Sentencing: Repeat Offenders

Debate between Anthony Mangnall and Alex Cunningham

Tuesday 21st June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for a second time, Sir Gary, despite the 10 years you tell me you have been in the role. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris)—a fellow north-east England MP—on securing the debate. I believe he captured powerfully the frustrations that victims have with a criminal justice system that is crumbling on the Government’s watch. Before I go on, I want to pay tribute to the police, prison officers, probation officers and all the others who work so hard under very difficult circumstances.

My hon. Friend the Member for Easington recognises that the Government are soft on crime and, as he reports from his constituency, are letting criminals off and victims down. He mentioned the ludicrously small fines that offenders are receiving in his constituency and how one offender with a hundred offences ended up with a community service order. I am sure the Minister will want to comment on whether that is appropriate.

The hon. Member for Bury North (James Daly) mentioned that many people receive sentences that simply do not work, and that many simply ignore the courts and get away with it. According to Labour’s research, the number of uncollected court fines has now reached £1.2 billion in the last five years, and that includes more than £50 million of unpaid compensation due to victims directly. Can the Minister tell us what he is doing to collect some of that money? A billion pounds would be enough to pay the salaries of more than 19,000 additional police officers—not far shy of the number of officers that the Government have cut. I know that the Government plan to replace them and that some progress is being made. I welcome that, but we are in a situation where we are replacing experienced officers with inexperienced officers. Nevertheless, the Minister will be pleased to know that my nephew, Lewis Cunningham, is going to be one of those new police officers when he starts working for the Yorkshire force in the autumn.

The public rightly feel that the police are no longer visible on their streets. That is why we would try to put this right with our community police hubs. Some of those officers would also play a crucial role in our new neighbourhood prevention teams, bringing together community support officers, youth workers and council staff to tackle the causes of repeat antisocial behaviour currently blighting our communities. My hon. Friend the Member for Easington is right that being tough on crime and on the causes of crime is as valid now as it was during the days of the last Labour Government. It was nice to hear the hon. Member for Bury North celebrate his full employment under the last Labour Government, when we had a fully resourced and proper justice system. The policies we have announced in this Parliament show that our party is still committed to those guiding principles.

However, it is not just in the detection of repeat crime that the Government are letting victims and communities down; it is also in effective sentencing that properly acts as a deterrent, a prison system that properly rehabilitates defenders and a probation system that properly protects the public by reducing reoffending in communities themselves.

We have heard some positive things about prisons. The hon. Member for Warrington South (Andy Carter) mentioned the importance of education in the prison system and where it can work well. My own home prison in Stockton, Holme House Prison, does it best and has some fantastic facilities, yet even there prisoners are still spending far too long in their cells and are not really making full use of the facilities available to them.

What do we have? Under this Government, our prisons have become colleges of criminality. Repeat offenders, many of them on short sentences, leave prisons more addicted to drugs than they were when they entered, because prison drug abuse is up an astonishing 500% since 2010. Despite that, there has been only a fractional increase in the number of mandatory drug tests, so addiction grows. Drugs are rife in prison because the detection of contraband is so poor.

The Ministry of Justice is especially wasteful at times; it has thrown £140 million of taxpayers’ money down the drain in the past year. That includes £6 million on prison drug scanners that are picking up on average only 12 items of contraband each month because they are used so sparingly. They are not really a waste of money; if they were being used effectively and on a daily basis, we would be in a stronger position. It is no surprise that addiction causes problems in communities after prisoners are released if they are not accessing the types of rehabilitative programmes that they need while in custody. The number of NHS alcohol and drug treatment programmes started by inmates fell dramatically between 2015 and 2020, with 7,000 fewer places taken up.

The hon. Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) talked about rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is the answer, but it needs to be properly resourced. Reoffending in our communities can only be stopped by making prisons work. A Labour Government would do that by putting a greater focus on rehabilitation and ending the explosion in drug use, which fuels further crime when inmates re-enter society.

[Anthony Mangnall]

Going back to the point about the resources put into rehabilitation, the hon. Gentleman is right up to a point, but the private sector also plays a significant role in preventing reoffending. Does the hon. Gentleman see that there has to be a bit of quid pro quo from both the private and public sectors on this issue?

[Alex Cunningham]

I agree. I think employers should play a greater role in prisons and we should encourage more of them in. However, we need to provide the right environment for employers. Many years ago I was employed by National Grid, which had a scheme working in partnership with prisons—I think forklift truck drivers were the main output from one prison in the south. Those people did not reoffend—or very few of them did—because they worked with the employer while they were still in prison, they had day release into the workplace and then they got a job afterwards. That is the real answer: education followed by a job.

We know that community service sentences have enormous potential for reducing reoffending as an alternative to short prison sentences, which, under this Government, only entrench offending behaviours. A large body of evidence suggests that community orders are more effective in reducing reoffending than short sentences. Under this Government, community sentences are being set up to fail because the Government do not seem to care about stopping repeat offending at source.

The number of hours of community service was falling significantly even before the pandemic, but has now fallen to less than 1.5 million, from over 5 million five years ago. Public trust in community sentences is flagging because those schemes have stopped being seen to be viable. The number of offenders completing a community sentence has fallen by a quarter in the past five years because offenders are breaching the terms of their sentences, often by not turning up.

Labour has proposed a better way forward. The public need to see that justice is being done in their communities. That is precisely what Labour’s community and victim payback boards would do, by providing publicly available data on the work that offenders are doing, determined by the communities and victims affected. We have put the victims of crime and the communities blighted by it at the centre of unpaid work schemes through existing safer neighbourhood boards. Another reason for the failure of community sentences, particularly where repeat offenders are concerned, is down to the fact that judges no longer trust that they will be delivered. The fault with that lies in the problems experienced by the probation service, which this Government have created with the service’s disastrous privatisation in 2014.