Oral Answers to Questions
Tessa Munt Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Norman Baker
Yes, I absolutely agree. The Scrap Metal Dealers Act, which I mentioned, is designed precisely to ensure that rogue traders are dealt with properly, and a properly funded licensing scheme will see more effective compliance activity by local authorities and stronger enforcement by the police, ensuring a level playing field for law-abiding scrap metal dealers. For example, we see from the British Transport police that offences are down 44% in the last year.
Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)
My local paper still carries adverts providing only a mobile phone number and offering free collection of any scrap metal, cars, vans, caravans and electrical items for cash payments. What can my constituents in Somerset expect by way of checks and investigation into those who place these adverts, especially since fly-tipping of these very items is such a bane to Somerset residents and adds to the cost of their council tax bills?
Norman Baker
We have created a new criminal offence to prohibit cash payments to purchase scrap metal and therefore my hon. Friend ought to report that matter to her local police. If it is a registered scrap metal dealer who holds a licence, the local authority will want to look into the matter.
Oral Answers to Questions
Tessa Munt Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Damian Green
As the right hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well, that amendment has already been debated. We want to take practical steps to ensure that all police forces react appropriately to evidence of domestic violence when considering gun licensing. That is why we will strengthen the guidance, and do so quickly.
Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)
Ministers and the Department have been undertaking an investigation into the cost of licensing to the police. Is there any news on the results of the consultation, and are taxpayers continuing to subsidise the cost of screening and licensing for guns?
Damian Green
As the hon. Lady knows, we are still considering the current cost of licensing. I am looking at possible changes to full cost recovery, because we want to make the system more efficient and cheaper, and to deliver a service that provides greater safety to the public.
Oral Answers to Questions
Tessa Munt Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Maria Miller
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his question. We work closely with the Welsh Government through VisitBritain. This is a shared objective. VisitBritain has a clear target of increasing international tourism by 33% by 2015, and that will mean some 200,000 extra jobs in this country. Tourism is an important sector, and we have some excellent support plans in place.
Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)
My constituency is particularly dependent on tourism. What discussions has the Secretary of State had with the Treasury about the capacity for reducing VAT in line with some of the countries on the continent? That might help the sector to grow, and would be particularly helpful to the tourism business in Somerset.
Maria Miller
I understand the point that my hon. Friend is making, but there would clearly be a significant cost associated with any such change to VAT. I prefer to invest positively in our country as a place to visit. At the moment, the Treasury is not convinced that there is a correlation between a cut in VAT and any benefit in terms of figures.
Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill
Tessa Munt Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
I suspect that the Home Secretary has recently become used to me standing here criticising things she has done and highlighting where we have disagreed; I am delighted that today will not be another of those days. I am able to support much of what is in the Bill, and it is a great pleasure to follow the Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), and to agree with him that it is excellent that it does not appear that there will be a Division on Second Reading, and that we can therefore proceed.
There are good things in the Bill, such as the changes to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, bringing in private providers, which the Liberal Democrats have wanted for some time; stronger control sanctions against forced marriage; controls on firearms; the introduction of the College of Policing, which will be important for evidence-based policing; controls on dangerous dogs; and particularly protections for guide dogs, which I shall talk about later.
At the core of the Bill, however, are the antisocial behaviour provisions. It is particularly welcome that the Bill underwent pre-legislative scrutiny by the Select Committee. I thank the Home Secretary for taking on board some of the suggestions that it made, although she did not take on board all of them. The principles are surely absolutely right. The simplification of the toolkit used to remedy antisocial behaviour, which can blight lives, even at a relatively low level, is welcome. It will produce a quicker and more coherent response, empowering police, local authorities and other agencies, so that they can deal with the problems far more effectively and efficiently. This issue is serious: there were 2.3 million reports of antisocial behaviour in 2012, although I suspect the vast majority of such incidents are never actually reported. We need a simple scheme to deal with that.
