Feltham A Young Offenders Institution

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Edward Argar]

I am as ever grateful to the hon. Lady. As she mentioned, I spoke to her yesterday, and we met again this morning. I am grateful for her typically measured tone, not seeking to score points but focusing on what needs to be done to improve the outcomes for young people at Feltham. I know her constituents will be grateful to her as well.

The hon. Lady raised a number of issues that I will address in turn. Her first point was about the gap—the interregnum—between governors. She is right that there was a gap. The previous governor was promoted to a prison group director role and the recruitment process took longer than anyone would have wished. One of the key reasons was that the governor, who has now been appointed, had to serve a notice period in her previous role. The view taken was that she was the right governor to do this job and that therefore it was appropriate to wait. She served her notice and is now in post. I emphasise that I have confidence in her. I believe that she and her team are doing a difficult job very well, as the hon. Lady alluded to. I recognise the constructive and positive relationship between the local branch of the POA and the governor and her team, and I thank them in the same way.

On the root causes, there are a number of challenges at Feltham. As I said, it has a very high concentration of very violent and challenging young people. At present, I believe, there are 110 young offenders in Feltham A, which has an operational capacity of 180. There is, therefore, significant headroom to give the staff greater opportunity to tackle the violence and the underlying challenges faced by those young people. The hon. Lady will be aware, because we met to discuss it earlier in the year, of the violence in April and of the incidents of assaults on other prisoners and on staff. There were a large number of incidents of self-harm and violence but a small number of perpetrators. We have some very challenging individuals.

The hon. Lady was right to mention resources and the need for skilled resource. There has been a 31% uplift in the budget for Feltham A, with £3.5 million going in, and it has an opportunity to draw down further moneys from a second £5 million pot across the youth custodial estate. There are also 90 more staff across Feltham. The experience mix and band mix are broadly the same as they have been over time, but the hon. Lady was right to allude to the importance of experienced staff. We are bringing in extra senior and mid-level experienced resource to help drive change, both at the top level and to support those staff. I believe that seven senior staff have already been seconded, and there will be further changes in the coming days. Andrew Dickinson, the governor of Wetherby, is also taking on a role in supporting Emily, the prison governor. It will be a mentoring role, but he will also play a key role in monitoring the action plan. His institution got a good inspection report and we want to learn the lessons from that.

The hon. Lady raised two other points, which I will address swiftly. On fitness for purpose, current Government policy is to move away from the existing youth offender institution model and towards a secure schools model. Like the Minister who spoke before me at this Dispatch Box, I will not bind a future Government, but that is the current policy. In terms of keeping this House updated, I anticipate that the action plan will be ready within 28 days. I or my successor will write to the hon. Lady and the shadow Secretary of State when it is ready, so that they are kept informed, and we will continue to keep the hon. Lady, as the local Member of Parliament, informed throughout the action plan process.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

I was glad to hear the Minister refer to the good report for Wetherby, but may I press him further on what is being done with an equally difficult cohort of individuals at Wetherby? What is Wetherby doing right that Feltham has been doing wrong?

[Edward Argar]

I will focus on what Wetherby has been doing right, as highlighted in the recent report. The governor of Wetherby is doing a lot of work to ensure that his staff and new recruits get not only up-front training but continuous training over a 12-month period, which makes a real difference to them. It has a strong and effective regime and the governor is focused on continued access to that regime; that is hugely important. The Keppel unit also does very important work in helping some of the most challenging people in the prison to tackle the underlying causes of their trauma, offending and behaviour. I believe we have a lot to learn from Wetherby and that Andrew Dickinson will help the governor of Feltham in playing a key role in making progress.

Courts and Tribunals (Online Procedure) Bill [Lords]

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons
Tuesday 16th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard]

My hon. Friend makes an important point with which I wholeheartedly agree. I always agree with the Lord Chief Justice in everything he says and does, and I would never dream of disagreeing with him. The fact that an online process is available makes it in no way obligatory for people to use it. There is still a case for physical hearings and very much still a case that people who wish to use a paper system should be able to do so.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

As we just heard, the Minister agrees with the Lord Chief Justice on all matters. Does he agree with him that court structures and buildings need considerable investment? Will he reassure me that digitalisation, which is welcomed by those of us who have used the courts a great deal, is not at the expense of the physical courts?

[Paul Maynard]

We are cheerfully straying far and wide in this Second Reading debate, but I am more than happy to confirm that any innovation in online procedures does not in any way invalidate the concerns that many have about the state of our court estate. My hon. Friend will know that we are spending an extra £50 million this year on renovating courts. There is much more to do, and I am keen to see all buckets removed as soon as possible from the court system. I cannot promise that the online procedure rule committee is the remedy for that, but I assure her that I am working on it.

The new rule committee will be judicially chaired and comprised of three members of the judiciary, a member of the legal profession and two additional members, one of whom has experience of the lay advice sector and the other from IT design. While the new committee will be smaller than existing rule committees, the Bill provides the Minister with the power to amend the committee’s membership so that it has the flexibility to respond to changes in subject matter and technology.

Oral Answers to Questions

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Tuesday 9th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gauke]

I agree with the hon. Lady’s point about the statistics—we should be led by the evidence—and I hope to make further progress on this matter in the time that is left ahead.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

I very much hope that a large amount of time is left to my right hon. Friend, who has been a truly reforming Secretary of State in this area, and I endorse everything said on this question by my fellow members of the Select Committee on Justice. However, does the Secretary of State agree that it is very important that if we do have community sentences they are robust and well enforced? Given that the original question was asked by a Scottish MP, I am conscious of the fact that one in three community payback orders in Scotland are ignored by criminals.

[Mr Gauke]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight that point, and much though I believe that we should make rapid progress in this area, I think that we should do so in a way that ensures the system works properly, and I do think that the link with, for example, strengthening community sentences and the way the probation system works is very important. I hope that we are moving in a direction whereby we can make progress and we focus on ensuring that these prolific petty offenders do not reoffend and we are led by the evidence on what is the most effective way to achieve that, and my sense is that there is a large cross-party consensus on this point.

Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Bill (First sitting)

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Melanie Onn]

Q I have one final question. David, you mentioned flaws in the legislation, and you have also talked about the need for some amendments. Is there a danger, as we go through this process, that we end up in the same situation as in 1996, where there are multiple amendments and we make what is currently quite a simple piece of legislation far more complex than it needs to be?

David Hodson: From the legal profession, we desperately hope not. We want a simple process. Despite what may be thought, family lawyers try to settle all our cases. We try to deal with the crucial elements—issues regarding children and finance—but divorce is not a matter on which lawyers would want to spend any amount of time. We want it to go through smoothly.

Will it change the parliamentary process? We hope not. I agree with Nigel: we think the spirit of the age has changed since 1996. Our perception is of a far greater willingness to accept no-fault divorce from those categories that might not previously have been supportive. The changes that certainly the Law Society would like are not substantial; they do not change the structure or concept of a period over notice. They just try to protect the interest, particularly of the so-called respondents—the sole petition where the person may not have fully been expecting a petition to come through.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

Q Could you focus on children for a moment? What proportion of divorces involve children? How will the Bill promote their welfare?

