HMP Birmingham

Debate between Lord Vaizey of Didcot and Rory Stewart

Tuesday 4th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that it is about staff. We now have 3,000 more prison officers than we had when we made the announcement, and having more staff will make a difference. The next stage is getting the training right, particularly the training for the band 5 and band 4 uniformed staff who are out there on the landings day in, day out. It is about getting the staff college right for governors, and it is also about making sure that, in places like our Newbold Revel training college, we have the right support for our prison officers. It is an amazing profession, but it needs support and training.

[Mr Edward Vaizey (Wantage) (Con)]

I agree with the Minister that this is not a debate about privatised versus publicly run prisons; obviously it is about how we work to ensure that we do not have such trouble again. I echo what my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Justice, said about the need to carry on the vision of reinvigorating the prison estate.

I also echo the Minister’s comments about education. The great opportunity in our prisons is to work with prisoners and to use, for example, culture and sport to give them opportunities. Prisons are often dealing with people who have mental health issues and, sometimes, a lack of education, and it has been shown that the arts and sport can do a great deal to help rehabilitate prisoners, as opposed to, say, penal servitude.

[Rory Stewart]

My right hon. Friend encourages me to reflect on our sport strategy, which is coming through. Broadly speaking, there is also the key point about how education changes lives. By changing lives and helping people to get employment when they leave prison, education reduces reoffending and protects the public. Stabilising our prisons and delivering high-quality education in prisons is good not just for prisoners but for the rest of society.

Phone and Broadband Coverage (Herefordshire)

Debate between Lord Vaizey of Didcot and Rory Stewart

Tuesday 6th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Vaizey]

As a Minister I am also responsible for supporting the national and local press, so I am obviously in favour of anything that we can do to support the Daily Mail. The serious point behind that advert is that we are rolling out superfast broadband throughout the country as part of our rural broadband improvement programme. Although we are using public money to fund it, it is a co-investment with Openreach. One reason why we are doing it is that sometimes, broadband is not commercially viable, and one way to make it more viable is if more people take it up. We have noticed that, even in rural areas where people have cried out for broadband, they are not taking it up when it is there, so we want to encourage take-up. It is worth saying to my hon. Friends that the more people take up broadband, particularly under the rural broadband programme, the more money we will get back under the contracts we have negotiated with Openreach and therefore the more money we can invest in rural broadband.

[Rory Stewart]

Given his commitment to superfast broadband, will my hon. Friend the Minister absolutely confirm that we in Cumbria will not find that inflexibility from the Department for Communities and Local Government and too narrow an interpretation of European Union guidelines leads to us being unable to spend the money allocated to us, thereby leaving tens of thousands of my constituents without broadband coverage?

[Mr Vaizey]

I absolutely take on board my hon. Friend’s point, which he made to me over the Christmas recess. I can confirm to him that my Secretary of State is in touch with the relevant Minister at DCLG. There is a technical point: European Union funds must be spent by the end of 2015. There is, therefore, a deadline by which such funds much be spent—currently March—to ensure that the time for spending them does not inadvertently overrun. We are making a confident case to DCLG that we can continue to spend the money throughout 2015 without any danger of spending it after the cut-off date at the end of 2015. My hon. Friend’s point is well made and the Department agrees. We are working hard with DCLG to come up with a solution because, when European money is on the table—I know that Government Members are all in favour of Europe—it is important that we spend it effectively on behalf of our constituents.