Cutting Crime (Justice Reinvestment)

Lord Beith Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

I am pleased, Mrs Main, to serve under your chairmanship, and to have the opportunity of debating this report, which has been around for some time. It is from the 2009-10 Session, and represents the culmination of an extensive inquiry that took place over two years. It was a unanimous report, and I pay tribute to the members of the Select Committee who took part in it. I particularly single out the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael), who is here this afternoon and looking ready to take part in our proceedings. He has a lot of experience in this area, and made a major contribution to our deliberations, as did many then members of the Committee.

I also pay tribute to the Committee’s staff, who gave us such excellent support in producing the report, and to the many organisations and individuals who were witnesses in person, who submitted memorandums, or who took part in e-consultation. We received a lot of evidence, and we gave it a great deal of attention. The report was extremely well received by many organisations working in the field.

I shall remind hon. Members of the context. The previous Government had announced that their solution to prison overcrowding, likely further demand, and the use of police cells was to increase capacity to 96,000 prison places by 2014. The Committee was worried that a predict-and-provide approach to the problems was not sustainable in the long term. That was the approach that Lord Carter had recommended in his December 2007 review of the use of custody, but we thought it was short-sighted and could not be maintained.

We wanted to consider whether committing further resources to prison building represented the best possible way to improve public safety, and to reduce reoffending in the context of a fall in recorded crime rates and under-resourced probation services. Interestingly, there has been another fall in the recorded crime rate today—an 8% fall and a 4% fall in the British crime survey figure. I am not claiming that that is success for the coalition Government, any more than I supported the claims that the previous Government sometimes made about the fall in crime. Movements in crime statistics respond to all sorts of things, and have a curious way of being similar throughout neighbouring countries, and indeed throughout much of Europe. We are sometimes in danger of exaggerating our impact on total crime figures, although the system, through the good work of good people, is having a significant impact on the lives of many people who become involved in crime. I pay tribute to those who work in the criminal justice system and whose efforts have turned people away from crime, thereby saving other people from becoming victims of crime.

The fundamental issue is that the first duty of the state is to protect its citizens and keep them safe. We spend well over £5 billion on the criminal justice system in England and Wales, and billions more on policing and the social, health and business costs of crime. We owe it to taxpayers to calculate whether we are spending all that money in the way most likely to prevent them from suffering the effects of crime, but the reoffending rate of ex-prisoners is so high—two thirds of prisoners go on to reoffend—that it seems that we are not. Some offenders are so dangerous that they must be kept in prison or in secure mental institutions for very long periods, but for many, custody is an expensive way of not solving the problems that they present.

A number of things have happened since we produced our report. The previous Government published their response, which accepted much of our analysis, but did not accept or were rather lukewarm about the route that we had identified to deal with the problems. That might be attributed in part to the pre-election atmosphere, but it also reflected the strongly held views of the previous Lord Chancellor.

The situation has changed dramatically for several reasons. First, we have a different Government with a Lord Chancellor who holds different views from those of his predecessor, and is never slow to express them. Secondly, there is a very serious financial crisis which both Government parties and the Opposition recognise requires substantial cuts in public spending. They may disagree about precisely how much and precisely where, but there is common ground between the parties. That has caused the coalition Government to shelve plans that the Committee criticised for a 1,500-place prison, and to make deep cuts in the departmental budget of the Ministry of Justice, which will affect spending on probation and other services that provide alternatives to custody.

The Committee was not unaware of the difficult financial situation. In the report’s summary—we are talking about December 2009—we said:

“Public expenditure generally is under pressure in all areas in the worst economic climate since the Second World War. The Ministry of Justice is no exception, being tasked with finding £1.3 billion worth of cost savings over the next three years.”

The situation was bad then, and cuts had to be made, but it is recognised that the position is worse now and even more demanding. There are two differences: the change of Government and an even more serious financial situation. The third is that the Government are developing ideas such as payment by results and social impact bonds, which we did not examine and which were not part of our report. They are new elements in the discussion.

