Prison Capacity

Emily Darlington Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

I thank the hon. Member for his question. May I gently say that this is part of the problem? I am not going to get into the specifics of his particular constituency or those particular planning proposals—those proposals are already within the planning system, as the shadow Lord Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Melton and Syston (Edward Argar), alluded to in his remarks—but prisons have to be built in this country. We have to do more building, we have to do it more quickly, and we have rightly said that we will always treat prisons as of national importance. That was actually a change brought in by the previous Government to unlock the delays that they had faced for many years, particularly when concerns were raised by their own Members of Parliament.

We take too long to build any kind of infrastructure in this country. That will not be the approach of this Government, so while I am very happy to consider any proposals that any Members of this House have about specifics in their constituency, the reality is that prisons will always be deemed by this Government to be of national importance, and they will be built.

[Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)]

First, I congratulate my right hon. Friend on her new post, and thank her for reassuring us that this scheme will not apply to sexual violence, domestic abuse and stalking—that will really reassure survivors in my constituency. Will she review how the scheme will affect those with learning disabilities who are in prison without support, and ensure that there is good communication with local councils on the housing of ex-offenders, with early notification that is not on a Friday afternoon?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I welcome my hon. Friend to her place. This change is designed in part to allow probation to do the job that it would normally do when it comes to prisoner releases on licence. We will have an eight-week implementation period; that is one of the big differences between this scheme and the previous Government’s end-of-custody supervised licensing scheme, which was pretty chaotic and opaque. Things moved very quickly, not allowing probation the time to do its job. I am not going to pretend that the eight weeks is ideal, but it is better than where we might have been: it allows the sentencing calculations to be redone and some planning to then happen in the normal way, so that we can make sure that, when those people are released into the community, they have a proper release plan in place. Once we are into the prospective element of the change, I believe that the process will be much smoother, and probation will be able to do a much more effective job of managing those prisoners as they are released into the community.