Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Alex Davies-Jones and Neil Shastri-Hurst(3 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Alex Davies-Jones
May I put on the record my sincere gratitude to the WomenCentre for doing all it can to support the victims of these crimes? Support services are a vital element of ensuring that victims and witnesses engage with the criminal justice system, and are kept informed about the uptake of their trial. We have ringfenced funding to protect these special support services. We are currently going through the allocations process to ensure that we have support services at the front of our minds, and I will be happy to keep my hon. Friend updated as that comes forward.
Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst (Solihull West and Shirley) (Con)
In July this year, alongside a cross-party group of parliamentarians and others, I wrote to the then Lord Chancellor seeking a meeting regarding improving gatekeeping and alternative dispute resolution in family court matters. I have not received a response. Can the Lord Chancellor give me the reassurance that such a meeting will take place?
Prison Capacity Strategy
Debate between Alex Davies-Jones and Neil Shastri-Hurst(9 months, 4 weeks ago)
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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.
Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst (Solihull West and Shirley) (Con)
This strategy does little more than commit to deliver the 14,000 places that the previous Government committed to delivering, except that it will cost more and take longer. To what extent have the Government factored in optimism bias when working out the delivery timeframe?
Alex Davies-Jones
Honestly, the display from the Conservative party is staggering given the inheritance we were left with, and there is still no humility whatsoever. We have published a realistic strategy for how we plan to deliver this, with contingency timelines built in, offering real solutions. As I said, this is less of the rhetoric than we got from the Conservative party, and more actual action on delivering these places. You failed to build—[Interruption.] The Conservative party failed to build these places, but we are going to deliver them.