Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Selous Excerpts

Tuesday 31st January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

Sentencing guidelines should ensure that those who deserve to go to prison because of the severity of their offence, and those who need to go to prison in order to protect the public properly, do go to prison. Those who get community sentences are graded according to risk. More attention must be paid to those who are near the risk threshold of needing to go to prison rather than those who pose quite a low risk of reoffending. With respect however, I think my hon. Friend is slightly misinterpreting what is called the risk assessment for people on community sentences. People who should go to prison should be sent to prison by the courts, and they are.

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that it is ridiculous that unaccountable managers in the National Offender Management Service can undo all the good work done by probation officers by putting an ex-offender back in prison purely for having been a conscientious employee who was kept on late at work?

[Mr Clarke]

If those are the facts of the case, I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. He is obviously concerned about this case, and if he thinks something has gone badly wrong, I know him well enough to share his concern. I have had a word with the prisons Minister about this case, and we will investigate the facts and come back to him. The events as described obviously should not happen; that is not how the system is supposed to work.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Jonathan Djanogly)]

We have had the Welsh report and are looking at it, but we dispute the figures in it. As I have said on many occasions, when it comes to legal aid, we are concentrating our efforts on helping to deal with domestic violence, and that will be the case following our reforms.

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

T3. Do Ministers share my concerns about the unacceptable burdens placed on small businesses by ambulance-chasing lawyers, who pursue those businesses for spurious claims when they have no right to do so?

[Mr Djanogly]

The Government are taking firm, significant steps to address the burgeoning claims market, which, as my hon. Friend says, particularly encourages low-value claims against businesses and others—claims for which we all end up paying. That is why we are reforming no win, no fee conditional fee agreements and banning referral fees, and why we are countering illegal text advertising and consulting on banning inducement advertising.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Selous Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

7. What steps he is taking to provide relationship skills programmes for prisoners.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Crispin Blunt)]

Currently, commissioning services for offenders is devolved to directors of offender management in the regions and Wales. They are responsible for deciding what services they wish to commission to meet the needs of prisoners in their area. We are examining how reforms to the justice system could enable delivery of more programmes from a broader range of local providers of greater relevance to the many rehabilitation needs of offenders.

[Andrew Selous]

Given that there is a mass of academic evidence from the UK, the US and the Netherlands that strong family relationships reduce reoffending and, therefore, cost to the Minister’s Department, can I ask him to stress that in the Green Paper and when he and his colleagues speak to prison governors?

[Mr Blunt]

I tend to agree with my hon. Friend. We have to get to a position in which those people who are charged with the rehabilitation of offenders have a much freer hand to deliver the interventions that will be effective for the offender who is in their care. If we over-prescribe exactly what has to be done from the centre, we will have a much less effective system. That process will be central to the rehabilitation revolution of delegating responsibility and authority for these decisions to a local level.