Justice and Home Affairs Committee
11 November 2026
Contents updated at 10:20
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Justice and Home Affairs Committee House of Lords
Follow its sittings00:03 - 00:32
Speaker 4
The meeting is now being recorded, and public proceedings are beginning in 5, 4 Welcome everybody, and welcome to this meeting of the Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee, looking at the work of the Ministry of Justice, and we're absolutely delighted to have the Lord Chancellor with us. Lord Chancellor, could you be just, for the record, just announce yourself and your title and your responsibilities?
00:32 - 00:38
Speaker 2
So, I'm Alex Norris. I'm Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, and Member of Parliament for Nottingham North and Kimberley.
00:38 - 00:57
Speaker 4
Thank you very much. A nice easy question to kick off with. You've been in office for, I think, 115 days, so you've had plenty of time to settle in. Can you just give us a very quick outline of what you see as the major challenges facing you and the Department of Justice?
00:57 - 02:00
Speaker 2
Well, as all new Lord Chancellors have for many years now, and sadly there have been, I think, eight of us in seven years, upon opening the inbox, as it were, there've been two particularly hot-running problems that have been uppermost in my challenges. Firstly, a crisis in prison places that mean that if we hadn't taken the action we took in the Sentencing Act and over the summer, we would have run out of prison places any day now, set against increasing waiting lists in court times that mean that people are having intolerable delays for justice. And, you know, my responsibility so far, as I say, implementation of the Sentencing Act, the continued progression of the Courts and Tribunals Bill, is to manage those two issues, but not only to but not solely to live and manage those issues. It's to manage those issues down to a place where the system gets back to doing what it should be doing as a criminal justice system, particularly around reducing reoffending, which has withered on the vine as the system kind of gets more and more addicted to crisis. So, that's what we've been up to in the criminal space.
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