Prison Safety

Philip Davies Excerpts

Thursday 15th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

It is always a great honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, and to follow the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), for whom I have a great deal of respect. As others have done, I commend our Chair of the Justice Committee, who does a great job in martialling sometimes disparate viewpoints on the Committee.

When I say “disparate viewpoints”, what I am really referring to is me. As on many issues, I tend to have a very different view of the world—particularly the world of prison and sentencing—from that of many of my colleagues, so I might put a slightly different viewpoint from theirs. That is not to say that I do not have a great deal of respect for their views and expertise on these matters; we just happen to draw different conclusions.

One thing that never gets talked about with regard to prison safety that I want to talk about, and that I raised with the Secretary of State on her initial performance before the Justice Committee last week, is the change brought in under the last Labour Government: it has done immense harm not only to public confidence in the criminal justice system, but to safety in prisons.

That Labour Government passed a law, and this is a welcome opportunity to make a public service announcement to the many people who are not aware that it is on the statute book. The law stated that everybody who had reached halfway through their prison sentence had to be released from prison, irrespective of how disruptive they had been and whether they were still considered a danger to the public. Those prisoners have to be released halfway through their sentence.

The law had nothing to do with any great rehabilitation revolution, or with making our prisons or streets safer; it was introduced because the last Labour Government got themselves into a crisis over prison numbers and could not meet the capacity. They were desperately looking for ways to reduce the prison population. Anything would do.

One method they used was letting everybody off 14 days before the end of their prison sentence. The second method was to say that people had to be, by law, automatically released halfway through their sentences. It does not take a genius to work out that that will have—and this has proved to be the case—a negative impact on safety in prisons.

If prisoners have a six-year sentence, become eligible for release after three but could still serve the whole six years, the chances are that there will be an incentive for them to behave themselves in prison, get their heads down, work hard and do the things that are asked of them; if they do, the parole board may well let them out of prison when the three years come up. If they know they will be released from prison after three years no matter how well or badly they behave, what on earth is the incentive to behave in prison? There is none at all. It does not take a genius to work out that that is pure common sense.

If the Government want to get to grips with safety in prisons—and, as a by-product, instil a bit more public confidence in the criminal justice system—they must deal with that issue. They must repeal that terrible law and say to prisoners once again, “You become eligible for release halfway through your sentence, but only if you are considered to be safe to release to the public and if you have been behaving yourself in prison.”

I remember when the last Labour Government introduced this law—the Conservative party was apoplectic. What have we done in our six years in government? Absolutely nothing. That is a disgrace—certainly for the millions of people who have gone down to the polling station to vote Conservative at a general election. Those people would expect a Conservative Government to deal with this, and I hope the Minister will not only address the issue in his remarks but will act on the situation in his time as prisons Minister.

[Alex Chalk]

My hon. Friend is setting out his characteristically robust and principled position, with which I do not disagree. But even if that welcome repeal were to happen, is not the difficulty that it would lead to such additional pressures on the prison system that, frankly, we would not be in a position to absorb the extra numbers at this juncture?

[Philip Davies]

I understand my hon. Friend’s point, but he is looking at it from a perspective different from mine. My view is that we should not manage the prison population to fit an arbitrary figure that we have decided is the limit that we will allow in prison; we should imprison the people who should be in prison, and it is the Government’s job to build the capacity in the prison system to cope with those people. That is the bit on which the Government need to get a grip.

I was going to come to this later but, as we are on the subject, I will deal with it now. One area on which I happen to disagree with the Chairman of the Select Committee, although it pains me to do so, is the size of the prison population. We have to address the myth that has been perpetuated that the UK has a very high prison population. The fact of the matter is that we do not, and I will explain why. Yes, the absolute number of more than 80,000 represents a high prison population, but the UK is a very highly populated country so of course we have a high prison population. That is a meaningless measure.

If we look at the number of people in our prisons as a proportion of the population as a whole, we are not at the top of the table by any means, but I concede that we are above average. We are in the highest quartile but, again, it is a meaningless measure. The only meaningful measure of prison population is the proportion of criminals that we send to prison. In other words, for every 1,000 offences committed in the UK how many people go to prison? That is the most meaningful measure of whether we send a lot of people, or not many people, to prison. Comparing those figures with the figures for other countries across the world shows that we have a very low prison population. For every 1,000 crimes committed in the UK, we send some 18 people to prison. I challenge anyone to name four or five countries that send fewer people to prison, because they will be hard pressed to do so.

