In a swearing-in speech published by the Attorney General’s Office on gov.uk, Ellie Reeves used her first remarks as Attorney General to set out the terms on which she wants the office to operate. The speech was framed less as a legislative announcement than as a statement of operating priorities: protect judicial independence, raise confidence in the justice system, improve support for victims and make government legal advice more practical in use. That matters because the Attorney General’s brief sits across constitutional principle and day-to-day administration. Reeves presented those two functions as connected. The argument running through the speech was that the rule of law and effective delivery should not be treated as competing goals.
Addressing the Lady Chief Justice, the Lord Chancellor and members of the court, Reeves placed judicial independence at the centre of the office’s constitutional duty. She said the judiciary upholds the rule of law with independence and integrity, often in difficult and sensitive cases, and said she would work to protect that independence. For courts policy, that is more than ceremonial language. It signals that Reeves wants the relationship between the Law Officers and the judiciary to be framed around institutional respect, while also using that relationship to support public confidence in the justice system.
Reeves also stressed continuity inside the Law Officers’ team. She described her move to the top job, less than a year after being sworn in as Solicitor General, as an extension of work already under way rather than a reset. The department, she suggested, should be judged on whether it can move decisions forward. She paid tribute to her predecessor, Richard Hermer, welcomed Andy Slaughter as Solicitor General, and linked her brief closely to that of the new Lord Chancellor. The practical message was that the Government wants its senior legal leadership aligned across Parliament, departmental decision-making and the wider justice agenda.
Part of the speech was personal, but the policy relevance was clear. Reeves used her own route into law, from a south-east London comprehensive school to Oxford, the Bar and later employment rights practice, to argue that the profession should not remain closed by background or social expectation. She said her legal career was shaped by representing trade unions and their members, and later by advising women facing maternity and sex discrimination at work. That background helps explain the emphasis she placed on law as something that affects pay, livelihood, safety and dignity in ordinary life, rather than as a remote constitutional discipline.
On substantive policy, Reeves gave the clearest weight to violence against women and girls. She said that as Solicitor General she had made VAWG her top priority, helped design and publish the Government’s strategy, secured £5 million for the Crown Prosecution Service to improve support for domestic abuse victims in the Crown Court, and backed the early Victims’ Right to Review scheme. She said she had also announced the national roll-out of the Victim Transformation Programme, including dedicated victim liaison officers for victims of domestic abuse. For practitioners, that points to continued pressure on prosecution and court-facing agencies to improve communication, case handling and continuity of support for complainants.
Reeves did not present those measures as sufficient. In the speech, she said public confidence in the criminal justice system remained low and accepted that government still had more to do to deliver for victims. She said she would work with the Lord Chancellor and the Home Secretary to address that gap. That places the Attorney General’s Office inside a wider justice and public protection agenda, rather than limiting it to narrow advisory work. The speech suggests that Reeves wants prosecution practice, victims’ entitlements and court process to be assessed not only for legal correctness but also for their effect on public trust.
One of the more operational passages concerned Legal Risk Guidance. Reeves said she had changed the guidance a few weeks earlier because she wanted government lawyers to feel able to identify lawful, workable routes for ministers, rather than approaching legal risk only as a reason not to proceed. In departmental terms, that is an important signal. It points towards advice that remains grounded in legality and scrutiny, but is more explicitly geared to implementation. If applied consistently across Whitehall, it could affect how departments frame options, assess litigation exposure and record the legal basis for contentious decisions.
Taken together, the speech offers an early map of Reeves’s tenure. The Attorney General’s Office is being presented as a department that must defend judicial independence, improve delivery for victims, support ministers to take decisions that can withstand challenge and widen access to the legal profession. There was little detail on timetables or new statutory change, and that will matter later. But as a first statement of intent, the speech set out a clear test for the office: constitutional standards must be protected while the justice system shows more clearly how it works for the people it serves.