Safe Streets for All

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I begin by thanking the Home Secretary and the Justice Secretary for the work that they do to make our streets safer, the commitment they show to the victims of crime and their determination to start bringing justice back into the justice system. Imprisonment for life for child murderers, keeping the most serious offenders behind bars for longer and the £4 billion extra over the next four years for 18,000 additional prison places are incredibly encouraging steps and signify a direction of travel that we should all welcome.

However, I hope that my right hon. and learned Friend the Justice Secretary will forgive me if I use this opportunity again to encourage the Government to go further. Ensuring that we have a justice system that more consistently delivers justice is one of the main reasons I got involved in politics. The harsh reality is that, right now, if any of my friends and family were the victims of a serious crime, even with our planned reforms, I doubt very much that they would get what I would consider to be justice.

I have talked before in this place about the intellectual snobbery that exists towards people who think that those who commit serious offences should spend a very long time in prison. On the Justice Committee, there is an endless supply of well-meaning witnesses, who come to tell us about the reasons why people should not go to prison or should spend less time there. There is a whole swathe of lobbying and campaigning organisations that want prison reform, and they are right that there is more that we can and should do to improve rehabilitation —I know the Justice Secretary speaks very powerfully about his commitment to do that in the upcoming Bill—but failings in one area do not excuse inaction in another.

The absolute priority of the justice system should be to deliver justice for victims. In my experience, first and foremost, people want to see those who have raped, abused, maimed or murdered their family members locked up for a long time, and at the moment our justice system is not delivering that frequently enough. The highest starting point for the sexual assault of a child under 13 is six years, with a range of just four to nine years, and every year dozens of child rapists are sentenced to less than five years in prison. I would ask anybody to look in the eye a parent of a 12-year-old who has been sexually assaulted, and tell them that the perpetrator could be out of prison before their child has even reached adulthood and say that that is justice. I can tell you, Madam Deputy Speaker, that if somebody raped my niece or nephew, traumatising them and potentially robbing them of the joy of intimacy in their personal lives forever, only that person spending most of the rest of their life in prison would satisfy me.

Across the board, I believe that we need—and, importantly, that the public support—a wholesale recalibration of criminal sentencing in this country. I think the term “life sentence” in itself is offensive to victims, implying as it does that in some way being on licence is anything like being in prison, or even close to what it is like living the real life sentence of being traumatised by a serious crime.

The Government are acting decisively. By reducing Labour’s early automatic release, in one simple step we will be delivering a huge increase in the time spent in prison by serious offenders, and I welcome that, but we remain some way off widespread confidence in our justice system, which can only come from increasing the sentences themselves. The Home Secretary and this Justice Secretary have my full support in delivering on this agenda, and I ask them to keep listening to victims and families, who would be criminalised if they sought justice on their own terms. The law requires them to ask the state to provide justice for them, and the state must not let them down.