Justice Secretary Robert Buckland Speaks to T&G on COVID Restrictions, Legal Marriage Age and More

Justice Secretary Robert Buckland has told Times Radio he supports former Chancellor Sajid Javid in his bid to raise the minimum age to marry to 18.

Speaking to Tom Newton Dunn and Sonia Sodha on T&G, he said;

"It's no secret that the principle of the need to protect children and young people is very much at the core of my thinking, which is why I do believe that the age of marriage should be raised."

Asked whether he would rule out another winter lockdown, he refused to commit to a strategy but said he didn't want another lockdown;

"I don't want one, I don't think anybody wants lockdowns. I think we've just got to relentlessly push on keep breaking that link, to make the need for lockdown much less than that it's ever been in the past."

"I think all of us are, you know, mature enough and grown up enough who've lived through this crisis, to know that you can't ever sort of say, you know- mission accomplished. The question is, the efficacy of the vaccine, the need for boosters which, I think is everybody well understands that, and the way, then that we manage it through the winter. Now look, I think that the vaccination campaign. Not only is it been successful, but it's proved and shown it with emerging evidence if you can break that that chain between, you know, transmission, and then hospitalisation you can do it. and therefore, I'm confident and hopeful that evidence gets stronger and stronger than the case for the sort of lockdown approach becomes weaker and weaker."

On the Conservatives losing Chesham and Amersham, he admitted the party needed to do better;

"I went out on the stump in Chesham Amersham and people's concerns were real, I mean HS2 is now happening, and therefore that does affect people's lives and that clearly shone through. (...) If we're going to solve the housing supply crisis in this country, you're going to build homes, which is why in the last year we've built over a quarter of a million, the biggest number since 1987, but we've got further to do."

On the planning reforms, he said the current system "is not working";

"I just want to assure listeners that what we're trying to do here is get the right balance, trying to win the old sort of battle that we all seem to have about planning applications, you know, it's, it always seems to me sort of from my considerable experience of having gone through many of them as a as a local MP, that the public already feel shut out of it and feel disenfranchised, so the current system is not working. We can do better I think with the proposals that we set forward to involve the public right to the get go, so that they feel consulted and part of the process even before particular planning applications come onto the horizon. That's what we should be doing, and that's what these proposals embody."

In regards to the govt rape review released on Friday, he refused to say whether he would resign if there wasn't an improvement in rape convictions;

"That would be wholly wrong of me to make some sort of political commitment as has been suggested by the opposition on the basis of independent decisions made by the police and prosecutors. Can you imagine if Keir Starmer was still Director of Public Prosecution and he had a phone call from me saying, You know what Sir Keir, I really need you to ramp up prosecutions here because my political future is at stake. That would be wholly improper, it would be constitutionally wrong, it would be an undue influence on the prosecutorial process. I want to see safe convictions here and I want to see more of them, frankly, that sort of approach that has been suggested by the Labour Party should be beneath them. And it's beneath the issue frankly. We need to raise the level of debate here in the way that I hope I'm trying to do by acknowledging the failure, and then pledging through the action plan to do better."---

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