Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Andrew Selous and Dominic Raab

Tuesday 21st February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dominic Raab]

We published our response to the Bellamy review and the criminal legal aid independent review, and indeed are already implementing those reforms. They include uplifts of 15% to most legal aid fee schemes, which is very significant given the current context of public sector pay challenges. The hon. Gentleman needs to put this in some kind of perspective: just to give one aspect, criminal legal aid spend is expected to be £1.2 billion a year, so we are doing the right thing to make sure we support the most vulnerable who need access to legal aid and to the courts.

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

T6. We have an excellent target—up in lights—of recruiting 20,000 more police officers, but prison officers can appear to be out of sight and out of mind. These are brave men and women who regularly get assaulted. What are we doing on prison officer recruitment and retention?

[Dominic Raab]

I thank my hon. Friend and pay tribute to him for the work he did as Prisons Minister—I remember it, because I was a junior Minister in the Department at the same time. He is absolutely right about the value of prison officers, and how they are out of sight and out of mind; people do not bang pots and pans for them in the same way they do for other public servants, but we should take every opportunity to sing their praises.

To answer my hon. Friend’s specific question, between the end of 2016 and 2022, the number of full-time prison officers increased by 3,677 to 21,632. That shows that the recruitment programme is bearing fruit.

Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime

Debate between Andrew Selous and Dominic Raab

Monday 6th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dominic Raab]

I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman’s advocacy and tireless campaigning on behalf of his constituent. Of course we want to secure his release from the Houthis. The hon. Gentleman rather smartly wove in the non-state actor element of these regimes. That is important, because this is not just about perpetrators who come from arms of the state: there are a lot of other people out there, whether from militia, armed groups, various organisations or organised crime, who are aiding and abetting and supporting these human rights abuses, and we need to target all of them.

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

I particularly welcome the reference to the hundreds of thousands of people who perished in the gulags of North Korea—a country about which we learn very little from television reports or social media posts. In his statement, the Foreign Secretary mentions organisations rather than individuals in respect of North Korea. What are we going to do to publicise the names of the individuals responsible for these heinous crimes, in North Korea and globally?

[Dominic Raab]

Part of the problem in North Korea, as we discussed earlier, is the clandestine nature of the decision-making process. However, my hon. Friend is right that we would certainly now be able and willing to proceed to name and designate any individuals. The two organisations that we are designating are bureau 27 of the Ministry of State Security, which oversees the political prison camps, and the Ministry of Public Security’s correctional bureau, which oversees the ordinary prison camps—both ghastly in their own right.