I am also pleased to see the direction of travel and the move away from the automatic criminalisation of breaches, which in many cases gave ASBOs a poor reputation. We are moving a lot further and I am pleased also to see the introduction of positive requirements to try to help people out of the problem—we have argued for that for a long time and it has cross-party support. The Home Affairs Committee highlighted that the positive requirements
“can help to achieve an outcome that satisfies victims and helps to mend the ways of perpetrators without exposing them to the criminal justice system.”
That has to be what we all want. It was the aim of the acceptable behaviour contracts, and it is the right direction in which to be travelling. It also fits in well with the Government’s general approach to the criminal justice system, with a focus on rehabilitation. Rather than focusing on how we punish people, there is a focus on how we can prevent problems from happening in the first place. I am very pleased about all that. I could talk at great length about how excellent some of the provisions are, but the Home Secretary has done that, as have others.
Further improvements could still be made in a couple of areas, and there are particular concerns about how the system will deal with young people. In looking at antisocial behaviour the focus has always ended up on young people; it is many people’s first encounter with the criminal justice system. Some 40% of ASBOs were issued to 10 to 17-year-olds, who comprise only 13% of the population, and a very large proportion of those people have mental health problems and learning difficulties, which is a serious concern.
That situation was acknowledged in the antisocial behaviour White Paper, which stated:
“There are strong links between anti-social or criminal behaviour and certain health needs.”
However, the Bill does not yet contain enough to strengthen early intervention or ensure that a full health and social assessment is made to go with any of the orders that are available. I accept that that is not all about legislation; I hope that in Committee, or through comments from the Home Secretary, progress will be made to strengthen the arrangements, because we want to help people with mental health problems or learning difficulties, rather than putting them through an inappropriate route.
As I mentioned when I intervened on the Home Secretary, I remain concerned about the naming and shaming of young people. Clause 17 would disapply section 49 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, which restricts reports on proceedings in which young people are concerned, in respect of injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance and criminal behaviour orders. That goes against the presumption of anonymity for children in criminal proceedings and is likely to hinder their successful rehabilitation, particularly in this age where people can say things online that can stay with people for ever. We want a chance for a young person who made an error at 14 to be able to have that removed very quickly. Article 40 of the United Nations convention on the rights of the child clearly requires that a child accused of, or recognised as having infringed the law, must
“have his or her privacy fully respected at all stages of the proceedings.”
Both the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Human Rights Committee have expressed grave concerns about the privacy of children subject to ASBOs, and I am concerned about what may happen.
I know the Government’s intention, as they have been clear in their response to the Home Affairs Committee and I am grateful for that. The intention is not simply a blanket naming and shaming of young people, and I am pleased to be reassured about that. However, I want the right clarification to be given to judges. The Minister of State, Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Mr Browne) made the point well when he gave evidence to us, but there may well be some special cases where it is simply unreasonable to prevent a child from being able to do something if we cannot tell anybody that we have prevented them from doing it. I accept that there are such cases, but they should be seen as the exception. I want to develop the point implied by the Home Secretary that judges should use such an approach rarely and sparingly, where there is a good case for doing so. We want a
“short, focused nudge for young people to set them on the right track, not a millstone that will weigh around their necks for years to come.”
We have to ensure that the right guidance is in place, so that the provisions are used only when they have to be. Fitting in with the positive requirements will help with some of that.
Many of the organisations we spoke to welcomed the general direction towards positive requirements but were concerned about the extra monitoring and the burdens of that. The Chair of the Select Committee was right to express concerns about the funding available. This is the best direction in which to go, but we need clarity on the funding. The Local Government Association, of which I have the great honour to be vice-president, has said:
“Clarity is needed from the Home Office on the cost of imposing ‘positive requirements’”
If they are not available, that could lead to breaches and to the whole system falling into the sort of disrepute that we saw with ASBOs. That is particularly so for children, where parental support may not be sufficient in many cases.
On one issue there has been an arms race, with every Government trying to change the antisocial regime, lowering the standard of proof and widening the definitions. The Home Affairs Committee unanimously concluded;
“This arms race must end.”
