Parole Board: Maintaining Public Safety Debate
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Laura Trott
Main Page: Laura Trott (Conservative - Sevenoaks)Department Debates - View all Laura Trott's debates with the Ministry of Justice
Parole Board: Maintaining Public Safety
Laura Trott Excerpts(3 years, 5 months ago)
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Laura Trott (Sevenoaks) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Cummins, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa) on securing this incredibly important debate. I echo his comments on the importance of Parole Board discretion in serious cases such as the one he described, and its ability to keep people in prison when they represent a danger to the public.
The single point I want to make is that of the importance of Parole Board involvement with rape cases in particular. Some 84% of rape convictions are dealt with by a standard determinate sentence. That means that the Parole Board is not involved at all in the release of those criminals. A key question to me is what the Parole Board is for, if it is not to determine whether rapists are going to reoffend. The reoffending rate for sexual offences is around 14% and we need to look again, seriously, at the level at which the Parole Board gets involved to make sure that every single serious sexual offence is looked at and that there is the discretion to decide whether someone is released among the public, as well as some analysis of how effective it has been. As my hon. Friend said, the issue has existed for many years and we have an opportunity to get it right.