Nigel Shepherd: I do not have the figures to hand, but I can certainly come back to you on that. Self-evidently, a very considerable number involve children under the age of 16. I am sure that is the case. Professor Liz Trinder may have the specific figures to hand. Clearly, children are at the heart of this process. As David said, as Resolution members and family lawyers doing the job properly we are trying all the time to help people focus on what really matters. The children are absolutely the first consideration in that. We know from the research that conflict is damaging to children. It is not necessarily divorce itself; it is the way you divorce. This Bill will help at the beginning to have a more constructive approach to that and help people focus on what matters.

David Hodson: It is curious. The reasons for a divorce do not reflect on children issues and they will not be dealt with in financial issues, and we do not deal with them. But it is the psychodynamic of the couple that every so often a client will say to one, three or four months under way, “I still resent the fact that I am the respondent. You do know that this is equally to blame,” and we say, “Yes, we do, but it won’t have any bearing on children or financing”. However many times we say it to our clients, there is a residual feeling in their mind: “How am I the respondent? I shouldn’t be. I may be partly to blame, but I’m not wholly to blame”. It is the black-and-white element that we have one petitioner and one respondent.

One of the things the legislation has to bring through is that we have to review how we call people in this process. It is the softer elements around the legislation that are as important as the harder elements. For example, let us not get rid of the idea of an applicant and a respondent; let us have “in the marriage of”, and let us name the parties. Even if one person applies for a divorce and the other one responds to it, let us call it a divorce between two people, without having a litigious element in the heading. I think Relate and others would also certainly want to support those softer elements, which are crucial to this process as Parliament and society look at amending this law.

Aidan Jones: From my perspective, the best I can do is quote one of our senior practice consultants, who says:

“The proposed legislation sends out a much healthier message for children. I have known plenty of couples over the years who have agreed together to separate, but one had to cite unreasonable behaviour and the other had to go along with it. This can cause issues. Blame is toxic and never helpful. A great deal of the work we do in the counselling room is around helping people to understand this and to take responsibility for their own actions. It is possible to have a healthy divorce. This legislation will make that easier to achieve”.

[Anna McMorrin (Cardiff North) (Lab)]

Q The new procedure will introduce a minimum clause between application and the conditional order. Can I begin by asking Aidan how the minimum pause between application and condition order will improve the wellbeing of couples and children in practice?

Aidan Jones: Between application and decree nisi?

--- Later in debate ---

[Melanie Onn]

Q Mrs Owens’ case brought this to prominence in recent years. How many other such cases have there been that I may have missed?

Professor Trinder: It is extremely unusual. About 2% of divorces in England and Wales intend to defend. Most of those cannot actually continue with that, and only about a dozen out of 100,000 cases go to a fully contested trial each year. Owens is the only case that we are aware of in the last two decades in which the decree has been refused. We also looked at defended cases and had a sample of 74, and none of those were upheld. It is worth noting that in those defended cases, most of them were not defences of the marriage. It was not somebody saying, “No, I don’t believe that my marriage has broken down.” Mostly, they were triggered by the law itself. People were objecting to the allegations of behaviour made against them, including what appear to be perpetrators who defended allegations of quite serious domestic abuse. Because the court tries to settle cases, rather than go to a fully contested hearing, what happened typically was that the particulars were stripped out, so the line went through references to very serious assaults and they were removed from the particulars.

[Victoria Prentis]

Q You heard the evidence from the previous panel about a barrier to divorce being the cost of the fee. Is that something you have any evidence for or opinion on?

Mandip Ghai: Yes, I would agree with that. Obviously, fee exemptions are available, but lots of people will not fall within the criteria to be exempt from the fee and will not be able to pay the £550. For survivors particularly, the option of sharing the fee with the respondent is not there, and even if she is able to get a costs order from the court to say that the respondent has to pay the court fee, usually he does not pay—

[Victoria Prentis]

Q So is the exemption system not working?

Mandip Ghai: Not yet. For a lot of people, it is not working.

Professor Trinder: I would add that we had interviewees in our sample who had been saving up for their divorce over several years. A couple of years ago, the fee went up from I think £410 to £550, literally overnight, and this man was in tears describing how he then had to start saving again. His divorce was almost in his grasp, after he had saved for several years, and then again taken away. The fees are very high—internationally, they are very high—and they are unaffordable for many people.

[The Chair]

I think we shall move to the Minister.

Court Closures: Access to Justice

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and as he will know the Committee, of which he was for a time a distinguished member and for whose work I am very grateful, recently published a report into the magistracy that deals with a number of challenges facing the magistracy. It is convenient that I refer to this point, given that 90-odd% of criminal cases are dealt with by magistrates, who, as he says, are unpaid—they are volunteers; they are the bedrock of the criminal justice system. The point of a magistrates system is that they are lay people—mini juries, in effect—delivering local justice. Defendants are thereby judged by one’s peers, not only in the sense of one’s status in society, but in the sense that they come broadly from the community from which they themselves come.

That has always been fundamental to our system in criminal work. The difficulty has been the number of pressures on the recruitment of magistrates, and one, which was identified to us by the Magistrates Association and other witnesses, is the effect of court closures. Where they become as drastic as they have in some cases, they act as a disincentive to magistrates to continue on the bench, as travel times are much longer than they were. They can also skewer recruitment patterns for new magistrates. A number of studies indicate that the drop-out rate for magistrates in rural areas, where courts often sit only in the county town, is more marked and that there is a tendency in areas where the court has moved to an urban centre for magistrates to be recruited predominantly from the surrounding town areas rather than the rural areas.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

I wonder if my hon. Friend remembers, as I do, the very powerful evidence we heard from Welsh magistrates in our work on the Justice Select Committee about the difficulties they are having recruiting magistrates in rural parts of Wales.

[Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The evidence from the Welsh magistrates was particularly marked. They have the additional issue that they often need to recruit magistrates who are bilingual, since the Welsh language is usable in court proceedings. Rural areas of Wales suffer greatly from the dearth of magistrates, we are told, as well as from the difficulty of defendants, witnesses, police officers and lawyers having to travel long distances to get to court. The balance there has to be kept permanently under review.

There are other challenges as well. I know that the Minister will respond in full to a magistrates report, and I hope he will take that on board. One of the things we say is that we should have a holistic approach to the recruitment of magistrates—a workforce strategy—and that must include looking at what is reasonable in terms of the travel times that they are expected to undergo.

