Sentencing Bill

Debate between Baroness Winterton of Doncaster and Shabana Mahmood

Wednesday 6th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)]

We are here to debate the Second Reading of the Sentencing Bill, but it is impossible to consider the Bill properly without acknowledging what lies behind it: the prison capacity crisis. If prisons in this country were not at crisis point, I doubt the Government would have proposed the Bill.

The prisons crisis is very much the elephant in the room, and something that the Government are loth to discuss in detail—I notice it did not feature in the Secretary of State’s opening remarks—not least because, I imagine, they do not want to admit their failure over 13 years in government. This will not surprise the Secretary of State, but I cannot let him get away with that.

The true story of the Bill and its measures on short sentences and home detention curfew is that it is a rushed response to the Government’s own failure to manage the prison capacity crisis. The Bill is about reducing numbers, first and foremost, and not about getting the criminal justice system to function more effectively or reducing reoffending. There is a case for careful consideration of how best we reduce reoffending and make rehabilitation a true success story of our criminal justice system, but acting primarily because you are worried about the numbers and are about to run out of prison places is a very different exercise. The Government are acting out of desperation, not principle, and the public deserve better.

On the Government’s watch, we have now reached 99% capacity in the prison estate. Of the 20,000 prison places that we were supposed to see by next year, fewer than half are on track to meet the deadline, and the total will not be delivered before 2030. That has happened despite more than a decade of warnings that the demand for prison places was on course to exceed supply, from everyone from the Justice Committee to the National Audit Office. The situation has been so bad for so long that earlier this year, the previous Justice Secretary, the right hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), wrote to judges to make them aware of the significant population in prison, so that they could take it into account when passing sentences or deciding whether to remand people in custody.

As far back as 2016, the Government had pledged to build 10,000 new prison places by 2020. They did not get anywhere near that figure. In fact, the Public Accounts Committee found that they had managed to add only 206 places by that point. In November 2020, the Government pledged 18,000 new prison places, but still with no real plan for delivery. A year later, they said that they would make it 20,000 by the mid-2020s. According to the latest figures, no more than 8,200 places are set to be built by the end of 2025. That represents a shortfall of 60%.

That is an abysmal record—a total failure to deliver by the so-called party of law and order and by a Government who cannot seem to get anything built. Our prisons are completely full and now the Government have run out of space and time. As a result, we have the reforms on short sentences.

As the Secretary of State said, the Bill will introduce a presumption that sentences of 12 months or more will be suspended and instead served in the community. According to the Government’s own impact assessment, the reforms will mean that nearly 7,000 fewer offenders go to prison, and yet these are exactly the same proposals that the Secretary of State’s predecessor’s predecessor—there have been many—told us four years ago were not “the right way forward”. What has changed, Secretary of State? Does he expect anyone to believe that it is nothing at all to do with the prisons crisis?

The Government say today that these measures will aid rehabilitation and break the cycle of reoffending. They are right to say that the reoffending rate for those leaving prison after serving less than 12 months is 50% and for those on suspended orders with conditions it is 22%, but if that were truly their priority and if there were a newfound zeal to deal with this problem—it is, I acknowledge again, a real problem—perhaps they would have done something before now about the 80% of offenders who have a previous conviction or caution. And even if I were to believe the Secretary of State and accept that this desire to cut reoffending is entirely unconnected to the fact that he has run out of prison places, the truth is that the Government are introducing these changes without any thought-through or proper consideration of the infrastructure and resource that would support programmes such as suspended sentences.

The truth is that the Government will not break the cycle of reoffending without a functioning probation service. It is therefore astonishing that there is nothing in the Bill or any accompanying document that prioritises or appropriately resources the probation service. Under this Government, we have seen the botched privatisation of the probation service. In fact, it was so disastrous that the Government then had to renationalise the same service. Only these Conservatives could manage to make an absolute mess of both.

Today our probation service is understaffed, undervalued and overstretched. Workloads are soaring, almost 50,000 working days among probation staff have been lost due to stress and nearly 20% of the new trainee probation officers that the Government boast about recruiting have already quit. We have a probation service under huge pressure, and the problems of chronic understaffing point to a demoralised workforce and overstretched probation officers. In fact, the probation service is in such a poor state that in the 31 inspections since it was reunified in June 2021, only one has received a report of “good”. The rest were rated either as “requires improvement” or “inadequate”. The Government are simply failing to keep the probation service properly staffed, and these shortfalls could have dangerous consequences. Further pressures caused by the measures in the Bill and the end-of-custody supervised licence scheme have the potential to make matters much worse, and the Government’s strategy appears to be to take the pressure off the prison service, only to transfer it to the probation service instead. That is not good enough.

