Jack Straw: We must lift the veil that keeps justice from view

Crime denies the most fundamental of rights. The right to feel safe; the very right to life. When there are high levels of crime it's those with the least who suffer the most. And never forget that when someone is the victim of a crime, they are 100 per cent victim – and no blizzard of statistics from people like me will take that away.

This weekend we saw the determination of those affected by knife crime as they marched through London. We stand firm with all those who know too well the devastating impact these crimes have, and all of us pledge that we will relentlessly keep up our efforts to tackle it.

Labour will always put victims and their families first. That's why we are transforming criminal justice from a bureaucratic system to the public's service It's about a change of culture, of attitude, about lifting the veil which sometimes keeps justice from view: explaining more, hiding less. So I've abolished the fees which newspapers had to pay for court lists. And I'm going to open up the justice system through the power of the internet, with online court records so anyone can see for themselves what happened when someone appears in the dock.

In the very sensitive area of the family courts, I think we can shed more light whilst preserving the imperative of the welfare of the child. And when people receive community punishments, the public must literally be able to see them working – so we are introducing high-visibility jackets for all those on such sentences. Prisons are obviously part of this service. Since 1997, we have increased prison places by 23,000 – a third, twice the rate of the Tories, and there'll be another 13,000 places by 2014.

I am passionate about getting the correct balance between the rights of the accused and the rights of the victim. That's why I said last year that we would change the law so that those who are brave enough to have a go against burglars or street robbers do not find themselves unfairly in the dock.

In 1997 we began a quiet revolution to transform services for victims and witnesses. In the autumn we'll continue that with a new bill before parliament. Legal aid is one of Labour's many great post-war social reforms and it's grown dramatically. Legal aid spending per head in England and Wales is the highest in the world. It's as much as we spend on prisons.

There are now three times as many lawyers in private practice but paid for by the taxpayer as there were three decades ago; the budget has grown faster than the health and education services.

The challenge now is how better to spend these huge sums in the interests of the public and justice; something I want to do with the legal profession and local government.

Taken from a speech given yesterday by the Justice Secretary at the Labour Party's annual conference in Manchester