdrawn from whole fields including employment and also (with very narrowly drawn exceptions) housing and welfare benefits. The Law Society, which represents solicitors in England and Wales, maps local advice “deserts”; in many specialisms the deserts now cover most of the country.
So how does the justice system we’ve got measure up against what a modern society needs? The realities of the County Courts, says David Allen Green in his essay for Nuffield, are of “chronic understaffing”, endemic delays, “almost non-existent IT” and an unhappy mix of a stubbornly physical paperchasing and unanswered correspondence.
I hear about a lot about these problems second-hand, because my partner is a part-time judge. While some county courts manage to send her an electronic bundle of papers, others insist on posting them out, leaving the amount of prep time a judge has to consider a case down to the vagaries of Royal Mail.
Wanting to see how civil justice worked for myself, I headed to Leeds County Court in June, and sat in—at random—on a case about BMW trying to reclaim a car and/or funds from a customer who hadn’t kept up repayments on his vehicle finance. It sounded simple enough, yet turned out to be anything but, and was in fact the third hearing in a whole tangle of applications between the parties. What really confused things, though, was that the customer was a “litigant in person”, something which became much more common across the retrenching justice system a decade ago. Many people who used to quality for legal aid no longer do (though we don’t know if this man was once of them), and are left lawyerless and representing themselves—or, at least, trying to.
I soon got a taste of the chaos unleashed in the courtroom when non-lawyers attempt to navigate law. The man read out a pro-forma statement which sounded like it had been downloaded from the internet, with awkwardly bolted-on details about his own contract, and random embellishments about his protections under the 1688 Bill of Rights. He struggled to deal sensibly even with the judge’s straight question about whether he was at an earlier hearing. The obstinate, eccentric character of this particular litigant was part of the problem for sure. But I, too, was frequently confused by what was happening and what was being asked. I was left reflecting that justice without representation is unlikely to be justice at all.
Delays are another routine problem. Green mentions one case which had its preliminary hearing in early 2025, and which related to a claim that had been brought back in 2021. He regards this as unexceptional, and that further delays are likely.
If people cease to believe functional courts are available to them, they lose trust in the law and the rights it is supposed to enshrine. Doubts about whether the writ of regulators, the bylaws of councils or even the statutes of parliament can be made effective then cause damage to the standing of these public institutions and their ability to get things done. Moreover, if—as Green suggests—consumers and smaller businesses see writing-off even sizeable debts as more rational than embarking on a costly, slow and unreliable journey through the courts, then it’s not hard to imagine profound implications for economic life.
Trust, explains Diane Coyle, is the fundamental precondition for business investment and other commercial exchanges. The civil justice system is the critical “social infrastructure” that has been developed to secure that trust. Failure to maintain that infrastructure will, therefore, jeopardise the number one Starmer mission—to “kickstart economic growth”.
The second of Starmer’s five “missions” concerns health, and includes building a society where “everyone lives well for longer”. This seems a long way off in a country in which life expectancy is stagnating, and has been falling outright in poorer postcodes. I asked the two pre-eminent scholars in two different academic fields—Marmot from the health side, and the pioneering “access to justice” researcher, Hazel Genn—to spell out together, from their distinct perspectives, the connections they see between the law on the one hand, and tackling disease on the other.
Decades of public health scholarship, a good chunk of it by Marmot himself, has uncovered cast-iron connections between social disadvantage and a host of maladies. Poor living conditions can very directly harm bodies (think of damp housing) and inflame anxiety, but can also—more subtly—get “under the skin”, raising stress and with it, over time, the incidence of potentially lethal conditions, including ischemic heart disease.
Marmot has often framed the response required in terms of “social justice,” but he now goes further and highlights ways in which formal processes of law—including statutory rights to the sorts of social entitlements which might make citizens healthier—could make a difference. A functional justice system is a precondition for making such initiatives stick.
From her vantage point, Genn sees all sorts of health-sapping problems of daily life—such as debt, bills and squalor—which legal advice could fix. Indeed, she sees in all the research a singular connection between various maladies and unresolved legal issues. On top of the protracted stress these involve, there is the danger of a “cascade of crises,” which can see—for example—an unaddressed employment problem warp into an eviction and then a family breakdown, which in turn will ramp up all sorts of dangers to mental and physical health. Huge amounts of family doctors’ time in poorer communities especially is squandered on patients presenting with day-to-day problems which take a medical toll, but which medics are not well-placed to fix. One GP in Stratford, east London, told a study Genn was involved with that “at least a third” of the consultations that they dealt with have “a social element.” Funding advice to ensure people can secure their legal entitlements and manage their obligations could plausibly more than pay for itself by reducing this wasteful call on NHS resources. It would also be an effective “intervention” for the patient, quite possibly helping them to “live well for longer”.
