Jon Robins reviews the Lord Chancellor’s first outing before the House of Commons’ Justice Committee
There are only so many ways of saying “Can I get back to you on that?”. The new lord chancellor must have used every single one of them in a frustrating debut before the House of Commons’ Justice Committee earlier this month.
After all the harrumphing over the appropriateness or not of Liz Truss’s appointment as our first female lord chancellor—some fair, some not—you might have expected the minister to have spent the summer mugging up on her new brief.
If she had, there wasn’t much evidence of it. Much of the session was devoted to the MPs trying to get a handle on what the change in officeholder might mean for her predecessor’s plans for the biggest shake up of prisons since Victorian times.
Pressing issues
After thanking MPs for “the fantastic opportunity to set out my agenda”, Liz Truss confirmed that, yes, sorting out our prisons was “the most pressing issue”. The second key priority was making sure that our justice system “works for everyone”,
