Prison Capacity Strategy

Debate between Kieran Mullan and Sureena Brackenridge

Thursday 12th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

I thank the Minister for advance sight of her remarks. I also thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling out what was quite obviously an attempt to avoid scrutiny this week. I also thank the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), for his efforts to ensure that we had a proper statement today.

I begin by making one thing absolutely clear: if Labour MPs think that spending the next few years talking about our record in government is going to stop this Opposition from holding them to account, they are dead wrong. There will be no free passes for them on these Benches. It is already clear to the British public why the Government desperately want them: they are floundering and they know it.

I say to the Minister that I will happily spend all day comparing records of Governments and inheritances. Labour MPs and the Minister decry our record of having had to release 5,500 prisoners early, but the last Labour Government released not just 5,500 or even 10,000 prisoners early. By the end of their time in office, they had released 80,000 prisoners early. That was the state of the system when Labour was in charge, and that does not even include the systematic erosion of the punishment element of our justice system brought about by Labour’s introduction of blanket halfway release for essentially the entire prison population. Labour did not call it early release, but that is what the British public know it to be.

That was the record of the Labour Government that we had to try to turn around. I am proud of the fact that we began to unpick that record by reducing early release for the most serious offenders from halfway to two thirds, and that we introduced a whole-life tariff for premeditated child murder and increased maximum sentences for child abusers and others. Let us be absolutely clear: the root cause of the problem that we now face is a spike in the remand population. We have approximately 7,000 more people in prison on remand than we normally would. That unprecedented spike has occurred as a direct result of covid, and the Government know that.

[Mrs Sureena Brackenridge (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)]

Will the shadow Minister give way?

[Dr Mullan]

No—you cannot give way on a statement.

In fact, prior to covid, we had got the Crown court backlog down to a lower level than it had been under the last Labour Government, another record of which we can be proud. To try to tackle the problem, we increased sitting days and introduced Nightingale courts, and contrary to what the Government have said, we were clear that we would carry on doing everything possible to bring that number down. We did not refuse the judiciary extra sitting days, as this Government have done, nor would we have refused them.

We had agreed a floor on sitting days, not a cap, and negotiations were ongoing. If the judiciary had come to us and asked for more sitting days, we would have responded to that—and not by saying no, which is what this Labour Government have done.

In the prison population estimates that sit alongside this plan is the proof that the Government truly have already given up on fixing this problem. Not only do their projections not target the remand population being brought down, but they show it going up, which means more victims waiting for trials and more prisoners released early. We should be building more prison spaces, and under our leadership we actually increased prison capacity at the fastest rate in living memory. That was not so we could accommodate more people on remand, but so we could go even further in ensuring that offenders are properly punished and victims get justice.

The Government want to talk about the last 14 years, but I am afraid this plan leaves me asking what they were doing for those 14 years. They came into office telling the British public they had it all worked out. What have they done on sentencing? They have asked someone else to do a review. What have they done on how we prosecute murder? They have asked someone else to do a review. What ideas have they come into office with for tackling the court backlog? Absolutely none. Today, as the Minister knows, we have simply had a reannouncement of our planned prison building programme, with four new prisons, all of which were already announced or under way before Labour took office. This is not a bold new strategy; it is a continuation of work started under the Conservative Government.

There are of course some important questions for the Minister. First, given that we did not do so, why have the Government refused additional Crown court sitting days to the judiciary? Secondly, why do their prison population figures project an increase in the remand population? Thirdly, given that they are committed to building more prison spaces whatever the sentencing review says—they will have to decide that; they cannot park responsibility with an independent review—will she commit to continuing our programme of increasing the amount of time that the most serious offenders stay in prison? Fourthly, missing from the prison population figures is any transparency at all about the number of foreign offenders, so what are their estimates for the foreign offender population in our prisons in future years?

The Government blame us for their early releases, but the situation was nothing compared with the scale of the early releases they themselves oversaw when they were last in office. They released prisoners they should not have done, they botched the legislation and had to come back to this House to correct it, they let people out without tags who should have been tagged, and they have given up on fixing the fundamental issue of the remand population. The Leader of the Opposition has said that

“we did not get everything right in government”,

and she knows there are no easy answers to these challenges, only trade-offs. However, this Government are making it clearer and clearer how not to do it, and we on these Benches will be there every step of the way so that the British public know exactly that.