Prisoner Early Release

Katie Lam Excerpts

Monday 29th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Jake Richards]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. As I have said, under this Government convictions for child sexual offences are at a record high. There is more work to be done in this area, and I know that my hon. Friend the victims Minister and others are working to ensure that we have even more robust investigation and punishment of those who commit these serious offences. As we set out in the Sentencing Act, we have also implemented the most robust community package ever, including exclusion zones, tagging, 24/7 tracking, curfews and the biggest expansion of tagging in history, to ensure that dangerous offenders are monitored and the public protected. We must ensure that the tagging system is robust, and we will do so.

[Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)]

In June, 20 grooming gang perpetrators were jailed for offences in West Yorkshire, which included the rape and abuse of three girls of whom the youngest was aged just 12. Abbas Kaji was sentenced to just seven years for rape, and Mohammed Ishtiaq Hussain to just eight. All too soon, these vile men will be back on the streets of the very communities that they terrorised, and the idea that the Government could cut their sentences to be even shorter is terrifying. This is not about the past but about the present and the future, so can the Minister please assure the House that everybody involved in grooming and rape gang offences will, at the very least, serve the entirety of their already too-short sentences?

[Jake Richards]

Once again, I am happy to meet the hon. Lady or indeed the appropriate Member of Parliament to look at the details of that case. We need to make sure that we have enough prison places to ensure that those who commit these serious offences serve time at all, and that is what the Sentencing Act, complemented by the biggest prison building programme since the Victorian era, will do.