Sentencing

Nigel Evans Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Richard Graham]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. May I ask whether I correctly heard what the right hon. Gentleman said? Did he accuse me of misleading the House in the figures I mentioned in my question to him?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

As I recall, the right hon. Gentleman said quite the reverse: he said you were not misleading the House intentionally.

[Richard Graham]

Further to that point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Did the right hon. Gentleman therefore accept that what I said was factually accurate?

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

To save a bit of time, let me say that it might be more appropriate for that question to be asked in an intervention on the shadow Secretary of State.

[Sadiq Khan]

I am afraid I have no idea what that point of order was about, Mr Deputy Speaker.

--- Later in debate ---

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. There is a six-minute limit on Back-Bench contributions, but if Members can get their points across in less than six minutes, they will be helping their colleagues.

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the Secretary of State, who presented a familiar face. There was a mixture of pragmatism, an element of bluster and just the occasional shaft of precision in his argument.

I begin by making an obvious point, and I do so at the risk of sounding like Michael Howard, now Lord Howard. We often lose sight of part of the meaning of what he said on the subject. Prison does work, at least to a limited extent. It seems to me an incontestable fact that while somebody is locked up in prison, they cannot commit offences out in the community. There have been many cases in my constituency over the years in which people have been given a custodial sentence and been taken out of the community, even if only for three or six months, and there has been an appreciable difference in the crime rate. Local police inspectors and senior officers in my area, and I am sure in other areas, will attest to the fact that prison works in those circumstances.

In my remaining time, I wish to cover two issues, the first of which is sentencing in general, which is the main subject of the debate. I approach it from the vantage point—or it might be a disadvantage point—of having sat on the Gage working group, which reported in July 2008. I will refer briefly to that report, then I want to say a word about community sentences.

The Gage working group examined, among many other things, the causes of the increased prison population to which the Secretary of State referred. We highlighted nine points. I will not go through all of them—time forbids, and in any event the Secretary of State has already referred to them, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) has covered the same points. However, I wish to pick out one of the nine, because the Secretary of State made a great point of talking about reoffending. Point (5) in paragraph 2.2, on page 5 of the report, states that

“re-offending including breaches of supervision, licence recall, suspended sentences and community orders”

is one of the drivers that increase the prison population. I shall come back to that point later, but it is important to recognise that the prison population increased for reasons relating to the alternatives to prison sentences.

This month, the new Sentencing Council, which was established from the Gage commission and subsequent legislation, produced a survey, “Attitudes to guilty plea sentence reductions”, which is germane to this point—it is included in the note produced by the House of Commons Library. I shall focus on three of the survey’s findings that have some force, the first of which is a point that the Secretary of State used to criticised my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting. First, the survey states:

“The public assume that the key motivation for the guilty plea sentence reduction is to reduce resources (time and money)…There is a strong sense that the drive for cost savings should not impact on a system effectively delivering justice.”

Secondly, it states:

“For the general public, there was weak support for higher levels of reductions beyond the current guideline range of up to 33%”.

Thirdly, it states:

“The public (and some victims and witnesses) do not like the idea of a universal approach to reductions”.

There is therefore a strong disconnect between the Secretary of State’s proposals and how the public feel things need to be handled, which is a real problem. I accept that he is making a genuine attempt to address the issue—he is not one for eye-catching initiatives. However, he has not won over the public, and he certainly has not won over large numbers of his own Back Benchers, and for that—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order.