Diana Johnson
Main Page: Diana Johnson (Labour - Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham)Department Debates - View all Diana Johnson's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(5 years, 7 months ago)
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Urgent 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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Rory Stewart
I pay tribute to Care after Combat’s work, and the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), and I have met the organisation on several occasions. Unfortunately, as my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Tom Pursglove) will know, when we have a £700 million underspend in the Department, that does not necessarily mean that we have £700 million available to spend on anything we like.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
Following the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner), is not the real lesson from all this that the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) should not be allowed anywhere near any large-scale, transformative Government projects or, indeed, near any projects, as the House will hear during the next urgent question?
Rory Stewart
No. Respectfully, that is not the fundamental lesson here. The lesson is that reducing reoffending is very complicated. The reoffending rate has been static across the developed world for nearly 50 years, and addressing that involves changing the lives of some of the most challenged individuals in society, dealing with their housing, their education and their early childhoods. Fundamentally, we need to be serious about the scale of the task.