Prison Capacity

Eleanor Laing Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)]

With permission, I shall make a statement on the criminal justice system in England and Wales.

The first duty of any Government is to keep their people safe, and that is why those who pose a danger to society must be locked up. The Government are categorical that the worst offenders should be locked away for as long as it takes to protect the public. We have increased the sentences for offences including knife crime, causing death by dangerous driving—now a maximum of life imprisonment—and causing or allowing the death of a child. We have ended automatic halfway release for serious sexual and violent offenders, so they will serve two thirds of their sentence behind bars, and, in the most dangerous cases, all of their sentence behind bars. We are changing the law to make whole life sentences the default for the most heinous type of murder, so that for society’s most depraved killers, life means life and murderers end their days in prison.

Today, I can announce that we will be going further. We will legislate so that rapists, as well as those convicted of equivalent sexual offences, will serve the entirety of the custodial term handed down to them by the courts. A 15-year custodial term will mean 15 years behind bars.

There have been inaccurate reports in the media, claiming that judges have been told not to send rapists to prison. Let me be categorical: this is untrue. Sentencing is a matter for the judiciary acting impartially and in accordance with the law. It is a fact that under this Government the most serious and dangerous offenders are being locked away for longer. In the case of rapists, average sentences are nearly a third longer than in 2010. That is the right thing to do to keep the public safe.

To continue to put the worst offenders away for longer, we must use prisons better, and always so that there are sufficient spaces to lock up the most dangerous criminals. We must reform the justice system so that it keeps the worst of society behind bars, rehabilitates offenders who will be let out and presents the least serious, lowest risk offenders with a path away from a life of crime. That matters, because intelligent reform means less crime.

I have been candid from the moment I took on this role that our custodial estate is under pressure. Today, the prison population in England and Wales is greater than it has ever been—nearly double the level it was three decades ago. That is not principally because of the growth in the sentenced population: instead, it is the remand population, principally made up of unconvicted prisoners awaiting trial, which has surged in recent years, from 9,000 in 2019 to more than 15,000 in 2023. That is more than 6,000 more people in our prisons out of a total of some 88,000. That is because in the white heat of the pandemic we took the right and principled decision not to jettison hundreds of years of British history and abandon the jury trial system. We did that because the jury trial system is the bedrock of our freedoms. But covid restrictions inevitably meant that the flow of trials slowed and, in turn, the remand population grew. That growth was exacerbated by industrial action last year. In addition, the recall population is also significantly higher than in 2018, partly because we are rightly ensuring that offenders who do not comply with their licence conditions are returned to prison.

The Government have taken unprecedented steps to meet demand. We are building 20,000 modern rehabilitative prison places—the largest prison-building programme since the Victorian era. By doubling up cells where it is safe to do so, speeding up the deportation of foreign national offenders and delaying non-essential maintenance projects to bring cells back into use, we have freed up an extra 2,600 places since September last year alone. On top of that, we have continued to roll out hundreds of rapid deployment cells at prison sites. Altogether, we have been bringing on capacity at a rate of more than 100 places a week—the fastest rate in living memory, and possibly in 100 years.

We are going further. Today I can announce up to £400 million for more prison places, enough for more than 800 new cells. When we legislate to keep rapists behind bars for the whole of their custodial term, I will ensure that commencement is dependent on there being sufficient prison capacity. There is already an obligation to lay before both Houses of Parliament a report as to how I have discharged my general duty in relation to the courts. To ensure public confidence, a new annual statement of prison capacity will be laid before both Houses. It will include a clear statement of current prison capacity, future demand, the range of system costs that will be incurred under different scenarios and our forward pipeline of prison build. That will bring greater transparency to the plans and will set out the progress that is being made. I have also already commissioned urgent work, to conclude before the end of the year, to identify new sites for us to purchase. That is backed by a down payment of up to £30 million in funding to acquire land in 2024 and launch the planning process.

We must do whatever it takes to ensure that there are always enough prison places to lock up the most dangerous offenders to keep the British people safe, to ensure that criminals can be brought to justice, and to maintain safety and decency in the prison estate. We have decided to use the power in section 248 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to allow the Prison Service to move some less serious offenders out of prison on to licence up to 18 days before their automatic release date.

