Criminal Law

Bambos Charalambous Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Bambos Charalambous (Southgate and Wood Green) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I congratulate you on your election and welcome you to your place as Deputy Speaker.

I welcome this motion from my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor, who is taking the only realistic action open to her to deal with the critical issue of prison capacity, with our prisons projected to be overflowing by September. This is another failure by the former Conservative Government, the result of their continuously kicking the can down the road, rather than dealing with the issues at hand.

The current situation cannot come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the developments in criminal justice over the past 14 years. Prior to the election being called, I had the pleasure of serving for a second time on the Justice Committee, and on 22 May this year, in one of his last statements as Chair of the Committee, Sir Bob Neill KC said that

“Prisons are simply running out of space. My committee has long since warned of the dangers of successive Governments ignoring the rise in jail numbers, set against a workforce recruitment and retention crisis and a crumbling Victorian prison estate. Ministers and society must be prepared to invest in prison capacity and proper rehabilitation programmes as the current situation is unsustainable”.

That is the Conservative former Chair of the Justice Committee speaking. The warning signs were there a long time ago, but the failure to invest has meant that we are now reaping this bitter harvest. I welcome the prison building programme and the renewal programme mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor, but in addition to the measures proposed in this motion, I would like to suggest some further measures that may reduce the prison population over a longer term.

The first measure is addressing court delays. In its report “Reducing the backlog in the Crown Court”, published in May this year, the National Audit Office found that at the end of December 2023, the outstanding Crown court caseload was 65,573, and 18,000 of those cases had been outstanding for a year or more. It also found that it took an average of 683 days from offence to completion of a case in the Crown court, and that a staggering 16,005 people were on remand as of the end of December 2023. One third were awaiting sentencing, and the remaining two thirds were awaiting trial. The remand population is the highest it has been in over 50 years. Those figures are truly shocking, and the issue of remand prisoners needs to be addressed urgently. The maxim that justice delayed is justice denied is certainly apt, and we should remember that delays in cases going to trial also have adverse impacts on the victims and witnesses.

One of the causes of the delay is a shortage of criminal barristers and duty solicitors, whose numbers have been in decline since 2018. In part, that has been due to a serious under-investment in our criminal justice system over the past two decades. I hope that we will soon see the investment we need in the criminal justice system from this Government. On court dates and the listing of trials, I very much hope that His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service gets smarter in how it uses time and space for court hearings.

The second point I wish to make is about reoffending, an issue that my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor has touched on. According the Ministry of Justice’s own figures from the last quarter for which stats are available, 33.4% of adults released from custody will go on to reoffend. That figure is way too high. As reoffending is so high, it should come as no surprise that a large number of people are being remanded for non-violent offences due to their repeat offending. Many of those repeat offenders will have underlying vulnerabilities, such as drug abuse, homelessness and mental health issues, which will not have been properly addressed. Unless there is a co-ordinated approach to tackling the causes of reoffending, we will see this endless revolving-door cycle in our criminal justice system that gives courts no option but to remand repeat offenders into custody. I know that my right hon. Friend is serious about taking action to address those issues, and I ask her to co-ordinate work with other Departments to help stop reoffending.

The final point I wish to focus on is imprisonment for public protection prisoners, who account for approximately 3,000 of the prisoners in our prisons. In its report on IPP prisoners, the Justice Committee said that

“Our primary recommendation is that the Government brings forward legislation to enable a resentencing exercise in relation to all IPP sentenced individuals…This is the only way to address the unique injustice caused by the IPP sentence and its subsequent administration, and to restore proportionality to the original sentences that were given.”

On previous occasions, I have made the point that dealing with IPP prisoners who have spent more time in prison than they should have would not only help reduce the prison population, but would right a wrong.

In conclusion, I very much welcome this motion as a short-term measure to deal with the overcrowding in our prisons. I also welcome my right hon. Friend’s commitment to an annual prison capacity statement, which will allow us to see what effect this measure and other measures have on the prison population. In addition to building more prisons, we need an investment in our criminal justice system, and greater recruitment and retention of barristers, solicitors, prison officers and probation officers. I was delighted to hear that my right hon. Friend has committed to recruiting 1,000 more probation officers. That will certainly help to address issues that arise among people who are on licence after serving half of their sentence. We need to clear the backlog of cases in the Crown court to allow remand prisoners to be dealt with sooner, and we also need to address the root causes of both offending and reoffending. Finally, we need to deal with IPP prisoners, and see what can be done to release those who are over tariff.

I hope that the motion will pass today; it is a very good start to tackling the Gordian knot that we face. Still more work needs to be done, but I have every confidence that the Lord Chancellor and her team will deliver.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Ghani)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.