Sentencing Bill

Debate between Baroness Porter of Fulwood and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Committee stage
Wednesday 26th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Porter of Fulwood (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord. To build on that, more needs to be done for the community and voluntary organisations that, sitting alongside this Bill, will help build the capacity to deliver, so that the rates he outlined will be increased. Policy examples include multi-year, unrestricted grant funding and regional commissioning.

I return to the amendment. By being more explicit in the Bill about the central role that rehabilitative activity plays, my hope is that the Government would be forced to resource this area sufficiently and signal that they view these services and programmes as essential, rather than discretionary.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment in the names of my noble friends on the Front Bench. Some 14 years ago, I travelled to San Miguel prison in Santiago, Chile, which was one of the worst prisons in South America. I had the dubious distinction of travelling often with the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, who is a noted prison campaigner. When I travelled with her, she invariably asked me to accompany her to a prison. She would regale me with the greatest hits of the worst prisons in the world. Her choice was Kingston prison, in Jamaica. At San Miguel, in Santiago, we saw the results of a system that was overly concentrating on punitive actions and did nothing on education, training and rehabilitation. In fact, a few weeks before, 81 prisoners had died in a fire following a riot in that prison. Over the course of a few years, I visited the toughest prisons in Honduras and El Salvador. I can tell the Committee that they were not Pontins holiday camp in any respect.

The serious point, our earlier debates notwithstanding, is that if we accept the importance of suspended sentences and the fact that, according to Ministry of Justice figures, incarcerating a person in the prison estate costs £53,801 a year, then the state has an obligation to provide those individuals in the criminal justice system with endemic, underlying problems—drink and drug misuse, poor family background and poor education, skills and training—with an alternative way out of recidivism.

I have a great deal of respect for the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, particularly the work he has done on problem betting and gambling. I look forward to our debates on that issue in this Bill. He has been rather shy in neglecting to mention the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014 that arose from the coalition Government. The Minister and others will know that, prior to the Act—which was groundbreaking legislation —prisoners were turfed out of prison on Friday evening with £46 and within a few hours were in the company of ne’er-do-wells, drug-dealers and others who were leading them back to a life of crime. That was the beginning of rehabilitation being taken seriously for offenders who were not at the top end of seriousness in their offences: there was drug testing and a need to attend appointments; specific, targeted help for young people; the beginning of rehabilitation activity requirement as a policy; and bespoke treatment for female offenders, which is something I know the Minister cares deeply about.

I welcome this amendment and the imperative of the wording. While it is important to respect the discretion of the judiciary, to put in the Bill a requirement that we use that time in as efficacious a way as possible, to ensure that those who have the most acute problems and who will cause the most acute problems, as my noble friend Lady Porter put it—