Sentencing Review and Prison Capacity

Debate between Lord Dholakia and Lord Keen of Elie

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Keen of Elie (Con)]

I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement of the Justice Secretary. It is comforting to note that the Whitehall tradition of dusting down old policies for new Ministers is still with us. Of course, there are many matters addressed in the Statement with which I entirely agree. The proposal for a review is certainly to be welcomed, and there are many policy initiatives touched upon that deserve further consideration and ultimately, I hope, some form of introduction, but does the Minister agree with me that one major issue to be addressed at the outset is the practicality and cost of the measures being proposed?

Take a simple example: extending home detention and the use of tagging. The Minister mentioned tags and sensors, but that is a tiny part of that overall programme. When we have, let us say, thousands of offenders tagged, we require more than just the tag and sensor, however sophisticated it may be. Does the Minister agree with me that, for the programme to work, we require real-time monitoring, real-time reporting 24 hours a day and a real-time response—again, 24 hours a day? There is no point in noticing that someone has left home under curfew if we do not check on them for another week. That makes considerable demands on police resources, for example. What will be done to address that issue in the context of these reforms?

If, however, we are going to use some other service, such as the Probation Service, does the Minister anticipate a significant and, indeed, material increase in the provision of that service? I also ask him: is it proposed to use home detention and tagging as a potential alternative to remand, since it is at the end of remand that we find the greatest pressure upon the current prison system? Furthermore, if we are to have a much-extended home detention system, what steps will be taken to monitor and deal with the impact on families of having an offender in their midst for up to 16 hours a day? We know from the experience of the pandemic lockdown of the stress and mental difficulty that can be caused by that sort of situation. We will need more than just experts in the criminal justice system to address that sort of proposal, so I hope that the appointment of the review panel will go further than indicated in the Justice Secretary’s Statement.

We should also consider the victims of crime and the public perception of crime and punishment. If your home has been burgled half a dozen times in the previous year by the same individual, it is somewhat galling to see him walking down the street in front of your house wearing a tag. We have to be able to inform the public as to the effectiveness of the proposals that are being made. We are going to have to educate the public with regard to their effectiveness. There is the further issue of public confidence in the penal system. At present, it is conceivable that a person given a three-year sentence can be released on licence after three months. How does the Minister consider that the public perceive that when it occurs? A further area of education may be required, if I might be permitted to mention it: the education of the magistrates and judges to persuade them that community sentences can have a much more major part to play in our sentencing policy. Will that too be addressed in the context of the present review?

Then there is a question of how the Government will deal with the opposition. I am referring not to His Majesty’s loyal Opposition but to the Treasury—the place where all penal reform proposals go to die. Before we start out on this ambitious project, will the Minister be able to assure us that he has, in principle, the support of the Treasury for the considerable sums that will be required to implement these policy proposals?

There is an acknowledgement in the Statement that we need more prisons. Will the Minister disclose to us the programme for those new prisons? Will he also address the difficult issue of planning, where proposals for prisons seem to be notoriously subject to blocking and delay? Are there steps that the Minister will be able to advise us of to try to circumvent that problem?

We then come to the matter of foreign nationals, who make up about 12% of the present prison population. The Justice Secretary said in the Statement that it was

“my personal view that deportation is as good a punishment as imprisonment, if not better ”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/10/24; col. 200.]

Does the Minister agree with me that this is a completely mad proposition? Foreign criminals, gangsters and drug dealers from safe countries—remember that we can deport foreign nationals only to safe countries—will come here to rob, burgle and create mayhem. Then when caught, according to the Justice Secretary’s policy, they will simply be sent home again, no doubt at our expense. We will become a magnet for foreign criminals. Why would you not come here if that was the policy being implemented? Get caught and go home but get a free ticket to go home—wonderful. Can the Minister advise me who dreamed up this particular policy and how they intend to implement it?

It is clear that penal reform has been overdue in this country for many years. I welcome the idea of the review and the appointment of the former Conservative Justice Secretary to head that review. I hope we can see such a review being carried forward in the very near future. I thank the Minister again for repeating the Statement.

[Lord Dholakia (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement in your Lordships’ House. Overcrowding in our prisons has been in the headlines for as long as I can remember. Different Ministers have offered various solutions to this problem. No one seems to have looked at overall solutions that could resolve the problem. We are now offered a review by a former Minister and a prison capacity package to solve the present crisis.

We have long called for a review of criminal sentencing. We have asked for reoffending to be cut by taking a holistic approach to rehabilitation and community supervision, including a full range of rehabilitative services. We also believe in implementing a presumption against short sentences of 12 months or fewer to facilitate rehabilitation in the community.

The present proposals offer short-term solutions but do not alleviate the problems or provide the long-term solutions we badly need. The previous Administration had a golden opportunity to set up a royal commission on the criminal justice system, but this was kicked into the long grass. Instead, we have a piecemeal approach to legislation in this field. We need to look at the overuse of imprisonment. This has put us on top in Europe as the worst country in the way we sentence offenders. It is astonishing that we imprison nearly twice as many people as Germany.

There are a number of questions for the Minister. I welcome the proposals to reduce the prison population. We should seriously examine the work of the Sentencing Council. Surely a Minister should put a legislative obligation to take note of the prison population before a sentence is passed. How will the review plan to address concerns about disproportionate sentencing of minority groups and marginalised communities? Would the Minister agree that ploughing more resources into expanding the prison system to hold an ever-growing number of prisoners is far from the most sensible way to tackle crime?