In our report, we concluded that after the election the Government would face a choice of risks: to muddle through with the previous plans to build more prisons in the hope that commitments made under the predict-and-provide model would prove to be affordable and not merely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy; or to make more radical decisions and investments, putting the system on a sustainable footing in the longer term by shifting resources away from incarceration towards rehabilitation and measures that prevent people from becoming criminals in the first place. It is far better to spend our taxes on preventing suffering from crime than on housing and feeding more and more people who have committed crimes and caused great suffering and distress in the process.

The report highlighted the fact that, although the prison population has increased as a direct result of the introduction of longer sentences and better enforcement, rather than an increase in crime, there were other contributory factors. They include the press, perceived public opinion and political rhetoric. Paragraph 36 states:

“Wider factors, such as the media, public opinion and political rhetoric, contribute to risk averse court, probation and parole decisions and hence play a role in unnecessary system expansion. … A good deal of media comment assumes that sentencing is below the level that the public expect, whereas the evidence suggests that the public—when asked to make a judgment—set out expectations that are close to the levels that are actually being set by the courts… The Government should lead a public debate on the aims of criminal justice policy, and seek to influence, as well as to be influenced by, the public response…In basing arguments for reform on the best use of taxpayers’ money, the political argument could be shifted away from notions about which party is ‘harder’ or ‘softer’ on crime and criminals to questions about the most effective use of scarce resources…It is time for an objective consideration of what is in the best interests of society”.

I welcome the fact that the Lord Chancellor has recognised the importance of rational political debate and has tried to stimulate it. That is precisely what he did in his speech at King's college at the end of June, and I hope that we will see a move away from the numbers game that he said characterised the penal policy of the past 25 years. The key messages in the Committee’s report were reflected in the Lord Chancellor’s inaugural speech and those of other Ministry of Justice and Home Office Ministers. They have moved on from the previous assumption that a high and rising prison population is inevitable.

Even without a deliberate policy shift, yesterday’s spending review made it clear that the financial situation made change unavoidable. In its report, the Committee drew attention to clear precedents that proved that it was possible to reduce the prison population and public spending without compromising public safety.

Finland successfully reduced its prison population over two periods in recent history when it decided that it could not afford to build more prisons. When we were in Finland some time ago, we questioned officials on why and how they had embarked on a substantial reduction in the number of prison places and people in custody. We expected a deep philosophical answer from the thoughtful Finns, but they said, “Well, the Ministry of Finance told us that we couldn’t have any more money for prisons.” It is remarkable how economic circumstances can sometimes create policy changes. Those changes did not result in any increase in crime in Finland, as some in this country might fear such a policy.

Some American states have become more sophisticated than England and Wales in their thinking about whether prison represents the most appropriate use of taxpayers’ money, and they recognise that the expansion of imprisonment can come at the expense of new hospitals and schools. Those states faced the same choices as we do now against a background of historically high rates of incarceration.

Several US states have adopted “justice reinvestment” approaches. That term refers to criminal justice policy reforms that are designed to reduce prison spending by redirecting resources from inside and outside the criminal justice system towards more productive, locally-based initiatives to tackle the underlying problems that give rise to certain kinds of criminal behaviour. Hon. Members know the sorts of problems involved, such as unemployment, mental ill health or drug and alcohol dependency. Such initiatives are targeted at the populations that are most at risk of offending and reoffending.

[Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for the work that he has undertaken over a number of years. The report on justice reinvestment has been long in the making and it is good to bring it to light. I know that there are a number of cricket supporters in the room, so early in his innings, I would like to bowl my right hon. Friend a full toss to whack away to the boundary. Does he agree that it was disappointing that the Government sought to compartmentalise their response by suggesting that the Committee overestimated the benefits that could accrue from moving towards a justice reinvestment approach, by distinguishing between less serious and more serious offenders when looking at the impact of early intervention and prevention? Plainly, early intervention will have an effect on whether a person ends up as a more serious or less serious offender. If we can get there early, we will save taxpayers and victims a lot of damage.