Our prison population is very low, so we have to end the myth that has been built up by these prison reform groups, which frankly just do not like anybody being sent to prison. We have to address the myth that has built up over the years that we have a high prison population. We send very few people to prison. Everyone knows that it is difficult to be sent to prison in the UK. People get community sentence after community sentence—the only people sent to prison are either very persistent offenders or very serious offenders. Courts bend over backwards not to send people to prison. We have to nail that myth.

Contrary to what my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) said in his opening remarks, I do not think that public opinion is that we should have fewer people in prison. I do not think public opinion has moved an awfully long way. Clearly, my hon. Friend is much more expert than I about public opinion in Bromley and Chislehurst, and I bow to his superior knowledge, but I invite him to come up to Shipley. He can knock on the door of any 100 houses he wants to ask people, “Do you want to see more criminals or fewer criminals in prison?” I suspect that a number in the high 90s would say that they would like to see more criminals in prison, not fewer. I accept that Bromley and Chislehurst may differ, but I am here to represent Shipley.

[Robert Neill]

I respect my hon. Friend’s point, but I want to put my point to him in a different way. I suspect that both his constituents and mine would like to see fewer victims of crime and fewer crimes being committed, so they also might like to see people in prison being more effectively rehabilitated so that they reoffended less. Does he accept that overcrowding in our prisons prevents rehabilitation? Reducing such overcrowding would be in his constituents’ interest.

[Philip Davies]

I agree with one part of what my hon. Friend says, which is that we should be doing our best to rehabilitate people while they are in prison. I do not see how anyone could possibly disagree with that. What I do not accept is that we should have fewer people in prison. I want more people in prison.

The Minister and I were discussing this not too long ago, and we observed that the UK prison population has increased quite substantially over the past 20 or 30 years. Lo and behold, what has also happened in the UK over the past 20 or 30 years is that the crime rate has gone down. Members here might want to try to pretend that those two things are alien to each other, but I contend that one follows from the other.

To be honest, it is not rocket science. It is blindingly obvious, certainly to most of my constituents, that the more criminals there are in prison, the fewer criminals there are out on the streets committing crimes. It is obvious that the more criminals we lock up, the less crime we will have. I accept that we want people to be rehabilitated while they are in prison, but I do not accept that the answer is to send fewer people to prison in the first place. In my opinion, it is too hard to be sent to prison and most people are not sent to prison for long enough.

The idea that short sentences do not work is another myth. The reoffending rate for people on short sentences is 60-odd per cent. Virtually every single person in prison on a short sentence has had community sentence after community sentence. The reoffending rate for that cohort while they were on a community sentence was 100%, which is why they ended up in prison in the first place, so a 60-odd per cent. reoffending rate for the cohort on short sentences is actually a rather good record compared with the alternative. We do our prisons a disservice. The longer people spend in prison, the less likely they are to reoffend. That point is made clear by all the Government statistics.

Prison safety is also undermined by fixed-term recall, which is little known. We have a system in the UK whereby people are released halfway through their sentence. If a prisoner reoffends, most people would expect them to go to prison to serve the remainder of their original sentence, but I am afraid not. The last Labour Government did for that, too. They introduced fixed-term recall, whereby people are sent back to prison not to serve the remainder of their sentence but to serve 28 days. Again, people have no incentive to behave themselves when they go back because they know they will be out in 28 days, come what may—that is the whole principle of fixed-term recall.

There is no incentive in our sanctions for these people to behave themselves when they go back into prison, and there are lots of them—I think there were some 7,000 people on fixed-term recall last year. In fact, many of them make a point of going back into prison just to see how their illicit operations have been doing while they have been out. They know that they will get only 28 days if they commit another offence, which gives them enough time to see what is going on before they are back out again. The whole thing is an absolute scandal. These are the things that the Minister needs to get a grip on if he is to do anything about prison safety.

Drugs are clearly a massive issue in our prisons, and the number of people who take drugs for the first time in prison astounds me. It cannot be beyond the wit of the Government to address drugs in prisons. They have to be much more robust on that, too.