The Secretary of State has previously claimed that he is giving an additional £155 million a year to the probation service, but he knows—and I know, and this House will know—that that is not new money. It was announced in 2020 as part of the reunification of the probation service, to help the service at that point to recruit staff, bring down caseloads and deliver better supervision of offenders in the community. It is fair to say that that money has not yet resulted in a service that is functioning as well as we would all, I am sure, want to see, and now there is to be a huge increase in its workload as a result of the measures in this Bill.

The Government have provided no new funding, no new resources and no action plan to deal with the significant additional workload for the probation service. That is not credible, not reasonable and not safe. We will be tabling amendments in Committee to push the Government on their plans for the probation service, to ensure that it is working effectively and can deliver these new changes in a way that does not compromise public protection. We have all been witness to the tragic outcomes when the probation service fails, and it is paramount that the staffing and capacity issues in the service are urgently addressed before its workload is hugely increased by the measures in the Bill.

Let me turn to how the suspended sentences will work. In theory, both suspended sentences and community sentences should involve robust conditions that work to protect the public and change offenders’ behaviour, such as a curfew or being prohibited from doing a particular activity or going to a particular area, as the Secretary of State explained in his opening remarks. The Government have been particularly keen to talk up the benefits of unpaid work requirements such as cleaning up graffiti. None of this is new. These types of sentences have existed since the last Labour Government, but we have plenty of evidence that 13 years of Conservative neglect have completely squandered their potential, because we know there has been a huge decline in the use of community sentences during that time, reportedly because judges do not have confidence that conditions such as unpaid work will actually be delivered.

Let us look at the Government’s most eye-catching attempt at a rebrand, the so-called “rapid deployment” unpaid work pilots. These are just the latest example of the Government’s failure to deliver on justice and law and order. This scheme was supposed to see offenders, some of whom are on suspended sentences, deliver 20,000 hours of unpaid work in six months. Four months in and, according to the Ministry of Justice’s own management information, the scheme has managed just over 2,000 hours.

Given the Government’s track record, how can they reasonably expect the public to believe their promise that more suspended sentences will lead to meaningful, properly enforced community payback? Just as we will be pressing the Government on their plans for the probation service, we will also seek to push them to return to the House with proposals to make community sentences effective in respect of both reducing reoffending and, crucially, ensuring public protection.

I am surprised, and I believe the public will be too, that the Government are not specifically excluding any offence from the new presumption that short sentences will be suspended—not stalking, not domestic abuse and not even sexual offences. The main safeguards on which the Government are relying seem to be that the presumption will not apply in cases where an offender has breached an order, or where the court believes that suspending the sentence would put a particular individual at significant risk of harm.

We do not believe that is good enough. It does not protect the next partner of a known domestic abuser—an abuser she has not yet had the misfortune to meet—nor does it protect the many potential future victims of sex offenders and stalkers. We do not believe the courts should effectively be strongarmed into keeping out of prison people who commit predatory and abusive crimes in which vulnerable women are most often the targets. Again, we will return to this in Committee, having tabled amendments to ensure that the courts are free to send these potentially dangerous offenders to prison without having to shoehorn them into the arbitrary and inadequate exceptions that the Bill currently provides. I note with interest that some Conservative Back Benchers would like to see other exclusions in this Bill, and I am sure we will return to that debate in Committee.

We only have to look at media reports to know that not exempting domestic abusers from these proposals could have serious consequences, and I will put two recent examples before the House. Under these new measures, violent offenders such as Brendan Dugan, who launched a torture attack in which he bit his partner on the nose and strangled her until she thought she was going to die, could avoid being locked up. After a disagreement with his girlfriend, Brendan became violent. He threw objects around their home and then started his attack. He pinned her down on the bed with his knees and put a pillow over her head before she pushed him off. He then got on top of her again and strangled her for about 30 seconds, while telling her that he was going to kill her. This man received a 10-month sentence and, under the Government’s proposals, he could avoid prison time altogether.

