Queen’s Speech

Lord Dholakia Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dholakia (LD)]

My Lords, I make no apologies for drawing the attention of the House yet again to the state of our prisons. The United Kingdom continues to have the highest rate of imprisonment in western Europe. In England and Wales, there are 131 prisoners for every 100,000 people in the general population, compared with 90 in Spain and 69 in Germany.

Sentence lengths have greatly increased in recent years. The average sentence for an indictable offence is now 58 months, which is more than two years longer than in 2008. Mandatory life-sentenced prisoners now spend on average 18 years in custody compared with 13 years in 2001.

We still send large numbers of people to prison for short periods: 47% of those entering prison under sentence are imprisoned for six months or less. Community sentences are significantly more effective than short prison sentences in reducing reoffending among comparable offenders, yet the use of community sentences has halved in the past decade. As a result of the higher use of custody, most of our prisons are overcrowded: 80 out of 121 currently hold more prisoners than their certified “normal” population.

Safety in prison has deteriorated over the past decade, during which the number of deaths in prisons has risen by over 50%. For every 1,000 prisoners, there were 741 incidents of self-harm in the period 2010-2020, compared with 282 in 2014. Over half of British prisons have found it more difficult to provide resettlement support to help prisoners avoid reoffending on release. Over the past 10 years, there has been a marked decline in prison inspectorate ratings of our prisons for purposeful activities and resettlement.

Covid-19 has caused particularly acute problems for the prison system. During lockdown, the vast majority of prisoners have spent 23 hours or more out of every 24 in their cells—2,000 of them in conditions that amount to solitary confinement. But even before lockdown it was clear that purposeful activity in our prisons had suffered a marked decline in recent years.

The latest projections predict a prison population of over 98,000 by 2026. The Government have announced plans for a significant programme of prison building. Despite this, last year’s report from the Public Accounts Committee, Improving the Prison Estate, estimated that the demand for prison places could outstrip supply by the next financial year. We all know that prison building programmes take time to deliver additional places, and this one will be no exception.

Against this background, the Government are introducing the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which contains a raft of provisions for lengthening sentencing further, including measures to ensure that most offenders serve lengthy minimum sentences and to increase the time served under discretionary life sentences. The Government estimate that these measures will increase the prison population by a further 700—the population of a medium-sized prison—by 2028. The Government’s impact assessment of this acknowledges that there is little evidence that these measures will deter offenders or reduce the level of crime.

I have one simple question for the Minister: will the Government adopt a policy objective of reducing, or preferably ending, overcrowding in our prison system, with clear target dates? It is a question that can be answered with a yes or a no. If the Government were prepared to adopt a clear objective along these lines, they would gain the support of noble Lords in all parts of this House.

Tucked away in the gracious Speech is a sentence which will require lots of attention in coming months:

“Measures will be brought forward to address racial and ethnic disparities”.


Nowhere are these disparities more obvious than in prison sentences. I see that my time is up, but I intend to take this matter up in future debates, and I will write formally to the Minister on this issue.