Oral Answers to Questions

Kelvin Hopkins Excerpts

Tuesday 5th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I do not know whether the Minister wants an Adjournment debate on the subject, but I am sorry to tell him that that answer was far too long. We need to speed up.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

2. What assessment his Department has made of the effect of his proposals for the probation service on low and medium-risk offenders.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)]

The proposals in our “Transforming justice” consultation paper are designed to deliver a criminal justice system that punishes offenders properly and helps them to get their lives back on track. We want providers of rehabilitation services to tackle the root causes of offending, and to ensure that they have the right package of support to help offenders to turn their lives around. We will announce further details of our proposals once we have considered the responses to the consultation.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

Lower-risk, profitable components of the probation service are to be handed to the private sector. Yet again, the Government are simply putting public money into deep private pockets and bringing additional costs into the system. Given the year-by-year decline in reoffending, why are they intent on unleashing a potentially risky and certainly costly upheaval of the existing system, rather than investing to improve it?

[Jeremy Wright]

The first point to make is that we do not think that what we propose will be more expensive than the current arrangements. Quite the reverse: we think that it will save the taxpayer money. The second point is that we intend to bring in good ideas from not just the private sector but the voluntary sector, so that we can start to drive down those all-important reoffending rates. The argument for opening up rehabilitation to other agencies, private and voluntary, was advanced by the last Labour Government during the passage of the Offender Management Act 2007: we are simply implementing their idea. However, I note that the hon. Gentleman was not persuaded on that occasion either.