Lord Beecham
Main Page: Lord Beecham (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Beecham's debates with the Scotland Office
(8 years ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, a key aspect of our prison reform programme will be to address offender mental health and improve outcomes for prisoners. That is why we are investing £1.3 billion to modernise the prison estate.
My Lords, last week the Justice Secretary proudly proclaimed her intention to appoint another 400 prison officers; today, she says that an additional 2,100 will be recruited. But the service has lost 7,000 officers since 2010, which is 28% of a workforce for whom the sickness rate is 25% higher than the labour market average. When will the Government recognise that prisoner numbers—the highest in Europe except for Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic—are the real problem and adopt a cross-government strategy to reduce the prison population, not least by tackling the mental health problems which afflict 70% of those given custodial sentences?
The noble Lord is right to highlight the fact that mental health is a very material issue so far as prison populations are concerned. As I indicated earlier, it is one that we are addressing but it is not just increased staffing levels that will deliver improvements. How prison officers are deployed and the training and support they receive are equally important elements for any workforce strategy.