Electoral Registration

Debate between Jim Cunningham and Sadiq Khan

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

Perhaps Ministers do not realise what officials in the Cabinet Office are sending out, but they have accepted that it was their mistake.

To be fair to the Minister, his boss, the Deputy Prime Minister, has finally woken up to the mess that this Government made by speeding up the process. That must be why, last month, the Deputy Prime Minister announced £9.8 million to help with registering voters who are currently under-represented. He accepted that he had messed up. Will the Minister confirm that that money is ring-fenced solely for electoral registration activities?

Another critical factor is the extreme pressure on local authorities because of the cuts imposed by this Government. Local authorities have to write to 48 million individual voters, instead of 20 million households. Unlike the Minister, who criticises them, I take my hat off to local authorities, most of which are doing a remarkable job dealing with this massive change in our democracy, all against a backdrop of enormous pressures on council budgets.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

In Coventry, more than 8,000 people have not been registered, the bulk of whom are students. Coventry city council, alongside the students, has organised a registration day tomorrow at both universities. The situation is very serious, and it is no good the Government blaming everybody else but themselves when things go wrong.

[Sadiq Khan]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. I am sure we all agree it is outrageous that the Government are once again seeking to blame somebody else for cock-ups that they were warned about.

The electoral register is in a parlous state. It is just 92 days until the general election, and just 75 days until the deadline for registration on 20 April. We need action, and we need it now. Doing nothing is not an option. The main thrust of our motion is to propose a number of remedies to which the House should give its backing. A particular priority must be young people. All the evidence shows that if people vote when they first become eligible, they are more likely to vote for the rest of their lives, because voting becomes a habit. The opposite is also true: if people do not vote early in life, taking part in elections will never be much of an issue for them. There must be a greater onus on schools and colleges to provide focused activities.

Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Debate between Jim Cunningham and Sadiq Khan

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I beg to move an amendment:

“That this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords] because the implementation of the proposals in the Bill depends on the Government’s proposed restructuring of the Probation Service; believes that this proposed restructuring will see the abolition of local Probation Trusts, the fragmentation of supervision of offenders on the basis of their risk level and the commissioning of services direct from Whitehall; further believes that the Government has failed to provide any costings for their proposals; notes reports that suggest the Ministry of Justice’s own internal risk register warns that the Government’s proposals could result in a high risk of an unacceptable drop in operational performance; and further declines to give a Second Reading to the Bill on the grounds that none of the Government’s proposals has been piloted nor independently evaluated, potentially resulting in an unnecessary risk to the public’s safety.”

We support many of the Bill’s objectives, despite that awful speech by the Justice Secretary. The first part of the Bill, consisting of clause 1, was inserted by the other place because of its concerns about controversial plans to reform and restructure the probation service. Clause 1 requires any change to the structure of the probation service to be approved by both Houses of Parliament. We note that, so far, the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) supports clause 1, but we will see as the evening progresses and as the votes transpire how he moves his position, and whether he decides to vote with conviction or do what the Conservative Whip asks him to do. I will return to clause 1 later.

The second part of the Bill, clauses 2 to 13, deals with the supervision of offenders released from short custodial sentences. All offenders released from sentences of less than two years would be subject to at least 12 months’ mandatory supervision in the community. It has always been a ridiculous anomaly that short-sentence prisoners, the group with the highest rates of reoffending, are the ones left to their own devices when released from prison. As the Justice Secretary just read out, the previous Labour Government tried to address that with the custody plus proposals. I will come back to those later—accurately, rather than by rehashing history in the way attempted a short while ago. Nevertheless, extending supervision to those who serve less than 12 months in custody should play a part in reducing reoffending.

The Bill would also put on a statutory footing the requirement to have regard to the special needs of female offenders when making supervision arrangements. We are grateful to Lord Woolf for his important contributions on that matter in the other place. For the avoidance of doubt, we also welcome the introduction of the new drug appointment requirements and the expansion of the categories of drugs that can be tested for. The third part of the Bill, clauses 14 to 18, would amend the community sentencing framework.

As much as the Justice Secretary would like us to do so, however, we cannot read the Bill in isolation. It is a smokescreen for fundamental changes to the way in which probation works in England and Wales. The motivation that the Justice Secretary relies on in public is his frustration that reoffending rates are too high, which he says means that something bold and radical needs to be done. He is in serious danger, however, of doing something that, bold and radical as it is, might make matters worse and increase the risk to the public.

