Prisons

Debate between Baroness Berridge and Lord Beecham

Tuesday 29th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving me advance notice. The statistic that I have been provided with from a 2015 Ministry of Justice survey is that 40% of male remand prisoners have a common mental health problem. I agree with the noble Lord that that figure is too high, but I assure him that mental health training and specific self-harm and suicide prevention have been introduced into the basic prison officer training. Over 25,000 new and existing staff have completed at least one module of that latter training and 14,000 have completed the specific mental health module. I am also pleased to tell the noble Lord that the Samaritans were given £500,000 last year, and there is a commitment to give that amount every year for three years to help vulnerable prisoners.

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

In every year since 2014 the Government have proposed to increase our overcrowded and all-too-often squalid prisons by 10,000 extra places. Despite having among the highest incarceration rates in Europe, they have failed both to achieve their own target, now reiterated by the Prime Minister, or even to replace dismal Victorian buildings as promised. How long are prisoners and prison staff expected to endure what the Prison Reform Trust describes as a policy that is likely to make overcrowding worse and produces an indecent prison system that puts lives at risk—and that is before taking into account the Prime Minister’s aspiration to promote longer sentences?

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for his question. Since 2010 there has been a net increase in the number of places of just over 1,100. It is precisely to avoid an increase in crowding that the Victorian estate cannot be closed at this time. Ten thousand new places will come on line, and an additional 3,000 are committed to at Wellingborough and Glen Parva. Central to the modernisation programme is to get back to the point in 2015 when new prison places came on line without an increase in crowding.