Yet another Starmer mission is shattering “the class ceiling” on opportunity. Tribunals rulings on things like special educational needs provision and unfair dismissal at work have obvious and particular pertinence here. But Shameem Ahmad of the Public Law Project, a charity which has supported many individuals who are down on their luck through the courts, draws a more general lesson. Through effective and accessible justice, she insists, a Goliath-like state can “rearm David”, the individual citizen, handing them the power of legal challenge to keep the state in check and working effectively for all.
Ahmad highlights the case of a benefit claimant who was whacked with a repayment deduction after being overpaid, even though this overpayment was down to the Department of Work and Pension’s own maladministration. By turning to the law, this claimant didn’t merely get their personal financial problem solved, but also established the principle that the consequences of similar bureaucratic blunders should not be visited on other vulnerable citizens. Giving people an equal chance across public services would do a lot to unlock opportunity. Conversely, a faltering justice system that can’t be relied on to ensure fair access to services run to decent standards will reinforce class ceilings on ambition.
The other two Starmer missions have less obvious connections to civil justice, but they are not immune from its degradation. Coyle’s point about the importance of the law in securing trust, investment and growth in general, could, potentially, also apply in the specific context of making Britain “a green energy superpower”. To the extent that private investors are funding the net zero transition, those investors will expect not only contracts that are clear, but contracts that they are confident can be enforced.
The remaining mission—“safer streets”—is on the face of it to do with criminal, not civil, justice. But one of the tools the government wishes to use are new so-called “Respect Orders”, issued by the civil courts. And its single most-trumped “safer streets” goal is halving violence against women and girls. But in the context of domestic abuse, it is not only criminal but also civil justice that matters. Ahmad details a case where—until litigation put things right—the British state had failed to respect the independence of victims, by means-testing services available to them on the basis of property jointly owned with their abusers, an asset which they are never realistically going to be allowed to access.
Better civil justice, then, could play a positive part in virtually every major challenge the government has set itself, just as its continuing degradation could impede every one of its missions. If that isn’t a sufficiently loud wake-up call for Westminster, the widely respected former MP Karen Buck highlights a consequence that might be: the warping of the day-to-day life of politicians themselves.
Buck was one of parliament’s most-dedicated constituency caseworkers, which was just as well because her west London seat always had an exceptionally heavy load of immigration issues and housing problems. But a welter of factors pushed up the number of problems coming her way—by up to 10-fold during her years in the Commons from 1997 to 2024, she estimates—including rising needs for some services, and squeezed budgets for most. Maladministration by understaffed bureaucracies, delayed court hearings, and—most particularly—a dearth of legal advice services leaves many constituents stuck. Finding most doors are shut, ever-more of them divert to one that politics makes it impossible to slam: the surgery of the local MP.
While burgeoning casework can arguably help anchor MPs in a troubled real world, over-reliance on it creates downsides, for both constituent and representative. Even the very best politicians can’t give citizens the specialist advice they most need. Then there is a question for parliament and the country as to whether it wants its best politicians to be spending so much time on the casework that it impedes what they’re able to achieve on the national stage.
Some problems raised by the fraying of civil justice are obvious. Families trying to keep a roof over their heads, and small-scale entrepreneurs battling to claw-back money they’re owed, are among those making the lonely discovery that they can’t rely on the system as they’d assumed they could. The rule of law is a singular virtue, enshrining freedom from arbitrary rule. When the administration of justice falters, that ideal falters with it.
What’s less obvious are all the insidious effects, sprawling way beyond the individuals directly affected or the law itself. A toll is taken on the economy, on public health and the way public services run, not to mention public order and our political system.
Civil justice is an invisible “infrastructure,” a backstop that props up not only trust, but so much of what we call civilisation. Seen like that, justice deserves its place in the lexicon of any serious language of priorities.
“Why Justice Matters” a new collection of essays edited by Tom Clark is out this month, and will be available for download from the Nuffield Foundation from 17th July 2025 .
