Robert Jenrick

I will just advance my case a little, and then I will come to my hon. Friend. The most important thing that we could do is get the courts sitting round the clock. There are sitting days on the table that are not being used. The Lady Chief Justice, the most senior person in our judiciary, has said repeatedly that she is able to offer the Government more sitting days. She has said it in the press, she said it before the Justice Committee the other day, and I am sure that she has said it privately to Ministers as well. The Government have been pushed, slowly, to take her up on those sitting days, and I commend them for that. However, there are still, by the Lady Chief Justice’s measure, at least 2,000 extra sitting days available that the Government are not taking her up on. We need to go back to her, welcome those sitting days with open arms, and say, “What would it take for you to produce more? Can we turn 2,000 into 5,000, or 10,000?” Get the courts actually sitting. That is not happening right now. The principal reason for that is financial: the Ministry of Justice has not been able to secure from the Treasury a comparatively small sum of money. We can argue about the priorities of this Government, and we will differ across the House, but the sum of money that we need for the proper operation of our criminal justice system is relatively small. It must be better to spend that money on this cause than to scrap an ancient freedom that we have enjoyed, generation after generation.