Other unintended consequences can stem from that. The hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate referred to the closure of four youth courts in London and the amalgamation in Bromley magistrates court, which, as he says, creates difficulties. Even though the geographic distances within London—some of us here are London MPs—might not be great, travel is not necessarily easy, particularly if one is using public transport, and even more so if defendants or other parties to proceedings have chaotic lifestyles. In civil and family cases, they may be people undergoing real stress—because of relationship breakdown, debt problems in civil proceedings, and so on—and the greater the travel burden put on them, the greater the risk that they do not attend and the hearing is ineffective or that those with a legitimate claim in such proceedings are deterred from taking their case forward.

Much progress has been made to make it easier to initiate things such as money claims and divorce proceedings online, which is welcome, but as the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, observed wisely in the other place recently, there is a difference between an online process to deal with transactional matters and online proceedings. As the president of the family division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, observed that video or virtual evidence is unlikely to be as appropriate in family cases as in other cases. For example, it can be easier to resolve things such as straightforward claims for damages—money claims—online. It seems important to us that we find that balance and ensure greater nuance and sensitivity in where we reduce our court facilities.

There is also the issue of travel times. The suggestion seems to be that it is reasonable for someone to leave home at 7.30 am to get to a court hearing and then to get home two hours after it finishes, which might be at 5.30 pm. I did a lot of that when I was practising at the Bar, but I understood that, having chosen that job. It is not the same for someone who is a witness in proceedings or who has been summoned to assist the public good by giving evidence about an incident they witnessed. It does not seem reasonable to expect those people to put up with long journey times. Legal aid lawyers are not well remunerated, and their having to travel long hours on modest fees while also preparing their cases properly does not always ensure that justice is fully served.

I hope that we will be cautious in how far we go. It is perfectly fair to point out that the volume of work going through courts—magistrates, Crown and county—has declined and that that fact will obviously be reflected in the court estate to some extent, but I would be happier if I thought that the money being saved was being immediately spent on the upkeep of the retained estate. I regret to say, however, that that is manifestly not the case. The Criminal Bar Association recently posted online a photograph of the wall in the robing room at Southwark Crown court. As well as various stains and cracks—it is a 1970s building—a number of phone numbers had been written on the wall next to the telephone. The phone numbers were so old they predated the 0207 and 0208 numbers, which shows how long it has been since the place was painted. In Snaresbrook Crown court, I have seen buckets in the judge’s corridor and so on. We are not recycling the money even to maintain the estate we have. We have to get that right somehow.

[Victoria Prentis]

I wonder if I could draw my hon. Friend’s attention, and perhaps by proxy the Minister’s attention, to the excellent and important evidence given by Ian Burnett to the House of Lords Constitution Committee about the quality of repairs to court buildings and the effect it has on judicial morale.

[Robert Neill]

The evidence of Lord Burnett of Maldon, the Lord Chief Justice, was most compelling, and I know that the Minister, who is a diligent Minister and who I welcome to his place in the Ministry of Justice, will want to take that heavily on board. We pride ourselves on having a Rolls-Royce system of justice in this country, and in terms of the intellect and integrity of our judiciary, that is absolutely right, but sometimes the buildings in which they operate—

[Victoria Prentis]

They are more like a Škoda.

[Robert Neill]

As my hon. Friend says, they are much more like a Škoda.

Having drawn those matters to the House’s attention, as well as my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which I should have done at the beginning, I hope that the Minister will take the opportunity to reflect on the voluminous evidence that our Committee and others have amassed not about how we should abandon the reform program—absolutely not—but about how we can take it forward efficiently and effectively. We must strike that balance. We must achieve efficiency but never at the expense of justice and fairness in what is a fundamental civic right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ellie Reeves]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. I, too, know the difficulties that this is creating for the police and the court service locally. These complex considerations have to be taken into account, but they are sometimes not thought about when introducing these sorts of reforms.

The current outline for a reasonable journey assumes that everything in court that day runs to time and to plan. Court listings are usually oversubscribed under the current set-up, so many people often make their way to court, which often takes several hours, in anticipation of a hearing that never takes place. Not only does that have negative consequences for victims, witnesses and defendants and inevitably cost more, given that solicitors’ fees must still be paid, but it is quite possible that the combination of more difficult journeys and the continued floating or warned-list system will lead to the unintended consequence of people just not turning up at all. Research has shown that those effects, combined with court closures, have led to an increase in no-shows and an increase in warrants of arrest for defendants in locations where magistrates courts have closed.

[Victoria Prentis]

Does the hon. Lady share my concern that the Department has done no real research on the number of no-shows?

[Ellie Reeves]

That is a good point. The reforms are being pushed through without a proper look at what they mean in practice.

A survey of Resolution members by the Family Law Group showed that nearly 50% of respondents said that the courts that they had historically used had been closed and that, as a result, many clients’ travel time to court had increased to two hours each way. There were also over 200 examples of clients suffering financially or emotionally as the result of a court closure or a failure in court administration.

I am also concerned that court closures are leading to a wider reduction in facilities and services available to those who interact with the justice system. Previously, people in court could attend a counter for assistance or advice, particularly when having to fill out the relevant paperwork for their hearings. Resolution’s evidence went on to detail the struggle that many of their clients experience due to the need to phone ahead to arrange things that were previously done in court at a counter. The evidence described clients calling a centre only to find that up to 100 people were ahead of them in the queue and finding that support staff, while not unhelpful, had only limited information, making it difficult to progress any queries. In addition, the fact that individuals now have to book an appointment before being able to attend the court counter creates another barrier to getting stuff done, both for professionals and for members of the public. As I stated earlier, given that vulnerable people are disproportionately represented among court users, reducing the availability of services and switching them to online or telephone-based solutions instead risks excluding many from full interaction with our justice system.

The overarching message from stakeholders is that, while reform can improve the workings of the court system, the pace at which courts have closed, combined with the inaccessible roll-out of the digitalisation reforms, has left behind a gulf in access to justice. Cuts to staffing will see those who have to use our courts system finding the whole process even more difficult to navigate. The courts and staff who are left have to deal with increasing caseloads. The Government’s reforms have a facade of ease of use and straightforwardness, but the cuts that have hit the courts have left us with a system in disarray.

In evidence to the Justice Committee, the Criminal Bar Association succinctly stated that

“many of the reforms already implemented and those proposed are framed too much around efficiency at the expense of ensuring a fair process for all.”

I urge the Minister to look at the speed at which the reforms are rolled out and to consider the evidence that too much is happening too quickly. He should also listen to the recommendations of the Public and Commercial Services Union and many other bodies involved in our courts and justice system and prevent any further court closures until it can be proven that they are not having a detrimental impact on access to justice.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) and all my learned friends from the Justice Committee. I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee and the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous), whose application I was proud to sponsor. The Justice Committee has been looking at this area for some time, and the poor Minister is being inundated with the statistics and evidence that we have gathered during the course of our inquiries over the past few years.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) gave an important speech about access to justice, and Opposition Members also made important contributions, so I make no apology for going from the sublime to the very local. I am going to talk about Banbury and Bicester, because we are an interesting example of what happens when courts close.

