Oral Answers to Questions

Graham P Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am extremely grateful to the Minister, but we must move on. I am afraid that these answers are rather long and they need to get a bit shorter.

[Graham Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

5. What level of resources his Department plans to provide to the Prison Service in 2011-12; and if he will make a statement.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Crispin Blunt)]

The resource budget for the National Offender Management Service for 2011-12 is £3.679 billion, £2.181 billion of which relates directly to expenditure incurred in prisons.

[Graham Jones]

If, as the Secretary of State predicted in The Daily Telegraph on 11 February, crime increases under his Government, will he reverse his prison closure policy and undo the scaling back of the prison building programme? If not, what will he do with the criminals?

[Mr Blunt]

I am not entirely sure that my right hon. and learned Friend’s comments bear that interpretation, but what we have to do in the Ministry of Justice is ensure that we successfully imprison those people sentenced to prison by the courts and not get ourselves into the state of affairs that occurred under the previous Administration, whereby people had to be let out early because they had run out of space.