Let me be clear: this will not apply to anyone serving a life sentence, anyone serving an extended determinate sentence, anyone serving a sentence for an offence of particular concern, anyone convicted of a serious violence offence, anyone convicted of terrorism or anyone convicted of a sex offence, and this power will be used only for a limited period and only in targeted areas. Every offender will be placed under strict licence conditions that provide a step down from custody to living in the community. They may include the following: first, being made to wear an electronic tag when that is needed for the offender to be managed safely; secondly, a condition not to contact a named individual, directly or indirectly; thirdly, having to live at an address approved by the offender’s probation officer; fourthly, attending appointments; and fifthly, a condition not to enter certain areas such as particular postcodes. I should also make it clear that breach of those conditions could lead to offenders’ being recalled to custody for the entire second half of their sentences.

This will be overseen by the probation service—a probation service into which we have injected £155 million a year to recruit staff to bring down case loads and deliver better supervision of offenders in the community. In addition, HM Prison & Probation Service leadership will retain discretion to decide on further exemptions from release on advice of governors when concerns remain. Let me make it clear that this is a temporary operational measure to relieve immediate pressure contributed to by remand.

However, if we are to protect the public and reduce crime, we need to go further to use our prisons better. At the heart of the long-term plan for prison reform that I am announcing today is a simple mission: cut crime. To deliver that, we need to do three things. First, we need to ensure that the most dangerous offenders are locked up for longer, away from the public and unable to commit crime. Secondly, we need to ensure that prisons are geared to help offenders turn away from crime, to change their ways and to become contributing members of society. Thirdly, we need to ensure that more lower-level offenders get the tough community sentences that are shown by the evidence to cut reoffending and hence to cut crime.

Let me put that last point in another way: prisons should not ruin the redeemable. It is clear that all too often the circumstances that lead to an initial offence are exacerbated by a short stint in prison, with offenders losing their homes, breaking contact with key support networks and, crucially, meeting others inside prison who steer them in the wrong direction. When they are released just a short time later, they all too often reoffend, fuelled by addiction or mental health issues that cannot possibly be addressed effectively in such a short space of time. The fact is that more than 50% of people who leave prison after serving less than 12 months go on to commit further crimes. The figure is 58% for those who serve sentences of six months or less. However, the figure for those who are on suspended sentence orders with conditions is 22%.

Meanwhile, the cost of this is £47,000 per year per prisoner. The taxpayer should not be forking out for a system that risks further criminalising offenders and trapping them in a merry-go-round of short sentences, so the Government are determined to grasp the nettle and deliver a better approach. We will legislate for a presumption that custodial sentences of less than 12 months in prison will be suspended and offenders will be punished in the community instead, repaying their debt within communities, cleaning up our neighbourhoods and scrubbing graffiti off walls. We can do this more intelligently with modern solutions for a digital age.

I can announce today that we are doubling the number of GPS tags available to the courts, to ensure that offenders can be monitored, to track them to ensure that they are going to work, and also to ensure that their freedom is curtailed in the evenings and weekends, with robust curfews of up to 20 hours a day. We will make further use of new technologies such as alcohol monitoring tags. This will enable us to strengthen and expand successful step-down programmes such as home detention curfew, which we will keep under active review. If offenders breach the terms of their curfew or other requirement of their suspended custodial sentence, or commit another offence, they can be hauled back before the court and forced to serve that sentence in custody.

What we are not doing is getting rid of short sentences altogether. I know from my time as a prosecutor that that is sometimes the right and just option. Prolific offenders who are unable or unwilling to comply with community orders or other orders of the court must know that their actions have consequences, and they will continue to feel the full force of the justice system. Building on our antisocial behaviour action plan, the Home Secretary and I are looking at what more we can do to punish those so-called lower-level offenders who are a blight on our communities. For some offenders, the proper sanction is, I am afraid, the clang of the prison gate.



We will also remove foreign offenders who should not be in the United Kingdom taking up space in our prisons at vast expense to the taxpayer. There are over 10,000 foreign nationals in our prisons. It cannot be right that some of them are sat in prison when they could otherwise be removed from our country. That is why we will extend the early removal scheme so that we have the power to remove foreign criminals up to 18 months before they are due to be released—up from 12 months now—getting them out of the country early and no longer costing taxpayers a fortune.

To support that, more caseworkers will be deployed to speed up removals, and the Home Office will also look at measures to do more to remove foreign nationals accused of less serious crimes more quickly. We will continue to strike new prisoner transfer deals like the one agreed with Albania, ensuring that criminals from overseas serve their time at home rather than in Britain. We will bring forward legislation to enable prisoners to be held in prisons overseas—an approach taken by Belgium, Norway and Denmark in recent years.