In July 2015—remember those days?—I was a new MP and the world was rosy. Soon after I was elected, and not entirely to my distaste, it was proposed that Bicester magistrates court would be closed. At the time, along with Banbury and Oxford, it was one of three magistrates courts in Oxfordshire.

I was not too distressed about the news, even as a new, keen MP, because I was told that Bicester magistrates court was operating at 11% capacity. On both sides of the House, we can probably all agree that 11% capacity is not ideal for a court to operate at; it was employing people and taking up a large building on a prime site. I did not resist the proposal, but I made strong representations on the need for Banbury magistrates court to remain open and for the Department to keep an open mind about mobile justice and the real effect on access to justice. I am trying to show that I am not anti-court closure per se, but that what matters is that people can access justice.

The closure went ahead, and the building has since been transferred to Homes England for development. Work has not yet started on the building, which irritates me every time I drive home. At the time, my general support for the proposed closure of Bicester magistrates, as the Department knows well because I told it very clearly, was predicated on Banbury still being open and having the capacity to absorb a possible surge in demand.

I also suggested, to the delight of the Daily Mail, that alternative venues for justice, such as pubs and town halls, be explored as part of a wider discussion about the future of the courts estate. As a Government lawyer for 17 years, I have experience of organising secret hearings in unusual locations, and I am convinced that justice is not about place but about what is done in that place. I am happy to continue making that case both to the new Minister and to the House.

North Oxfordshire is an area facing unprecedented growth, with approximately three houses being finished each day. Cherwell District Council is leading the way and, as the Minister knows only too well, the route for the Oxford to Cambridge expressway, which has yet to be announced, will almost certainly come very close to us. The local population is therefore projected to grow by 25% in the coming years.

We hope that all those people will be law-abiding and will never need recourse to either a criminal court or a family court, but the reality is that some of them will. In our daily lives, many of us do not come across the type of person who uses the courts—although, as MPs, we often do. I am talking about those who are really difficult to reach.

The Minister has done a great deal of work on hidden disabilities and authored the fantastic Maynard review. He fully understands this matter, but I implore him, when thinking about court users in the round, to really think about the type of people we are trying to get to court buildings early in the day. They often have hidden disabilities, they are often not very literate and they have difficulties with ready cash to pay for train fares and bus fares. They are genuinely one of the hardest sections of society to reach, let alone to get to a court building by 9 o’clock in the morning.

The closure of Banbury magistrates court has to be viewed against the backdrop of a febrile local atmosphere caused by the removal of some services, notably obstetrics at the local Horton General Hospital. There is considerable local disquiet about services being taken from Banbury to Oxford, with our area being used merely as a dormitory. I noticed—the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge also mentioned this—that, snuck into the recent “Fit for the Future” consultation document, is a measure that has moved the goalposts; it is suggested that any time between 7.30 am to 7.30 pm is acceptable for travelling to court.

For the consultation that we filled in on the closure of Banbury magistrates court—one that provoked many responses, none of which were taken any notice of as far as I am aware—the document stated that a journey from Banbury to Oxford takes approximately an hour and 10 minutes by car. I would suggest that that is a very optimistic estimate. I conducted my own travel survey in January 2017, as a result of worries locally about closing local health services. It was clear from the 450 responses I received to my survey that the average journey time to Oxford from Banbury or the surrounding villages is approximately 90 minutes.

It is not clear from the consultation document we received at the time we were consulted about the Banbury court whether consideration was given to the lack of parking facilities at the receiving site in Oxford. Court users will have to allow enormous amounts of additional time to find a parking space. Once that is taken into account, it is possible that a one-way journey from Banbury to Oxford could easily take more than two hours. If I were travelling to court in Oxford, as I did from time to time in my working life before I entered this place, I would allow two hours at least.

The other thing we have to remember is that the vulnerable group of users I mentioned do not necessarily have access to cars. As the consultation document suggests, Banbury is also served by a regular train to Oxford. Although the train provides a realistic alternative mode of transport—for those who live in Banbury itself—the 36-minute journey time suggested in the consultation does not take into account travel times to Banbury station. We have extremely limited bus services locally, and many villages are not served by public transport at all.

I am also concerned about whether real evidence was collected on the absorbing court to determine whether it could cope with the extra work. The Justice Committee had some disturbing evidence given to us last week, unprompted by me, about the shortage of judges in Oxford and therefore the inability of the court to absorb this extra work. We know that in 2016-17 Banbury magistrates sat for a total of 2,211 hours, which we think works out at about 58% usage, with 2,009 hours being spent on criminal work and 202 hours being spent on family work. During the same period, Oxford magistrates had 1,184 spare sitting hours. Even my maths can tell me that there is a shortfall in capacity of about 1,000 sitting hours, and that does not take into account any increase in crime locally which we may get because of the vast increase in the local population.

I was brushed off by representatives of the Department, who suggested that the court could absorb the gap by regular Saturday sessions or sittings beyond the usual five-hour day. I gently remind the Department, which is extremely keen to increase diversity in the professions, that sitting at irregular times does not go with increasing diversity. I hope that the Ministry of Justice will undertake specific engagement with the relevant magistrates associations to ensure all options are fully scoped before decisions are taken in the future.

I am keen, as I have said many times in this House and almost weekly before the Justice Committee, on exploring alternative venues for justice. I am therefore very pleased to welcome the new Minister to his place, because I believe he shares my desire to do this. I met the previous Minister along with two of my favourite local magistrates, who came to help me make our case for piloting alternative venues locally. Given the limited capacity at the receiving site in Oxford, and the risk of over-centralisation and the effect that has on my vulnerable constituents, we have suggested that real consideration be given to using Bodicote House, which is the home of Cherwell District Council, as an alternative venue for justice. The Department has done some scoping work on the suggestion, and I would really like to press forward by having Banbury be one of the pilot sites for this new idea. Every time I mention the idea to certain officials, I am met with the response, “Security is a problem,” but it is a problem that we will be able to overcome if we work together in a constructive fashion.

In welcoming the new Minister to this debate and to his new position, I politely encourage him to help me in my mission to bring justice to local people, and to join me by agreeing that justice is not a place but a precious concept—but only if people can access it.

Imprisonment for Public Protection

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr Dhesi]

My hon. Friend’s excellent point encapsulates the mental health issues and the intertwined nature of what we are discussing. I will elaborate further on the mental health problems faced by prisoners.

In 2009, Tommy Nicol received an IPP sentence with a minimum four-year tariff for stealing a car from a mechanic’s garage and injuring a man’s arm in the process. Once his tariff was completed, the Parole Board refused his request to be released and told him he should access a therapeutic community, in order to address his mental health issues and become safe to be released.

Tommy’s mental health suffered as he was repeatedly denied access to mental health treatment courses. He was moved to prisons that did not even offer those courses, making proving that he had been rehabilitated increasingly difficult. In November 2014, he made a formal complaint saying that IPP sentences were a form of “psychological torture”. Around that time, he also began to self-segregate and went on hunger strike. His behaviour became increasingly erratic as he understandably struggled to deal with the psychological impact of his situation. Tommy tragically took his own life in prison in September 2015.

