Criminal Law

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Shabana Mahmood

Thursday 25th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith and Chiswick) (Lab)]

I am sure that the whole House will be pleased to hear of the safeguards that the Lord Chancellor is putting in place. Is she confident that, by the time the changes to the scheme come into effect, both victim notification and probation—and, indeed, police and accommodation services—will be in a position to pick up those being released?

[Shabana Mahmood]

That is precisely why we have ensured that we have an implementation period for this policy change. That work will continue at pace over the summer, so that the Probation Service has the time to prepare proper release plans for offenders who will be released as a result of the changes and to ensure that all our obligations to victims and the wider public are fulfilled.

Let me also be clear that this change is not permanent. We will review this measure within 18 months of implementation—at the very latest, in March 2026. At that point, we believe that the situation in our prisons will have stabilised and that we will be able to reverse the measure, returning the automatic point of release to 50% of a sentence.

I want to directly address a question raised during the oral statement in the House last week. We have not included a specific sunset clause within the legislation that would end it automatically. We have pledged to be honest about the challenges in our prisons and the changes that we put in place to rise to them; that is a marked difference from the previous Administration’s approach. Given the scale of the crisis that we have inherited, placing an artificial time limit on this measure would be nothing more than an irresponsible gimmick. We have taken the very deliberate decision not to reverse this measure until we are certain that prison capacity has stabilised. The last Government allowed our prisons to fall into crisis. We will not introduce legislation that could force us back there again.

Finally, we will introduce a new, higher standard of transparency. Every quarter, we will publish data on the number of offenders released, and we will make it a statutory requirement for a prison capacity statement to be published annually, introducing that legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows. We are clear that this is the only safe way forward. The House does not have to take my word for it: we have heard senior figures in the police, prisons and probation all warning of what will happen if these measures are not taken. We have even heard my predecessor as Lord Chancellor come out in support of this measure.

Thanks to the action—or rather, inaction—of the last Prime Minister, our predecessors ran the prison estate to within days of disaster. As a result, they were forced to introduce a series of emergency measures, such as Operation Safeguard, which turned police cells into prison overflow, and Operation Early Dawn, a daily triage system that managed the flow of prisoners from police cells to the courts. They even came perilously close to triggering Operation Brinker, which is effectively a one-in, one-out measure in our prisons. It is the very last, desperate act available to forestall, by a matter of days, the total collapse of law and order in this country.

The last Government also introduced the flawed end of custody supervised licence scheme. When this new legislation takes effect, it will be my pleasure to end ECSL. With next to no implementation period, ECSL released offenders with only a few days of warning, and sometimes none at all. That gave the Probation Service no time to assess the risk of offenders, and next to no time to plan how they would be managed safely in the community. This new legislation, with its longer, eight-week implementation period, gives the Probation Service the time that it needs to prepare. The last Government’s early release scheme did not have the same exclusions that this new legislation has. Most notably, it provided no exclusions for offences linked to domestic abuse. That meant no exclusions for stalking, for strangulation, for controlling or coercive behaviour, or for breaches of restraining orders, non-molestation orders and domestic abuse orders, all of which are excluded in the legislation presented to the House today.

Perhaps worst of all, this quick fix was carried out under a veil of secrecy. A number of extensions were made to the scheme, which first released offenders up to 18 days early, then 35 to 60 days early, and finally up to 70 days early. That last extension was implemented without any announcement at all. Throughout, no data was ever published by the previous Government on the numbers released; it fell to this Administration to reveal the true scale of the ECSL scheme. Only now do we know that more than 10,000 offenders were rushed out under that veil of secrecy by the previous Administration.

Our approach will be different. Unlike under the previous Government, those sitting on the Opposition Benches will never have to chase me around this building to get hold of the numbers. The numbers will be put in the public domain for all to see and scrutinise, as they should have been all along. ECSL was one of a series of decisions that this Government believe must be examined more fully. That is why I have announced a review into how this capacity crisis was allowed to happen, which will look at why the necessary decisions were not taken at critical moments. We will shortly be appointing an independent chair for the review, which will conclude by the end of this year.

Let me be clear: the crisis in our prisons is not over. The prison population remains within a few hundred places of collapse. Last week, we temporarily closed HMP Dartmoor, taking around 200 places out of the prison estate. Although we were able to withstand that loss of capacity, any further changes—be they a further loss of supply or an unexpected increase in demand—could tip us into crisis. The measures that I have set out will take effect in September, giving probation officers the precious time they need to prepare. During that time, we will continue to monitor the prison population closely and we will be ready to introduce further emergency measures such as Operation Early Dawn or Operation Safeguard if required.