Criminal Law

Caroline Johnson Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is talking about reoffending rates. May I remind him that the reoffending rate for young males under the last Labour Government was 70%?

[Imran Hussain]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her intervention, but the fact of the matter is that in the last 10 years, this Government have enacted policies that at best ignore the impact on public safety, and at worst actively undermine it. Cuts to the police service have led to frontline police officer numbers being slashed and to forces being under-resourced elsewhere. My police force in West Yorkshire has had its budget cut by £140 million since 2010. We have seen cuts to the Prison Service; prison officer numbers have fallen by a quarter between 2010 and 2015, which has left many of our prisons—including high-security prisons—being staffed by inexperienced officers. We have seen an ill-advised decision to break up the probation service, with catastrophic consequences—something that the whole House now accepts—and just days ago, we were found to be leaving the public less safe as a result of under-staffing and overloading with casework.

Prosecution and conviction rates for serious offences have stalled. That has been driven by these cuts to important services that work to keep reoffending down and the public safe. Most alarmingly, prosecution and conviction rates for the offence of rape have fallen by 32% and 26% respectively in a year, creating a situation that women’s groups say effectively amounts to the decriminalisation of rape. Reoffending rates across the whole range of offences remain stubbornly high, with proven reoffending rates for sexual offences fluctuating at about 14% between 2006-07 and 2016-17. The figures for violence against the person offences have increased from 20% to 26%.

Under this Government, the public are less safe. Faced with such a record, we and the public should rightly be sceptical when the Government talk about cutting crime and keeping the public safe. To try to correct their abysmal record and create an impression that they are tough on crime, the Government have brought forward this order, but even they know that it will not be enough to overturn the problems that they have created. Taken on its own, it will increase neither public confidence nor public safety, and it is far from the silver bullet that the Prime Minister would like to praise it as being.

Throughout this process, the Government have consistently failed to make the case for the order and its implementation. As their own impact assessment and explanatory note point out, judges already have powers akin to the ones set out in this order for dangerous offenders. They have the ability to hand down extended determinate sentences, which not only require an offender to serve longer in custody, but are subject to the double lock of the requirement that the parole board be satisfied the offender is no longer a danger to the public before they are released. Conveniently for the Government, however, Ministers seem to have been remiss in telling the public about that when talking about the action they are taking.

Instead of the Government bringing in such measures without properly making the case for them, and without showing evidence that supports their proposal, they should get serious and tell us how they will reduce the rampant overcrowding and violence in our prisons; how they will increase the quality and availability of real, purposeful activity both in prisons and in the community; how they will deliver an effective probation service that is not hampered by the Government’s failed privatisation agenda, which has proven so disastrous; and for non-violent and non-sexual offenders, how they will deal with the number of ineffective super-short sentences that their own evidence, in the report the Ministry of Justice published last year, shows lead to more people becoming victims of crime than if effective alternatives were used. The Minister accepted that earlier.