Sentencing Bill

Tony Vaughan Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 16th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Tony Vaughan (Folkestone and Hythe) (Lab)]

I am glad to support a Bill put forward by the only party serious about reforming our criminal justice system. I say that as a barrister with 19 years’ experience, and I draw the House’s attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Having been in full-time practice right up until last July’s elections, I saw at first hand the chaos in our prisons, the leaking and inadequate court buildings, and the overstretched probation officers, criminal barristers and others who were doing more for less in increasingly challenging circumstances.

This Bill is critical to delivering meaningful justice for victims, protecting them more effectively, punishing perpetrators and rehabilitating offenders so that they become better citizens, not better criminals. We often talk about the Government’s inheritance from the Conservatives, but I argue that the prison and probation system is the area of the public realm that is most affected by the Tories—where they did most damage. They had 14 years, and they created 500 prison places, as the Lord Chancellor said. The number of frontline prison officers fell by 31% and the Conservatives decimated the Probation Service. Their so-called transforming rehabilitation reforms, which privatised part of the Probation Service, resulted in taxpayers bailing out failing private companies with £467 million of public money. There is nothing more serious than ensuring law and order, and the Conservatives became the party of lawlessness and disorder.

It will take time to fix our prison and probation system, and this Bill begins that vital work. There is much I strongly support in this Bill. I particularly welcome the commitment to transition to an earned progression model for standard determinate sentences, inspired by reforms in Texas. There, as we heard, crime is at record lows, and it is important to stress that the behaviour of prisoners will impact their release. The principle on which this reform is based—that offender risk is relevant to how long they will stay in prison—is sound. If they reoffend and breach the terms of release under this system, the system will come down on them like a ton of bricks.

The inescapable fact is that we send too many people to prison who then become better criminals. The point of prison is to face punishment as part of taking personal responsibility for their actions, but most people in prison can be rehabilitated. People must be accountable for their actions without us becoming cynical about human nature.

I also strongly support other measures in this Bill, such as the expansion of tagging to monitor offenders in the community, which, as the Lord Chancellor said, has been shown to cut crime. I also strongly support the streamlining of deportation for foreign national offenders, on which I have a recent constituency example. In June, three men from Folkestone and Dover were convicted of raping a child and committing related sexual offences. They were together sentenced to around 54 years’ imprisonment. It was an utterly horrendous case. They were foreign nationals. Under existing laws, they can only be deported after serving the minimum term of their custodial sentence, which is often between a third and a half of it. Why should the British taxpayer foot the bill for their incarceration here for the next seven, eight or nine years while our prisons are at capacity?

Clause 32 of the Bill answers that question by allowing the Home Office to remove the offender from prison at any time and subject them to deportation action, irrespective of how long they have spent in prison here. I support that common-sense measure, which is yet another example of a measure that could have been enacted by the Conservatives, yet was not.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

Despite the party political edge to the hon. and learned Gentleman’s remarks, I want to ask him a serious question. Presumably there need to be safeguards to ensure that when people are deported before they have served their sentences, those sentences will be served in the country to which they are deported. Can the hon. Gentleman explain to the House what sort of guarantees there will be that these people will not get off scot-free after deportation? I am sure that there must be some such safeguards.

[Tony Vaughan]

I do not think anyone is suggesting that people are going to leave their sentences early from the UK and walk free in their country of origin. There is a range of existing rules relating to prisoner transfer agreements and so forth, which will apply in any event. This may be a matter that the right hon. Member will be able to raise in Committee, but I have no doubt whatsoever that this measure—which will still be subject to the safeguards that are already in existence, whether in the deportation process or the justice process—will ensure that justice is done, which is the whole point of the Bill.

There is much in the Bill that I welcome, but let me ask the Minister a few questions. How can we keep the strongest possible safeguards in place for victims during the transition to more community sentences, how can we ensure that our Probation Service is well resourced and able to support the expansion of such sentences, and what additional measures are Ministers considering to support more effective rehabilitation of prisoners who have addiction and mental health conditions?

The Bill is a serious and radical response to our prisons crisis and our reoffending crisis, which are costing our society more and more every day in every way, and I invite Members to vote for it today.