Immigration and Home Affairs

John Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve in the Chamber with you in the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker. I wish the new Government Front-Bench team well. They know that I have high regard for many of them, including the hon. Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle) and the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham (Dame Diana Johnson), who are in their places.

As a patriot, I wish the Government well, because they are in a position to run our country and there will be many matters on which we can agree. I have worked with a number of Government Members on the kinds of matters that go well beyond Punch and Judy politics, if I can call it that, particularly on national security. However, those good wishes are not the same as wishful thinking. Too much wishful thinking pervades the Government Benches. Having made change itself the brand, the risk they face is thinking that change alone is enough. CS Lewis said:

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

Nevertheless, I wish the Government well.

We are debating a number of challenges in this aspect of the King’s Speech today, but none more challenging than that of lawlessness. Too often when we debate crime, lawlessness and order in this Chamber, we give too little regard to the victims of crime. We simply must end the culture, which has pervaded for most of my lifetime, of believing that crime is an illness; to be treated. It is not an illness; it is a malevolent choice made by those who are careless of the harm they do. When we understand that, we understand why the principal objective of the criminal justice system must be punishment. A justly retributive response to that malevolence is necessary not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the component of the criminal justice system which maintains the public’s faith that justice will be done and be seen to be done.

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I am listening intently to the right hon. Gentleman’s speech. Does he therefore believe that people are born wicked? I believe that, with good education at a very early age and early intervention, crimes can be prevented.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir John Hayes]

I imagine you will not allow me to talk about the fall from the state of grace and the character of sin, Mr Deputy Speaker, but let me say briefly to the hon. Lady that human beings are capable of the greatest wickedness and the greatest good. When they choose to do good, they can do immensely joyful things. I hope that the people in this Chamber all seek to do good, which is why I began my speech by wishing the Government well. My experience of this place is that people, regardless of party, are here because they want to make their constituents better off and the country they live in a happier and more agreeable place. Of course people have the capacity to do good, but we know too that people can do the most dreadful things, and when they do so it is absolutely right that law-abiding decent patriotic people see that they get their just deserts. That is not a strange or curious idea; it is one that has informed most criminal justice systems in all civilisations for all of time, and the most obvious way of ensuring that people who do harm get their just deserts is to incarcerate them.

That brings me to the second principle of the criminal justice system, which is that we take people out of harm’s way. The best way of doing that is to imprison those who seek to do harm. I am shocked, as are my constituents, that the Government now intend to let more of those dangerous people on to our streets. We are now told that people will be released—including people who have done violent things, who have hurt and damaged other people’s lives—after they have served 40% of their sentence. When most people I represent hear of a sentence for such crimes, they assume that people will serve 100% of it. Of course, that has not been the case for a long time, but we now know that the Government, on the grounds of prison overcrowding, are to release many more of these dangerous people on to our streets. I am afraid that the wishful thinking I described earlier will soon turn to the wish that the Government would see the sense of why that is an entirely unacceptable course of action. The last Conservative Government added to the number of prison places, but not enough and not fast enough—I think all of us on the Conservative Benches would acknowledge that—but given where we are, we simply cannot subject the British people to the fear, and not only fear but the reality, of letting out of prison others who would do them harm.

Let us deal with the third aspect of criminal justice, which is to try to prevent recidivism by reforming those in prison. As a Minister, I worked on prison education, because it is important that we try to ensure that people who have committed a crime and have been punished for doing so do not commit another, but that cannot be the only or defining characteristic of criminal justice. We have to recognise what Philip Bean, the criminologist in the 1970s said: retribution has to be a core part of what the public see in order to maintain their faith in the system and in what the Government and the authorities are doing. Yes, let us have a debate about rehabilitation; let us try to save souls, not only because it prevents recidivism but because it is the right thing to do for those individuals. But we should understand that punishment is not a dirty word. It is what most of our constituents take for granted, yet I never hear those sentiments expressed with any vehemence or conviction by the liberal establishment in this country, which unfortunately is too well represented in this place.

[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.