[Sir Alan Beith]

It must be remembered that that was the response of the previous Government. I found that part disappointing because it got into a circular situation. If we simply look at the present prison population, we are looking at the failures of the past. If we do not change the policy, the situation will continue. I will return to that theme later in my remarks. Catching people early is of vital importance. The people who initially commit relatively minor offences sometimes go on to become those who, through drug dependency or something else, get into more serious offences and become subject to repeat custodial sentences because of the ever more serious or frequent crimes that they commit.

In 2007, the Texas state legislature rejected plans to spend $0.5 billion on new prisons in favour of a justice reinvestment approach. Half that money was spent on expanding the capacity of residential and out-patient treatment for substance misuse and mental health, community-based sanctions for offenders and post-release support to prisoners. Parole revocations were reduced, and the increase in the prison population was 90% smaller than had been predicted. Significant savings were made within two years, because the costs of increasing the capacity of treatment and residential facilities were significantly less than the cost of increasing prison capacity.

The Committee gave a great deal of detailed consideration to how justice reinvestment approaches could be applied to the system in England and Wales. We believe that the system as a whole should be revisited through a lens that looks at crime as a problem to be managed in a cost-effective way. A longer-term rational approach must be taken to policy and the diversion of resources. That would enable prisons that are currently stretched to deal more effectively with those for whom incarceration is necessary for public protection, and prevent the need for continued expansion in the number of prison places. Few hon. Members in the Chamber will not have visited prisons and seen the pressures under which prison officers work. Such officers desire more time and opportunity to devote to rehabilitative work. Ideally, they would work with smaller numbers of prisoners who need that kind of support, and they are anxious to provide it to them by using the skills that they have built up over the years.

We also suggest that probation services should be able to pay greater attention to those offenders who represent the greatest risk to the public. Lurking at the back of that is a problem to which I will refer later. We must find a way other than imprisonment to signify society’s disapproval of crime. For some, community sentences can be more demanding than prison. The week before last, we took evidence from four ex-offenders during our work on the probation service. Two of those offenders said that they had committed offences in order to get back inside, because that was easier than the community sentence on which they were engaged. In one case, the sentence did not seem to work well, because the daily supervision requirement prevented the person from taking a job. In both cases, people had committed offences that they knew would put them back in prison, which was the easier option. That is not often recognised by the public, who see prison as the only way of saying that society will not put up with crime. We must demonstrate that community sentences can fulfil that function, as well as reduce the risk of reoffending.

A priority for the Government is to find a mechanism to overcome the fact that we treat prison in the system as a “free good.” If the sentencer—judge or magistrate—has an offender before them, they may consider whether some form of rehabilitative treatment such as intensive supervision or a course of drug treatment, residential or otherwise, would be the right thing. Inquiries must then be made into whether that is available. If the sentencer says “prison”, the van pulls up outside the door and takes the person away. The prison system and the National Offender Management Service recognise that it is their obligation to take whoever the court sends. However, there is an imbalance between the automatic availability of prison, and the uncertain availability of an alternative, which might be much better in a given case.

We thought that the most promising way to deal with that issue was probably the devolution to local agencies and communities of resources that are spent on corrections. The first step would be to look at how money is currently spent on offenders across the system in Government Departments and statutory agencies. We felt that a business case could be made to move resources from a significant part of the prison building programme, if the numbers entering or re-entering the system could be reduced by a sufficient margin before contracts were signed for new prisons.

The Washington State Institute for Public Policy looked at the cost of imprisonment to the state, and developed an alternative model of investment that primarily involved investing in rehabilitation programmes that would break even over five years and yield considerable savings thereafter. It is therefore possible to reap significant rewards by adopting justice reinvestment approaches over a 10-year period.

Fundamental change in the pattern of public expenditure is entirely appropriate during times of economic difficulty. When is it more necessary to look at how we are spending money than when we realise that we have not got as much as we would like? That requires the Government to recognise that change must be facilitated by some movement of money and spending in other areas. When changes cut across departmental boundaries and involve transfers between central and local government budgets, it is rarely an easy process. We are looking not only for justice disinvestment but for justice reinvestment.

In order to release resources in the medium term by halting the prison building programme, investment is required in the shorter term. We must identify where resources are currently being wasted or duplicated, and where quick wins could be achieved by reducing the prison population if that money were reinvested. The amount required for reinvestment is relatively small when compared with the resources that would have been committed to building and running 96,000 prison places.