Similarly, Lee David Smith was jailed for harassing, headbutting and threatening his ex-partner with a knife, as well as for threatening to burn down her house. He received a sentence of eight months and he, too, could avoid jail time under these new proposals. We think such cases are a good reason for further strengthening the Bill, and we look forward to those discussions in Committee.

Although the Government’s recently announced end of custody supervised licence scheme is not included in the Bill, I must take this opportunity, which I believe the Government have been seeking to avoid, to bring some much-needed scrutiny to this emergency measure that is already under way. We now know that the Government are letting thousands of people out early on so-called compassionate grounds. Compassion for whom? Stalkers, domestic abusers and other dangerous offenders. People whom a court has decided should be in prison. All of this, yet again, without a word on how the probation service is supposed to manage the flurry of new demand. I have already written to the Secretary of State to express my concerns about the Government’s absence of transparency on this matter.

The end of custody supervised licence scheme was announced to Parliament and the public in a statement to this House on 16 October, but without a word on when it was expected to start. It has emerged through media reporting and written questions in Parliament that the scheme in fact began the very next day. No details have been published on the workings of the scheme, including in which prisons it is operational, exactly which offenders are eligible and how the risk to the public is being monitored. No numbers of prisoners released under the scheme or of those recalled for breaching their licence conditions in the weeks that it has apparently been in use have been made available.

The Labour Government, unlike this Government, were clear and transparent out of respect for both this House and the public when they introduced the end of custody licence scheme in 2007. The then Justice Secretary announced, from the place where the current one now sits, that he had written to prison governors that day, and he in turn published the guidance that they were using for all to see and scrutinise. However, we have been told by the Minister with responsibility for prisons, probation and parole—the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar)—that there are no plans to publish the guidance issued to prisons. This is an astonishing failure, and the lack of transparency in this matter is a huge mark of disrespect to Parliament, the whole of the public and, indeed, victims of crime. Justice will not be delivered if men who have done real harm are quietly let out when a court intended that they should still be behind bars. Justice cannot be delivered in secret. The Secretary of State has had the chance to come clean on this issue for weeks, but instead he is hoping that no one will notice.

The Opposition believe that prison is where sex offenders, stalkers and domestic abusers need to serve their time, instead of in the community, where the risk to their victims and future victims is simply too high. Under Labour, courts will never be required to suspend the sentence of an abuser or predator who receives a custodial sentence. These offenders will not be allowed out of prison before their intended release date, nor will potentially thousands of offenders be released into our communities without Members of Parliament even knowing it is happening. Again, we will seek to amend the Bill in Committee to make that a reality.

The Bill also introduces measures to let serious offenders—those on sentences of four years or more—go home up to six months early on electronic monitoring if they are deemed “suitable”. Once again, we are assured by the Government that violent offenders, sex offenders and domestic abusers will continue to be excluded, but they have not told us exactly who this will include. What exactly does it mean for a person who is guilty of such a serious crime that our independent courts have judged that only a sentence of four years or more is appropriate to be considered suitable for release perhaps just 18 months later? What does this mean for victims? At the very same time that the Government are assuring them that their rights will be enhanced by the long-delayed and inadequate Victims and Prisoners Bill, victims can no longer be assured that people who have seriously harmed them will serve the prison term they were sentenced to. Once again, there is not a word from the Secretary of State on how the probation service is supposed to cope with all this.

The proposals for whole-life orders are in line with our commitments to tougher sentences for those who commit the most truly heinous murders, and ensuring that those convicted of rape and serious sexual offences serve more prison time. Those are measures that we will support as the Bill progresses. However, let us be clear that those provisions are not the main point of this Bill, and the Government should expect that we will stay focused on the short sentence reforms and early release provisions, as the Bill progresses.

We will not vote against the passage of this Bill today, even if we do believe that the Government owe it to this House and, more importantly, to all our constituents and victims of crime to be more honest about the real reasons why this Bill is before us. These are emergency measures dressed up as principled reforms, and the Government’s own failures have forced their hand. We have grave concerns that too many dangerous offenders have been kept in scope for suspended sentences and early release, and that the vital public protection work of our probation service has been overlooked, with potentially disastrous consequences.

We will be pressing the Government in Committee and beyond to ensure that this Bill has a plan for an effective probation service, that they make sentences in the community truly effective and that the courts will in no way be fettered in their ability to send domestic abusers, stalkers and sex offenders to prison, which is exactly where I am sure all of us in this House agree they all belong.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the Chair of the Justice Committee.