James Ward was given an IPP sentence in 2006 with a tariff of only one year for setting light to his mattress while in prison serving a fixed sentence for a fight with his father. He ended up serving not one year but 11 years.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the case of arsonists is often serious in the IPP sentence structure? Because of the links between arson, sex offending and reckless behaviour, arsonists have been disproportionately affected.

[Mr Dhesi]

The hon. Lady ably makes the point about arsonists who end up serving a lot longer than they should. It is not fair.

During those 11 years, James Ward regularly self-harmed and his mental health deteriorated significantly. He has since spoken out about the damage that the IPP sentence did to his mental health, telling the “Today” programme:

“Prison is not fit to accommodate people like me with mental health problems. It’s made me worse. How can I change in a place like this? I wake up every morning scared of what the day may hold.”

IPP sentences leave prisoners in limbo, with a lack of access to courses and treatment. Those cases show how much more needs to be done to address the issue faced by those serving IPP sentences. They also highlight a particular issue for IPP-sentenced prisoners, namely being unable to complete the courses that the Parole Board has told them will help to demonstrate that they are safe for release. That is partly because we face an increasingly violent and overcrowded prison system, where there are simply not enough places on development courses and therefore not enough opportunities for short-tariff IPP-sentenced prisoners to demonstrate that they no longer pose a risk.

There are other problems, which are easier to fix. For example, the families of IPP-sentenced prisoners have said that prisoners are prioritised for places on courses based on how close they are to their release date. Because IPP-sentenced prisoners do not have a fixed release date, they fall to the back of the queue and can struggle to ever get on the appropriate courses. I would be grateful if the Minister provided an update on what is being done to address that issue.

IPP sentences have a huge impact on prisoners’ mental health, as they would do on anyone locked up and deprived of their liberty with no end in sight. They create a sense of despair and hopelessness, which can have a significant impact on an individual’s mental health. This is demonstrated by the fact that IPP prisoners are significantly more likely to self-harm than determinate-sentence prisoners and even life-sentence prisoners, which is an amazing statistic. This is borne out by numerous reports, such as those by the Prison Reform Trust, the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Institute for Criminal Policy Research at King’s College London.

Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons found that IPP prisoners were significantly more likely than life-sentence or determinate-sentence prisoners to have arrived in their current prison with problems, including feeling depressed and suicidal. Mental health issues are already endemic in our prison system, with at least one in three prisoners reported to have mental health issues by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons reports. The real figure is likely to be greater.

Instances of self-harm are already too high, with 55,598 in 2018 alone. We need a comprehensive and fully-funded strategy for the reduction of all forms of violence in prison, including self-harm, and that must include special support for those on IPP sentences. Will the Minister outline what special provision is made to tackle the mental health conditions of IPP prisoners, especially those with shorter tariffs, who have served way beyond their tariff and probably never expected to be in this situation?

Another issue that affects the prisoner’s ability to rehabilitate and turn their life around is recall. When an IPP-sentenced prisoner is released, they are released on licence, with strict licence conditions that must be followed. Breaching those conditions can result in recall to prison. In many cases, that is a correct and appropriate response, but there are cases where technical breaches—for example, missing a probation meeting due to unforeseen illness or travel delays—have resulted in recall to prison. The excessive use of recall to prison for minor breaches of licence has contributed to the number of IPP prisoners remaining in prison staying stubbornly high. Families of those serving IPP sentences have called for a more reasonable approach to recalls to be taken, to ensure that only those breaches that suggest that someone poses a risk should necessitate the deprivation of an individual’s liberty.

Minor breaches of licence conditions are often not crimes in and of themselves, but simple things, such as missing appointments and breaching administrative conditions. The ex-head of the Parole Board told of offenders sent back to prison for turning up drunk at their bail hostel, even though that presented no risk to anybody. Repeated recall to prison while on release on licence also prevents an IPP prisoner from securing housing and holding down a job, both factors that are proven to reduce reoffending rates. Indeed, 936 people on IPP sentences were released by the Parole Board in 2017. In the same year, 543 people on IPPs were recalled. This is a complex and serious issue that will be tackled only through proper co-ordination between the Ministry of Justice, prisons, probation services and the police. Will the Minister outline his Government’s strategy to tackle the issue of recall?

The only way that an IPP prisoner can finally be entirely released from their sentence is to apply to the Parole Board, 10 years after their release from custody, to have their licence ended. Many experts and campaigners have rightly pointed out that this is simply too long and sets people up to fail. Does the Minister have plans to amend this?

Before concluding, I will highlight the impact of IPP sentences on our justice system. Such sentences do not just have a detrimental impact on the mental health and stability of offenders, both while in prison and during release on their extraordinarily long licences; they are detrimental to the efficient running of the prison and parole systems. The Parole Board has historically heard the cases of offenders given longer sentences than those who were subject to IPP sentences, but is now forced to conduct a lengthy risk assessment process for short-tariff offenders on IPP sentences. There is also no doubt that the rapid increase in the number of prisoners on IPPs contributed to prison overcrowding, which continues, despite the abolition of IPP sentences, because many IPP sentence prisoners face difficulties in demonstrating that they are safe to be released.

The prison population has risen significantly since 1994, especially following changes to minimum sentences since 2000. The UK now has the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe, with 141 prisoners per 100,000 of the population. Our prisons are often dangerously overcrowded, with many prisons operating at significantly over their certified capacity. Such overcrowding has a detrimental impact on safety, which has deteriorated considerably under this Government; prisons are substantially more violent than in the past. Overcrowding has also had an impact on the ability of prisons to rehabilitate offenders effectively; Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons has repeatedly raised it as an area of concern because it affects the resources available to reduce reoffending.

It is now time for IPP sentences to be resolved. Continued calls for further change—including from former Justice Secretaries, from Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons and from the chair of the Parole Board—have focused on the unfairness for prisoners who are still serving IPP sentences and on the challenges that they create for the prison system. Abolishing new IPP sentences was the correct course of action, but there is still more to be done to address the issues that face those who were sent to prison for a short tariff that has effectively turned into a life sentence.

The families of those on IPP sentences are making proposals that may well offer a way forward. For example, Donna—the sister of Tommy Nicol, who I referred to earlier—is now campaigning for reforms to the system that prisoners on IPP sentences face. She has called for the sentences of those who are serving initial tariffs of four years or less, as her brother was, to be converted to fixed sentences. Is the Minister looking at that? There are many suggestions for reforming these outlawed sentences to ensure that public safety and justice is served. Suggestions from the criminal justice reform sector include converting IPP sentences to fixed-length sentences, starting with shorter tariffs, and protecting the public with minimum licence periods.

The Government need to finish the job that they started. Their challenge now is to lay out how they will ensure that this wrong is finally righted. Until it is, it will remain a stain on our justice system.

