Prisons and Courts Bill

Debate between Andrew Selous and Kate Green

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 20th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Selous]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. I have met Jim Davidson on a number of occasions, and I thoroughly commend the work of Care after Combat throughout the Prison Service.

Family work, which brings prisoners face to face with their enduring responsibilities to their families who are left in the community, is indispensable to the rehabilitation culture that we urgently need to develop in our penal system. I welcome the commitment by the Ministry of Justice to measuring the quality of prisoners’ relationships. At a very practical level, we know that enduring family relationships lead to many prisoners being able to access on release family accommodation that would be unavailable to them if those relationships had broken down.

[Kate Green]

There is a huge amount of consensus this evening about maintaining prisoners’ family relationships. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that a corollary of that is that family contact should not be removed as a penalty where other forms of sanction are available? It is unfair to the family members and it defeats the object, which he and others have talked about, of maintaining prisoners’ contact with their families.

[Andrew Selous]

I share the sentiments expressed by the hon. Lady, and my instincts are with hers. I have talked extensively to prison officers about the issue, and on occasions they have a relatively limited number of levers that they can use. I am with the hon. Lady, however. Family relationships are really important, and they are often powerful forces for good that can help prison officers to achieve what they are trying to achieve.

Accommodation is the base camp of rehabilitation, and we are unlikely to make any progress without it. It is concerning that some local authorities are, frankly, discriminatory towards ex-offenders. Ex-offenders should not be given preferential treatment, but neither should they be treated worse than others who seek accommodation.

I hope that Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, as it will be called from 1 April, will look at the cost of prisoners phoning home. Many prisoners have mobile phones so that they can speak to their wives, husbands, partners and children. We need to make sure that prisoners have good access, for legitimate use, to affordable prison telephones. I am also a fan of the prison voicemail initiative, which is spreading in our prisons. A daughter managed to leave a message of her first violin piece for her father to hear on a prison voicemail, for example.

Gypsies and Travellers

Debate between Andrew Selous and Kate Green

Wednesday 12th October 2016 Commons Chamber

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

I am grateful to colleagues who have stayed and I will be more than happy to take interventions.

On the sunny morning of 26 May this year, an eight-year-old boy climbed over the fence of a Traveller site in my constituency to chat to the Minister’s predecessor, Baroness Susan Williams, a local farmer whose land we were on, and to me. He was a delightful boy, but his prospects are destined to be much less good than many children of his age. A 2014 report from the Office for National Statistics shows that he is far less likely to gain any qualifications compared with the rest of the population, is more likely to be out of work and is likely to have worse health. The report found that 60% of adult Travellers had no qualifications, compared with 23% for the rest of the country, and that 20% were unemployed compared to 7% for the national population.

In 2016, in the fifth-richest nation in the world, this boy was living on a site with no proper sewerage system and no legal water supply, and he had not been in school for several weeks despite the best efforts of the local authority. I also question the quality of home schooling provided by parents who have themselves low levels of educational attainment.

The site he lives on has had three major incidents of modern slavery, a recent murder, frequent fighting between different Traveller groups, and significant sub-letting of pitches to vulnerable groups and some east Europeans in often the most atrocious of conditions. I do not believe that our current Traveller policy is in the best interests of that young boy and that is one reason why I am calling for the Department for Communities and Local Government to undertake a complete review of legislation affecting planning, law enforcement and housing allocation for Travellers.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, this is a subject that deeply concerns me, as it does him. He is right to talk about the need for a cross-governmental review. Would he include in that list the Department for Education? As he rightly says, the educational outcomes for those children are very poor. Too often, because schools do not meet their needs, they end up with substandard home schooling.

[Andrew Selous]

I most certainly would, and the Home Office needs to be engaged as well.

The settled residents of my constituency have had a very difficult summer and it is no exaggeration to say that many are living in fear. One local farmer has had four fires on his land started by Travellers, and he has had to employ a student to walk in front of his combine harvester to pick up all the metal and other items fly-tipped on to it by Travellers.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Andrew Selous and Kate Green

Tuesday 23rd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

The prison service is housing an increasing number of older prisoners. What steps are being taken to rehabilitate prisoners who are too old or too ill to work?

[Andrew Selous]

We cannot require older prisoners to work, but I would certainly want those opportunities to be available to older prisoners, just as they are to many older people in society who want to carry on working. All our educational opportunities are, of course, open to older prisoners. We recognise the challenge, which the hon. Lady rightly raises, of an increasingly elderly prison population.