Prison Overcrowding

Lord Beith Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

Having listened to those comments, Members might never know the truth. Prison overcrowding is lower under this Government than it was in the last four years of the previous Labour Government. Let me walk the right hon. Gentleman through the operational capacity for adult males in our prisons: in May 2010 it was 80,269; today it is 82,395; and in 2015 it is predicted to be 85,133. That means the capacity for men in our prisons is increasing. The tornado squads, which deal with serious incidents, have dealt with half the level of activity seen in 2007.

I think that the right hon. Gentleman needs a little bit of a lesson in what a prison capacity crisis really is. It is having to introduce a special scheme to let prisoners go home after serving a quarter of their sentence because there are not enough places to keep them in. That is what Labour did. It is deciding to shorten everyone’s sentence by a few weeks because they did not plan for the places needed. That is what Labour did. They let out more than 80,000 people early, and 1,500 of them committed suspected crimes when they should have been in prison. That is my definition of a prison overcrowding crisis, and it happened under Labour. Now they have the nerve to call sensible contingency planning a crisis, even though they were the ones who were forced to rent out thousands of police cells across the country because they ran out of space.

I make no apology for the fact that under this Government more people are going to prison, and they are going to prison for longer. I have a strategy in place to ensure that we will always have the space for them.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

Why should Britain find it necessary to have a higher proportion of its population in prison than almost any other western European country?

[Chris Grayling]

Of course, we have a much lower proportion of our population in prison than many other countries, but I would like it to be smaller. That is precisely why I believe that the reforms to the way in which we rehabilitate offenders—for example, supervising offenders who go to jail for less than 12 months, who currently get no support, guidance or mentoring—will make the kind of difference that enables us to bring down our prison population in future. That is a goal we should all share.