Sophy Ridge on Sunday Interview with David Lidington MP, Justice Secretary, 9.07.17

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SOPHY RIDGE ON SUNDAY, SKY NEWS

SOPHY RIDGE: We are joined from Central London by the new Justice Secretary, David Lidington. Hello, thank you for coming on the show this morning. Now I know you were hoping to come in and talk about your shining new justice brief but once again the front pages of the papers are all about Theresa May’s leadership, according to the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday Andrew Mitchell has said that the PM has got to go, there is no authority, there’s a kamikaze group of Conservative MPs willing to risk another election. Are these plots happening?

DAVID LIDINGTON: I think there is always in July a lot of gossip, hot weather, people going to rather too many summer [inaudible] for their own good and you get this sort of silly story. What I see with the Prime Minister and my Cabinet colleagues is a government that is knuckling down to work, saying look the public have given us the election result, we have to live with that, make adjustments to that but there are some big problems out there. The impact of digital technology on our economy, how we fund and reform our public services in the future, how we deal with a huge intergenerational issue like social care – and I think the public want the government to be getting on with that and sort of self-indulgent gossip really doesn’t help anybody, we need to get the job done.

SR: It’s an admirably loyal answer from you but you and I both know that these conversations are going on, has Theresa May lost her authority?

DAVID LIDINGTON: No, I look at the Prime Minister’s performance at Prime Minister’s Questions and the support she’s been getting from the Conservative side of the House, I look at how she has been chairing Cabinet meetings every week, I look at how she has taken charge of the ministerial task force on Grenfell and I see somebody who is very determined to lead and to get on with the job. .

SR: Now I am keen to talk to you about austerity. We’ve just shown a film where I went to a school in Hackney to talk about funding changes, to talk about the public sector pay cap and teachers there were really struggling, they felt under-appreciated, they felt they couldn’t do the things they wanted to do with their lives like buy a house. Is it time now for that pay cap to end in your personal opinion?

DAVID LIDINGTON: I think you have got to look at the issues of pay in the context of public spending overall. It’s worth reminding ourselves that so far this government has implemented every one of the recommendations from the pay review bodies that have come in for instance and I think we’ve got three outstanding.

SR: The pay review bodies are effectively instructed on what to do by the government so that is an easy excuse for you isn’t it?

DAVID LIDINGTON: No, no, no, that’s not the case at all. The pay review bodies are independent, they obviously take advice and take evidence from the government and the Treasury on behalf of the government puts forward the overall arguments about the need for the country to live within its means so that’s the record so far. Clearly every Minister in the government wants to see us putting as much money as we can afford to do into the front line of public services and you look at our track record, you see the education budget has gone up and is due to rise further, the same is true of health and so on but we have at the same time to take account of the fact that the country still has a deficit and as long as we have an annual deficit that means that the amount we pay, not on public services but the amount we are paying on interest payments, is going up each year and it also means there is an accumulated underlying debt that we’re passing on to the next generation to carry on their backs and try to repay. So it is important to look at this in the round, the country has got to live within its means, we need economic policies to get the growth which will allow us to spend more on key public services like schools and we need to try and make sure we are fair to the people like teachers, like nurses and doctors, working very hard in the front line of those services.

SR: It’s quite a novel experience to hear a government minister sticking to the government line on this, certainly some of your colleagues didn’t appear to get that memo, people like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, so if government policy is being made by those people who shout the loudest, this is your chance. What’s the top of your wish list, what do you want to happen?

DAVID LIDINGTON: I think what is going to happen is that the government will take a collective view on the overall balance in public spending, borrowing, taxation. There is a budget later this year at which the Chancellor will set out the scope for making changes in the year ahead and we’ve got three outstanding pay review bodies due to report from this year’s round and obviously we will be responding in due to course to those.

SR: Let’s turn to your justice brief shall we now, finally, after going through some other issues before. Now a report this summer says that violence in our prisons is now out of control. The head of the Prison Officer Association says it’s a bloodbath. Do you accept that the prison system that you have inherited is in crisis?

DAVID LIDINGTON: I think the prison system has got very severe problems, yes and I would share the view that my predecessor, Liz Truss, expressed publicly in a White Paper of November last year that at the moment prisons are not working in the way that we want them to do, there’s too much violence, too much self-harm, too many drugs getting into prisons and we are not making enough use of the time we have people in prison to get them educated, get them to take on skills that make them employable when they’re released and less likely to commit crimes again. There’s a programme of work that we’ve got, including targeted spending, to deliver improvements. That starts with two and a half thousand extra prison officers to ease the pressures on the current hard working prison officer teams and make sure that they can manage the regimes and security more effectively in prisons but it is also the money that we have spent on 300 new sniffer dogs to trace drugs in prisons; it’s the new kit that we’ve got into every prison now to try to detect mobile phones that are being used illegally there; it’s the new intelligence unit that we’ve set up inside the prison service to try to make sure we are dealing with things like organised gangs and we’re getting many, many more organised gang members in prisons now than there were in the past; it’s the work we are doing with the police to share intelligence and information on the use of drones because we are finding that criminal enterprises are using drones to try to take illegal drugs and illegal mobile phones over the prison walls. So on all these fronts we are moving forward, I’d like to see us move further and faster, I’m determined to make improvements but we start yes, as you say, by acknowledging that there are some very big challenges that face us but we have a determination and a plan to get those improvements that will get the country safer in the long term, particularly if we can get the education, the training, the work programmes effective in prisons so that we have people coming out who can get a job and who are less likely to commit crime again.

SR: You talk about those big challenges, it’s not been helped has it, let’s be honest, by the fact that the government has cut 7000 prison officers since coming into power and has only recommitted to rehiring half of them.

DAVID LIDINGTON: When the government coalition government came in in 2010 we were facing a huge economic crisis and a massive problem with a government deficit of Greek proportions and tough immediate decisions had to be taken then that affected the prison service and the Ministry of Justice along with practically every other department to try and restrain spending so we could get that deficit down. That has bought us some opportunity now, that discipline over our finances, the tough decisions over public sector pay restraint, the tough decisions about benefit reform mean that we have the headroom now having cut the deficit by three-quarters to provide the extra two and a half thousand prison officers that I talked about, to commit ourselves to £8 billion of additional spending on the National Health Service during the lifetime of this parliament, so actually sound money and living within your means is what frees us then to make improvements in public spending on the front line when the finances are in order.

SR: Now before you go I am keen to talk to you about the really tragic case of Charlie Gard, the little boy who is terminally ill, whose parents are locked in a court battle to try and extend his treatment so that they can go to the US and try out experimental therapy. Do you think it is right that judges can overrule the wishes of his parents?

DAVID LIDINGTON: It is right that judges interpret the law independently and dispassionately. As Ministers in the government we have no role to play in the Charlie Gard case, as would be the case of any other proceeding in court. What is happening in that case is that Charlie’s parents – and goodness knows any of us particularly if we have children must feel desperately for them – his parents are putting their case through their lawyers, the hospital doctors are putting their case and an independent advocate from the court, so is acting as the independent guardian for Charlie, is putting a case to the court and what all of them are arguing is what is the course of action that is in Charlie’s best interests, that is what the argument hinges upon. Frankly I do not envy the judges who are having to take decisions on this, it must be incredibly pressured, probably emotional under the judicial professional, a really emotional heart wrenching case for them to have to decide but they are independent and they know their duty is to decide the case on the basis of what they genuinely consider to be in the best interests of Charlie himself.

SR: Okay, David Lidington, thank you for your time today.

DAVID LIDINGTON: Thank you.