We know that probation works, as those under supervision are less likely than those who are not to go on and commit more crimes. The MOJ’s figures for the most recent full year show that among those who received a sentence of between four and 10 years who were released and supervised by probation, 30.7% reoffended; among those who received a sentence of between 12 months and four years who were released and supervised by probation, 36.2% reoffended; and among those in custody for less than 12 months who were released and not supervised by probation at all, 58.5% reoffended. By the by, it is a shame that the Justice Secretary is not suggesting payment by results for the public probation service. However, I welcome the fact that he appears, at least on this particular aspect, to want to follow the evidence and to use it to inform his policy making. Offenders who receive probation support do better than those who do not. That must be why he wants to extend probation to those who receive a custodial sentence of less than 12 months. But why does he want completely to dismantle our probation service?

We can all agree that too many people are stuck in a cycle of reoffending. Just over a week ago, on a visit to the Justice Secretary’s flagship Oakwood prison, I met one young man who had previously been in prison six times and who could not have been more than 25 years old. It is precisely that group of people whom we need to get to grips with. It is not only a waste of taxpayers’ money, although we know that on average it costs £40,000 a year to keep someone like him in prison. There is a cost to society, too, as crime is estimated to cost the country £12 billion a year as well as creating, as the Justice Secretary said, needless victims of crime, heartache and misery. It is also a waste of human potential for people to spend their time locked up behind bars when, if properly reformed, they could contribute more meaningfully to society. Nobody would disagree with the need to address the offending behaviour of those individuals, but we do disagree with dismantling probation.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Is there not a competition among various Secretaries of State to see who can privatise the most? The Secretary of State is advocating a policy that was pursued the last time the Conservatives were in government, when the solution to all problems was either privatisation or banging people up.

[Sadiq Khan]

If the Justice Secretary was saying that he had evidence that privatising probation worked or that it would save money, he would have an argument. He is saying neither, which is why we suspect that this is all about ideology rather than the evidence of what works. Although we agree with the broad objectives of the Bill—[Interruption.] I am sorry, but I can hear chuntering from the Lib Dem Whip, the hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt), which is quite distracting. I am not sure whether she is trying to persuade her hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham to vote with her, or to put me off my stride—[Interruption.] She is certainly better than the Justice Secretary at trying to put me off my stride.

Although we agree with the broad objectives of the Bill, there are some major areas of difference between us and the Government and some big questions remain unanswered. Those questions are so fundamental that they cast a shadow over the Bill and call into question whether its objectives can be implemented without taking a serious gamble with public safety as a result. The Bill has been brought forward against a backdrop of upheaval and change—change that is not informed by evidence or statistics, but driven by recklessness and ideology.

Probation Service

Debate between Jim Cunningham and Sadiq Khan

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

What my hon. Friend describes is a repetition of what happened with the Work programme. Small companies, charities and voluntary groups are used by the big boys as bid candy to get the contracts and are then elbowed out. We saw that with the Work programme and we will see it again in probation.

Do Members know who will be able to bid? G4S and Serco. The allegations against both companies are so serious that the Serious Fraud Office is investigating them, and yet the Justice Secretary is refusing to rule them out of the bidding process. By the way, there is no obligation for the staff of those companies to be trained or experienced in this area. Those companies have no track record of providing such services.

We are not confident in the ability of the MOJ to procure the contracts, given its poor track record. Last year, we had the scandal of court translators under this Government’s watch. The hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) is busy reading her texts, but I will read what the Public Accounts Committee, of which she is a member, said of that debacle. She can correct me at any stage. It stated:

“The Ministry was not an intelligent customer…The Ministry failed to undertake proper due diligence…The result was total chaos…the Ministry has only penalized the supplier a risible £2,200.”

There is no guarantee that the big private companies will not run rings around the MOJ yet again.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I apologise to my right hon. Friend for being a little late for the debate. Is not the picture that is unfolding of this Government that they are the friends of the private sector who see the state as a golden calf that they can milk when it suits them? This proposal is not in the public interest and it is not in the taxpayer’s interest. G4S wants to be considered, but it has some problems in South Africa at the moment.

[Sadiq Khan]

The question that our constituents are asking is: why are the Government so keen to suck up to the big and powerful?

House of Lords Reform Bill

Debate between Jim Cunningham and Sadiq Khan

Monday 9th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

I heard the Deputy Prime Minister desperately trying to answer that question, but on four or five occasions when such questions were put to him by his hon. Friends, he failed to answer them.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Did my hon. Friend notice that in answering one of his colleagues earlier, the Deputy Prime Minister said that the coalition had decided on a change to the voting system in favour of proportional representation? Only a few months ago, however, the electorate rejected that, but the coalition is not prepared to accept the democratic will of the electorate.

[Sadiq Khan]

It is worse than that. The Joint Committee did not even examine the type of voting system that is now being proposed. It was pulled out of a hat without any proper consideration.

Although the Bill recognises that conventions—[Interruption.] Ministers on the Treasury Bench need to calm down.