Oral Answers to Questions

David Heath Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright]

The hon. Lady might be referring to the local adult reoffending rate. The difficulty with that measurement is that it measures reoffending only over a three-month period. It is much more reliable to measure it over a longer period. She has heard me say many times that I recognise that much good work is already being done within the probation service, but that does not mean that there is no case for change. The case for change is that we still have very high reoffending rates, and we think it is necessary to do something about that. Our proposals will do so.

[Mr David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD)]

One of the really bad ideas from the previous Labour Government was the so-called Titan prisons. The Attorney-General, the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) said so, as did the Justice Select Committee, and I might even have said so myself. So will the Secretary of State tell my why that really bad idea might now be considered a good idea?

[Chris Grayling]

We are not building Titan prisons. The proposed new prison in Wrexham, for example, will be a campus prison with a number of separate small units for 250 to 300 prisoners. It will benefit from the economies of scale achieved by shared facilities, but we will not create a single monolithic institution in which people are detained.