Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Priti Patel(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Shabana Mahmood
We are working closely with colleagues from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to understand the impact on the housing sector, but, as is the case any time a prisoner is released, probation staff are working hard to prepare release plans, including permanent and temporary accommodation. If an offender is at risk of homelessness on release, they will be housed in community accommodation. We expect to provide housing for the majority of offenders using existing provision, but, should there not be enough, I have authorised probation directors to make use of alternative arrangements, including budget hotels, as a temporary measure for the cases that we will see in the next few weeks.
Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)
During the debate on early prisoner release in July, the impact assessment produced suggested that there would be 5,500 fewer prison places than planned for because of the need to meet the capital savings that were discussed at the time. When I raised that with the Secretary of State, she said that this matter would be under review. Can she now confirm that it is the Government’s intention to cut back prison places by 5,500 over the medium and long term?
Shabana Mahmood
The right hon. Lady will know that I have committed to publishing a 10-year capacity strategy. There are also live discussions as part of the Budget and spending review process. We have committed to delivering the shortfall of 14,000 places in our prison system, which the previous Government failed to do. That is a commitment that we have given. Those conversations are live conversations and I will report to the House in due course, but we will publish that 10-year capacity strategy before the end of the year.
Criminal Law
Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Priti Patel(4 months ago)
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Shabana Mahmood
With the leave of the House, I will respond to the debate, but let me begin by saying what a pleasure it has been to do my first piece of legislation in this House under your chairmanship, Madam Deputy Speaker. You are a fellow Small Heathan Brummie, and it is no doubt a great first for the community from which we both come.
I was astonished by the shadow Minister’s remarks. He said that he was deeply troubled by the measure, but he and his party, who formed the previous Government, were not troubled enough to prevent the crisis from occurring in the first place. He knows full well that they have left no other option on the table but that which we are taking, and anyone with access to a newspaper can tell that, until about three weeks ago, this was their own plan. I am afraid to say that that is the modern-day Tory party: opportunistic, cynical and unfit to govern.
The shadow Minister asked a number of questions, most of which I had addressed in my opening remarks. Let me remind him—he should know—that our prisons are at over 99% capacity. The exact number will fluctuate on a daily basis, but everyone who works in criminal justice knows that our prisons will overflow by September unless we pass this measure.
On the sunset clause and exclusions for domestic violence-linked offences, I will take no lessons from the Tory party. It brought forward the end-of-custody supervised licence scheme, and that had no exclusions for domestic abuse. I raised that issue many times when I was sitting on the Opposition Benches, and the then Tory Government simply stonewalled and did not give any answers whatsoever. I am pleased to see that Opposition Members have finally discovered that we should treat victims of domestic abuse differently from how we have previously, but they should have applied that to the measure that was their Government’s policy until just three weeks ago.
I will also take no lessons from the Tory party on the sunset clause. I remind them that the end-of-custody supervised licence scheme not only did not have a sunset clause but was in fact extended by the previous Tory Government from 18 days to 35 days and then to 60 days. We then had the ignominy of the increase to 70 days that came without any announcement whatsoever. So when I say that the Government will be different from the last one, I mean it. We have already been far more transparent than the previous Government ever were or could have dreamed of being, and that is the vein in which we will continue.
I was pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Southgate and Wood Green (Bambos Charalambous) raised reoffending, which was also brought up by the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain), as well. It is critical that we get the rates of reoffending down.
Let me turn to the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes). I am slightly perturbed that I found myself in agreement with his first point—I agree that prisons are about punishment—but when 80% of offenders are reoffenders, something is going horribly wrong within our prisons. Every time we have somebody coming out of our prison estate who is a better criminal than they were when they went in, that creates more victims, and we are letting our public down if we do not get the rates of reoffending down. Cutting reoffending is a strategy for putting victims first and cutting crime as much as it is about helping those prisoners become better citizens. I hope that he will take my comments in the spirit in which they are intended, which is a good-faith response to his remarks, and reflect on the necessity of the country finally getting its shocking rates of reoffending down and putting the public first.
I return to the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Southgate and Wood Green. IPP prisoners are not included within this measure. I know that he and others in the House have supported the possibility of a resentencing exercise, which we did not support in opposition. That is not the Government’s policy, because while I do want to make progress on IPP prisoners, we cannot take any steps that would put public protection at risk. It is a delicate balancing act, but we will start with the measures passed by the previous Government in the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 on the changes to the licence period and the action plan, which we will publish as soon as possible. Where possible, I want to make progress where IPP prisoners are concerned.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter) made a really important point on the costs. There is a cost to the action that we are taking today, but there would be a much bigger cost to inaction. If we fail to take this measure today, we will face the total collapse of the criminal justice system. That catastrophic disaster has to be averted at all costs.
Let me turn to the comments of the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel). I am pleased about how she has approached the debate. Let me assure her, particularly on matters of national security such as they touch on my responsibilities as Lord Chancellor, that we will always take a cross-party approach and look to work together in the national interest.
