Oral Answers to Questions

Sadiq Khan Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

It is clearly in our interests to have a system where we encourage people who are guilty to plead guilty early. That saves money. It is the right thing to do for society. I do not believe or accept that we would be in a position where any qualified lawyer would try to encourage someone to plead guilty when they were not guilty, but of course we are listening to all the responses from the consultation and will bring forward further proposals in due course.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

May I say, in the most courteous way, to the Justice Secretary that he should revisit some of the answers on legal aid he has given today? He is just wrong on a number of points. There is now a general consensus that his Department’s reform of court translation services was a shambles—the Select Committee on Justice, the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee all agree. What differences are there in his plans to reform legal aid to avoid repeating the mistakes made in the previous set of reforms?

[Chris Grayling]

Let us be clear: it is no secret that the handling of contracting of translation services could have been better, and lessons have been learned. However, that service is now delivering to a very high standard and saving the taxpayer millions of pounds. The Opposition simply do not get that we have to take tough decisions to save money to deal with the mess they left behind.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Grayling]

I can give that assurance. As I said a moment ago, this is one of the things that has come out of the consultation—it is a genuine consultation, although I know that Labour does not believe that it should be genuine—and we are listening and I will review it over the next few weeks.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

And all said with a straight face!

It is a statement of fact that the Justice Secretary’s plans for the probation service will lead to serious sexual and violent offenders being supervised by the likes of Olympic security and Work programme experts G4S, A4e and others. Why has he refused my freedom of information request to see the risk register for these plans?

[Chris Grayling]

Labour simply will not accept the need for change and for those under-12-months prisoners to be supervised. As the right hon. Gentleman knows, when his party was in government he did not publish risk registers, either. This is another example of Labour doing one thing in government but wanting the rules to change the moment it moves into opposition. It is very unedifying.

[Sadiq Khan]

May I gently advise the Justice Secretary to seek advice from the Leader of the House, the former Secretary of State for Health, about how that movie ended for him?

The rest of us saw leaks of the risk register in last week’s media. What would the risk register need to say for the Justice Secretary to change his plans, or does he really not care?

[Chris Grayling]

Again, the right hon. Gentleman has conveniently forgotten what the purpose of a risk register is: it is a management document designed to ensure that we look at all the issues a project should address when formulating its plans and that we take the necessary steps to ensure that the process runs smoothly. That is what we are doing, and we are doing it because there is a large group of mostly young people on our streets who are likely to reoffend and have no support at all at the moment. I think that that is a problem worth sorting.