Prisons

Oliver Colvile Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove (Surrey Heath) (Con)]

It is a privilege to follow the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint). She is a highly effective advocate for the causes in which she believes, and she was an outstanding Minister. I hope that when the Labour party comes to its senses, she will be restored to the Front-Bench position that she deserves.

Congratulations are also in order to the shadow Justice Secretary, the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon). It is important for us to have an opportunity to reflect on what is happening in our prisons. The hon. Gentleman has devoted his life to justice, as a distinguished trade union lawyer, and I am grateful to him for securing the debate. It was a pity, however, that while he understandably drew attention to concerns about what is happening on our prison estate, he did not put forward a single positive alternative proposition. The contrast between his speech and that of my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary was striking.

My right hon. Friend has been in office for less than 12 months, but during that time she has unveiled and advanced a series of reforms that I believe have the potential to transform our justice system more powerfully, for the good, than those of any of her predecessors for a generation. The fact that she dealt so skilfully with interventions, and also outlined—not just in policy detail, but with authority and humanity—what needs to be done, underlines how fortunate we are to have a genuine, passionate and humane reformer in such an important role.

It is right to pay tribute to those who work in our prisons, and I expect that nearly every speaker in the debate will do so. I always remember a visit that I made to HMP Manchester, formerly Strangeways prison, during which I talked to a prison officer who was working with the most refractory and difficult prisoners. I asked him why he had chosen deliberately to work with some of the offenders whose cases were the most complex and whose behaviour was the most threatening. He explained that he had been brought up in a part of Manchester that was afflicted by crime, with unique challenges, and that one of the things that he wanted to do was put something back by working with offenders to ensure that their lives were changed and that, as a result, people who had been nothing but trouble—people who had been liabilities to society, people who had brought misery and pain into the lives of others, people who were wasting their own lives—could be turned into assets, and we as a society could ensure that whatever talents they had, long buried in many cases, could at last be put to the service of the community.

I remember being inspired by the fact that this young man from a working-class background had decided that the greatest service he could give to the community that had raised him was to try to turn around the lives of others, and it is that spirit that animates nearly everyone who works in our prison system. Despite the occasional frustrations that I experienced in dealing with members of the Prison Officers Association when I was Justice Secretary, I was never for a moment anything other than grateful for their service, their commitment and their dedication. That is why I am particularly grateful to my right hon. Friend for the steps that she has taken to enhance the way in which the professionals who work in our prisons can do the right thing—not just the reform governors who are changing the way in which prisons work by exercising a greater degree of control and autonomy over the individual prisons that are their responsibility, but those who work on the front line in our wings, particularly, but not only, in our reform prisons, and who are being empowered to play a much more positive role in encouraging and securing rehabilitation.

I pay particular tribute to my right hon. Friend for an initiative that she has unveiled, Unlocked for graduates. As she pointed out, more than 350 undergraduates from some of our very best universities have now applied explicitly to work in prisons. Just as Teach First played a part in transforming the reputation of teaching, so this initiative is helping to recruit more people to our prisons. Alongside the work of Unlocked, the implementation of Sally Coates’s review of prison education is ensuring that those who are in custody finally receive a higher quality of education and the chance to transform their lives for the better. Moreover, the work of Charlie Taylor in reviewing youth justice is being followed up and implemented by my right hon. Friend. In so doing, they are making sure that those whose contact with the criminal justice system occurs relatively early in their lives, and who would otherwise be set on a course of criminality, are diverted from crime and assured of a productive future at the earliest possible stage.

I think we can all draw an important lesson from the experience of the youth justice system over recent years. It is the case that youth crime has fallen dramatically in the last few years, and that at the same time the number of young offenders in custody has fallen as well. It is not the case that in order to be tough on crime, we need to maintain the same number of individuals in custody as the number we currently have. There are smarter alternatives to incarceration that we need to contemplate. Let me be clear, however: there will always be some criminals for whom custody is the only appropriate answer, given the seriousness of their crimes and their capacity to reoffend. Sometimes society will be so outraged by particular crimes that incarceration is the only answer.

