Prison Capacity

Edward Argar Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Edward Argar (Melton and Syston) (Con)]

I am grateful to the Lord Chancellor for very timely advance sight of her statement. May I take this opportunity to congratulate her on her appointment, as well as the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones)? I congratulate the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the hon. Member for Swindon South (Heidi Alexander) on her return to this place. Notwithstanding the occasional tussle across the Dispatch Box, I look forward to working constructively with Lord Chancellor, and to holding her and the Government to account. She is of course a decent, courteous, and incredibly able person, and I wish her well in her role.

We recognise the challenges and pressures facing the prison and criminal justice system, and the need to ensure that our prisons function effectively. Of course, the Government were well aware of those things when they were in opposition, as I know from challenging oral question sessions. In Government, we took the right decisions to significantly toughen up sentences for those who commit the worst crimes, in order to ensure that society was protected. To reflect that, we set in train the biggest prison building programme since the Victorian era. More than 13,000 additional prison places were delivered while we were in government. Two new prisons opened; one prison is under construction; there are two prisons with planning permission; and one prison is on the cusp of a decision. Labour’s planning permission proposal for prisons would not impact any of those developments. In that respect, it is simply a gimmick.

Crucially, in the covid pandemic, supported by the then Opposition, we made the tough but correct decision not to mass-release prisoners as other countries did, and we maintained that bedrock of our justice system, trial by jury. Those correct decisions meant less space, and the number of people on remand waiting for trial or sentencing dramatically increasing from around 9,000 to 16,500, with resulting additional pressures.

In deciding to reduce capacity pressure, the paramount consideration for the Lord Chancellor must always be public protection. With that in mind, although we will of course have to scrutinise the detail of her proposed sentence reduction scheme, I must say that we have significant public protection concerns about what she has announced so far, and I hope that she will be able to address those concerns today.

The Lord Chancellor set out plans for limited exclusions relating to domestic abuse, but can she confirm that if a domestic abuser is convicted of, say, common assault, as is often the case, they would not be exempt from this policy? What exclusions does she plan to put in place to ensure that the worst, persistent, repeat offenders cannot benefit from this scheme? She set out that this was a temporary measure that will be reviewed after 18 months. What criteria will she set for its ending? Better still, will she commit to sunsetting the measure in the delegated legislation, and to returning to the House on this afresh in 18 months, if needed?

What additional resources are being made available to probation? We hear what the Lord Chancellor says about getting 1,000 more trainee probation staff by March 2025, but how many of those will actually be new? How many will be additional to those whom we already planned to have in place through the existing trajectory for new trainees? Can she guarantee that no prisoners will benefit from her early release scheme without GPS tags and strict conditions? Indeed, will she mandate the imposition of GPS tracking? Can she confirm to the House progress on bringing HMP Dartmoor’s places back into use, and her long-term plans for HMP Dartmoor’s places? The previous Government committed £30 million to acquire land for building new prisons, and had already begun drawing up a site longlist. Is she expanding that fund, or merely re-announcing the same thing?

More widely, the Lord Chancellor states that this is a temporary measure to ease pressure, so what are her long-term plans for meeting demand? Is she planning to scrap the tougher sentences for serious crimes that the Conservatives put in place to protect the public, and so to reverse our changes, or is she planning to build more prisons over and above the six that we committed to funding, to meet future demand? If it is the latter, has the Chancellor agreed the significant extra funding needed? Those are the long-term questions to which she and the Government owe this House and the public answers, given the changes that she is making today. I hope that she will be able to give clear answers.

[Shabana Mahmood]

I welcome the shadow Lord Chancellor to his place; we have always worked constructively together wherever appropriate, and I look forward to continuing to do so while he is in post. He made a heroic attempt to gloss over many years of failure in planning by the previous Government. I was surprised that he managed to say it all with a straight face. He knows full well that for many years the previous Government struggled to get such measures past many of their Back-Benchers, not all of whom have returned post the general election, but some of whom remain here, and remain implacable opponents of any kind of planning developments in their constituency. They think that national infrastructure is a good thing as long as it is elsewhere. I look forward to seeing whether there is a change of heart among those on the Opposition Benches. It would be welcome, because this Government will not allow the planning system to prevent our country from having either the prison places or the national infrastructure that we so desperately need. He also knows full well that of the 20,000 places that were supposed to have been provided by the previous Government by 2025, only 6,000 have been delivered.

I am concerned about the position relating to prisoners on remand. The shadow Lord Chancellor rightly notes that the number of those on remand in our prison estate is around 16,000. Of course, judges need to be able to remand people to prison for public protection reasons. That will not change. He will know, given his former role in the Department, that there are no immediate solutions, because many of those individuals will in the end be sentenced to custody. I am considering all options available to me for driving that number down as much as possible. In the end, we will need our 10-year capacity plan to take account of what we expect the sentenced population to look like.

On the sentences that are covered by this measure, the shadow Lord Chancellor will know that in order to make a change by means of a statutory instrument, it has to relate to specific offences. That is why we have taken every precaution and every option available to us to exclude sentences connected to domestic abuse. He knows that those will include—I am sure that he has seen the draft statutory instrument—offences related to the breaching of a non-molestation order; stalking, which I mentioned in my statement, including stalking involving the fear of violence, serious alarm or distress; strangulation or suffocation; controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship; the breaching of a restraining order; and a breach of a domestic abuse protection order. The common offences that we know are connected to domestic abuse are caught in the statutory instrument. On multiple and repeat offences, he will know that the decision relies on the combination that is reviewed when the sentencing calculation is done.

As I said in my statement, I will return in 18 months to update the House. We want to remove this temporary measure as quickly as possible, and we will be transparent throughout. The shadow Lord Chancellor will not need to chase me around this building trying to find out what is happening, as I had to when I was in his position and we were considering the previous Government’s early release scheme. We will be transparent in a way that the previous Government simply were not. We will do a quarterly release of all the data, and we will update the House regularly.

I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman followed the announcement on Friday closely, so he will know that the announcement on probation does not involve new money. It is a re-prioritisation of resources, because strengthening probation to make sure that it is in the strongest possible position to deal with the early release scheme is incredibly important to us.

On Dartmoor, the right hon. Gentleman knows the history very well. Safety is our No. 1 priority, and after close monitoring of the situation at HMP Dartmoor, it has been decided that prison will be temporarily closed. I will update the House as the situation develops. I say to him gently that we have committed to a 10-year capacity strategy. We recognise that we need to make sure that this country has the prison places that it needs. We will deliver where the previous Government failed, and we will never allow the planning process to get in the way of having the prisons that we need in this country.

Longer term, however, we will also look at driving down reoffending, because the entrenched cycle of reoffending creates more victims and more crime, and it has big impacts on our ability to have the capacity that we need in our prison estate. That is why this Government will make it a key priority to drive down reoffending. That is a strategy for creating better citizens, not better criminals. It is a strategy for cutting crime, and in the long term, it will deal with our capacity problems for years to come.