Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Chapman of Darlington Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

The guarantee I can give the hon. Gentleman’s constituents is that we are not removing the people who are doing the job at the moment. We are freeing them operationally to innovate, and we are bringing new skills to the task of rehabilitating offenders. A much greater danger to his constituents would be to do nothing, and to leave all those thousands of offenders with no support or supervision, walking the streets, including in his constituency, and able to commit more crimes.

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

The fact is that the Secretary of State has had to delay his plans already. His work force are going out on strike, he has a payment-by-results model that pays regardless of results, and 200,000 offenders do not know who will be supervising them. Has he not become so enamoured of his project that he can no longer see, let alone deal with, its many serious flaws?

[Chris Grayling]

What a load of complete nonsense! The reality is that the Opposition have no idea how to deal with the problem of reoffending. They are in opposition, and we are now less than a year away from a general election, yet I have not the slightest idea of what they would do in our place. I am not prepared to allow a situation to continue in which people are left to walk the streets with no post-prison supervision, resulting in thousands of them reoffending, when we know from the experience of the pilot that we set up in Peterborough that mentoring those offenders can bring down crime significantly.