Members will know that I have an interest in the comparative treatment of men and women in prisons. More women than men, per 100 of the prison population, have been punished for disciplinary offences while in prison. There were 130 adjudications per 100 women prisoners, compared with 106 adjudications per 100 men prisoners, according to the Ministry of Justice’s publication “Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System 2011”. We have a massive problem with violence by women offenders in our prisons. This is not a men- only problem.

The other thing that I wanted to mention is radicalisation in our prisons, which is a massive cause for concern. I put in a freedom of information request to the Ministry of Justice a year ago asking which prisons had reported instances of or concerns about religious radicalisation in the last year. The MOJ’s reply did not tell me which prisons had had such reports; it told me which prisons had not, because there were so few of them. When I totted them up, there were only seven prisons in the whole UK that had not reported instances of or concerns about radicalisation. If we are to do something about prison safety, tackling radicalisation in our prisons must be a top priority for the Government. It is a massive area of concern. We cannot let political correctness be an excuse for inaction; we must get to grips with that particular problem.

I agree with the right hon. Member for Delyn about prison officers. We clearly need more of them in our prisons. To me, that is blindingly obvious. They do a valiant job of trying to keep order in our prisons in difficult circumstances; we cannot keep cutting their numbers, as has been done in recent years, and expect there to be no consequences. We must invest in our prison officers.

In summary, I look at the issue from a different point of view from the Chairman of the Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst. He said that he did not think the public wanted more public spending on prisons. I disagree; I think that our constituents do want it. They want less public spending on things like international aid and more spending on locking up criminals in our prisons. I genuinely think that that is the public mood. They do not think that too many people are being sent to prison; they think that it is too easy for people to get out of prison, or not to be sent there in the first place. We should be wary of getting out of touch with public opinion on this issue.

There are many areas that the Minister can attend to in order to improve prison safety while also improving public confidence in the criminal justice system. He must not be seduced by the bleeding-heart liberals whose basic agenda is that they want fewer and fewer people in prison because they do not believe in sending people there. He must be robust and stick up for public opinion a bit more, ensuring that criminals are in prison and that they serve the sentences handed down by the courts, preferably in full.

The Minister certainly should not allow them to be released halfway through their sentences when they are still a danger to the public and have behaved badly in our prisons. That is not fair to the public, and it is not fair to the prison officers who have to deal with such people and see them released halfway through their sentences, much to their disgust. I welcome the Minister to his position, and I trust he will tackle some of those issues and not be seduced by the bleeding-heart liberals.

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[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer.

At this stage in the proceedings, there is perhaps little that one can say that has not already been said, particularly by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), the Chairman of the Justice Committee. However, I will add my comments to the excellent work that my hon. Friend does in that capacity.

I was also a member of the previous Justice Committee and I say that for a number of reasons. It is not simply because Ministers come and go, whereas we members of the Justice Committee continue examining these issues, which we inherited and which we return to, time and again. I also say it because in the report that we produced at the end of the last Parliament—“Prisons: planning and policies”—we examined safety issues. Indeed, I disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), as I think the Government and the National Offender Management Service completely underplayed the deterioration of safety in the prison system.

However, that situation was partially improved—indeed, it became a much better situation—by the previous Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who focused on the issue of safety and admitted that our prisons were in a serious crisis. All the speakers today have acknowledged that. Also, a common theme has emerged throughout this debate and it is about the Government response to our report. I will come to that shortly.

Other speakers have already asked whether we have a higher or different prisoner population, compared with the low staffing numbers that we have in prison. Nevertheless, the point that we made in one of the Justice Committee reports—namely, that those factors had been there all along—means that they are not the answer to the problem and none of them is the overriding factor that determines that the situation is as bad as it is. We have to consider other reasons why the situation is so bad.

If we consider what action has been taken so far, we see that it has principally been around legislative change, without much emphasis on implementation of legislation. It is very easy for us as legislators to introduce legislative change and then just believe that the job has been done, whereas the real job comes in ensuring that any new legislation is implemented.

One issue that the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) raised—fortunately, he did not amplify it, because that means that I can amplify it now—was mental health needs, which fully illustrates this point. It is not operational action that is required to deal with mental health needs, particularly the prevention of suicide; the needs in question go beyond the drugs that are available to treat them, whether those are traditional drugs or new psychoactive drugs. Indeed, the prisons and probation ombudsman, Nigel Newcomen, has said:

“It remains the case that I am frequently obliged to repeat recommendations and lessons and it can be depressing how little traction we appear to have on occasions”.