The Committee’s proposals are in line with what the previous Government sought to do—and significantly achieved—in diverting women away from crime. That explicitly linked the reduction of expenditure on women’s prison places with the funding of new initiatives to improve community provision. For two years, £7.8 million per year was committed to provide additional services in the community for women offenders who were not a danger to the public. That was an attempt to reduce the female prison population by 400 by 2012, as recommended by Baroness Corston in her 2007 report. Those initiatives have already borne fruit in reducing the number of women in prison. The investment required was a tiny sum in the context of spending on prisons.

The previous Government had some similar success in reducing custody for young offenders. We may no longer need a free-standing Youth Justice Board, and it is going, but we should recognise that it helped to achieve a sharp reduction in custody as a way of dealing with young offenders.

In both cases, the significant element was that there was a commissioning process, which created the opportunity to change the mix of custody and alternatives to custody that were available to sentencers. We argue that similar approaches should be adopted to deal more effectively with other groups of offenders, including low-level but persistent offenders, who frequently have problems with drugs, alcohol or mental health, or some combination of those things. The severely mentally ill could be dealt with more appropriately in the health care system.

Local services such as housing, drug agencies and mental health trusts, which could help to prevent people from reoffending when they are no longer in contact with the criminal justice system, are often under-resourced. Targeted investment in the areas where offenders and victims are known to live could ensure that services were more readily available, without having explicitly to prioritise access to offenders, whom the public would regard as a not particularly deserving target in themselves.

The right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth brought to the Select Committee his knowledge of what was happening in Cardiff and the work done by an accident and emergency consultant there. I hope that he will find an opportunity to refer to that in the course of this afternoon’s proceedings.

[Alun Michael (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is just possible.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I am giving the right hon. Gentleman a prompt, but I am sure that he does not need it.

Short-sentenced prisoners frequently end up in custody after repeated community sentences. There is a need to examine why community sentences are breached and why some offenders continue to offend. We concluded that that was partly because the sentences are under-resourced. There are waiting lists for offender behaviour programmes and assessments for mental health and treatment. Probation officers typically have extremely large case loads, and often we are talking about people with completely disorganised lives who just do not get up in the morning. What they need is not a very short prison sentence but someone to bang on the door and get them out doing the community programme that they are supposed to be carrying out. They need someone to exercise some authority.

In the course of the inquiry on probation, we have spoken to ex-offenders, and what they said was very illuminating. They made it clear that they needed probation officers to challenge them, not simply to offer friendship and a cup of coffee, however desirable it is to establish a relationship. They needed probation officers to challenge them because, as they openly admitted, their behaviour needed challenging. Their unwillingness to do some of the things that they needed to do to turn their lives around needed someone with authority to challenge it.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

The right hon. Gentleman will recall that a fortnight or three weeks ago, we visited the Lambeth project—the so-called Sapphire project. In that project, if a person did not turn up for the unpaid work part of the probation order, he was visited by a police officer to get him out of bed. That is not a bad idea, in the circumstances.

[Sir Alan Beith]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to focus on what we saw in practice. The Committee has tried to make it its business to get out and look at what happens in practice and what works. I commend the reports of our public evidence sessions and our future report on probation, which I hope will be as valuable in its own way as I think the report is that we are considering today.

Of course, we know what happens in the United States. When the federal Government want to do things, they offer money to states to do them. They do not have the power to make them, so they offer them money. They can use the grants system under the Criminal Justice Reinvestment Act 2009 to support or persuade state and local governments to analyse criminal justice trends to find out what is driving the growth in their local jail and prison populations; to develop tailored policy options to reduce corrections expenditure and increase the effectiveness of current programmes to make communities safer; and to measure the impact of those changes and develop accountability measures.

