Oral Answers to Questions

Paul Goggins Excerpts

Tuesday 18th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

As I have indicated, we have some high-quality probation professionals in this country. It is a profession that will remain important to us. We need specialist skills, particularly in the protection of public security, risk assessment and harm prevention. Such skills will remain integral to the way in which a public sector probation service works.

[Paul Goggins (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

16. What plans he has to extend the use of restorative justice.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mrs Helen Grant)]

The Government published their restorative justice action plan for the criminal justice system on 19 November. It will improve the victim’s awareness of and access to restorative justice. We have also introduced legislation to put restorative justice on a statutory footing.

[Paul Goggins]

I am grateful to the Minister for that answer. I welcome the Government’s action plan, to which she referred, including the clear commitment to the needs of victims. However, if she and her colleagues are to embed restorative justice at the heart of the criminal justice system, she will need to find additional resources. Will she make a commitment now to allocate to restorative justice some of the extra money that has been raised from offenders through the extended victims surcharge?

[Mrs Grant]

We are already doing so.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)]

I am happy to join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to the Erewash community safety partnership, and to reassure her that this is one of the many areas where the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice are working together closely. She will know that last week my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary published a draft Anti-Social Behaviour Bill, which aims precisely to help community safety partnerships put victims at the heart of their response to this problem. The Ministry of Justice is funding a number of organisations, including Victim Support, that are working to the same end.

[Paul Goggins (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

T8. I know that the Minister responsible for probation has had the opportunity to visit Manchester and see for himself the intensive alternative to custody programme, which is co-ordinated by the Greater Manchester probation service and has achieved significant reductions in the rate and seriousness of offending. Will he and the Secretary of State make a clear commitment that, under the new commissioning arrangements, whenever they are announced, that tremendously important initiative will continue?

[Jeremy Wright]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for raising that, and I certainly enjoyed my visit to Manchester, where I could see that a great deal of good work was being done. He can take reassurance from the fact that the system we will roll out will reward those things that work. If the intensive alternative to custody programme is as effective as it appears to be, it will work and it will be rewarded.