Sentencing: Repeat Offenders

Debate between Grahame Morris and James Daly

Tuesday 21st June 2022 Westminster Hall

[James Daly (Bury North) (Con)]

I completely agree with what the hon. Gentleman says on the facts that I have heard about this matter. He can accuse the Government of many things, but the sentencing function is for the independent judiciary or magistracy; it is not the responsibility of the Minister. There is much to be discussed on a political level, but certainly not sentencing policy and what sentences are imposed in such circumstances.

[Grahame Morris]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and what he says is reasonable. I have just been reading a book about the former Director of Public Prosecutions and his early career; he is now the leader of the Labour party, I believe. [Laughter.] He was at pains to provide sentencing guidelines in discussions with Ministers—Conservative Ministers, I might add—to try to address some of these issues. I do not think that Ministers can completely wipe their hands of responsibility.

I will elaborate some of the related issues and explain why prison is not as effective as it might be, although it is an important alternative, particularly for serial offenders. As I said, the victim of the particular crime that I referred to has completely lost confidence in the system and has said that he would not give evidence in future, because he thought that the sentence that was given was inappropriate—in fact he said that it was laughable.

When a case goes to court and the outcome is an affront to justice, it is the police who experience the fall-off in public confidence. Members might be aware that YouGov regularly conducts a survey in which it asks the public whether they have confidence in the police’s ability to deal with crime in their area. The trends are very worrying; 47% of the public lack confidence in the ability of the police to tackle crime, compared with only 43% who are confident in the police. Overall, the number of people who believe the police are doing a good job—nationally, and not in County Durham; I think we have an outstanding police force—has fallen from 75% to 53% in the last two years. I hope that sets alarm bells ringing for Ministers.

The failure is systematic. When I presented my Prisons (Violence) Bill in the previous Session of Parliament, I warned that offenders often left prison more damaged and more dangerous than when they arrived. The out-of-control levels of prison violence make rehabilitation in the current circumstances practically impossible. That leads to more reoffending, at a cost of tens of billions of pounds a year to the criminal justice system, as well as causing misery for millions of victims and their loved ones, who have to live with the consequences of even more crime.

That situation is more than an appalling waste of both public money and people’s lives; it is nothing less than a crime against our communities, and I must say that the Government are complicit in it. The Conservative Government and all Ministers are responsible, first, for the devastating cuts to the budgets of the Prison Service during the coalition years of austerity. It was those cuts that triggered the escalating level of violence in prisons. For example, the number of prison officers was cut by a quarter. That meant that a massive amount of experience, held by experienced prison officers, and of that most precious resource, which prison officers refer to as jailcraft, was taken out of the system at a stroke. The vacuum that was created was quickly filled by prisoners who had become more experienced than many officers on the landings of our prisons. The vacuum has also been filled by violence.

Despite recent recruitment drives, the Prison Service has lost almost 90,000 years—I repeat, almost 90,000 years—of prison officer experience since 2010. That is a shameful statistic, but it just gets worse every year. As the experience of the prison officers who are in charge of our prisons goes down, violence goes up; there is a direct correlation. In turn, that leads to even more officers leaving the service. Not surprisingly, the retention rate for prison staff is at a record low, as of course is their morale.

It has not helped that this Government have raised the retirement age for prison officers to 68. Frankly, for prison officers—both men and women—who are grappling with young and fit criminals, 68 is far too old. It is a cruel policy, which we have discussed on many occasions in this place.

The Government consistently ignore the advice of their own experts. The Prison Service Pay Review Body has proffered advice that prison officers should be given a proper pay rise. Ministers have ignored experts for three years running, and we are currently waiting for them to respond to this year’s pay review body recommendations.

The Government broke our Prison Service when they robbed it of resource, in the name of austerity, and now they need to fix it if they want to have any chance of reducing reoffending. The Government have also broken our probation service with a failed privatisation experiment. They took an award-winning service, envied and held up as a model and example around the world, and smashed it—fragmented it into little pieces, each to be run for private profit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Grahame Morris]

That must be one of the prisons on my list to visit, though I hope not as an inmate. I received numerous invitations from prison officers when I was in Eastbourne. I held a surgery for prison officers to raise concerns, anonymously if they wished, and there is a catalogue of issues to be addressed. Prison education is certainly one of those, but that is normally delivered by members of the UCU, the prison educators, who have an unenviable task, which I will come to in a moment.

I want to continue my point about the role of probation. In the complex jigsaw of the criminal justice system, there are vital elements: the police; magistrates; the Crown Prosecution Service; prison officers; the prisons themselves, which should be properly staffed and resourced; probation and prison educators. Those are all important elements of that mosaic. Probation officers play a vital role that is largely unrecognised in reducing reoffending. That is what their jobs are all about and how we gauge their success. They perform a vital public service, protecting our communities from crime, while helping ex-offenders to develop the skills they need to turn their lives around.

By introducing a profit motive into probation—a mistake since acknowledged—the previous Government betrayed the highly skilled and priceless work done by probation officers with many years of experience, leaving their pay, terms and conditions at the mercy of private firms, which tried to reduce their role to little more than a tick-box exercise. That led to a flood of resignations, with people leaving the system, and all the problems we saw as a result.

