Richard Holden
Main Page: Richard Holden (Conservative - Basildon and Billericay)Department Debates - View all Richard Holden's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(3 days, 2 hours ago)
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Shabana Mahmood
We are investing in probation. Funding will increase by £700 million by the final year of the spending review. That is a 45% increase in annual budgets, which will fund further recruitment on top of the 1,300 officers we will recruit this year and the 1,000 officers we recruited in the previous year. That will support our investment in services that rehabilitate offenders and cut crime.
Mr Richard Holden (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)
The Lord Chancellor admitted in a recent interview with The Times that her sentencing reforms will create “inevitable tensions” with the Government’s efforts to halve knife crime and rates of violence against women and girls. It sounds like she does not really believe in these reforms, which have been trotted out by David Gauke, the Prisons Minister in the other place and the Prison Reform Trust. Does the Lord Chancellor realise that none of them is elected, and that if this package fails to keep our streets safe and restore the criminal justice system, the country will hold her and this Government to account?
Shabana Mahmood
I think the country will hold to account those responsible for the absolute mess that this Government inherited. Nowhere in the right hon. Gentleman’s question did he acknowledge that under the Government of which he was a member and for which he campaigned, prisons were brought to the brink of collapse. These reforms are necessary. This Government will not allow our prisons to run out of places—the one thing everybody agrees we cannot allow to happen. The only reason that is a possibility is because of the Tory party.