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[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

Thank you very much, Sir Edward, for calling me first. Owing to unavoidable complications at home, I will have to leave early; I apologise to both Front Benchers that I will not be present for the summing up, but I look forward to reading what they have to say. IPP sentences are an issue on which I have long campaigned and I would not have missed this debate for the world, so I am so grateful to you for allowing me to take part.

It is a great pleasure and honour to follow the excellent speech of the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi). He has said almost all that needs to be said, so I do not think that colleagues will have any difficulty in keeping to the time limit that you suggest, Sir Edward. He is right, and he fairly said that both sides of the House have been at fault on this difficult issue.

IPP prisoners and their families were the victims of fairly catastrophically bad policy making in the first place. When that was seen and, to my great delight, the system was changed in 2012 by those of us who were then in power—not that I was at the time, directly, but I was a civil servant working in the field—a residue was left because the changes were not made retrospective. As the hon. Gentleman said, that has left the fate of these people as a stain on our system. They are the victims of poor policy making, but also of enormous churn at the Ministry of Justice.

As ever, it is a great pleasure to see my dear friend the prisons Minister in his place. I hope that he will be allowed to stay in post long enough to sort out this matter and several others—including children’s criminal records, about which I will talk to him later. It is very important that we get on quickly with the reforms that my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) posited when he appeared before the Select Committee on Justice in July 2016. In answer to my fairly brusque questions about whether he would

“consider changing the release test or other legislative change”

to help IPP prisoners, he told me that he was “actively considering” it. Unfortunately, the following day he was moved on. That has been the picture of my attempts to get Ministers to engage with the issue over the past four years, so I very much hope that we will hang on to the present Minister long enough for him to do something about it.

The test for the release of IPP prisoners is very high. As Dr Harry Annison of Southampton Law School noted in written evidence to our Committee, IPP sentences fall

“little short of life imprisonment”.

As I said in my intervention earlier, I am particularly concerned about those convicted of arson offences. The Committee heard evidence about a man who was convicted for a minimum of 10 months in 2006 and was not released for 11 years. I also remember from when I was in practice an extraordinary case of an individual who had been convicted for setting fire to a pair of church curtains and was still in prison very many years later; the reasons and lifestyle that had led to the original offence really did not make him a continuing risk to society. The hon. Member for Slough has already spoken, as I am sure other hon. Members will, about the horrific despair of individuals in prison who do not know when they will be released. It is Kafkaesque, and it is not acceptable in our criminal justice system.

IPPs were used far more widely than was intended. They were often given to offenders who committed low-level crimes with very short tariffs of less than two years. They were handed out at an extraordinary rate when they were first introduced. They proved very difficult to understand, they left victims and families uncertain about how and when people would be released, and they have led to real inconsistencies in sentencing. The sentence created its own complexities that were not fully foreseen when it was conceived. The test for release was set at a very high threshold, which has led to real problems with mental health, suicide and self-harm; the hon. Gentleman has already gone into those, so I will not.

There is good news, however: since 2017, there has been a concerted effort by the Prison Service, the probation service and the Parole Board to progress cases. In 2017-18, the Parole Board ordered the release of more than 900 IPP prisoners, including the re-release of some who had been recalled. The hon. Gentleman asked the Minister to go into recall in some detail; that is important across the Prison Service in general, and particularly with this cohort, for which there are real concerns about how the recall system is being used.

There is a great deal more to do. Immediate action could be taken, without legislative change, on treatment programmes. The Parole Board and prison psychologists have gone to enormous lengths to say that there are options other than treatment programmes that demonstrate the case for release, but boards remain very influenced by programmes that offenders have undertaken.

I am concerned generally about treatment programmes and their evaluation. We held up the sex offender treatment programme as a gold standard for many years, and then we got rid of it overnight and brought in new systems because it was proved not to work. I was interested by the response to a recent freedom of information request from Transform Justice, which showed that 95% of accredited programmes have no impact evaluation. I am really worried about the undue weight that boards are placing on programmes that have not been properly evaluated. The lack of provision of such programmes is effectively keeping people in prison without real evidence that it is the right place for them. May we please have urgent action, Minister, on treatment programmes and their evaluation, as well as real direction, so that we do not over-rely on programmes that have not been fully evaluated?

In the “Prison Population 2022” report, which the Justice Committee published in March, and in the Government response, which they very kindly gave us yesterday, there is a great deal of common ground between the Government and the Justice Committee. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), the Chairman of the Justice Committee, will go into them further, but there are very good practical suggestions in the report from the Howard League and from the Parole Board itself on how to deal with IPP prisoners. I encourage the Minister to take all of them on board. However, I have to say that I, along with others on the Justice Committee, would go further. We think that these prisoners represent such a blight on our justice system that legislative change is the only way forward.

Rehabilitation of Offenders

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

May I politely remind my hon. and learned Friend that it is not just employment prospects that will suffer if the box is not banned? There can often be a problem with getting social housing—indeed, any sort of housing—as well as with getting insurance or going to university or college. I welcome this statutory instrument, but it is particularly important that we get this absolutely right and proportionate.

[Robert Buckland]

My hon. Friend uses the word “proportionate”, and as a distinguished former Government lawyer, she knows what that means. I think many other people—Madam Deputy Speaker included—will know precisely what it means. It means, in effect, making sure that any measure does not defeat the purpose for which it was brought into force. In other words, it must not become self-defeating, and the response must be in line with the nature of the challenge. My hon. Friend is also absolutely right to talk about the wider context. We have to look at meaningful rehabilitation, and we have all seen plenty of examples of individuals who have committed offences and been punished for their crimes and who have been able to go on in later life to make a success of their work and family life and become the sort of citizens we want to see in our society. That is self-evident, and it is certainly the experience that all of us will have had at some point or other.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Buckland]

There would be a judicial review. That point was considered carefully in the other place. I readily accept and deal full on with the potentially onerous nature of having to bring a judicial review to challenge proceedings. But as I have said, the filter system that any chair would have to operate is considerable. There are safeguards and guarantees in respect of anonymity and publication that provide the sort of safeguard that, if misapplied, would quickly and obviously attract criticism when a higher court came to scrutinise the decision process.

[Victoria Prentis]

Will the Minister help the House? Are the chairmen of these inquiries not nearly always senior judges, who are perfectly able to make the sort of evaluation that he is telling us about?

[Robert Buckland]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As she will know, the process of obtaining a senior serving member of the judiciary will be done in consultation between the appropriate Secretary of State or Minister and, usually, the Lord Chief Justice, who will consider availability carefully. Retired High Court judges or lord and lady justices of appeal can also be considered. We are particularly fortunate, as I said at the beginning, to have Sir John and, formerly, Sir Christopher. They were asked to fulfil the role of chair as a result of consultation between Ministers and the Lord Chief Justice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I am always wary of extending powers that can trespass upon the convention rights of citizens and generally wary of giving blanket powers to organs of the state. I am very much in favour of the rehabilitation of offenders legislation and spent convictions. As the right hon. Member for Delyn (David Hanson) observed, the Justice Committee recently published a report that urges the Government to consider reducing the amount of disclosure that is required, particularly in relation to spent convictions that occurred when the person concerned was a child or young person. There is no doubt that that is a desirable course of action, because the inappropriate and unnecessary disclosure of spent convictions can be a serious bar to rehabilitation—I think we would all be as one on that.

