draft Telecommunications Restriction Orders (Custodial Institutions) (england and wales) regulations 2016

Tristram Hunt Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 General Committees

[Mr Hayes]

I will be brief. I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her contribution, particularly as this is her first performance, if I can put it that way, in a statutory instrument Committee—

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

Her first intervention.

[Mr Hayes]

I like to think of these things in theatrical terms, as you know, Mr Owen. I am grateful for the tone and spirit of what she said, as well as for the inquiries she made. Let me be clear: she is right that the issue is not only about crime. It is about crime, as she said, but it is also about the system being made a mockery of. Prisoners are using Twitter and Facebook in a way that makes prison authorities look foolish. It can be worse than that. They can send all kinds of messages over those media of a most unpleasant nature—I mentioned harassment and so on earlier.

The hon. Lady is right that, as I said in answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford, we need to be open-minded about how the system develops and how the technology changes. In the form in which it has been introduced to the Committee and the House, the instrument is a means by which we can cut off handsets and SIMs, but I take the hon. Lady’s point that we will need to review that over time, which is precisely why I committed to do what my right hon. Friend asked me to do.

I shall now give some detail on that commitment. My officials will not like this, but that is not a problem because the Ministers make the decisions. I suggest that we complete the review by the end of 2017, and that I, or whoever is Minister then, write to the House with the details of that review. The review should encompass all that I described, including the National Crime Agency, the police, the prison authorities—NOMS will clearly be closely involved—and the telecommunications operators, who Members from both sides of the House suggested will need to be involved. It will be based on an analysis of whether we need to go further both technologically and in terms of the prison estate, as my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate said.

Let us commit to that on the basis of what has been discussed in this brief debate. So that right hon. and hon. Members can go about their daily business, I draw my remarks to a close.

Question put and agreed to.

9.19 am

Committee rose.