More must be done to stop people spending long periods of time waiting in prison for their trial. As I have set out, there are now more than 15,000 defendants on remand in our prisons. Remand decisions are properly for independent judges, but we will consider whether to extend the discount to encourage people to plead guilty at the first opportunity, because when more offenders plead guilty, that saves time in the court and cuts the number of people in our prisons on remand, but most importantly it saves victims the ordeal of giving evidence in court. We will also be reviewing the use of recall for offenders on release who infringe the terms of their licence. It is right that ex-prisoners who commit new crimes or serious breaches while on licence should be returned to prison. We want to ensure that the system is working effectively to mitigate any risk posed by offenders while not having people in prison on recall longer than necessary.

We will take decisive action to address sentences of imprisonment for public protection. We put a stop to these discredited sentences a decade ago, but it is true that there remain about 3,000 IPP prisoners in custody despite their original tariff expiring years ago. IPPs are a stain on our justice system, so I am looking at options to curtail the licence period to restore greater proportionality to IPP sentences in line with recommendation 8 of the Justice Committee’s report, and I will come back to the House on that in due course. This will not compromise public safety. Those found by the Parole Board to pose a risk to the public will not be released.

As I have set out, we are taking decisive action to make our prisons work better in the long term. We are building more prison places than at any time since Disraeli was speaking from this Dispatch Box. We are rolling out hundreds of rapid deployment cells across the country to increase immediate capacity. We are going further and faster than ever before to remove foreign criminals from our prisons.

To govern is to choose. We choose to lock up the most dangerous criminals for longer to protect victims and their families. We choose to reform the justice system so that criminals who can otherwise be forced into taking the right path are not trapped in a cycle of criminality. That is the right long-term plan for our justice system, and I commend this statement to the House.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

[Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)]

Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement.

The Secretary of State was on his feet for about 15 minutes, his statement is about 2,500 words long, he did an op-ed at the weekend in The Telegraph, and there have been endless briefings to the media over the last few days. Yet in all that verbiage there has been not one word of apology to the British public for failing in the first duty of Government, which is to keep our citizens safe. As everybody knows, the first stage of rehabilitation is to acknowledge mistakes and make a sincere apology to those affected and let down by those actions, or, in the Secretary of State’s case, inactions. His failure to do so today is utterly inexcusable. It is a damning indictment of this Government’s collective failure.

Our prisons are completely full. We have been sounding the alarm for many years now, as overcrowding has skyrocketed. As of today, the public will undoubtedly be less safe. Although the Secretary of State has said that sentencing delays will apply only to those deemed “low risk”, he knows that in 2021 more than 20,000 offences were committed by those on bail, including more than 200 sexual offences. So the public need to know: what steps will he be taking to mitigate the risk of increased offending that will arise as a result of the delayed sentencing? How many cases in total are we talking about? How many of those involve sexual and violent crimes? What is the plan to reach out to victims and assure them that the convicted offender in their case will be taken off the streets as quickly as possible?

The reason we are in this position is that the Government have consistently broken their promises to deal with the rising prison population. As far back as 2016, the Government pledged to build 10,000 new prison places by 2020—the Public Accounts Committee found that they had managed just 206. So the Government went ahead and pledged 18,000 prison places, but still with no plan. A year later, they said that they would make it 20,000 by the mid-2020s. According to the latest figures, there are no more than 8,200 places set to be built by the end of 2025, which represents a shortfall of 60%. The Government have known about this problem not only for the whole time this Secretary of State has been in Parliament, but ever since the Prime Minister was the Chancellor, and they have done nothing. It beggars belief that the funding has been allocated but the Government still cannot get these prison places built—so much so that they are looking to rent space in prisons abroad, with no indication of how much that will cost. Given this woeful record, why should anyone believe that the Government will build those 20,000 prison places that we need? What update can the Secretary of State provide on the number of new prison places that are guaranteed to be built before the end of the year?

Will the Government consult on the changes to short sentences? Will any such consultation include victims? The Secretary of State knows that the use of community sentences has halved since 2011. How will the Government persuade the courts that these sentences are the solution? How can he reassure the public that this is not just a green light to offenders? He will know that this plan will take time to go through Parliament. What will his Government do in the immediate term to address the problem? So far, it sounds as though his plan is to move some prisoners abroad and to let others out early. Is that all he has got?

