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

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 12th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate our five maiden speakers. They are the future of this House, and the future of this House is clearly effective.

I congratulate, too, the committee on this well-researched and hard-hitting report. I absolutely join in the welcome that this House gives to the noble Lord, Lord Timpson—he enjoys support all the way around the House, and I very much hope that he never qualifies for early release—but I was rather disappointed by the lack of urgency, commitment and humanity in the Government’s response to the committee’s report. I rather suspect that the Minister did not write it himself.

My connection with prisons comes from my wife, Antonia Rubinstein, who co-founded and ran the charity Safe Ground for 17 years. We were lucky; prisons were reasonably well funded in those days, and we had a fine succession of Labour Prisons Ministers. I remember with particular admiration Lord Williams of Mostyn, the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, and Hilary Benn. They all, as I remember them, exercised their distinctive voices. That allowance for Ministers to speak in their own voice seems to have been suppressed over the last 25 years, and I very much hope that the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, will reverse it.

In the same vein, I hope that, as the report asks, the Minister will swiftly restore discretion and responsibility to prison governors, who should also stay in post for a sensible time. A lot of my working life has been with the Good Schools Guide, and I reckon that seven years is about right for a headmaster; it is long enough to do big things and not too long to get stale. That same period ought to apply to prison governors. Given discretion and longevity, governors would be much more effective in running prisons and instilling a strong ethos into the staff, and they would collectively become a strong, self-improving community of capability, expertise and experience available to the Minister. As the president of the Prison Governors Association said at its 2024 conference, recalling what it was like 20 years ago:

“My team … were mine to deploy into whatever role I chose for them. The SMT could be as large or small as I liked, provided changes were properly consulted upon … I didn’t have to choose from a restrictive list of job descriptions … teams were resilient and … the senior management team was small …. decisive and executive … The staff group was well established, experienced, confident and capable … also occasionally grumpy and intransigent where change was required. The prison was reasonably safe for both staff and prisoners”.


Responsibility and trust have gone and been replaced by a central bureaucracy. We thought in doing that—this was largely under Conservative Governments—that we were buying safety, but look at our prisons now compared to 25 years ago: we have achieved the opposite. All through public life, we can see that this pursuit of imaginary safety has hugely increased expenditure, from £100 million bat tunnels to our own £10 million front door, and our nice but utterly pointless traffic marshals. We need to get back to a culture of trust and responsibility. We would free up a large amount of money that could then be applied in our prisons without troubling the Treasury.

As chapter 4 of the report describes, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Hunt of Bethnal Green, said, staff in prisons need to be much better supported. I will say only that I very much agree with what was said about the Belmarsh buddy system and other advocated forms of mentoring. My wife was talking to a couple of Timpson employees the other day—always an enjoyable thing to do—and asked them what they would do to improve the lives of the staff who had looked after them when they were in prison. They both said mentoring. I hope that is a theme that the Government will take up.

I end with one other suggestion. In 1997, the Prison Service commissioned Safe Ground to produce a programme for prison staff to deliver family relationships education to prisoners. It was called Family Man. It was hugely successful. It helped prisoners build a network of family relationships to support them post-release and made prisons safer places because of the effect on the motivations and attitudes of prisoners. This is a Prison Service course; it owns the copyright of it. It should be revived.