That is why I looked twice when I saw this statutory instrument; I looked at it with some care and at what was said about it in the other place. On balance, having listened to the Minister’s careful and thoughtful explanation, and with all respect to the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), who spoke from the Opposition Front Bench and for whom I have great regard, I find that the objection to it is ill-founded. This is enabling legislation, in the sense that, I understand, it makes provision for spent convictions to be admitted in particular classes of statutory inquiry where they are relevant—it is not general legislation insisting that this should happen. As the Minister rightly said, the relevance test has to be met in any event.

One or two questions are raised that we could helpfully think about. First, it is asserted that there may be a risk of people being dissuaded from becoming witnesses at an inquiry if the provision is in force. With respect to the Opposition Front Bencher, I am not convinced by that, because the same would happen under the ad hocery arrangement that is suggested. If someone were likely to be a witness in a particular inquiry, they would be put off as much by ad hoc secondary legislation as by the generally enabling provision before the House.

[Victoria Prentis]

Does my hon. Friend agree that as statutory inquiries have the ability to summons witnesses, as much as many courts do, that would deal with the issue?

[Robert Neill]

That is precisely right. Someone summoned to give evidence to a statutory inquiry would be obliged to come forward. With all due respect, it seems to me that it is a false point that should not weigh on us.

The second point is that even when people are summoned there is still a safeguard. It seems to me that the safeguard of the application of the test of relevance, in what is after all an inquisitorial process, as opposed to the criminal, adversarial one, is proper and appropriate. I am concerned about the potential cost of somebody having to seek a judicial review, because that process is lengthy and difficult.

Oral Answers to Questions

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

The hon. Lady makes a very proper point, and I pay tribute to the probation officers I have worked with over many years. They are dedicated public servants who use their professional judgment and skill to help assess risk, which is an onerous task. I do not approve of scapegoating. I expect the service to support probation officers who are under pressure, but for cases where there needs to be an investigation, due process then has to take place.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

8. If he will make it his policy to end the requirement for 12 months of probation supervision for people with sentences of less than 12 months.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr David Gauke)]

It is absolutely vital that prisoners get the support they need after release to turn their lives around. It would be premature to reverse reforms that, for the first time, saw those released on short sentences supervised after release, with a period dedicated solely to rehabilitation. We have already looked at ways of making that process more proportionate, but as my hon. Friend will know, I want to look at the broader question of short sentences and measures that actually serve to reduce reoffending.

[Victoria Prentis]

If I may trespass for one moment on your good will, Mr Speaker, given the previous question, perhaps you would like to join me in congratulating the Nacro winners, who are in the Public Gallery at the moment and who are about to join me for tea in the Pugin Room—where are they? They are putting their hands up so they can be congratulated by all of us in the House today, who appreciate what probation staff and those who work with prisoners do for us.

Does the Secretary of State agree that we should put real resource into alternatives to custody, so that we can end the cycle of reoffending and stop all our constituents from suffering from further crime?

[Mr Gauke]

I join in the congratulations to the prize winners in the Gallery and welcome them to the House of Commons.

I agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of alternatives to custody, and I am keen to ensure that we make greater use of curfews, exclusion zones and new ways in which we can restrict offenders in the community in a way that can be more effective in reducing future reoffending.

Prisons and Probation

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gauke]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. Sometimes, Opposition day debates can be a bit of knockabout, but there is a lot that we ought to debate and discuss in respect of the prison system and how it operates, and leadership is a really important aspect. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) and congratulate him on his promotion. He pursued with great vigour the theme of the importance of leadership—of having the right governors and leadership teams in prisons—and it is absolutely key. To be honest, that matters more than whether an institution is run by a private company or by the public sector. The quality of the leadership is a much more important factor. I hope we have an opportunity to debate that issue and others like it in future.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

That is what has struck me during this debate: what matters in prisons are the standards under which people are kept and the results that are shown in stopping people reoffending, not who keeps the prisoners. Does my right hon. Friend agree?

[Mr Gauke]

That is exactly right. If the private sector is not working, I am prepared to step in—I have no problem with doing that—but the most important thing is that we should look at the outputs and outcomes and base what we do on that, rather than take a simplistic view that the public sector is good and the private sector is bad or, indeed, vice versa. That is the approach that I wish to take.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gauke]

Obviously, that is a tragic case, and, as I have before, I express my sympathies for the family of the hon. Gentleman’s constituent. As regards identifying and attributing blame, I am not in a position to comment on that. CRCs manage those who are assessed as low and medium-risk offenders.

If I can return to my comments, I want to make a wider point about the crucial role that can be played by the private sector and, indeed, the voluntary sector in supporting probation work. It is the dedication and commitment of these organisations, many of them small and community-led, that enables offenders to turn their lives around. The work of the voluntary sector, particularly with vulnerable offenders such as those with learning difficulties and other complex needs, is irreplaceable and the Government are committed to supporting it. We have been clear that the public, private and voluntary sectors all have a clear role to play in building a strong probation service. That does not mean that we cannot learn from the experience of transforming rehabilitation.

I have been clear that under CRCs the quality of offender management has too often been disappointing. I am determined to learn from what has gone well and what has not under the current system. That is why the Government have acted decisively to end CRC contracts early, invest an additional £22 million a year in through-the-gate provision, and hold a consultation on the shape of future arrangements. I am grateful to all those who have responded to the public consultation, as well as for the work of Dame Glenys Stacey, the Justice Committee and the Public Accounts Committee in providing helpful scrutiny and challenge as we consider how best to deliver a stronger, more resilient system. It is important to recognise, as those partners have, the role of external factors in creating a challenging operating environment for CRCs, but we have also looked very carefully at their findings about the complexities of contractualising offender management and the challenges of ensuring continuity of supervision and integration among providers.

I look forward to bringing detailed plans for the future of probation to the House in due course. I will be driven by the evidence and what works. This must not be a matter of ideology or dogmatism but one of single-minded focus on delivering the probation system we need.

[Victoria Prentis]

When?

[Mr Gauke]

I think the phrase I just used was “in due course”.

[Victoria Prentis]

Is it?

[Mr Gauke]

It certainly is “in due course”.

Finally, as we debate these issues we should recognise that the challenges in the current system are not down to the work of probation staff. Their hard work and professionalism, in both the NPS and CRCs, is tremendous and I pay tribute to them. Probation is a vocational career, and as part of the future arrangements we are looking to establish an independent statutory body so that probation staff have the same professional recognition as their peers in health and education.

