Immigration and Home Affairs

George Freeman Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Commons Chamber

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that there are different types of crimes and different types of prisoners, and that many people in our prison system at the moment, particularly those responsible for relatively low-level, non-violent antisocial behaviour, could powerfully serve much better and more rehabilitative community sentences? I do not want chain gangs in Norfolk and Lincolnshire, but good community service, where people can see that they are actually putting something back into society, would ease a lot of pressure on the system.

[Sir John Hayes]

Community sentences can play a part, that is true, but my hon. Friend will recall that the problem I described earlier of misunderstanding crime as an illness to be treated has its roots in thinking that stretches right back to the 1960s. You will perhaps know, Mr Deputy Speaker, that the Children and Young Persons Act 1969 began intermediate treatment orders, which essentially rewarded young people who had committed crimes with the kind of community activities that my hon. Friend describes. People were sent to the Brecon Beacons when their law-abiding neighbours had to make do with a week in Clacton. I mean no disrespect to Clacton or its representative, I hasten to add. [Laughter.] That is not the kind of response to crime that the vast majority of my constituents—or, I suspect, those of my hon. Friend—expect. Yes, community sentences can play a part, but they must not in any way distract us from the fundamental truth—I think it was Grotius who said it, Mr Deputy Speaker—that criminal justice has to have at its heart the idea of an ill suffered for an ill inflicted. I hope that the new Government will recognise that to crack down on crime, they really do have to restore public faith in the fact that, as I said, justice will be done.

It is fact that 10% of convicted criminals are responsible for half of all convictions. It is true, too, that those individuals are known and can be identified and must not be released in the way that has been suggested. Yet, disturbingly, the new Prisons Minister is on the record as saying:

“We’re addicted to sentencing, we’re addicted to punishment. So many people who are in prison, in my view, shouldn’t be there.”

That is both the opposite of the truth and anything but what most people think.

I welcome the attention given in the King’s Speech to shoplifting, but again I fear that the Government’s approach amounts to little more than wishful thinking. We have a shoplifting epidemic in Britain. Police forces do not respond to almost nine out of 10 serious incidents and UK retailers already spend around £1 billion each year on trying to deal with a problem with which they struggle to cope. Many offenders persistently commit crimes and get away with it.

So let us, in this debate and in the programme that follows it, not simply rely on wishful thinking but face up to the profound truths which seem to have escaped the notice of Labour Governments forever and, too often, of Conservative Governments too: reflecting the sentiments of the vast majority of law-abiding people means the guilty must be punished and the innocent must be protected.

--- Later in debate ---

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

It is a great honour to speak in this new Parliament, my fifth, and particularly to follow the hon. Member for Barking (Nesil Caliskan), who spoke with dazzling eloquence about her constituency, but also about the importance of diversity in our democracy. It is wonderful to see such diversity in the new Parliament. I congratulate the new Prime Minister and his team of new Ministers on that, and on their laudable tone of humility and public service. In the same spirit, I thank our Leader of the Opposition for both the fantastic tone in which he conceded on election night, and the tone in which he started his new role. One can say many things about the politics of the last few years, but our Leader of the Opposition was not doing this for money; he was doing it out of a very deep sense of public service in the finest traditions of this country.

At a time when so many democracies around the world are struggling, democratic trust is under threat. I want to highlight what a wonderful 10 days it has been here, because we have seen the transfer of power with such peace and stability. The pictures from this Chamber that are going around the world show how this Parliament still stands for the very best of democratic civility. As a new generation of newly elected MPs and new Ministers take office with a mandate for change, all of us who have served in government and seen how hard it has become to deliver real, lasting reform will wish them well in the spirit of the late, great Jo Cox. As democratically elected parliamentarians, we do indeed have far more in common than divides us.

Whatever our politics, we share a deep and urgent need to show that MPs, politics and Parliament can make a difference, that there is serious respect for Government accountability throughout this House and at the sweaty corners of the Dispatch Boxes, and that Government is not—as I fear so many have, sadly, come to believe—an inevitably unaccountable, bureaucratic machine that always wins, no matter who people vote for. For my part, in the field of science and technology, I stand ready to help this Parliament and this Government see through the vital work needed to unleash the science, technology, engineering and mathematics economy.

Mr Speaker, you may be asking how I survived the Chernobyl meltdown of conservatism in Norfolk—we delivered not one but three Portillo moments on the night. I thank the people of Mid Norfolk for electing me for a fifth time, and I will quickly share with the House the key messages that they gave me as I knocked on 29,000 doors. They said that they wanted a politics of honesty, integrity and accountability first and foremost, and they wanted the new Government and the new Parliament to tackle three key issues. The first was immigration. It was very clear across the whole of my constituency that people feel that our security and our sustainability, both economically and in terms of public services, require the new Government to go further in tackling the wave of immigration that has hit this country in the last few years.

The second issue mentioned was housing and planning. There is deep exhaustion with the way that too many big developers are running rings round our councils and dumping big commuter housing estates in the wrong places, with no investment in infrastructure. We need new towns on railway lines to drive a net zero and sustainable model of living.

The third issue was the NHS and healthcare. People are fed up with our pouring billions of pounds into the system in London, because they are not seeing properly integrated mental health provision, social care and healthcare on the ground locally.

As we debate the King’s Speech, it is important that we are honest about the legacy of the last 14 years. It has not been 14 years of failure and cuts, as one or two Government Front Benchers have portrayed it. The truth is that we were hit by an extraordinary legacy from the financial crash in 2008, which caused £700 billion of debt. Then we had the Brexit disruption, followed by the pandemic, which led us to spend £400 billion on relief. The war in Europe has cost us £40 billion. Any one of those events would have knocked the breath out of the great Lady Thatcher.

This has been an extraordinary period of unprecedented shocks, and there is much in the last 14 years to be proud of. I would cite the introduction of universal credit; the tackling of welfare fraud; the school reforms; the 5 million apprenticeships; the degree apprenticeships; the huge reduction in youth unemployment, which was at a scandalous level when we took office; the progressive tax cuts for the lowest paid; huge improvements in life sciences, technology and innovation; green growth—we are the only country to have halved emissions while growing our economy; and the pensions triple lock.

On a personal note, I am deeply proud of the work that we have done in the life sciences and in the creation of the new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the 10-year science and technology framework, the creation of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, our re-entry into Horizon and our groundbreaking international collaborations. If we are to make this a decade of national renewal, the innovation economy is completely key to driving investment, opportunity and clusters around the country, and to harnessing the regulatory leadership needed for this country to be the dynamic innovation economy that we can be. In that vein, I welcome the new ministerial team and wish them all support as they seek to unlock that mission.

[Several hon. Members rose—]