Unpaid fines show a broken legal system

MUCH has been made of the lack of finance floating around Stormont departments since the restoration of the NI Executive 100 days ago.

Budgets across the board are falling short of what is needed. In infrastructure it’s delaying progress on long awaited road improvement schemes, in education it means school capital build programmes are still a long way off.

In health the crippling waiting lists are not yet being dealt with.

At the same time, on a weekly, almost daily basis, more financial leaks are uncovered.

Efforts to save money — and the NI Executive has to show the UK Government how it can cut spending and revenue raise to the tune of £113m in this financial year — mean cuts to services across all facets of life.

Under the remit of the Department of Justice, the PSNI is facing a dire financial crisis.

The prison service is buckling as well, court cases are being held up because of the sheer volume of them and the lack of resources to speed up the process of justice being done.

And now, even when it looks like justice has been done, that might not always be the case.

Financial penalties are the most common means of punishment handed out in magistrates courts across Northern Ireland.

They are expected to be paid, both by the criminal justice system and by those who find themselves the victim of a crime where a financial penalty is deemed appropriate.

The amount of fines outstanding is soaring to an incredible level.

From the beginning of 2019/20 to the end of 2023/24 some 91,332 unpaid fines worth £22.8m were transferred to the Financial Collection and Enforcement Service. Some £5.4m of that was in the last financial year alone.

It all adds up to more than 80% of court imposed fines not being paid.

It should raise alarm bells that something is wrong in the system, but with the number of fines going unpaid rising, is enough being done to try to redress the balance?

On the surface the answer looks like a clear ‘no’. It’s becoming much too easy to simply walk away and not give a monetary penalty a second thought. That notion of punishment is no deterrent at all.

Not only is it a collective lack of respect for the rule of law, it’s picking the public purse of much needed financial input and victims of the sense that justice has been served.

The only upside is that, once again, it highlights the need for systematic changes in how the justice system operates.