Prison Capacity Strategy

Debate between Alex Barros-Curtis and Alex Davies-Jones

Thursday 12th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Alex Barros-Curtis (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker—I was just going to refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am a qualified solicitor, and I am also a member of the Justice Committee under the excellent chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter).

I thank the Minister for the statement and the commitments she has made. I must admit that my head is still spinning from the extraordinary response from the Tories’ spokesperson, the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Dr Mullan), given their absolute failure over the last 14 years to build the prison places that they legislated for, so we will have no more of that hypocrisy.

I welcome the publication of the 10-year prison capacity strategy, which I know the Justice Committee will scrutinise carefully. Concerningly, however, it notes that we could run out of prison spaces by as early as November 2025. Aside from the findings of the independent sentencing review, when they come, what other steps does the Minister anticipate the Department taking to bridge the potential gap in prison places?

[Alex Davies-Jones]

My hon. Friend will know that we are straining every sinew to ensure we get this right. This is a whole-system approach. Justice is a system, and we need every part of it to be working for it to work correctly. My colleague the Prisons Minister in the other place is due to visit Texas to learn from the interesting model there, where offenders earn time off their custodial sentence for good behaviour. Texas has cut crime by a third. We are also looking at new advances in technology to see how they could help. For example, in Singapore artificial intelligence, combined with surveillance cameras, monitors offenders and spots moments that could escalate into violence. That is also being done in the Netherlands. A lot of options are available to us.

The other thing we are doing in the immediate term is increasing the sentencing powers of magistrates courts from six to 12 months’ maximum imprisonment for a single triable either way offence. That will also help us to bear down on the large remand population by ensuring that those on remand are sentenced far more quickly.