On the deportation of foreign national offenders, last year the Government managed to deport only 2,958 foreign national offenders, which is less than a third of the total number in our prisons and about half the annual number before the covid pandemic. Why should the public believe the Government when they claim that they can get a grip on the number of foreign national offenders in our prisons, given that they have failed to do so until now? What difference will bringing forward the deportation of foreign national offenders by six months make to the prison population—and by when? Let us be clear: the public need to know that today an offender—including, potentially, a sex offender—can go to court and be found guilty by a jury but instead of being locked up behind bars, where they belong, the inaction of this chaotic Conservative Government means that they can walk free. Can the Secretary of State tell the House today that not one individual convicted of a serious sexual offence is out on the streets as a result of a lack of prison places?

As the Secretary of State said, to govern is— [Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order.

[Shabana Mahmood]

As the Secretary of State acknowledged, to govern is to choose. His Government have chosen to fail victims and to fail the public. and to offer too little, too late to turn our failing criminal justice system around.

[Alex Chalk]

What a very disappointing response. I was surprised to hear that newfound interest in locking up rapists. Lest we forget, this Government are prosecuting more alleged rapists, convicting a higher proportion and imposing longer sentences than Labour, and ensuring that a higher proportion of those sentences is being spent behind bars.

It is important to aim off a little bit when looking at what is said in the Chamber by Labour Members. The hon. Lady refers to foreign national offenders, but I remember very well that back in 2020 we wanted to ensure that a plane full of rapists and murderers could leave the country, yet a letter came to the Prime Minister, saying:

“Dear Prime Minister, We, the undersigned,”—

have—

“grave concern over Home Office plans to deport 50 people”.

It went on to say:

“The flight and all future charter flights must be suspended”.

Shall we see who was on that flight, Madam Deputy Speaker? There was a man who had thrust a bottle into his victim’s face, leaving him scarred for life, in what was described as a “horrifying attack”—that is grievous bodily harm. Another person, who had been imprisoned for attacking a 17-year-old girl twice and abducting her, and who had sex with a 15-year-old, then lied about it and “vandalised” her life, according to her mother, was called “devious, callous and manipulative” by the judge. The hon. Lady signed a letter asking that he should not be deported. We will take no lessons from the Labour party in being tough on criminals. [Interruption.] She seems still to justify signing that letter. Does she not regret that decision? I think she might want to think about it again.

The Conservative party will get foreign national offenders out of this country. We have brought on the largest prison building programme since the Victorian era: 100 cells per week. [Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. When the hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) was being interrupted, I stopped the interruption. I hope she will have the courtesy not to speak now from the Front Bench.

[Alex Chalk]

We will always take the steps that need to be taken to keep the British people safe.

In respect of community orders, the hon. Lady is right that it is important that they are robust and enforceable. That is why I was at pains to point out that we are doubling the number of tags—I suspect we will go much further and triple the number of tags. By the way, they are not the old radio frequency tags that were used when I was prosecuting. They are GPS tags that mean that judges and those appointed to the bench can ensure the monitoring of where that individual has gone, to make sure that they go to work and that their liberty is deprived at the weekend. That is the kind of robust penalty we support.

Our ability to ensure that people are under curfew for over 100 hours a week was in our legislation, which was opposed by—guess who?—the Labour party.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I call the Chair of the Justice Committee.

[Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I commend the Lord Chancellor on his thoughtful, considered and serious statement that deserves a thoughtful and considered response, which it has not entirely had. Does he agree that it is right and proper that we are frank with the British public that prison is an extremely expensive way of dealing with people, and that it should be reserved for those who are a threat to us, not simply those with whom we are perhaps justifiably angry or irritated?

Does the Lord Chancellor agree that it is right to take on board some of the recommendations of the Justice Committee’s report in relation to IPP prisoners—those sentenced to imprisonment for public protection? I welcome what has been said about remand, which we know is also important. As well as reducing the qualifying licence period, can he help us a little more on what else he will do to take on board the recommendations about IPP prisoners in the report? What is the timeframe for moving swiftly towards reducing the remand population?

--- Later in debate ---

[Hon. Members]

Ooh!

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I think that was quite mild. It is all right. It could have been worse.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

There was a great deal to be welcomed in my right hon. and learned Friend’s statement, but can I unpack the capacity question? When he is successful in deporting more foreign national offenders, that will free up capacity. When he is successful in the home detention curfews and better use of technology, that will free up prison capacity, leaving the spike as the covid backlog is caught up with creating a temporary problem in capacity. Therefore, would it not be better to meet it with the temporary provision of cells in the existing prison estate, rather than going the whole hog and devastating communities such as mine in Grendon Underwood and Edgcott by building mega-prisons?