Swift and Sure? Or An Admission of Failure

I've been reading the White Paper, "Swift and Sure Justice: The Government’s Plans for Reform of the Criminal Justice System".

Yes I know, I need to get a life!

Whilst there is a lot in the proposals with which I agree the over-riding conclusion is that it represents an admission of failure by the Government to deal with the Criminal Justice System.

For example:
The paper says "The unprecedented rise in the use of out-of-court sanctions ...... has raised concerns about whether they have been used appropriately".

Well Magistrates have been saying this for some time, it's taken long enough for the Government to realise this folly of its own making.

Also, "alcohol related harm is estimated to cost society £21 billion each year" and "The Government’s Alcohol Strategy........includes introducing stronger powers for local areas to control the density of licensed premises including making the impact on health a consideration".

Isn't this the because the last Government introduced a free-for-all in licensing hours, and removed from local Magistrates the power to control alcohol licensing?

On community sentences, the paper is proposing reform:
"to make them an effective and credible means of tackling the high rate of re-offending".

Could this be an admission that they are neither effective or credible?

On IT, and I've mentioned this before, here the paper admits that:
"Significant resources have been invested in technology over the last decade. However, the public has not seen sufficient return on these substantial investments..................projects such as Libra, in the magistrates’ courts, and C-NOMIS for offender management suffered severe delays, ran over budget and did not deliver the functionality promised.
Poor investment decisions led to wasted resources, with programmes implemented in a way which reinforced the silo working approach, rather than helping to overcome it. There are few examples of criminal justice agencies sharing services; the agencies’ systems are not well integrated with one another" .

What an admission of failure!

It doesn't get any better, on video the paper admits it will aim to:
"create a unified infrastructure that will allow full interoperability of all different HMCTS video equipment so that every camera can be used with every screen".

Because at present it doesn't, often the police provide video evidence that the court's video player can't read, you couldn't make it up!

I don't know what to make of the proposals to:
"empower a lay magistrate, sitting alone, to deal with certain low-level uncontested cases, in some cases outside traditional court buildings".
The paper says it is about
"magistrates, engaging with the people in their communities ".

This from a Government that has presided over the wholesale slaughter of local justice in the closing of hundreds of local court houses, no wonder they talk of dealing with cases "outside traditional court buildings".

That's because there aren't any truly 'local' ones anymore!