We found evidence of the potential for geographically targeted local initiatives to reduce expenditure if such partnerships and the agencies that make them up, including probation trusts, are free to use resources more flexibly. That is in line with the Government’s emphasis on localism and the withdrawal of ring-fencing from local government. The first reaction of some people involved in the services is horror that a ring-fenced grant might now be used by the local authority for some purpose other than that for which it was originally introduced, but unless we give agencies, including local government, some freedom to move money around between different projects, innovative policies will not be developed. In this area, if agencies can work together and move money around a bit to where it is most effectively used, we can make progress.

We talked about needing to get in early. The Government made announcements yesterday in relation to school funding and pre-school education for disadvantaged children. That is a crucial area. Not just the criminal justice system but many other parts of our system are crucial in determining whether some youngsters get involved in crime. Giving youngsters a better start is a key way of reducing the likelihood of their being drawn into criminality. The concept of justice reinvestment includes the concept of early intervention. The child who has to be excluded from school has stepped on to the escalator that can lead to repeat offending and regular imprisonment in the future, so such initiatives are very relevant to justice reinvestment.

However, there is a risk that the financial climate will threaten existing initiatives that are proving promising. There is the Diamond initiative. I am trying to remember whether Sapphire and Diamond are the same scheme or two different ones, but obviously jewels are thought a good way of illustrating the fact that these are very valuable initiatives.

[Mr Llwyd]

I am advised that it is actually the Diamond initiative.

[Sir Alan Beith]

So we are talking about the same one. The Diamond initiative is delivered jointly by the Metropolitan police, local authorities and the London Probation Trust. Built on the principle of justice reinvestment, it has reoffending rates of 28% within six months of release from custody. That compares favourably with the 43% figure for those who have not received that intensive support and monitoring.

However, under the previous Government, there was a decline in crime reduction funding through local area agreements to local community safety partnerships. Those intensive options require partnership commitment and resources, which may be less readily available following yesterday’s comprehensive spending review. I am anxious to hear what the Minister can say by way of reassurance on that. Until the Green Paper is published, it is unclear how the new Government will enable those partnerships to fulfil their statutory responsibility to reduce reoffending under the Policing and Crime Act 2009.

We proposed that if the Government could identify moneys that could be used to create a national justice reinvestment fund, there would be an incentive for local partnerships to think creatively about ways of reducing crime and the use of imprisonment, pooling resources at local level and spending money in geographically targeted areas using the results of justice mapping. That technique, which was pioneered in the US and has been tried out quite a lot in Gateshead, for example, measures local needs and the existing flow of resources to particular communities.

The Government’s aspiration to introduce payment by results draws on the experience of Kansas in implementing justice reinvestment approaches. It is not clear whether the Government will go about it in the same way, but some of the options that the Committee has been suggesting could be accommodated in the sort of programme that the Government are talking about. The national investment fund could be part of the big society bank, for example.

If the Government are to place greater emphasis on evidence-based, targeted approaches, determined at local level, means need to be found to provide practical support to local areas in analysing trends, devising new policies and programmes and measuring their impact. A cross-disciplinary centre of excellence, like the Social Care Institute for Excellence, could provide robust economic modelling of what is effective in reducing crime and inform the development of a national justice reinvestment plan. I hope that the Government consider that cross-departmental approach.

All of this has implications for sentences. There remains a great deal of geographical disparity in the consistency of sentencing, to which the Lord Chancellor drew attention in his King’s college speech. Youth courts in some parts of the country are up to 10 times more likely to impose custodial sentences for certain crimes than their counterparts elsewhere. That cannot be explained by social and demographic factors alone.

It is often said by the judiciary that the sentencing of individual offenders should not be driven by the availability or otherwise of resources. In practice, of course, it is, but that is usually because of the scarcity of suitable alternatives to custody in a given area. Prison is always there; alternatives are not always there. It is nevertheless necessary to find a way in which recognition of scarce resources is built into the sentencing process.

We are concerned that sentencing policy, and the Sentencing Council, does not address the need for sentencers to have regard to the available resources and the relative costs of their sentencing decisions. There are few other public servants who are not required to be accountable to the taxpayer in relation to the value delivered for the money that they spend. In order to have such regard, however, sentencers need data on the cost-effectiveness of their decisions and on the outcome of sentences. We have been surprised at how little information comes back to the judiciary about the overall impact of the sentences that they pass.

