Abstract:
The justice system in England and Wales is a significant area of public spending (£11.8 billion in day-to-day spending in 2025-26) and touches on almost every aspect of economic and social life. It has also seen many important changes and reforms in recent decades. Despite the scale of change and the central importance of justice in underpinning economic and social relations as well as trust in the state, economists have paid relatively little attention to these developments. In this report, we bring together insights developed through the IFS Transforming Justice programme, established in 2024 and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, to respond to this relative lack of quantitative economic analysis. These insights emerge from a range of studies undertaken to date that examine different parts of the justice system. The programme is interested in all areas of the justice system, but the examples we draw on reflect the areas in which our analysis under the programme is most developed. We organise the evidence presented in this report around one connecting theme: the importance of understanding the role of resources for the functioning of the justice system, where resources refer not only to financial spending, but to a fuller set of inputs that shape the justice system's capacity and performance, including infrastructure and management. The studies presented demonstrate why it matters to understand how resources are deployed within the justice system, whether the system is allocating and using resources efficiently, and how resources shape justice outcomes and outcomes outside the justice system itself. While the important role of resources forms the backdrop of much existing legal and social science research on justice systems, our studies show how economics research can advance understanding of how justice systems work and how they may work better.
