Sentencing Review and Prison Capacity

Debate between Lord Dholakia and Lord Timpson

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dholakia (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement in your Lordships’ House. Overcrowding in our prisons has been in the headlines for as long as I can remember. Different Ministers have offered various solutions to this problem. No one seems to have looked at overall solutions that could resolve the problem. We are now offered a review by a former Minister and a prison capacity package to solve the present crisis.

We have long called for a review of criminal sentencing. We have asked for reoffending to be cut by taking a holistic approach to rehabilitation and community supervision, including a full range of rehabilitative services. We also believe in implementing a presumption against short sentences of 12 months or fewer to facilitate rehabilitation in the community.

The present proposals offer short-term solutions but do not alleviate the problems or provide the long-term solutions we badly need. The previous Administration had a golden opportunity to set up a royal commission on the criminal justice system, but this was kicked into the long grass. Instead, we have a piecemeal approach to legislation in this field. We need to look at the overuse of imprisonment. This has put us on top in Europe as the worst country in the way we sentence offenders. It is astonishing that we imprison nearly twice as many people as Germany.

There are a number of questions for the Minister. I welcome the proposals to reduce the prison population. We should seriously examine the work of the Sentencing Council. Surely a Minister should put a legislative obligation to take note of the prison population before a sentence is passed. How will the review plan to address concerns about disproportionate sentencing of minority groups and marginalised communities? Would the Minister agree that ploughing more resources into expanding the prison system to hold an ever-growing number of prisoners is far from the most sensible way to tackle crime?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I thank the noble and learned Lord and the noble Lord for their welcome of the review, their excellent questions and suggestions and enthusiasm for what we are trying to do. I will try to answer some of those questions now.

Increasing the use of technology as part of community sentencing is something we should consider very seriously. It is not just about the conventional electronic monitoring and the tag. Other countries have far more advanced technology than we do, including Spain, which is a country I am going to look at shortly to understand what we can learn from them. A lot of it is about the data it collects and the reassurance to victims from that data and how it can support them.

The noble and learned Lord is correct that the more tags we put on people, the more work that creates for others. I have mentioned in the House before that we are recruiting 1,000 probation officers and 4,000 more police officers. But it is not just about recruiting them; it is about training them and settling them into their jobs, which takes time. We need to make sure that we do not rush at it, but one thing I can guarantee is that we are not short of tags.

On the point about remand offenders being tagged in the community, for me this comes back to trust and how much the courts can trust tagging and how effective it is at reducing reoffending. When it comes to offenders being at home for a lot of time during the day, if I had the choice between being in prison or being on a tag at home, I would much prefer to be at home reading my kids bedtime stories and helping them with their homework to being behind a cell door.

I am concerned about highly prolific low-level offenders and what we do with them—the noble and learned Lord raised this. A few weeks ago, I spent two days in Preston Prison, following an officer, Steve, around as he did his job. One thing that was very clear was that a lot of the prisoners he spoke to he had known for the last 32 years that he had worked in that prison. They were coming in and out from when they were young to when they were old men. So, as part of the review, we need to consider whether custody for longer periods is the right thing for them. Public sentiment about crime and what we are doing depends on how good we are at reducing reoffending. When 80% of offending is reoffending, something is clearly going wrong. We need to deal with that, but we need to do so as part of the sentencing review and the other things I intend to do in my role.

On money, we are engaging with the Treasury on the spending commitments needed to progress our delivery plans. But, like noble Lords, we will wait for the Budget, which is not too far away. For me, the priority is protecting the public; that has to come before anything else.

On new prisons being built, one is being finished off in York: HMP Millsike, which will open in the spring. We will publish a 10-year capacity strategy soon. I do not have any further details on the planning proposals yet, but I know we have the willingness to make sure that we can build prisons where we need to.

Finally, I feel that £50,000 a year for every foreign national offender in prison is quite expensive when we could be sending some of them home. But what is important is that we work with our Home Office colleagues to make sure that we process the paperwork as fast as possible.