Sentencing Review and Prison Capacity

Judith Cummins Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

I know that the shadow Lord Chancellor followed it closely. I am setting up a women’s justice board, which will report with a strategy in the spring. We need to do more with female offenders, especially given the impact that the incarceration of women and the breaking up of family homes has on their children, particularly as two thirds of women in prison are there for non-violent offences. I hope there is cross-party consensus in this House on dealing with women offenders differently.

On prison capacity, I say gently to the shadow Lord Chancellor that we can trade numbers across this Dispatch Box about things that the last Labour Government did before 2010, or he might want to acknowledge the failure that took place over his Government’s 14 years in power. He knows that only 500 net prison places were added by his Government over those 14 years, and that the crisis that faced me when I walked into the Department was acute—he knows that, because he had walked out of that same Department only a few days before. The previous Government ran our prisons boiling hot for far too long, so my inheritance when I took over was dire, leaving me with no option other than the emergency release of prisoners.

I note the shadow Lord Chancellor’s point about domestic abuse and domestic violence cases, but I remind him that his own early release scheme that his Government implemented for many months before the last general election—the so-called end of custody supervised licence scheme—contained none of the SDS40 exclusions. He knows that; he also knows that we pulled every lever available to us within the law to exclude the offences that are most closely connected to domestic abuse and domestic violence. As a matter of law, it is only possible to exclude offence types, rather than offenders. I have had to pull that emergency lever; I have sought to do so in the safest way possible, to make as many exclusions as possible, and to give the Probation Service the time it needs to prepare for this measure and to make sure victims are notified under victim notification schemes in the usual way.

I will be publishing the data in relation to tranche 1 and 2 releases in two ad hoc statistical releases before Christmas, so that data will be in the public domain. As the shadow Lord Chancellor will know from his time in the Department, the recall rate usually hovers between 6% and 10%—it can vary quite a bit between those numbers. Our current information is that the SDS40 releases are not showing a higher recall rate than we would expect compared with normal releases, but those statistics will of course be published in the usual way in due course.

On hotels, I made provision to allow the emergency use of hotel accommodation for prisoners released under the SDS40 scheme to prevent any homelessness that might lead to higher rates of recall. Fewer than 20 prisoners have been housed in hotels, and at a very low cost. This is a temporary measure, and I do not anticipate that it will be used any more extensively than it has been already. On foreign national offenders, I will return to this House on that matter, but work is under way across Government and I am working closely with my colleagues in the Home Office.

I will be publishing for the House, and will return to the House with, the detail of the further measures on the home detention curfew. The shadow Lord Chancellor rightly says that not everybody is automatically eligible for a home detention curfew. There is still a risk assessment, and safeguarding concerns are the No. 1 way in which domestic abuse issues show up as a red flag for a particular prisoner. I would not imagine that those previous and current arrangements will change very much with the measures we will take.

I thank the shadow Lord Chancellor for the contract concluded with Serco to deliver the tagging. It may not have been him directly and personally, but it was his Government. The performance of Serco has been unacceptable. Let me be very clear with the House: there is no shortage of tags in this country. It has failed to make sure that it has enough staff in place to tag everybody who needs a tag. Its progress has been monitored daily by me, my Ministers and officials in the Department, and we will continue to hold its feet to the fire. We will levy financial penalties, and all options remain on the table. Performance has improved a little—it has made progress—but all options are on the table if that falls back in any way.

The shadow Lord Chancellor will know that I am not going to comment on anything relating to the Budget. The Chancellor will make her statement in due course. I gently remind him that the budgets of the Ministry of Justice under the Tory party left a lot to be desired.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the Chair of the Justice Committee.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith and Chiswick) (Lab)]

I welcome the approach the Lord Chancellor is taking to the management of the prison system, and the appointment of David Gauke to head the sentencing review. Given that the initiatives she has announced today to relieve pressure on prisons will create additional work for already overstretched probation officers, will she make a further statement when she has decided what operational changes she is going to make to the Probation Service? The additional 14,000 prison places she has promised to build will take prison capacity to above 100,000. Is that desirable in the long term? Given her intention to expand punishment outside prison, will she make it her aim in time to close some of the worst of our existing prisons, built two or three centuries ago, which warehouse crime and, despite the best efforts of prison staff, do little or nothing to reform or rehabilitate their inmates?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee for his questions. On probation, I recognise the very high workloads that probation officers are working under. We committed in our manifesto to a strategic review of probation governance. I have made sure that we have brought forward the recruitment of an extra 1,000 probation officers by March next year. We are working closely with probation unions and probation staff on the frontline to manage the situation. I am very conscious that we do not want to take the pressure out of the prisons and just leave it with the Probation Service instead. This is a whole-system response, and the whole system needs to be stabilised and able to face the pressures we see in it.

On the prison population, make no mistake: the number of prison places will increase in this country. We will deliver the 14,000 the previous Government did not deliver, and the prison population will therefore rise. However, as I have said, we cannot build our way out of this crisis, and we do have to do things differently. We are a very long way away from any of the changes the Chair of the Select Committee may want to see, but fundamentally we must make sure, and the review must make sure, that we never ever run out of prison places in this country again.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

[Josh Babarinde (Eastbourne) (LD)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of her statement.

Having myself grown up in a home of domestic violence at the hands of my mum’s former partner, I share the concerns of the Victims’ Commissioner and survivors of domestic abuse that loopholes in the early release scheme’s criteria could mean that some of their abusers, who have been convicted of violent offences but not of domestic violence-specific offences, may have been released early today. I know the Secretary of State attempted to provide some reassurances, but I can say to her that I have received communications from affected people outside this Chamber who are not satisfied with those assurances yet. Domestic abuse survivors deserve to be safe. Can she address these concerns today?

We welcome the Government’s determination to fix the mess that the Conservatives made of our criminal justice system through the evidence-led, independent sentencing review. The former Lord Chancellor chairing it and I have a track record of fixing things together. In my past life, I used to run a social enterprise phone repair company staffed by ex-offenders, and we ran pop-up repair shops in the MOJ, at one of which the then Lord Chancellor David Gauke eagerly presented his phone for repair. I hope this Lord Chancellor shares that collaborative fixing spirit when it comes to engaging with the Liberal Democrats and me on this review—and I will happily sort the Secretary of State out with a phone repair if she needs one.

While empirical evidence will be critical to this review, some of the most valuable insights on this matter are held by victims and survivors themselves. I was therefore disappointed not to find the words “victim” or “survivor” mentioned once anywhere in the terms of reference, although I have heard the Secretary of State say them today. Will she put that right, and outline specifically how victims and survivors will be represented and formally consulted in the sentencing review?

Finally, even though the Secretary of State has said there will be no constraints and no constrictions, something else missing from the review is the injustice of indeterminate imprisonment for public protection sentences, under which almost 3,000 people remain imprisoned with no release date. What is more, people are serving IPP sentences who have committed lesser offences than those being released today under the Government’s early release scheme. Reforming these sentences could help address prison overcrowding and the safety crisis, so why have the Government explicitly excluded IPP sentences from this review, and will she reconsider that decision?