Better Prisons: Less Crime (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Thursday 12th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redwood (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I am very conscious of the enormous privilege to be able to speak from these Benches in this magnificent room, in a Palace which represents the history and traditions of our great nation. I am suitably humbled, and I am very grateful to all the staff who have helped me already to acclimatise to the different mood and traditions of this noble House. I pay special tribute and give thanks to my two noble friends, one present in front of me today, who introduced me kindly as long ago as Tuesday.

I would like to reassure all assembled here that I speak in a debate on prisons not from any personal experience. I managed to survive 37 years in elected politics when allegations of law-breaking became all too common surrounding all too many MPs, but here I am, free of all such charges—but interested in the question of the quality, productivity and efficiency of public services. It was my good fortune to be offered a platform last night at the Centre for Policy Studies and to be given rather more time to expand on research I have been doing into why productivity has failed us so badly in the public services over the last 25 years under many different Governments. Why is quality not all it should be?

I welcome the report we are debating, and I welcome its aims and themes. “Better prisons”—who could possibly disagree with that? “Less crime”—that is exactly what we want. There are good comments in the report and there were good remarks from the noble Lord who introduced the committee’s findings.

We need to get back to the questions of what the Prison Service is for and how Ministers and the executive leaders of that service can do a better job in future. The first vital task is to ensure that those who have committed crimes of violence, and who could go on to damage individuals and societies further, are locked away to protect the rest of us. We, the law-abiding public, are the prime customers of the Prison Service, and we expect that manifestation—protection from those who would harm us—to be top of its priorities. Under the recent Government, and under the current Government, there have been too many cases of the Prison Service even letting out those who could harm us well before time and due date. Hitting the target of not letting out people we should not be letting out must surely be an urgent priority for Ministers to address.

The second important thing is to create safe spaces throughout those prisons, both to make them a bit more of a pleasant working environment for the security of the staff and for all those many prisoners who can be persuaded to return to a legal life, get a job and make a proper contribution to society when they have completed their term in prison. However, we read in prison reports of all too many cases where prisons are schools for scandal and colleges for crime; they are places where there are thriving entrepreneurial businesses, but for all the wrong things, such as supplying drugs. Surely it must be a priority to get all prisoners off drugs and to manage and provide treatment programmes for those who need drugs. They must not be fuelled and fed by illegitimate businesses within the prison framework.

The third thing that we want, which is touched on at rather greater length in the report, is for more people who leave prison to not want to go back there. They should be given support and help so that they are given training and find it easier to get a job; they should be able to get a bank account and re-establish themselves in normal life, because we do not want to see them in the Prison Service again.

On my wider work on public sector quality and productivity, I believe that quality and efficiency are two sides of the same coin. Get it right first time and you do not need a complaints department; get it right first time and you do not waste so much money. In my experiences as an executive councillor in my youth, as a Minister, as a participant in Cabinet and shadow Cabinet debates, and as a Back Bench MP who was very attentive to the public services in my area, I saw all too many examples of poor management, mistakes and error. Time does not permit me to go through my toolkit for mending quality and productivity issues. I look forward to further debates, because it is surely a vital, national, cross-party cause that we should manage better and achieve better results.