The current definition of antisocial behaviour is behaviour that
“caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress”.
Clause 1 requires only that the conduct appears to be “capable” of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person, as the Chair of the Select Committee pointed out. I share the concerns of the Association of Chief Police Officers that that lower threshold could unnecessarily stigmatise and criminalise young people in particular. It is a broad definition. I dare say that I have occasionally done things that are “capable” of annoying other people in this Chamber; I am sure we all have. [Interruption.] I am delighted to have the support of the Chair of the Select Committee. I would hope that the definition is not intended to cover such things; there has to be some sort of stronger level involved. I am pleased to see the move away from criminalisation, although some criminal sanctions will still be available, but I remain concerned about that definition.
The safeguards in the Bill about criminalisation go a bit further. A court has to consider an injunction to be “just and convenient”, but there is nothing about proportionality or the need to demonstrate necessity. The Committee concluded:
“For the IPNA, the threshold of ‘conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance’ is far too broad and could be applied even if there were no actual nuisance or annoyance whatsoever. A proportionality test and a requirement that either ‘intent or recklessness’ be demonstrated should be attached to the IPNA, as well as the requirement ‘that such an injunction is necessary to protect relevant persons from further anti-social acts by the respondent’.”
That was agreed unanimously by the Committee, and I hope that the Home Secretary will examine the case for that more carefully and consider whether we could have some clarity. None of us wants these provisions to be used to deal with trivial behaviour. I have known constituents who do not like the fact that young people sit on a bench, but I hope that we would not want to introduce controls to deal with that if those young people are doing nothing else.
I also have a few concerns about the provisions at the beginning of part 5, which would give landlords the power to evict a tenant when the tenant or a member of their household had been convicted of a serious offence nearby or of various other provisions. No flexibility is given for the judge to decide on that; it is an obligatory process. My concern is about the effects on the rest of a family when one of its members, be it a child or an adult, does something that we all agree is unacceptable. In particular, children may be made homeless as a result of the actions of other people that they could not control. Such concerns have been expressed by the Children’s Commissioner, and I hope that the Home Secretary will consider clarifying the arrangements, by changing where the grounds would be listed, to ensure that judges at least have the discretion to say, “In this case, it does not seem appropriate.” The LGA has highlighted that these powers could
“result in displacement of the problem rather than solution”—
none of us would want to leave children homeless. I hope that the Government will examine that.
To conclude, I wish to talk about the issues relating to dangerous dogs. I want to emphasise how good it is that we are making progress, particularly on the serious issue of guide dogs. There were about 240 dog attacks on guide dogs between March 2011 to February 2013, which is about 10 a month. Last year, I met some of my visually impaired constituents and found out what it was like to have a guide dog: I was blindfolded and had to follow a dog around Cambridge. I spoke to my constituents about some of their cases. The big problem is that guide dogs are trained not to fight back or defend themselves; they are trained not to run away, but to get their owner away safely. My constituents told me about some brutal cases where the dog had been savaged in awful ways—their guts were hanging out, and so on—but had still tried to lead its owner away. Such attacks were also devastating for the owner, because it takes a long time to get used to a dog and they cannot simply be replaced; the emotional cost is huge, too. Five of the dogs attacked had to be withdrawn, costing the Guide Dogs charity £170,000—money that it simply does not have. I am really pleased that the first clause in part 7 makes it clear that attacks on guide dogs will be considered aggravated attacks, but we need to go much further.
There are other bits of the Bill that I could talk about at great length, but some of them have already been touched on, and I am sure that they will be considered in Committee. This is a good Bill, but it could be tweaked slightly further to make it an excellent Bill. I am sure that that will be looked at in Committee.
Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)
I visited Glastonbury post office, which has been doing some fairly visionary work on what happens to post office staff when they are making deliveries. The stuff made two points. First, being attacked by a dog in the communal area of a block of flats is not covered by the Bill. Secondly, there may be no remedy for those who are bitten while putting a letter or packet through a letterbox; if someone trespasses with their fingers, effectively, they may not be covered. I wonder whether my hon. Friend agrees that the Secretary of State might take this opportunity to remedy that drafting problem and make sure that the issue is sorted out.
