Prison Overcrowding

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that the proportion of positive drug tests in our prisons has fallen sharply in recent years; that is to be encouraged. I am confident that Oakwood’s upcoming inspection report will show a significant improvement. The hon. Gentleman is, of course, a Welsh MP; one of the Welsh prisons—Parc, a large new prison that had some teething problems—has turned into one of the best performing prisons in the estate. I am confident that the same thing will happen to Oakwood.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend should be commended on the energetic way that he, in an unprotected Department, has sought to contribute to meeting the Government’s wider economic objectives. He is entirely right that the overcrowding crisis was inherited in 2010, but is it not about time that we started thinking about the long term—about addressing the issue of the 20,000 prisoners who are in overcrowded conditions—and began to look properly at reconstituting a privatisation programme, so that we can have better-manned prisons with more efficiency for the taxpayer?

[Chris Grayling]

The approach that we have taken on privatisation has been to privatise individual services in the way that was recommended by the Prison Governors Association, because we needed to drive through savings quickly across the whole estate, rather than across part of it, but my hon. Friend’s point is sensible. I do not want a prison population the size of the one we have, but nor do I ever want a court to be unable to send an offender to prison when it believes that it should do so. That is why our rehabilitation strategy is so important. The way we will bring down the population of our prison estate is by preventing people from coming back to it, rather than by not locking them up in the first place.