I spoke earlier about the media and about the public debate on sentencing. The public rightly see prison as a necessary means of dealing with extremely dangerous people who would be a threat to public safety were they not in custody but, in many cases, public safety is not the major issue. A custodial sentence and its length seem to have become the only means that the public and the media feel they have of asserting the seriousness of the offence. That is why we see so many headlines in the press saying, “Yobs only got six months,” or “Con man got less than a motoring offender.” The relative significance of crimes is measured by the sentence length. When the community or victims want to assert that they will not tolerate a crime, they look for a way of expressing that abhorrence, and a longer custodial sentence seems to serve that purpose, even if it is of little or no use in ensuring that the offender does not commit further crimes.

For offenders who do not need to be in custody, we need strong community sentences to be recognised as a punishment—not as a soft option. For some offenders they already are, but there is a media obsession with custody that is not justified by custody’s record in reducing reoffending. We are in a new situation, and there is a real chance to change things in a way that could reduce reoffending and make people safer from crime, at less cost.

In conclusion, we need to know three key things from the Minister. First, are Ministers ready to continue what the Lord Chancellor has started, by openly taking on the “prison works” argument and demonstrating that for many offenders custody is too costly and too ineffective to contribute as much to public safety as well-planned alternatives can? Secondly, how will a shift from the use of custody in appropriate cases be achieved, given that changes in sentencing principles will not work unless alternatives are widely available and the judges and the public are confident in them? Finally, and most important, how will Ministers prevent cuts in the Ministry of Justice budget from putting a roadblock in the way of the reforms that the Committee has advocated and to which the Government are now committed? What will be the impact of yesterday’s announcements on the ability of Ministers to deliver the policy shift that they have signalled? I hope that the Committee, in its work, has provided an underpinning of substance and intellectual coherence for what I see as a radical policy shift of real potential value to the safety of the people of this country. I am very interested to know whether the Government will be able to continue that initiative.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

I have letters from seven people who are hoping to catch my eye during this debate, and I also want to give the Minister and the Front-Bench speakers plenty of time for considered response. I hope, therefore, that everyone will keep that timing in mind.

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[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mrs Main.

I am pleased to have this opportunity to welcome the Justice Committee’s report. I congratulate Committee members on producing what all hon. and right hon. Members have agreed is a thoughtful, considered study. In the 19th century, the Quakers were in the lead on penal reform, but it seems that the Methodists are in the lead in the 21st century.

The criminal justice system has several distinct objectives: to protect the public, to deter crime, to punish offenders, and to reform and rehabilitate them. All those objectives must be taken into account in the criminal justice system. At times they may be supportive, and at other times, they may seem to conflict, but I do not believe that any should be pursued to the exclusion of others. That is what makes the task of running the criminal justice system so complex and difficult.

The Committee’s report concentrates on the importance of diverting people from entering the judicial system, and improving support and guidance offered to those who commit custodial offences to prevent reoffending. The report argues that two key challenges—prehabilitation and rehabilitation—need greater attention, and it is clear that greater success in those areas would have a major impact on cutting crime and improving our judicial system.

I welcome the report’s emphasis on providing community-based solutions and improving the interconnections between local services. I agree that, wherever possible, prisoners should be detained in and remain in prisons near their family and local community, because clearly that can help offenders after release.

I am glad that the report emphasises the need to reduce young adult offending, and to divert more young people from the prison system. I first worked on that issue about 10 years ago when I was at the Children’s Society, and I am particularly pleased that the Committee took evidence from the society in its project with young people.

I also believe that justice mapping is an approach with great potential, because when thinking about how different parts of the criminal justice system inter-relate, it is important to remember that some communities, notably poorer communities, tend to suffer most from crime and its consequences. The criminal justice system must work in those communities, which must have confidence in it.

Before I comment further on the report’s specific recommendations, I want briefly to address the wider issue of prison numbers, which has received considerable attention this afternoon, and in recent days and weeks. Everyone would like there to be fewer crimes, fewer criminals in our communities, and fewer people residing at Her Majesty’s pleasure and at taxpayers’ expense, but it would be wrong to set an arbitrary ceiling on prison numbers, or to identify an optimal size for the prison population. Yet that is precisely what the report does by suggesting that the prison population should be capped, and then reduced to two thirds of its current size.