That statement applies not only to the issue of mental health but to the whole of prison safety. As a Committee, we ourselves have frequently issued “recommendations and lessons”, but there is “little traction” to them and they are rarely taken up. Nevertheless, the mental health needs of the prison population must be taken very seriously. The big area of untapped resource, if you like, is being able to deal with those needs.

Since we are also considering the issue of self-inflicted deaths, I will comment on the Government reaction to the Harris review, which I also found to be a disappointment—indeed, Lord Harris himself found it to be a disappointment. It is a disappointment because the Government have not sought to take into account a number of the recommendations that Lord Harris made and so the issues involved have not been addressed. At a recent session that our Committee had with the Secretary of State for Justice, I asked her whether she was aware of Lord Harris’s report or had talked to him. She was aware of the report; I do not think that she had talked to him at that point, but she needs to do so.

[Valerie Vaz in the Chair]



Let me re-echo the point that others have made by saying that I found the Government response to our report flimsy; it was no more than a holding reply. There was a lot of talk about monitoring and some operational improvements; there was the use of what I would call the bogus figure of a net increase of 300 officers, which disguised the reduction in officers; and there was also the hint that we were building five new prisons. I ask the Minister who is here today to comment on those five new prisons and the progress being made on them, to say when we are likely to see them come into operation and to explain how they will improve prison safety.

[Philip Davies]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Vaz.

I agree with my hon. Friend that the Government response to the Committee’s report was thin and “flimsy”; it would be impossible for anyone to disagree with that assessment, really. However, is he being slightly harsh on our ministerial colleagues, given that the Minister who is here today and the Secretary of State have only just taken up their new positions? Perhaps we should give them some opportunity at least to examine these matters themselves before they rush to a conclusion on the Committee’s report. Perhaps we should just give them a bit of time to get their feet under the table and give these issues serious consideration themselves.

[John Howell]

I thank my hon. Friend for those comments, but I take a different view. We are still the same Conservative Government who were elected to deal with these issues. Whether it is a new Secretary of State or an old one, the issues are the same. A list of actions was put in place to deal with the issues. I cannot understand why a series of new Ministers want to take the time to throw all those things up in the air and start again. That is precisely what I meant by saying that the Committee has the longevity with these issues to see their continuity on the ground. I do not think I am being too harsh. I bear no grudge against the Minister; I appreciate that he is new to his job, but there are some things that should be continued, and we should be able to pick them up.

One thing that I stress is the changes proposed to the role of prison governor, since those could be introduced pretty quickly. There is a lot in the Government response about empowering prison governors. Can the Minister provide more information on that? I do not mean the detail of how we will empower prison governors or the detail of exactly what powers will be transferred. We should be looking for broader areas of principle to be set out and discussed with the Committee, to show where those are going to go, because governors feel completely left out.

As a Committee, we have come across that issue quite a lot in our visits to various prisons. They see themselves as bit managers of a whole range of different resources that are brought in to their prisons. That situation does not help them get control of their prisons or prison safety. I would like some information about how the role of prison governors will be defined and circumscribed. It will need to be circumscribed, but in the definition we will get the detail of what the Government want for that. What will the nature of the measures be to hold prison governors to account? That is the other side of the question. I do not yet want the specifics of how that will work, but in what areas will that work and how will it continue?

Finally, I want to comment on the action plan. We need considerably more flesh on the bones. That expression has been used by many speakers in this debate. I repeat what I said in an intervention: when we had a meeting with the Secretary of State, I asked how she would take forward the previous Secretary of State’s plans. Her response caused the press to argue that we were going back on our commitment.

I fully accept what my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst has said about the role of the press, but there is an issue here, and there was no need to put the whole thing into reverse and suggest that we were going backwards on this matter. As the Minister said, dealing with this issue remains a high priority for Government. I am happy to wait to see the detail of the action plan and how it will control safety, but I would like some more information about whether it will move beyond the legislative and the obvious to empower prison officers to take action and get to grips with a major problem in our prisons.

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[Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz, and I welcome the prisons Minister to his new role. This is our first occasion debating opposite each other in Westminster Hall and I hope it is the first of many. I also thank the chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) for bringing this matter before the House today. I will not comment on the speech of the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), as much comment has already been made, but there have been very knowledgeable and expert contributions to today’s debate. There is a very large measure of agreement, which I hope bodes well for the future of prison policy implementation and scrutiny.

