Community and Suspended Sentences (Notification of Details) Bill

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 23rd February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I am back again—this time on the Front Bench—for a third outing today. I apologise for my ubiquity. It is a pleasure to support this Bill, which was presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones). I congratulate her on her success in the private Member’s Bill ballot.

It really is a great day for the Welsh. By the sound of it, this will be the third Bill from a Welsh Labour Member of Parliament to gain support from across the House and receive its Second Reading today. For those who say that MPs from the devolved nations do not play a role in this place, the proof that they do is the fact that these three Bills have reached this stage today. I thank everyone across the House for their support for our Bills, and it is a pleasure to support my hon. Friend’s Bill from the Front Bench.

I thank Members who have contributed to the debate, including the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory), the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Chris Clarkson), who, like me, has been on his feet a lot today, and the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker), who I would never have guessed was an accountant in a previous life, as he revealed in the debate. He spoke with a lot of compassion and sense, and he mentioned probation, which relates to a point that I want to make in my brief remarks. Twenty years ago—I was here—the last Labour Government introduced community orders and suspended sentence orders in their current form. They were designed to be robust alternatives to prison in cases of less serious offending. It has been disappointing to note that the use of community sentences has declined sharply, particularly in the last decade, and particularly between 2012 and 2022.

In 2017, a survey of magistrates found that over a third were not confident that community sentences were an effective alternative to custody, and two thirds were not confident that they cut crime. It is plain to see that more must be done to strengthen the confidence of the courts and the public that sentences served in the community are effective, appropriate and, above all, safe. That is particularly pressing given the Government’s proposals in the Sentencing Bill—we are waiting for Committee of the whole House, hopefully soon—for a new presumption that all sentences of less than a year will be suspended unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as the breach of a previous order, or a risk to an individual.

The Bill before us makes an important contribution to that effort. It will require offenders serving community or suspended sentences to alert their probation officer or youth offending team if they change their name or contact details. The question is how these necessary measures will be properly enforced while the Government continue to load more and more pressure on to the probation service, without giving it any additional resource. Sentences served in the community can be effective only if there is a functioning probation service rooted in the area that can enforce sentences and keep offenders on the right track.

I am sure that the Minister can see that our probation service is already critically understaffed, undervalued and overstretched. Probation workloads are soaring. Almost 50,000 working days among probation staff have been lost to distress, with 68% of probation officers rating their case load as unmanageable. More and more experienced prison officers, who were also mentioned, are leaving the service, and there are over 1,000 vacancies for probation staff. A recent watchdog report warned that such understaffing is having a devastating effect on delivering the good outcomes that the Bill is intended to support. In September, the annual report of His Majesty’s inspectorate of probation said that 31 inspections of probation delivery units had been completed since the probation service was reunified in 2021, and only one unit was found to be good. The rest were rated either “requires improvement” or “inadequate”.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West for bringing forward the Bill and urge all Members to support it as a necessary step forward. I challenge the Government to ensure that the probation service is given the resources that it needs to ensure that the reforms are successful, and that the public remain protected, as they and the courts expect. I call on the Government to affirm their commitment to enforcing the crucial measures in the Bill when it becomes law.