The right hon. Lady raised important points about the join-up between different service providers, whether that is police, local authorities or others. I have already chaired a criminal justice board and we already have an implementation taskforce that will work over the summer to ensure that all the different agencies are working together so that the roll-out in September is successful. My Ministers will be working with Ministers in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to ensure that join-up occurs. That is an important point, and I will be taking a close personal interest in the implementation.
Priti Patel
Could the Lord Chancellor expand—probably not in this debate but over the summer or even in September —on the local authorities? The point about prison building will not go away. I believe that we need more prisons, we should be building more prisons, and that should come forward from the previous prison programme. There is the issue about finances—the £2.2 billion that I referred to—but will she commit to publishing a list of the local authorities she is proactively working with, which may be those from the previous prison building programme, where we will see more prisons?
Shabana Mahmood
I will happily return or write to the right hon. Lady in respect of specific local authorities. The impact of prison capacity is uneven, but it is also in flux on a daily basis. On money and the long-term supply of prison places, we will be publishing a 10-year prison capacity strategy, which will deal with the long-term plans that our Government have to increase supply of prison places.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Priti Patel(4 years, 9 months ago)
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Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)
Priti Patel
I had the privilege of visiting the west midlands two weeks ago and participating in an early-morning drugs raid. The scourge of serious and violent crime is absolutely one that we have to deal with, and this Government are fully committed to that. We are providing all the necessary resources—the money, the equipment and the powers—to the police to enable them to get on top of this.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Priti Patel(8 years, 11 months ago)
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Priti Patel
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He has drawn attention to two important facts: the fact that unemployment has fallen in his constituency and there are more people in work there, and the barriers—particularly mental health conditions—that prevent people from working. We will be launching a new Work and Health programme, and looking into how we can integrate services to provide the right kind of support to help such people to return to work.
Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)
Between June 2011 and June 2015 there were 10,920 referrals to the Work programme in my constituency, 21% of which resulted in jobs. Those figures would improve, and employment would be further reduced, if the assessment of claimants that is carried out at the beginning of the process were more adequate and consistent, and ensured that crucial characteristics such as drug problems were not missed. When will the Government introduce changes to the assessment process?
Priti Patel
The Select Committee and many others have said that the Work programme has been one of the most successful employment programmes that the country has seen. Naturally, we constantly review our work in respect of assessments, but we are focusing on targeted support for individuals, because we all want the right outcomes for them. We all want to help them to return to work, and to give them the tailor-made support that they need. Rather than adopting the hon. Lady’s disparaging approach, we are saying that those people need help, and that we will give them help so that they can get back into work.
Tax Avoidance
Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Priti Patel(9 years, 9 months ago)
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The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Priti Patel)
Like my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, I shall begin by highlighting the fact that tackling tax avoidance and tax evasion has been a key priority for this Government, and we will take no lessons from the Opposition on that issue. At every opportunity, this Government have introduced measures to clamp down on this corrosive practice. It is this Government who, over the course of this Parliament, have secured £85 billion in compliance yield, £31 billion of which came from large businesses. We are the Government who have abolished the shocking loopholes in the tax system that we inherited in 2010—loopholes that the Labour party chose to ignore when in office for 13 years, turning a blind eye when it could have acted. Now, belatedly, Labour Members lecture Government Members on their new-found wisdom in this area.
We have introduced groundbreaking measures to clamp down on tax avoidance schemes. Internationally we have led the world in this very area, as my hon. Friends rightly highlighted during the debate—for example, my hon. Friends the Members for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field), for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) and for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), who spoke so robustly about Britain leading the way internationally and the work we have been undertaking in the Crown dependencies and overseas territories, which are all supportive of transparency and have been signing up as early adopters of common reporting standards. Everyone in the House should welcome that and support those measures, rather than belittling the actions of those territories and Crown dependencies. They have led the way.
My hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) was clear about the standards we have set, and I deny absolutely the bluster and assertion from Labour Members. To claim, as they have, that Lord Green was at fault with regard to what has happened with the Swiss subsidiary of HSBC when there is no suggestion from anybody, and certainly not from the regulators, that that was the case is quite disgraceful. It is a fact that Ministers and the general public knew about the release of information about individual HSBC account holders, and it is also a fact, as my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary highlighted, that it is a long-standing legal requirement for taxpayer confidentiality that Ministers cannot, under any circumstance, be made aware of individual cases.
Shabana Mahmood
We have been calling for Lord Green to make a full and frank statement. No allegations have been made, but he needs to explain what he knew about what was going on at HSBC. The Exchequer Secretary should correct the record on what we have been requesting from the Government and from Lord Green and say whether she agrees that he should make a full and frank statement.
Priti Patel
Let us be quite clear on the point regarding Lord Green: that is now a matter for him. He is also not a Minister. We should be very clear about that.
When it comes to tax in particular, let us focus on the facts here. We have specifically taken action to get back money lost in Swiss bank accounts. Our agreement has so far raised more than £1.2 billion that would otherwise have remained beyond our reach, which is almost two thirds of the £1.9 billion that the latest forecasts expect it to raise. That is more than 22,000—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) sits there laughing. It was his Government who did absolutely nothing in this area, despite having the opportunity to close down loopholes. Labour Members do not like hearing it, but these are facts.