[Philip Davies]

I am sorry that the hon. Lady is not able to engage in a debate and only wants to deal with people who agree with her. Will she set out for the public’s benefit whether she therefore agrees that people should be automatically released halfway through the sentence, irrespective of whether they are still a danger to the public and of how badly they have behaved in prison? Is that Labour’s official policy—those people should be automatically released halfway through the prison sentence by law?

[Jo Stevens]

People are released from prison when they no longer pose a risk to public safety and when the Parole Board considers that they are fit.

There have been some great speeches today. The Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, spoke of his concern that the less safe prisons are, the harder it is to achieve reform. I think we can all agree on that. He also observed that he does not detect a sense of urgency from the new Secretary of State. I agree with him on that point, and I sincerely hope that he and I are both wrong.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) spoke of the staggering statistics on homicides, violence, self-harm and riots, which illustrate the serious problems in the Prison Service at the moment. I am glad that he also mentioned the unique situation, as did the former prisons Minister, the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), of IPP prisoners, which is a legacy that needs to be dealt with urgently. Perhaps the best line from my right hon. Friend’s speech was that autumn leaves are falling and we are still awaiting the autumn plan.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) talked about the lack of zeal and knowledge that became apparent from the new Secretary of State’s appearance before the Justice Committee last week, which is of some concern. He also talked with great knowledge about his local prison Wormwood Scrubs and, most worryingly, the staffing reductions on the horizon in that already very volatile prison.

The hon. Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), who has now left her place, talked about the strong leadership and statements on reform from the previous Secretary of State and Prime Minister and the then ministerial team. I echo her view that we need to see that from the new ministerial team. I am sure that we will.

I enjoyed standing across the Dispatch Box from the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire and we had many exchanges. I was pleased to hear his very knowledgeable and measured comments today, on both what is not in the response to the report and what is. I share his concern that, in terms of holding prison governors to account, accommodation outcomes and employment are missing from that response.

The state of our prisons and the growing levels of violence in them shame our nation. Today, there has been a large measure of agreement, despite party allegiances, that the current state of affairs is simply not acceptable. That is why I, along with my former Front-Bench colleagues in the shadow justice team, welcomed the former Prime Minister’s speech and the former Justice Secretary’s commitment to place prison reform at the heart of this year’s Queen’s Speech. We heard a lot about good intentions. Prison staff, prisoners and their families, stakeholders and the public had their expectations raised that finally the need for prison reform was being seen as part of a wider social reform agenda to help people change their lives for the better. It is very unfortunate that they appeared to have been let down last week by the new Justice Secretary in her evidence—but more of that later.

In his last report as chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick stated that prisons were

“in their worst state for 10 years.”

In his short tenure, the new chief inspector, Peter Clarke has realised that the situation has got “even worse” since then. As the Government presses ahead with cuts to the Ministry of Justice’s budget, our prisons become even more dangerous places in which to live and work. I make no bones about putting this on the record—it has been said before. On a daily basis, prison staff are being attacked, prisoner-on-prisoner assaults are increasing, time out of cells for offenders is being cut, more offenders are being forced to share cells, rehabilitation and training programmes for offenders are being cut, education provision is being reduced and services are being privatised or delivered through untested payment-by-results programmes. Prison officers have been living with the reality of working within a prison system that is creaking at the seams, due to starvation of the funds it needs to function effectively and safely. Overcrowded prisons where people spend 23 hours a day locked in cells on wings with too few staff inevitably leads to violence, suicide and self-harm. We need to take bold action to reduce the size of the prison population in order to improve safety.

I welcome the Committee’s recommendation that the Ministry and NOMS draw up together an action plan to improve prison safety, but in order for prisons to be safe, secure and the places of rehabilitation that they are supposed to be, we need to employ more prison officers. I cannot stress enough the simplicity and importance of that fact, which has been repeated by many hon. Members in the debate today. There is very little that we can do with high-quality health and education services in our prisons if we do not have enough prison officers to escort prisoners to lessons, to hospital or even—in some cases—just to get their food.

