Better Prisons: Less Crime (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Baroness Bertin Excerpts

Thursday 12th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bertin (Con)]

It is a real honour to follow my noble friend Lady Davies of Devonport. I congratulate her on a thoughtful and brilliant first speech, a story of such determination and resilience. She was a total hero of mine growing up—I am trying not to be too starstruck—and a huge inspiration to me and so many young girls, at a time when mentors in the sporting world were in pretty short supply. She was someone we could all relate to, and she came across as incredibly kind and encouraging. She was, and remains, a remarkable sportswoman. Let us just take a moment: she swam for Britain aged 11—I had barely got myself to school on my own at that age. It is a huge testament to the support she had from her family, and I heard her tribute to her mother and father. At 14, she won two European bronze medals and, aged 15, she won two Commonwealth gold medals. Her astonishing form continued, and she went on to win silver in the Moscow Olympics, although we know it should have been gold. She became an even bigger household name when she burst on to our TV screens. As a dedicated TV addict in those days, I basically spent the first 18 years of my life watching her on TV. She was either commentating brilliantly on key sporting events, appearing on “A Question of Sport”, presenting “Big Brother” or absolutely nailing her opponents as a Gladiator. She was a staple in my life. She is a mother, a grandmother, a committed campaigner for so many charities, a skilled equestrian—I could go on, but all noble Lords need to know is that she is superhuman.

However, perhaps most importantly, she is brave and campaigns courageously for women’s rights in sport, at considerable personal cost and risk to herself. She spoke out at a time when few people were brave enough to make the common-sense case that it was unfair on women to have to compete against transgender women in sport. I know that many young women in elite sport, and more generally, are incredibly grateful to her for this. She is brave, determined, hard-working and full of integrity. We need more of this in our politics, so I and many others are delighted that she joins us in this Chamber. I look forward to working with her—and maybe even working out with her, but I am not sure I am brave enough to do that. I know she will make powerful contributions, and she has already shown real leadership.

I also welcome the other four new Peers to this House. We have heard some amazing speeches already, and I look forward to working with them. We are at our best when we are cross-party, so I am sure there are lots of conversations to be had over the years. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for his amazing leadership and the team, particularly Alex South on the committee. I have been on committees that have produced many reports, but this has been a particularly powerful one.

Speaking of bravery, I want to begin by recognising the courage of our prison staff across this country. They rarely get that acknowledgement, and the Prison Service medal is the least we can do. They are on the front line. On the point the noble Lords, Lord Foster and Lord Hogan-Howe, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, made so powerfully about recruitment, it is absurd that we are recruiting in this way. It is such an important and difficult job. You cannot possibly be recruited as a prison officer, potentially having never stepped into a prison before. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, said it is insanity writ large, and it is. I remember the first time I went into a prison—although admittedly, I was eight months pregnant; do not ask what I was doing, heaving myself around Wormwood Scrubs. You can either do it or you cannot: it is a pretty shocking experience once those doors close and you see the reality of being inside a prison. It is no good for the staff or those in the prison, because when it becomes clear that someone is not right for the job, people start to worry a great deal about their safety, and rightly so. The whole thing potentially starts to fall apart quite quickly. The committee is unequivocal that our prisons are in a state of crisis. They remain overcrowded, under-resourced and unable to provide the conditions necessary for rehabilitation that so many of us have spoken about.

This overcrowding has many problems, about which noble Lords have spoken very eloquently. Low-level offenders are frequently housed in close proximity to more serious criminals. When we went to Belmarsh, which other Peers have spoken about a great deal, I talked to one inmate who said, “I came in because I robbed Tesco, but I’m leaving knowing how to rob a bank”. He was half joking, but that is the reality. The committee noted that overcrowding, poor conditions and a lack of purposeful activity create circumstances in which criminals become far more hardened rather than helped. When the cells are full, the staff are stretched, and gangs operate with impunity.

It struck me, on the several occasions I have been into prisons, that a lot of the classrooms and workshops are completely empty, either because there has been a big security problem or because the logistics of moving these guys around are incredibly challenging, especially if there are gangs being placed in the same prison. It is just an impossibility. There may be provisions for education, but quite often, with the greatest will in the world, you cannot get people out of the cells and into the places to do the learning. That is a massive problem.

On employment, the reason why I was in Wormwood Scrubs when I was eight months pregnant was because I worked for BT at the time, which was trying to recruit. My friend, the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, obviously knows a great deal about this, and I praise his work on it. It was not and is not straightforward, and far more work needs to be done on the programmes that help prisoners gain real work experience to make sure there is a real, meaningful connection with local employers that helps drive what they want from people leaving prisons, so that they can them give them meaningful employment about which there is a sense that it could potentially lead to something, rather than just being an activity for the sake of it that does not really take them anywhere. That is very important to get right.

Many others have also mentioned the urgent need for clarity of purpose within the prison system. The committee calls on the Ministry of Justice to enshrine reducing reoffending as the statutory aim of prisons. Rehabilitation is not an alternative to justice; it is essential to it. Being in prison is the punishment. What follows must be about equipping individuals to return to society as stable, contributing citizens.

I have one final point, raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, on tagging. If electronic monitoring and tagging are to be an answer to early release then there are some big problems to be addressed in the back office and in its organisation if it is going to be rolled out at any great scale effectively. I make one very small, urgent plea: when there is a lack of faith in that system, such as survivors of domestic abuse being absolutely terrified when they know their perpetrators are coming out of jail, it is vital to get the electronic tagging system under proper control, if it is an approach we are going to take.