Dr Huppert
I thank my hon. Friend for that comment; I am sure that the Home Secretary heard it. What my hon. Friend says seems sensible; we want to protect postal workers when they are posting leaflets. I have not checked the wording of the Bill, but if it is a problem, I hope that that can be addressed. The same would apply to those of us delivering leaflets. I have yet to be bitten by a dog, but I know that it happens to many of us too often. I hope that the Home Secretary will look at those suggestions to see whether we can sharpen up the provisions and make it an excellent Bill that we can be proud of for many years to come.
Oral Answers to Questions
Tessa Munt Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Damian Green
Yes; I have already read the report. It makes a number of important recommendations, which we will respond to fully in due course; and yes, joint working is happening between the Home Office and the Department for Education, the Department of Health and the Department for Communities and Local Government, as there are clearly a number of problems that need to be solved and they cross the governmental spectrum. We need to solve all of them before we can get a full grip on this issue.
Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)
The fee for a firearms or shotgun certificate for a new applicant is £50. That has not changed since 2001, but research shows that the cost to the taxpayer of granting such a licence is £189. Does the Minister agree that there is absolutely no case for subsidising those who wish to obtain those licences for recreation and leisure purposes, and that they should be charged more?
Damian Green
I am conscious that the Association of Chief Police Officers has made representations about the cost of gun licences, and the Government are looking at the issue very carefully.
Abu Qatada
Tessa Munt Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Mrs May
The suggestion that we have suddenly discovered how difficult it is to deport Abu Qatada is wide of the mark. That has been absolutely clear from the beginning. What I myself have made clear from the beginning is that we need to follow the processes of law. It has taken time and it will continue to take time, but I believe that it is the right thing to do, and that it will mean that we can eventually deport him.
Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on seeking a solution to this vexing situation. Do the fair trial guarantees in the comprehensive mutual legal assistance agreement with Jordan match the standards for fair trial under the English court system? If so, does that not constitute a huge improvement for those who face trial as British subjects in Jordan?
Mrs May
Obviously, the mutual legal assistance agreement, which when ratified will become a treaty, provides for people other than Abu Qatada. It is a general agreement on fair trial arrangements, the exchange of information and other issues. It provides that in all cases, whether for somebody being deported to Jordan from the UK who is not Abu Qatada or for deportations the other way round.
Child Sexual Exploitation
Tessa Munt Excerpts(14 years ago)
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Tim Loughton
My hon. Friend was involved in bringing that about. It was difficult to define what amounted to child sexual exploitation. Although technology is a wonderful enabling tool, its emergence also enables people such as groomers to do evil things by it. We have to keep up with such people. On my visits to CEOP and Scotland Yard, I saw police officers trawling through all sorts of extraordinary, horrific imagery on their computers. It is often the case that paedophiles and traders in extreme pornography who take advantage of children are technologically one step ahead of law enforcers. We must never shirk from making sure that, technologically, our law-enforcement agencies are up to speed in doing their job, because paedophiles are really clever at using technology to peddle their vile trade.
Are we safer in 2012? I believe that we are, but we still have a long way to go. I believe that the modern equivalent of the abuse that took place in north Wales children’s homes in the ’70s and ’80s, and other similar events that are now being revisited, is child sexual exploitation gangs. Most of those that have come to light so far happen to involve British Pakistani men, but we will also see other gangs with different cultural backgrounds around the country. It is child sexual exploitation of a different sort from, but on a similarly serious scale to what happened in those children’s homes. It is not happening in children’s homes any more—we have well-regulated, well-inspected, better-equipped people—but it is happening outside children’s homes in too many cases. That is why we must be absolutely vigilant and make sure that we learn the lessons of Rochdale, Derby, Bradford and all the cases that have and are still to come to light. The knowledge that my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon has of the cases that may come to light in her own part of the world will bring further gasps at the fact that such savagery can actually take place. This will continue to happen.
Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)
I would caution against ever making an assumption that children are safe in any environment, even if we set up safeguards for them. We should never assume that sexual abuse cannot take place in a children’s home from now on. It is the power relationship that creates safety for perpetrators of sexual abuse. Would the hon. Gentleman like to comment on that?
Tim Loughton
I entirely agree. I used the word, “safer.” No child can be guaranteed to be absolutely safe and I would not be surprised if further stories come out of sexual exploitation of children in care homes. That is why the work that I commissioned in July to set up working parties to look at the quality of children’s residential homes, the safety of children who are increasingly being placed well away from their own homes, and better data-sharing between the police and the local children’s services department about homes, is vital. No child can be deemed to be absolutely safe—I hope that I have made that absolutely clear.
Is what happened in a north Wales children’s home less likely to happen in our children’s homes now? I believe it is, but we cannot guarantee that it will never happen. That is the comparison that I wanted to make.
Sir Gerald Howarth
The hon. Lady makes a valid point. It is important that young people should have that confidence, which perhaps plays into the one observation that I want to make: an assault on childhood innocence, particularly that of young girls, is widespread in our country. It can be found on television, advertising and, overwhelmingly, in magazines that are on sale at eye level—not our eye level, but children’s eye level—in every supermarket in the land.
In 1996, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Worcestershire (Peter Luff) promoted a private Member’s Bill to require these girly magazines to place on their front page their target age audience. Unfortunately, the Bill fell, but I salute my hon. Friend for his work. I tried to follow it up when I came back to the House in 1997. I had a meeting with the editors of magazines such as More! and various others. Some of those magazines had features such as “position of the month”. It was sexually mechanical and devoid of moral content. I told the editors, who were overwhelmingly female, that I had a young daughter—she was young at the time but is rather older now, although I do have a young granddaughter—and when I asked them whether they would like their daughters to see such things, they all shuffled uncomfortably in their seats.
I will pay them this tribute: they have improved. I had a look around Sainsbury’s in Farnborough to check out what the magazines were up to and I think that they have got better, but they are still overwhelmingly sex-obsessed. What are young girls to think—what are young men supposed to think—except that this is the way of life and that if they are not behaving like that or like celebrities, they are old-fashioned, fuddy-duddies, not cool and behind the times?
Even this week’s OK! magazine has a headline with somebody called Harry Styles—I am afraid that he has passed my attention, but he seems a reasonably good-looking young lad—saying, “I jumped into bed with my mate’s mum”. The story is not what one might imagine it to be—it is rather more boring and less dramatic than it might appear—but it is on the front page and designed to titillate. The obsession with exploiting the vulnerability of young people—predominantly young girls—leads to situations, examples of which have been provided by so many hon. Members today, whereby they can be exploited by men. We all know—certainly us blokes here—what men are like. That is the atmosphere in which the kind of events that were happening in Keighley go on. I salute my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Kris Hopkins) for being so bold in what he said—I am sure that Ann Cryer would have approved thoroughly.
I submit—this is the essence of the argument that I am putting to the House—that one cannot look at the things that have gone on in north Wales and Rochdale without putting them in the wider national context. We must not just blame those whom we pay to look after these young people or the leaders of the local authorities, but must look at ourselves, the adults who buy this lurid dross and the people who produce it. We must ask ourselves what sort of society we are creating for our young people. It is hardly surprising that in our society young people, and young girls in particular, are vulnerable.
Tessa Munt
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the problem goes beyond the magazine racks of supermarkets and other shops on our high streets? Anyone can see the early sexualisation of young people in the sort of clothes that are on sale. It is possible to find bras and bikini sets for young girls of seven or eight. That is equally inappropriate.
Sir Gerald Howarth
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. I do not think that I will find many opportunities to agree with her, but I am delighted to have done so on our first encounter. Of course, mothers are under pressure and may not themselves have had the benefit of being brought up in loving families.
