Sentencing: Repeat Offenders

Debate between Andy Carter and Anthony Mangnall

Tuesday 21st June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

You will wish you had not said that, Sir Gary, but thank you for chairing this debate. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

It is welcome that the Government have committed to 20,000 new police officers and that we are on target to meet that number. It is interesting that in areas like ours, Sir Gary, such as the South Hams, we have 170 new officers and are due 217 more by the end of 2024, which we are also on target to meet. We have local initiatives such as the councillor advocates scheme, set up by our police and crime commissioner, Alison Hernandez, that help local parishes engage with the police to ensure better representation and visibility and a better ability to disrupt crime networks. Such structures will make a difference and, hopefully, alleviate the problems of crime in rural areas.

[Andy Carter]

We have similar experiences in Cheshire. The police and crime commissioner, John Dwyer, reported just this week that Cheshire is in line to have more officers than ever before in the history of the force by the end of March—a commitment that the Government made and are delivering on. Does my hon. Friend accept that although we often hear about having more police on the beat, many crimes are committed online and behind closed doors? The real value of having forensic investigators working behind the scenes is paying off with higher arrest rates, particularly in areas such as child exploitation.

[Anthony Mangnall]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The nature of policing has changed and we have to be clear about how we tackle crime. I do not expect to see as many officers on foot patrol, but I expect to see more of them driving about. Sir Gary, you did say that this debate is about sentencing, so I will get back to that topic. First, it is about crime prevention, and secondly—the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) touched on this—it is about people who repeatedly commit crimes and find themselves with unduly lenient sentences, such as his constituent.

It is not for Members of Parliament to stand in this place and decide what a sentence should be, but perhaps the Minister will clarify what the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act will do to enhance sentencing, because our understanding was that we would have the opportunity to be more stringent when it comes to those who repeatedly commit crimes. I do not want to take up a significant amount of time, but I do want to talk about one way in which we can deal with repeat offenders, which is rehabilitation.

There are three programmes that are relevant to where we are from, Sir Gary. The first is LandWorks, a local organisation in south Devon that works with those who are at risk of going to prison or are coming out of prison and likely to reoffend. It does it in three ways: engagement through a market garden, through pottery and through woodwork. It is a hand-holding exercise for those leaving prison to ensure that, from leaving prison to re-entering society, there is an opportunity to help them to re-enter and ensure that recidivism is not just something that we presume will happen.

I have visited LandWorks and I have asked the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), to visit. The Minister answering the debate today is of course welcome anytime in south Devon—it is amazing how many Ministers want to come down over the summer, so he could take a quick holiday and a jaunt to that extraordinary organisation that works to reduce reoffending. It helps the police and the Prison Service, who feel helpless, by ensuring that we do not have more and more prisoners going back in. As a Conservative, I believe passionately that we should have a tough stance on crime but I also believe that the purpose of prisons is rehabilitation and that people deserve a second chance, so we have to find a balance between those two positions.

The second group I will reference is Pathfinder, which has been launched with the police. It is an evidence-based intervention that reduces harm and reoffending and can hold offenders to account for their actions. The scheme integrates offenders and the police, so that they can work together to ensure that offenders do not go down the predicted path of reoffending and are held to account through targets and checklists that they must fulfil. Strict adherence to the programme is already showing some successes.

The third initiative is NHS Reconnect. I recently met someone who was working intimately with the NHS Reconnect service who made the point that after they had left prison they never thought they would be able to get a job in something as big and as brilliant as the NHS. NHS Reconnect is the perfect example to show, as my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (Andy Carter) said, how businesses and public organisations and institutions can play a role. If we can help offenders to find a way into those schemes and structures, we can divert them from the predicted course, and that is where we have to focus.

Using those three initiatives—Landworks, Pathfinder and NHS Reconnect—we have the opportunity to disrupt the chain, the concept and the belief that reoffending is the natural course after leaving the prison system. The statistics accurately prove that crime in our part of the country is going down; I am sorry to keep referring to south Devon but, anecdotally, I am sure there are similar examples across the country, and in fact the statistics prove that. With the police and others coming up with innovative schemes, such as the councillor advocate scheme, we have a way to disrupt.