I want to make it clear that I am not criticising those currently working for the Prison Service and I would like to take the opportunity to praise hard-working prison staff across the country. They are vital to ensuring public safety and their work is often overlooked. It is an extremely complex job and the role that they play in rehabilitation is one that we must never underestimate or take for granted. They are a dedicated group of public servants and they do vital work, which is why it is so disappointing that the numbers of front-line staff have been slashed in recent years to meet the budget cuts imposed by the Treasury.

As we have heard, there are 7,000 fewer prison officers than there were in March 2010. The loss of that many uniformed staff from the Prison Service continues to undermine the safety and security of our prisons and puts staff and offenders at even greater risk. We now have the toxic combination of prisons full of inexperienced prison officers and experienced prisoners, which is a recipe for violence.

I share the Select Committee’s concern about the Government’s failed recruitment drive. Given the growing prison population and the rise in staff assaults, it is no wonder that it is a struggle to recruit into the Prison Service and that retention is so poor. We must properly protect the health, safety and wellbeing of those who work in our Prison Service. I also welcome the Select Committee’s call for quarterly progress reports, and I am waiting with interest to hear what plans the Minister has lined up to ensure better and more successful recruitment and retention of prison staff.

I have heard at first hand from countless organisations and individuals about the dangers and implications that the lack of safety in our prisons has for prison staff and prisoners. Each time I raised that issue with the former prisons Minister, the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire, he agreed that the current safety levels are unacceptable. He said that the new Bill, which we were awaiting, would include measures to tackle those issues.

On 6 September in Justice questions, I raised the issue with the new Justice Secretary, who said:

“I fully acknowledge that we do have issues with violence and safety in our prisons. The levels are unacceptable. I am determined to deal with this issue and I will lay out my plans very shortly.”—[Official Report, 6 September 2016; Vol. 614, c. 202.]

Yet not even 24 hours later, in her evidence session with the Select Committee, she point blank refused to guarantee that the Government would proceed with prison reform legislation to improve prison safety, much to the astonishment of the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst.

The same evidence session also revealed that, despite the fact that the report was published in May, there had been no response to it. We received the response only two days ago. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith said, it is a paltry two and a bit pages. That does not suggest that the Government really are taking the issue of prison safety seriously. If I were a member of the Justice Committee, I would be pretty insulted by it.

In the same evidence session, the new Justice Secretary said she was looking into a number of urgent issues raised by Committee members. In fact, she said that 39 times. My question for the Minister is, is the plan for prison reform shelved or delayed? When are we going to see it? As far as I can see, there is no strategy for improving a decimated, but previously award-winning, probation service, and no idea about the benefits of our Human Rights Act. What exactly has the Justice Secretary been looking into during the summer recess? It certainly does not appear to have been a proper and timely response to the Justice Committee’s report.

The response contains no commitment to meet the Committee’s central recommendation of producing quarterly progress reports on prison safety and staffing numbers. To add insult to injury, the Government said that prison officer staff numbers have risen. That is unacceptable. The numbers are clearly lower than they were 12 months ago, as I pointed out to the Justice Secretary during Justice questions on 6 September. We now have 421 fewer full-time equivalent front-line prison officers working in our public prisons than we did a year ago.

I have some questions for the Minister, in addition to those of my hon. Friends, which I hope he will answer. Where is the promised programme of prison officer recruitment, which was to deliver the real and necessary increases to officer numbers required to provide a safe, decent and secure regime? Where is the national strategy, highlighted by the chief inspector of prisons, to help to make our prisons drug-free? Where is the commitment to the plan and the timetable for increases in prison capacity that will see an end to the institutionalised overcrowding of our prisons?

It has been said that we are going to have five new prisons by 2020. I would like the name of the builders—they are obviously very quick at their job, given that they have not done much of it yet. I am very interested to hear from the Minister more detail about where, when and how that is going to happen.

Finally, time after time and at great cost to the public purse, reports into the dangers, problems and failures faced by the Prison Service have made many, often repeated, recommendations for improvements, but they have not been implemented. Will the Minister, in his new role, change that pattern? I hope he will say yes.

Today another 15 prison officers will have been assaulted at work. The same will happen tomorrow and the next day and the next day. We need to take urgent action to put a stop to that. I welcome the Justice Committee’s report, and I urge the Justice Secretary and her Ministers to implement its recommendations urgently. We cannot afford further delay on this matter. Lives are being lost, serious injuries are being sustained and livelihoods are being ruined. This issue is too big and important to be kicked into the long grass.

