Lord Hanson of Flint
Main Page: Lord Hanson of Flint (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Hanson of Flint's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(10 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberUrgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
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This is what baffles me about the Opposition’s questions and challenges over this issue, because I am precisely not letting out people who should be in prison. I am simply taking sensible precautions to bring on additional capacity. I have to say that if prisoners have to share a cell, I do not regard it as a great problem. I think that the courts should be able to send people to prison if they want to, as does my hon. Friend.
In early 2010, when the Prime Minister first took office, he promised to take an axe to the number of foreign national prisoners in prisons. The figure then was 11,135. Will the Secretary of State tell me what progress has been made, because by my calculations, the number has reduced by about 40 a year?
The figure is, of course, now coming down. It is lower than it was when we took office, and it is roughly proportionate to the number of people in the population who were not born in the UK. We have to bear in mind that one of the reasons why we have a high proportion of foreign national offenders in our jails is that when the Labour party was in government it had a reckless policy on the number of people allowed to migrate to this country.