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The impact of the recent violent disorder in England and Northern Ireland will be felt for years to come and will “make the job of rebuilding the justice system harder”, a UK cabinet minister has warned.
Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood said that tackling the unrest was “made harder” because of problems “inherited from the Conservatives”, including a Crown Court backlog of 68,000 cases and a prison overcrowding crisis.
She warned on Sunday that the fallout from the riots would hamper the new Labour government’s efforts to solve the long-term challenges within the court and prison systems.
“The impact of these days of disorder will be felt for months and years to come,” Mahmood said in an article for the Observer newspaper.
However, she vowed that “many more” criminals who participated in the recent disorder would be “sent down to multiyear jail terms”, following the first convictions secured in the past week.
From September, the government will begin releasing some prisoners when they reach 40 per cent of their sentence to ease prison overcrowding, an advance on other early-release measures taken by the previous Tory administration.
Mahmood’s intervention on Sunday was echoed by Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions, who said “hundreds” more charges were expected in the coming weeks as police brough a “new phase” of cases against suspected participants.
These will “include more serious charges with stiffer penalties”, he told The Sunday Times newspaper, raising the prospect of the first convictions for rioting.
Prosecutors have charged about 350 people so far for offences including violent disorder, which has a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment. But they have not yet charged anyone with rioting, which carries a maximum ten-year sentence and requires proof that 12 or more people engaged in disorder for a “common purpose”.
“There’s inevitably going to be more police work involved to put those cases together,” Parkinson said.
As attention turns to physical infrastructure attacked during the unrest, the government has called on insurers to respond quickly to claims and extend as much assistance as possible to businesses affected.
Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, warned: “The barbaric action is likely to have led to thousands of pounds of damage to shop fronts and stock.”
In a letter to Hannah Gurga, director-general of the Association of British Insurers, he said the swift resolution of claims would ensure businesses “do not suffer additional delay in reopening and continuing to serve their local communities”.
The ABI said insurers appreciated that “this is an incredibly stressful time” for those affected by the violent disorder. They added that physical damage to homes or businesses was covered as standard by most insurance policies, while most comprehensive motor insurance also included cover for damage to cars.
As ministers examine how to prevent unrest erupting in future, plans are also in train to reform the school curriculum to improve pupils’ ability to identify extremist content and false claims online.
A series of children participated in the recent unrest, leading to teenagers as young as 13 being charged with violent disorder.
The rioting was sparked by false claims that the person alleged to have killed three children in a mass-stabbing in Southport was a Muslim immigrant to the UK.
The alleged attacker Axel Rudakubana, who has been charged with three counts of murder and 10 counts of attempted murder, was not Muslim and was born in Cardiff to parents from Rwanda.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson told The Telegraph newspaper that critical-thinking skills would be rolled out for children from the age of five to “arm” them against “putrid conspiracy theories”.