Covid-19: Prisons and Offender Rehabilitation

Lord McNally Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, between 2010 and 2017 I spent seven years at the Ministry of Justice, first as Minister of State and then as chair of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales. I visited many prisons and young offender institutions and never left any of those bodies without a sense of awe for those who work in them, doing a difficult and sometimes dangerous job on behalf of us all.

A month ago Sir Bob Neill, the chairman of the Justice Committee in the other place, called for the immediate publication of contingency plans to deal with what he called the

“potential hotbed for viral transmission”

in our prisons. The reason we are having this debate today—and that the noble Lords, Lord German, Lord Naseby and Lord Harris, have opened with such passion—is that there is a growing feeling that Ministers in the Ministry of Justice are not up to responding to that call for action. The Minister will be aware of the briefings that noble Lords have received from Nacro, the Prison Reform Trust, the Howard League, the Quakers and others. It is impossible to cover all their concerns in a two-minute speech, so will the Minister deposit in the Library a comprehensive response to the concerns raised in those briefings by these expert organisations?

Will prison staff and prisoners now be given the testing and safety equipment to manage the threats of the coronavirus safely, as is happening in hospitals and care homes? Will the Secretary of State take one of the Downing Street press conferences, accompanied by the head of the Prison Service, so that he can explain to the media and the British public what is happening in our prisons on his watch? Unless we hear an “action this day” response from the Minister, there is a very real danger of prisons being added to the list of too-little-too-late responses that have blighted this Government’s record in response to this pandemic.