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

As my right hon. Friend may know, I represent an inner-city constituency. A couple of years ago, on a visit to a Salvation Army centre, I came across someone who had been in prison, had become institutionalised by the experience, and therefore wanted to go back fairly soon afterwards.

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Some individuals become institutionalised by prison life, and many individuals, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State pointed out, are in prison as a result of problems they acquired—mental health problems, substance abuse, or related issues—which mean that their behaviour is such that, for their own health and for society’s safety, they need for a time to be separated from society. But they should not be in prison; they should be receiving appropriate mental health care, because the custody and incarceration environment they face will only harm them and will do nothing either to heal them or to make sure they become positive and contributing members of society.

One thing I would like to see—I know my right hon. Friend is looking closely at this—is the possibility of building on the experience of problem-solving courts, where those charged with sentencing offenders have the option, of course, of custody, but can also say to the offender that if they commit to undertake either an appropriate course of mental health care or to deal with their drug or alcohol addiction or to change their behaviour in a meaningful way, they have the opportunity to serve their sentence out of custody.

I also think that release on temporary licence is the right way to go. There should be the opportunity for people who have shown genuine redemption and a desire to commit to society to be released early under strict terms, so that they can reacquaint themselves with the world of work and learning. I know of one prisoner, C. J. Burge, who has been serving her sentence, after one horrendous mistake, in a women’s prison in Surrey, and who, as a result of the sensitive use of release on temporary licence has not only been able to act as a mentor to young offenders, to steer them away from a life of crime, but is now pursuing training to become a barrister in order to ensure that a life that she herself was responsible for harming can now be turned to good. I think all of us in this House can embrace that example and that path, and for that reason I support the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

If I am honest, I am entering the debate with a certain amount of trepidation, for the simple reason that we seem to have a veritable cricket team of former prisons Ministers and, for that matter, lawyers who have been involved in this area.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt), who came with me on a cricket tour to Jamaica, where we visited a very interesting prison. The work he did to make sure there will be a new prison there, so that we can, hopefully, transfer some of the Jamaican prisoners in this country back to Jamaica, was quite helpful.

I am not going to pretend for one moment that I have any prisons in my constituency. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, I worked as the Conservative party agent in Mitcham and Morden for the prisons Minister at the time—one Angela Rumbold—and I learned quite a bit. Indeed, I visited Wandsworth prison, where staff were trying to get Ronnie Biggs to go back. When I asked what was happening, they said that they had his clothes and that they wanted him to go back and collect the stuff in person, which, of course, he eventually did.

In my constituency, I have probably the busiest custody suite in the whole country, and that is the end we have to start from.

We need to make sure that three things happen. First, people must be able to read, write and add up. I commend the Government for producing a league table of prisons that are achieving that. That is very good news. Secondly, we must get people off drugs. The Government are obviously very aware of that issue. Thirdly, we must think about veterans. I represent a naval garrison city with a large and growing Royal Marine population. I pay tribute to Trevor Philpott, who runs an organisation called Veterans Change Partnership that is seeking to change the justice system so that we do not get veterans in it in the first place. I encourage the justice system to make greater use of people who have served in the military as magistrates. That would be incredibly helpful, because at least they have some idea of what happens—

[Jenny Chapman]

rose—

[Oliver Colvile]

I am sorry, but I will not give way because I am very short of time.

I am involved in an organisation called Forward Assist in which the shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson), has also been very involved. When I served on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, we went to Washington, where we learned how veterans are dealt with in veteran treatment courts. I urge the Government to examine at that in no uncertain terms, because it is vital that we get this right. We must also do something about mental health, where I ask the Government to look at better training for prison officers. Prison officers do a brilliantly good job. I have a lot of prison officers in my constituency who work just outside it in Dartmoor. I am really looking forward to visiting Exeter and Dartmoor prisons.