Planning for the Future

Debate between Andy Carter and Anthony Mangnall

Tuesday 15th December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. I congratulate the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) on securing this debate. We appear to have a bit of a zoning theme in the way that this debate has been scheduled. We have had the south-west and we are in the north now. Now we are up north, we will talk proper and get this debate sorted.

I am sure most of us in this place will agree that our planning system has been in need of urgent reform for some time; the disagreement is about how we actually do that. The speed at which we need to level up and the changes we need to see—the changes that voters backed a year ago—mean that we need to start to do things differently. Many of the issues that are relevant today—the technologies we use and the way we live our lives—have evolved, and that needs to be reflected in planning legislation. There is no doubt our planning system is far too complicated, driven in part by the litigious nature of developers, and that has been a barrier to building the homes people need to see and getting them in the right places.

That is exactly the case in Warrington, where the borough council has spent the past five years producing a plan, largely ignoring 4,000 responses to consultations, and still we have no plan available for inspectors to review. We are now told we will not have one until at least the summer of next year.

Many of the proposals put forward by the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government back in August are a welcome step. They lay the foundations for a brighter future. It is about providing affordable homes for young people and creating a better quality of neighbourhood right across the country, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) said, it is also about getting the detail right in the legislation. That is why I am so pleased we have the consultation at this stage, so we can bring those issues forward to the Minister to address.

I want to reflect on the proposed submission version of the Warrington local plan, which expected growth above anything previously achieved, with little evidence to support that expectation. To me, that highlights why we need some of these changes. The scale of new development being proposed in Warrington meant that large areas of the green belt, particularly across my constituency of Warrington South, were to be released for development. That is where the current Labour local council plan gets it so wrong. It concentrated on placing new development on the green belt and previously undeveloped sites, rather than providing for regeneration and redevelopment of a town centre massively impacted by years of neglect. While the council needed to reflect Government requirements for the assessment of the number of new homes to be built, the figure they used in the PSV exceeded all national requirements and proposes housebuilding at a level never, ever previously achieved in Warrington.

The plan does not address more obvious housing needs, but instead proposes large new suburbs and urban extensions, and there is no clear plan as to how developers would be required to deliver the type of housing in the right places of the town that would most benefit existing residents. In short, the number of homes does not make sense, but the location of the new houses is even less understandable.

Frustratingly, the largest brownfield site in Warrington—one of the largest brownfield sites in the north-west of England—the Fiddler’s Ferry power station, which closed earlier this year, has not been included in a plan that extends for the next 20 years. It even has its own rail line, which would satisfy some of the issues that we need to address in how we move around the country. It would allow us to retain some of the green belt, but it has not been considered.

On the back of the planning reforms, I am pleased to see that Warrington borough council will be pausing its work on the local plan, looking again at the homes we need and making a fresh assessment of the opportunity to redevelop our town centre and use brownfield sites. I have a request for the Minister: can we have some clarity soon on the housing numbers? The proposal in the White Paper will actually reduce the number of homes being built in Warrington, so I am perhaps one of the few people in this place who really like the algorithm—it is doing the right thing, and I thank the Minister.

[Anthony Mangnall]

I particularly welcome my hon. Friend’s making that point. It is the understanding that building houses in the right places is the most suitable point to go back to our constituents with. Does my hon. Friend agree?

[Andy Carter]

Absolutely. It is about getting the right types of homes in the right places. Land designated for growth will allow new homes, schools, shops and hospitals to be built quickly, and we need that levelling up to happen urgently. Getting the right places is the most important thing.

The hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), and I think also the hon. Member for Richmond Park, talked about how local councils are best placed to try to work these things through. I have to say that is not the case in Warrington. The local Labour council ignored all the Liberal Democrat councillors, who argued that it was building in the wrong places. I am afraid that the very simple system that we have at the moment is broken and needs to be fixed.

I welcome the new planning system. There are a lot of good elements in the proposals, but it will come down to the detail. I look forward to continuing the conversation with the Minister, who has been so good in responding to the issues that have been raised with him.