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6 July 2010

The Ministry of Justice does not understand the cost of prison

New report reveals that lack of financial controls at the ministry could be affecting services.

By Caroline Crampton

The National Audit Office has conducted an investigation into the way the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) administers its finances and found that its operations are not up to scratch. The problem areas, according to the report, are the MoJ’s understanding of its costs, lack of consistency in its financial approach, and a feeble commitment to “a clear, comprehensive action plan”. Although the situation is improving, it says there is still a long way to go.

However, the report also contains a dire warning of how poor financial management could be affecting its services:

The Ministry does not understand the costs of its activities within prisons, the probation service, and the courts in sufficient detail. This reduces the Ministry’s ability to allocate resources on the basis of relative financial and operational performance of individual prisons, probation services and courts.

Given the Justice Secretary Ken Clarke’s recent high-profile announcement that he will seek to reform the way prison works, the “financial pressures” on the MoJ that the report identifies are not likely to go away as it tackles new policy and new ways of distributing funding. With the additional burden of finding spending cuts, the task for the MoJ is not going to get any easier.

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Targeting funding at specific prisons, courts and services is going to become even more important as budgets are slashed. We need to be confident that the MoJ is up to the task of maintaining services in difficult financial circumstances, and this report casts grave doubts on its ability to do so.

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