Even now, two years after the Government admitted defeat and announced a full reintegration and renationalisation of probation, the service is still in the midst of a recruitment and retention crisis, very similar to the one in prisons. Napo has told me about the workload crisis facing its members. Many probation officers are working over their recommended offender management levels—the number of cases they have to look after—by between 20% and 50%, and in one case, by over 90%. The staffing and workload crises in probation have had terrible and tragic consequences in the past. It is no wonder that the mental health of many probation officers is at breaking point.

The Government have put the public at serious risk from reoffending by trying to run prisons and probation on the cheap, and undermining the pay and terms and conditions of those critically important workers in the process.

[James Daly]

The hon. Gentleman is being very generous in giving way. I have the greatest of respect for him, but I am failing to follow what he is trying to say. I assume that on behalf of his constituents he is saying that we need to impose more custodial sentences on repeat offenders. If that is the case, he is arguing that we should send more repeat offenders into a custodial environment. He is then arguing that we need to do something different in the custodial environment. Rather than using generic figures, will he tell us precisely what he disagrees with in terms of Government policy being implemented in prisons to aid the rehabilitation that we all seek?

[Grahame Morris]

The hon. Gentleman has got the thread of my argument precisely. I am not arguing in a contrary fashion, because I believe that repeat offenders—people involved in serial offending—need to be incarcerated for the protection of the communities and themselves. However, I do feel that in prisons, over a number of years now, the resources have not been made available to effectively prevent reoffending by offering alternatives and rehabilitation to those people who are incarcerated. I hope I can go on to develop that argument, but it was a good point, and I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention.

The greatest tool to tackle record rates of reoffending must be effective rehabilitation. At the heart of rehabilitation is education, which is desperately needed by so many prisoners. Prison education is a complete mess; that has been confirmed by independent inspectors, by the Education Committee, which is highly respected, and by Ofsted. The Government have announced plans for yet another shake-up, promising a new prison education service—I hope the Minister will say something about that. Unfortunately, details are still very thin on the ground. Ministers have had little to say about teachers, who, it might be thought, would be central to any new strategy to turn around the current, failing system. The Education Committee’s report said:

“Poor pay, lack of career development, unsafe working environments and no time or respect to do a quality job has left the recruitment and retention of qualified and experienced prison educators at crisis point.”

I hope that the Minister will listen, if not to me, then to the Education Committee, which is chaired by a Conservative, the right hon. Member for Harlow.

The problem is the Government’s ideological obsession with running key services, including the criminal justice system, for profit. Four giant prison education providers compete for business while cutting all sorts of corners to maximise profits. According to the union sources I have spoken to, pay and terms and conditions can vary widely. Any serious plan for fixing our broken prison education system should start with standard contracts across the whole sector, plus a pay rise to bring wages up to comparable roles outside. I do not want to go into the details of the issues that have been highlighted to me, but there are things that I hope will be included in the new prison education strategy, which the Minister might refer to when he responds.

Prisons are simply not fit for purpose. In the main, that is as a result of this Government’s savage cuts and poor treatment of the workforce—and all of us are paying the price. However, I believe that prison can and must work. A custodial sentence for a repeat offender provides the community with respite from their offending. In the communities that I represent, which in the main are fairly poor, a relatively small number of prolific offenders cause havoc and cause the majority of crime and antisocial behaviour.

Rail Strikes

Debate between Grahame Morris and James Daly

Wednesday 15th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[James Daly (Bury North) (Con)]

My hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) is no longer in her place, but I would like to associate myself with every single word of what she said in her brilliant speech. It was a lesson in reality given the financial situation that faces us at this time.

We were asked by the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) whether we had ever been out on strike. My answer is no, because I had the temerity to be self-employed. If I went out on strike, I would not have been able to eat. So when I am asked why I stand here and make this speech and whose side I am on, I have to say that I am on the side of the self-employed worker. The hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) talked about a person with disabilities who cannot get treatment, or the older person who cannot get to their cancer treatment, because public transport is cut off to them.

[Grahame Morris]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[James Daly]

No, I will not give way.

I am on the side of the pupil who is taking their exams and who has gone through an appalling period during the pandemic. For all of these people who will suffer in what will almost certainly be six days of action, the Labour party—certainly those we have heard from today—could not care less. My constituents can suffer at the altar of the Labour party, which is not able to stand up to its friends in the trade union movement. I have not heard one Opposition Member say the very simple words, “Do not go on strike.” If people go on strike, they will destroy people’s livelihoods, destroy people’s jobs and put even more financial pressure on the rail companies that are struggling with a drop in income at this moment in time.

I had a meeting with representatives from the North-West Partnership regarding the west coast main line. The gentleman I spoke to said that the level of business travellers using trains is at 20% of pre-pandemic levels. Why would anybody look at this course of action and say, “No, I am going to rely on travelling by train when I need to go to work, when I need to go to an important meeting, when I need to go somewhere.” I know the Labour party does not like to hear this, but I had the temerity to try to create wealth, to employ people, to pay my taxes and to create a better situation. What we have here is a train system that has gone through a very difficult period. It has seen a drop in income, a drop in revenue.

We must approach this situation with reality. We must also approach it with compassion for everyone, and the compassionate way to deal with this matter is for the RMT to make an immediate statement saying, “We are calling off this strike”—not suddenly to produce on a mobile phone on the day of this debate a letter that none of us has seen regarding a meeting: utterly, utterly counterproductive. It is not in the interests of our constituents, and on the Government side of the Chamber we will stand up for those who are hard-working, who need to get their health treatment or their education, who have done nothing wrong, but who will be punished by the Labour party and the RMT.