Family life is important in this debate. Mention has been made of the abuse that goes on in families. When I was chairman of the Lords and Commons family and child protection group, we produced an excellent report on the cost of family breakdown entitled, “Does your mother know?” The evidence shows overwhelmingly that children who are brought up in loving families and married households tend to thrive more than those who are brought up in other family units.
In conclusion, I have been delighted to listen to so many Members from all parts of the House make common cause on a matter of great importance to the people of our country. I hope that Parliament will continue to do whatever it can to protect young people. However, let us be absolutely clear that criticising state agents in the form of local authority employees and others is not sufficient; the root cause of this problem lies at the heart of our society and the way in which we behave as a nation, and it must be tackled.
Alcohol Strategy
Tessa Munt Excerpts(14 years, 7 months ago)
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Mrs May
Does the hon. Lady want an answer to her question or not? By setting a minimum unit price, we are tackling the cheap alcohol that is sold and the bulk discount sales of alcohol, which mean that people pre-load at home. They are often drunk when they leave home. They go to their town centres and sadly, they create the drunkenness, the brawls, the fighting in the streets, the mayhem that mean several things. It means that the police have to spend money and deal with those issues. It means that accident and emergency departments in our hospitals are having to deal with people in drunkenness; every year, 1.2 million admissions to accident and emergency units are alcohol-fuelled. It also means that many law-abiding citizens just do not feel able to go into their town centres at night, particularly on Fridays and Saturdays, and I think it is time we did something about it, and that is what this Government are doing.
Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)
I welcome this consultation as an opportunity to tighten up on irresponsible sales. Does the Secretary of State agree with landlords such as Juliet Watchman of The Bell Inn in Shepton Mallet, who makes the point that if she behaved as local supermarkets did and sold lager for 34 pence per pint and cider at 48 pence per pint—pocket-money prices—or sold to those who are already heavily under the influence of alcohol, she would have her licence revoked by the local authority, and that this is a massive opportunity for landlords, the police and hospitals to contribute to the consultation?
Mrs May
I thank my hon. Friend. I commend the landlady of The Bell Inn in Shepton Mallet for taking that responsible approach to the issue of alcohol. We certainly look forward to receiving responses to the consultation from people such as her constituent and others. There are responsible landlords out there who are running pubs in difficult circumstances. We know; we have all seen many pubs in communities closing. We want to ensure that those who drink responsibly and those who deal responsibly with their clients, as many landlords and landladies do, are able to carry on doing so, and that we hit that end of the market that is being fuelled by this very cheap alcohol, often sold by supermarkets.
Oral Answers to Questions
Tessa Munt Excerpts(14 years, 9 months ago)
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Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)
My constituent, Eleyda Rodrigues Torres, who is from Cuba and has been married for several years to an Englishman, has indefinite leave to remain in the UK. She made an application for a residence card last July, but catastrophic failures at the Border and Immigration Agency mean that 13 of her primary documents have been lost, including her passport, NHS letters, bank statements, with all the implications for fraud—
Tessa Munt
Will the Secretary of State meet Eleyda and me to explain what investigation is taking place—
Damian Green
If documents have gone missing, I obviously apologise to the hon. Lady and her constituent. I will happily talk with her to solve the problem as soon as possible.
Oral Answers to Questions
Tessa Munt Excerpts(14 years, 11 months ago)
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Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)
The Home Secretary is aware that women prisoners will only ever move between women’s prisons, and similarly young people will only move through young offenders institutions. What discussions has she had with her counterparts at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Ministry of Justice to ensure that we look at prison education for women as a cluster and for young people as a cluster, instead of relying on local arrangements?
Mrs May
My hon. Friend raises an important issue, and behind it lies the important issue of the number of women who go to prison. For many women, an alternative arrangement might be more appropriate, which is something Baroness Corston raised in her report on women in prison. I will certainly take on board my hon. Friend’s point and ensure that it is put to the Secretaries of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and for Justice.