Sentencing White Paper

Debate between Robert Buckland and Bambos Charalambous

Wednesday 16th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight the difficulty caused by having a generic starting point for all young offenders, irrespective of age and maturity. It is far better to have a sliding scale that allows the courts, using their discretion, to reflect the differing maturities and age ranges of the serious offenders before them. Although the welfare of young people has to be our primary concern, he is right that when it comes to the most serious offences, we cannot, I am afraid, stint from our duty to protect the public and to ensure that the punishment fits the crime.

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

I welcome aspects of this White Paper, especially paragraphs 239 to 242, which acknowledge the role that homelessness plays in reoffending. Being released on a Friday makes it difficult for offenders to access public services, which leads to increased reoffending. What steps is the Secretary of State taking to reconsider people being released on a Friday?

[Robert Buckland]

The hon. Gentleman, who speaks with experience as a practitioner, is right to highlight that issue. I have considered whether we should just ban release on a Friday, but that is probably the wrong answer because, frankly, services need to be there every day of the week. There should be no distinction between what happens on a Friday and what happens on a Wednesday. That is why proper cross-government work has been done to ensure that accommodation and potential jobs are identified when an offender is released and to ensure the benefits system is working if no job is available. That is at the heart of what I am trying to do.

Probation Services

Debate between Robert Buckland and Bambos Charalambous

Thursday 11th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

I am very grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend, who served with distinction in the Department I now lead. He is right to make that point that this is not about blind ideology, but about people and the shared values we have across the sector. That is very much within the CRC. I will make this point, and he will remember this: it was this Government who finally created licence and supervision periods for people on short-term prison sentences. That was a singular omission from the system that the previous Government failed to address.

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

Two years ago, the Justice Select Committee, on which I served, produced its highly critical report, “Transforming Rehabilitation” on the performance of the privatised probation service. One of the criticisms was how those contracts were measured on outputs, not outcomes. Will the Secretary of State confirm that sufficient funding will be available to tackle the issues of heavy caseload, poor IT systems and the need to work with specialist services and the voluntary sector to ensure that probation officers can deliver a decent service and help reduce reoffending?

[Robert Buckland]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who I know has a long interest in these issues, but I remind him of what I said a few moments ago about the £155 million uplift in this current financial year that we secured as part of the highest increase in the Ministry of Justice revenue budget in more than a decade. We will continue to match that in the years ahead with more investment, and he can be confident that that will translate not only into reduced workloads, but increased sophistication and development when it comes to the harnessing of new technologies and better ways of working. We have learned a lot from the current crisis about how we can do things even better.