JOHN McDONNELL warned yesterday that the justice system was at risk of further decline at “huge human cost” as a result of next month’s Budget.

The shadow chancellor released the first in a series of shadow Treasury team reports last night ahead of the March 11 Budget, highlighting the sharp decline in public services after a decade of Tory rule.

He warned that the upcoming Budget looked likely to “risk another five years of decline and disappointment” for the justice system.

The Road to the Budget: Justice report charges that “10 years of Tory gutting of the justice system has left people less safe than in 2010, and has left a system in crisis.”

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) budget is down this financial year by a quarter compared to 2010-11.

It is unlikely that Chancellor Rishi Sunak will allocate the £1.2 billion needed to plug the funding gap that has been quantified by the commons justice committee, the report says.

Reduced court budgets and failed part-privatisation of the probation service have also had an impact on the judicial process and made the public less safe, it added.

The ending of “disastrous” private contracts in the probation service two years early cost the taxpayer at least £467 million and “further costs were shunted elsewhere in the system.”

Courts had seen their budgets drop by 30 per cent between 2010 and 2016. Three hundred court facilities were closed over the same period, and legal aid was also slashed in 2012.

The Institute for Government reported last year “a dramatic deterioration in standards across prisons since 2009/10.”

The report points out that the institute attributed the decline of prison estates and rise in harm to cuts in spending on prisons and a fall in the number of prison officers.

Labour’s report states that prisoner-on-prisoner assaults more than doubled from 11,892 in 2009-10 to 24,541 in 2018-19.

Self-harm incidents also more than doubled, from 24,964 to 57,968 over the same period.

Between 2015 and 2018 alone, there was a 110 per cent increase in assaults on prison officers, a 63 per cent increase in prisoner-on-prisoner assaults, and a 73 per cent increase in self-harm incidents.

Labour is calling for sufficient funding and an “alternative approach” that connects policy areas of health, education, benefits and housing to help tackle crime and address regional inequality.