Better Prisons: Less Crime (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Thursday 12th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend and to congratulate him on his excellent speech. He certainly has a lot of experience. When he speaks to us in the future, it will be not from the theory of what it is all about but from practical experience of the day-to-day life that he has led. He is so well qualified to speak in this debate and, ideally, to one day become chair of the same committee, and more besides. I am genuinely impressed by the things that he has said. His children are amazed that he is one of the youngest here—I was one of the youngest here, but that was a long time ago. What I will says is: what took him so long to get here? He should have been here long ago. He is going to make a great contribution to this House and our work. He has made a great maiden speech and I wish him well in his future endeavours—we are going to be friends for a long time.

I am delighted to be a member of this committee and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foster, on leading us so ably through many interesting projects, including this one on prisons. I am convinced that my noble friend the Prisons Minister is committed to getting action to sort out the problems of the Prison Service. He inherited a very difficult task when he became Minister, and I wish him well with that.

I remember when I was in the Commons and was interested in penal reform. The prison population then, in the 1980s, reached 44,000, at which point we thought the world was coming to an end—that was an absolute disaster. We are now at double that figure and in an impossible predicament. We just cannot go on like this, so I hope that our recommendations will help the Minister. A lot of this is a work in progress. I do not denigrate that phrase; I think I will give the Minister the benefit of the doubt by saying that “work in progress” means he is going to do it and we are going to get on with it. After all, one of the recommendations from the Select Committee report states:

“We believe that the current Prisons Minister understands the need for change and what needs to be done; he should be strongly backed by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Justice”.


That sums up what our Select Committee report is about.

In preparing for this debate, I thought about how I have visited a large number of prisons. I will not go through them all but, as part of the Select Committee’s work, we visited Belmarsh and Isis, both characterised by excellent first-class women prison governors. We were really impressed by them. We sat around a table with a group of prisoners in Belmarsh and their plea was, “Please could we have the sort of training to help us get jobs when we get out?” It was a heartfelt plea. We were then told there were difficulties around this because they were not always going to be there long enough. There were also difficulties in liaising with local education authorities and so on. That is something that could certainly be overcome. On that list of prisons, I should add that I had Wandsworth prison in my constituency. Interestingly enough, I have visited prisons in Chicago, Bangkok and Tokyo, but this is not meant to be a tour around prisons of the world.

One of our big challenges is public opinion. Public opinion is being whipped up by some in the press to demand longer and longer sentences. One reason why the prison population has gone up is because sentences are much longer. This is not a satisfactory position. We have to tackle this culture in public opinion, because demanding ever-longer sentences simply will not solve the problem and will not make us safer in the end.

Interestingly, we learned in our evidence that prisoners like the idea of prison governors being more visible in walking around the prison. That is something we do recommend. I know there is a lot of pressure on prison governors, but it is important. We felt that governors should oversee the recruitment process of staff, that they should be longer in post before each rotation, that they should have more say in budgets and that there should be training for governors.

Let me talk about an experience I had, not as a member of the committee but before that, in Coldingley prison. The Howard League for Penal Reform had initiated a business in the prison, where prisoners did design work and so on, competing in the marketplace with the outside world. It was very enlightening. One of the prisoners, who was in prison for a long time, told me it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. There was an excitement about it. What happened? It closed down. Why was it closed down? Well, they were earning money. The Home Office said, “If you’re earning money, it can be taxed, and there’s a problem about employment rights, and we can’t have that competing with the authority of the governor”. So it was all stopped. It was a really brilliant initiative, and it just came to an end.

There needs to be more support not just for governors but for prison staff. There needs to be far more help with education and vocational training. It is an indictment of the system that about half of prisoners are functionally illiterate. I hope that the Minister will deal with these problems. He has a lot on his plate, and I hope he gets the full support of other Ministers in the Government so that he can bring about the changes that we all wish to see happen.