The comprehensive spending review statement yesterday made it clear that the Government are planning to cut the prison population by 3,000 over the next four years. Given that that includes offenders on short sentences, will the Minister tell us how many people will not now go to prison who otherwise might have done? Is the figure about 6,000 a year, or is it higher? Plans to put back the prison-building programme will result in 10,000 fewer places in the estate than under previous plans. That suggests an even greater reduction in numbers. I have several questions, and if the Minister cannot answer them this afternoon, I shall be pleased if he will write to me and other Committee members.

The plans reveal that what may seem to some Committee members to be a small reduction would in fact have a radical influence on how the criminal justice system is run. How will the reduction be achieved? The Times today seems to be considerably better informed than Parliament was yesterday, and listed the following options: those pleading guilty early on, those on indefinite sentences, some remand prisoners, a lower level of recall, drug addicts and foreign prisoners. Can the Minister disaggregate reductions into those categories? Perhaps most important, does he believe that the reduction in the prison population will take place against a background of rising or falling crime rates? Given that, is he confident that he can guarantee public safety?

[Sir Alan Beith]

The context is of falling crime rates with an 8% fall in recorded crime and a 4% reduction according to the British crime survey. That is the current decline in crime rates.

[Helen Goodman]

Of course. I shall come to that in a moment.

The overriding point is that we are not convinced that it is for politicians, civil servants or committees—even the Justice Committee—to decide what the prison population should be. It is for the Government of the day to provide prison places in line with need because the justice system is at heart a process. If justice is to be done and seen to be done, people must be confident that it is not subject to artificial constraints. I am worried that setting a target for prison numbers and then adjusting sentencing policy and conviction rates accordingly is putting the cart before the horse, and may do nothing for public confidence in the judicial system,

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[Mr Blunt]

Well, I am grateful to receive support, wherever it comes from. I welcome the repentance of the Leader of the Opposition.

[Sir Alan Beith]

Now that we are having a more rational political debate about criminal justice policy, I hope that the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues will do what they can—we will certainly do what we can—to encourage a more rational debate in some sections of the media. We found when we talked to people in other countries, including Germany and Finland, that the media in those countries did not present the arguments about crime in the way in which they are presented in some sections of the media here, where the argument is always that the sentence should have been longer. In other countries, the issue is debated much more responsibly.

[Mr Blunt]

If my right hon. Friend can find a way of pulling off that piece of alchemy, it would be extremely welcome. It would certainly be a very welcome development in intelligent policy making. As the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael) said, this is a question not just of the Government changing the rhetoric but of Parliament addressing the issue, and now we are in a position to do so because in essence all three main parties are in the same place on going for evidence-based policy making. That is a welcome change from policy-based evidence making.

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[Sir Alan Beith]

I can assure my hon. Friend that the new membership of the Committee is every bit as compelling as the old in its determination to work hard on these issues, and it has a great range of experience and ability. We have had a very good debate today and I want to thank right hon. and hon. Members who have taken part, bringing considerable experience to our discussions. Speaking as a Back Bencher leading a Back-Bench Committee, I want to say to the Front Benchers, “Come and join us in the consensus,” because I think that the consensus is there. We all have our points of partisan disagreement, which the Front Benchers perhaps tend to emphasise, but the basis for consensus is there.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) on taking up her new responsibility. I know her well and am sure that she will do a very good job. She has an opportunity, I think, to develop policy, and there is a need to do so, because if we stick with the predict-and-provide approach there will continue to be a weighting in the system in favour of custody, and alternatives will be neglected. Although numerical targets are not the answer to the problem, I really believe that if we do not set ourselves some objectives and remain with the predict-and-provide approach, we will not be able to make the kind of developments that are necessary. I welcome the Government’s willingness to do that, but we will be watching very carefully to see whether in a very difficult financial climate the Government and the Ministry of Justice are able to put in place the means to achieve what I think we now agree needs to be done.

Question put and agreed to.