Rehabilitation and Sentencing

Sadiq Khan Excerpts

Tuesday 7th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement on sentencing policy. The Ministry of Justice’s four-year plan on its vision page declares:

“We will provide a clear sentencing framework. It will punish those who break the law, and help reduce re-offending.”

I have no quarrel with that. It seems to me a perfectly sensible vision for a sentencing policy, entirely in keeping with the emphasis on punishment and reform that Labour followed in government, and which helped to cut crime by 43% between 1997 and 2010, both in times of growth and recession—the only Administration since the second world war who can boast such an enviable record.

I have a number of questions for the Secretary of State. First, will he confirm that he accepts that crime went down, as I have just said? So, on the core principle we are in agreement, and where the Government propose sensible measures to punish and reform offenders, we will support them. However, the statement that we have just heard and the Green Paper give rise to a number of questions and concerns. Will he confirm that the entirety of the Conservative party’s manifesto on law and order has been put in the bin? Before the election, the Prime Minister promised that there would be tougher sentences for knife crime. People caught in possession of a knife would face a presumption of prison. Does the Secretary of State accept that he has now made a humiliating U-turn on that policy? The Prime Minister promised that there would be “honesty in sentencing”. Judges would read out a maximum and a minimum sentence to offenders in court. Does the Secretary of State accept that there has been a U-turn on that also? The Prime Minister promised increased prison capacity—another U-turn?

Let us be absolutely clear. Every one of those pre-election promises to be tough on crime has been abandoned. They have been revealed for what they are: a bluff. A bluff on crime and a bluff on the causes of crime. Like so many of the heavily trailed announcements that we have seen in the past six months, this sentencing review is a wasted opportunity. Sentencing policy should be about dealing with offenders in the right way in order to protect the public, but this review has been about trying to reduce the prison population in order to cut costs.

When the comprehensive spending review was published recently, the Justice Secretary outlined his central aim, which was

“to reduce the total daily prison population by 3,000 by 2014.”

The prison population is about 85,000 today, so that would mean it being 82,000 in four years. In practice, however, because many people serve less than one year in prison, meeting that target would mean 10,000 fewer offenders in jail each year. That is what the sentencing review is all about.

Given the Government’s big claims about transparency, can the Secretary of State confirm that he will publish the detailed assumptions that his officials and the Home Office have made about crime trends to justify that target of 82,000? I do not subscribe to the view that there is a direct link between prisons and crime, but nor do I share the Justice Secretary’s belief that there is no link at all. Under Labour, more serious and persistent criminals went to prison for longer, and crime fell. The relationship between those two things might not have been simple and straightforward, and other factors, including an increase in police numbers, were at play, but there was a relationship.

The Justice Secretary, to justify his view that there is no link, is fond of saying that crime rates also declined internationally during that time, but that prison rates in many countries went down. Well, he is wrong. I have checked the figures for OECD countries, and prison populations rose almost everywhere. Although prison should always be the outcome for serious and persistent offenders, we believe that alternatives to custody should be used when they are a more appropriate form of punishment and reform. We accept that prison is not always the best place for offenders, and community sentences can be a better alternative in order to cut reoffending, but does he accept that, as a result of the changes that we introduced, the number of women in custody went down, and that reoffending rates for women, young men and first-time offenders also went down in recent years?

I welcome the announcement that the Government are seeking to build on important Labour innovations, such as the expansion of community payback. Further action on drug addiction is clearly welcome, and the steps outlined to deal more effectively with offenders with mental health problems, one of our society’s most pressing issues, are a vindication of the decision of my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) to set up and start to implement the important Bradley review.

The current Justice Secretary aims at some of the right goals, but his total eagerness to please the Treasury by cutting the Ministry of Justice budget by 23% will make it very difficult and risky to turn those aspirations into reality. With the Home Secretary having also caved in to a 23% cut, the obvious question voters will ask is, how can the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s party ever again claim to be the party of law and order?

The Secretary of State will recall the old care in the community model for mental health in the 1990s. As a former Health Secretary, he presided over it and will be aware of some of the real problems that it created. If proper resources are not invested in dealing with offenders outside prison, we could be in for care in the community mark II—this time with criminals.

Will the Justice Secretary explain, in particular, what assessments are being made of the likelihood that prisoners on indeterminate sentences, whom he wants to release, are no longer a risk to the public? What procedures will be put in place to monitor such people in the community?

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am loth to interrupt the shadow Secretary of State, but he is getting towards the point where his questioning has been longer than the Secretary of State’s pithy statement, so he really does now need to bring it to an end. He can have another sentence, but he must then bring it to an end.

[Sadiq Khan]

As ever, Mr Speaker, I am grateful.

When the Justice Secretary was recently asked on BBC’s “Newsnight” how he would judge the success of his penal policy, his first response was that he “hadn’t the first idea”. That was a more revealing answer than he perhaps intended, because it exposed a certain complacency that is becoming the hallmark of this Government.

In conclusion, let me offer the Lord Chancellor advice on how to judge the success of his policy. Will it make communities up and down the country more or less safe? Will it result in crime going up or down? I tell the Lord Chancellor and those who support him that it is against those criteria that we will be holding him, his proposals and his Government to account.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—