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[Mr Gyimah]

I, as well as NOMS, am in constant contact with the governor, to work with him to do what is appropriate and what works in order for the prison to function as well as it should.

More broadly on education reform, the recommendations made by Dame Sally Coates have been mentioned. We remain committed to improving prison education and supporting offenders into meaningful employment. We want to learn from the good practice that already exists in our system, such as the recently reported efforts at HMP Swaleside, where there is an ambition to change how education is delivered in prison. The prison’s A-wing is being redeveloped to create an education academy, with the hope that inspiring prisoners to learn will empower them and stop them reoffending.

A number of steps have already been taken to get prison reform under way. Six reform prisons went live on 1 July. The four executive governors, who have been unshackled, took control of their budgets and are now empowered to run their prisons as they see fit, which includes delivering bespoke services and having the option to move away from central contracts and policies.

I have seen for myself what is going on at HMP Coldingley. Contrary to some of the pictures that have been painted, every offender has a job in one of the impressive workshops at that industrious jail, and the governor, Nick Pascoe, is working closely with the community and with rehabilitation companies to help former prisoners even once they have left his care. HMP Wandsworth, which was also mentioned in the debate, is piloting a new “recruit in a day” scheme, which will radically speed up the process of getting new officers into the prison. In addition, HMP High Down has introduced a “recommend a friend” scheme to incentivise current officers to promote available roles to friends and family.

I will turn to a number of points raised in the debate before I bring my speech to a close. One was about our confidence in being able to deliver the estates programme. The Secretary of State will roll out the details, but, to provide assurance, we have closed 15 prisons in the past 10 years. There have also been two partial closures and two re-roles to immigration and removal centres. The Department has got quite good at ensuring that we can close down old prisons and open new ones, such as HMP Berwyn—new for old. As I said, the Secretary of State will set out the detail shortly, because that is a Government commitment.

My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley made a number of points, one of which I will tackle: offenders being released halfway through their sentence. If someone has been sentenced to 10 years, they are eligible for release at five, which is a particular concern of his. I remind the House that, even in those instances, that person remains under licence, so the system still has a hold over them, and if they were to reoffend they would go back to prison. If someone were sentenced to five years, served five years and then left, we would not have any hold over them at all. I want to put that to him as a point of clarification and to add nuance to the point I made earlier.

[Philip Davies]

rose—

[Mr Gyimah]

I knew that my hon. Friend was going to intervene.

[Philip Davies]

The Minister is giving the impression that if someone is sent to prison for 10 years and are released after five, if they commit another offence they will go back to prison for the remaining five years. If that were the case, some of us may not feel so strongly about it. However, as he well knows, they do not; they go back in for a fixed-term recall of 28 days, which is pathetic. There is not the great deterrence that he suggests.

[Mr Gyimah]

If they commit another offence, they will not only go in for a period of time but serve the sentence for the new crime they have committed. My hon. Friend suggested that somehow we are managing the prison population to an arbitrary figure, which is simply not the case. Our job, as I said, is to deliver the orders of the court.

On rehabilitation, on which I would say my hon. Friend has quite an exotic view, if we are to be a country that works for everyone, we have to fix prisons. That is particularly important.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I will give the Minister the same test I gave the shadow Minister. Is he telling me that he thinks it is absolutely right for a prisoner to have to be released by law halfway through their sentence, irrespective of how badly they have behaved in prison and whether they remain a danger to society? As a Conservative Minister, does he think that is right?

[Mr Gyimah]

What is right is that, before any prisoner is released, there is a careful assessment of the risk they pose to society. That risk assessment is the most important thing—obviously within the confines of the sentence handed down to them by the courts.

Improving safety and reform are two sides of the same coin. We want to empower governors to tackle the challenges they face and support them to run regimes in which they can facilitate the rehabilitation of offenders in a modernised estate. However, if we are to do that, first and foremost prisons need to be safe, decent and secure places to live and work. The ministerial team understands that, and the Government are aware of it.

I am grateful to the Justice Committee for its scrutiny and its report. If there are any points that I have not covered in my speech, I will be happy to deal with them afterwards. I look forward to scrutiny in the weeks and months ahead and to discussing detailed plans to ensure that our prisons are safe and secure places.