Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Brazier Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

In strongly welcoming my hon. Friend’s initiative, I urge him to consider the position of young people on remand. As successive prison inspectors have said, it cannot be right to have young people, even though they have not been sentenced, sitting about not required even to undertake any education let alone work.

[Mr Blunt]

Again, my hon. Friend is right. Remand prisoners pose a particular challenge, in the youth estate as well as the adult estate, because of the speed with which they tend to turn over in those institutions. That makes getting work for them more difficult, but there needs to be a proper focus on programmes for all people in custody following a proper assessment of their rehabilitative requirements.

Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Brazier Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

May I urge my hon. Friend, in doing this review, to look at the spending of legal aid money on private investigators? There was a case in my constituency in which the Legal Aid Board funded a quite dangerous criminal, well known to the police, in the search for his badly battered wife and small children; it then went on to fund his case without making any effort at all to see whether his claim to be penniless was true. He went on to harass that low-income family; the woman had remarried. I urge the Minister to look into that kind of case.

[Mr Djanogly]

The question of expenses, which would be included in what my hon. Friend mentions, is mentioned in the consultation document. If he gets in touch with me, I will specifically make sure that it caters to the point that he has raised.

Foreign National Prisoners

Julian Brazier Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd June 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mr Hollobone]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The purpose of prison, in denying people their liberty, is to be a punishment, but it is also to rehabilitate them so that, when they go back into the real world, they do not reoffend. If we are having to spend such a length of time dealing with people, many of whom do not speak English and do not understand our customs and how we do things in this country, it makes prison officers’ jobs, which are already very difficult, far more difficult and challenging. That will have an impact on the rehabilitation of British prisoners, who are likely to stay in this country for a long time.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way during his very powerful and important speech. Canterbury prison is in my constituency, and it is entirely composed of foreign prisoners. At stake is not only the cost, both financial and in management terms, of the prisoners, whose numbers almost trebled under the previous Government from 4,000 to 11,500, but the issue of deportation at the end of sentence.

We have several bad cases in my constituency. A woman who calls herself Sheena Daniels is perhaps the worst case of a person whom judges recommended for deportation. Somehow or other, she has claimed be a Zimbabwean—although I am told that she has a Nigerian name and a west African accent—and on the strength of that has finally received exceptional leave to remain. The judicial recommendation to deport has been abandoned, so that the community where she and her family have continued to commit criminal offences is suffering.