In conclusion, as I said at the beginning, the role of the private sector and the voluntary sector in the criminal justice system is an issue for debate. We should constantly examine and re-examine what the right role should be, but the approach from the Labour party is that this is the only issue that matters. We hear nothing from Labour about how to deal with repeat petty offenders and the role of non-custodial sentences. There is nothing about the measures to properly tackle drugs and violence; nothing about offender management in prisons; nothing about how we are recruiting additional prison officers or getting people jobs through our education and employment strategy. The only thing we ever hear is nationalise, nationalise, nationalise. As Sadiq Khan, one of the predecessors of the hon. Member for Leeds East, said in 2011, defending the Labour Government’s use of private sector prisons,

“our policy was and is based on what works, rather than dogma.”—[Official Report, 31 March 2011; Vol. 526, c. 527.]

That is as it should be. On this side of the House, we will always work to put the public first in reducing reoffending, protecting the public and building a stronger justice system.

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[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Delyn (David Hanson), my very well respected colleague on the Justice Committee. I am always immensely grateful for the contribution that he and other Members make to the work of our Committee. There might be the odd difference in nuance and tone, but there is broad agreement between us in the factual conclusions of our Select Committee reports. They are cross-party reports, and they are based on evidence, so I am with him on many of the points that he made.

In fairness, it is right to say that the Secretary of State has struck exactly the right tone. I congratulate him on doing so. It is not the first time in recent weeks that he has made an important speech on prisons policy and on other matters. The tone he struck in looking at the evidence has all too often been missing from the debate on prisons and on justice policy more generally on both sides of the political divide. I therefore welcome his tone and approach, and I broadly agree with where he is coming from.

There is not, to my mind, a need for a rigid, ideological division. There are differences on the evidence on prisons and probation. I think that the evidence of a mixed prisons economy makes it clear that good work is done in a number of private sector prisons. There are failures in those prisons, as there are failures in public sector prisons—the evidence provided by the chief inspector demonstrates that clearly. The issue is not who manages prison contracts—perhaps with the exception of facilities management failures, a specific area—but what we expect prisons and their staff to do on behalf of society and to achieve with the people sent there by the courts on behalf of the state. It is what we do to help them to ensure that prisoners are kept safely and decently, protecting the public, deterring reoffending and turning around the lives of those who go to prison so that they are less likely to reoffend and there are fewer victims of crime as a result.

Under Governments of all parties, we have not managed to achieve that satisfactorily for the past few decades—it is not a short-term thing—and investment is needed in some cases. I welcome the additional prison officers, but greater thought is needed, not just in the House but by society as a whole, about what we expect prison and the justice system to do. Ultimately, we can never make prisons places of rehabilitation and reform unless they are safe—when my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) was Prisons Minister he got that absolutely right—but, realistically, we cannot do that unless we continue to put in the number of people that we currently do. To achieve that in a safe fashion that has public confidence, it is critical that we spend much more time and energy in our debate finding robust and viable alternatives that punish people in the community, rather than simply warehousing them in prison institutions, which is counterproductive for everyone. I very much welcome the Government’s willingness to look again at the presumption against shorter sentences, as has happened elsewhere.

There are important things in the prisons debate, but I, too, am not going to dwell on them as much as other matters. My hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) is going to speak about prisons in particular, but I want to return, as the right hon. Member for Delyn did, to transforming rehabilitation and the probation system.

This morning, the Justice Committee heard from Dame Glenys Stacey, the chief inspector of probation, for the last time, as she is coming the end of her three-year tenure. She has done an excellent job. She has been robust and frank, and she has spoken truth to power, as an inspector should. She has not pulled her punches when necessary. The evidence that she has found is entirely consistent with evidence that the Select Committee found in a number of its reports, particularly one that we have recently published. It is entirely consistent, too, with the findings of the National Audit Office and those of the Public Accounts Committee. When, separately, four bodies produce reports based on essentially the same evidence and come to the same conclusions, the Secretary of the State and the Prisons Minister—I warmly welcome him to his post—who have been brought up professionally to work on evidence, know that it is time for change.

I submit urgently to the Secretary of State that, whatever the good intentions behind the transforming rehabilitation programme, partly because of the pace at which it was undertaken, and partly because of the intrinsic nature of the probation service as a social service, which is different from the Prison Service in many ways, it has failed to achieve many of the laudable objectives set for it. It has not created greater diversity of provision and, above all, it has not succeeded in bringing the voluntary sector into probation work in the way that had been hoped. Most importantly, it has—like it or lump it—lost the confidence of many sentencers. If we are to achieve the objective I mentioned of developing robust alternatives to custody so that we do not overcrowd our prisons, it is critical that we have a system of supervision in the community, either as an alternative to custody or on release from custody, that commands the confidence of the sentencer—the judge and the magistrate —as well as of the public. It is very clear that that has not been achieved under the current arrangements.

The point about risk is an important one, as our report stressed. On all the evidence that we heard, the division of risk at the point of sentence and on the basis of the offence is, in reality, arbitrary. It is a snapshot in time that is then frozen for the rest of the offender’s supervision, whereas in reality the evidence is clear that risk will change. If the supervision goes well, it will decrease, but in certain circumstances it may increase. This is not an efficient division of risk to have. It is interesting that a different approach has been taken in Wales. One of the reasons that is worth looking at is that it could enable us not to have that arbitrary division of risk. I hope that my right hon. and learned Friends will look at the practicality of how that works out, because this is a critical issue.

Another significant thing that Dame Glenys stressed to us is the way in which the contracts were written. The problem is that probation work—which is, of its nature, dealing with people with complex circumstances in quite often changing and difficult environments—cannot easily be distilled into a set of contractual requirements, which might be easier to do, in some circumstances, within a closed institution.

The current contractual systems model does not succeed in achieving either innovation or the sharing of good practice, because there is no reward for either of those things. The Secretary of State’s review and consultation now gives us an opportunity to look at that. He was right to terminate the CRC contracts early, because they were simply not delivering what had been sought and intended. It is clear, on the evidence, that just recreating them would not be the answer. It would be more sensible to look at alternatives that, on the evidence, address the systemic problems that we now know are there but were perhaps not foreseen at the time.

There are areas that need to be looked at in relation to people with particular vulnerabilities—for example, the particularly high number of young offenders with black and minority ethnic characteristics going through our probation system, and the particular difficulties of female offenders, many of whom, of course, have themselves been victims of abuse or other types of offence in the past. There is the real problem that we have with through-the-gate services, where clearly not enough is being done to discharge people from prison into circumstances where they will not be tempted to fall back into reoffending. I hope, in particular, that when the Secretary of State looks at new models for dealing with probation services, he will look specifically at the need to secure accommodation for people on release. Indeed, securing accommodation for people who are being supervised in the community as an alternative is central to the probation process. All the evidence clearly says that the best means of keeping out of trouble are a home, a job, and a family or support system relationship.

[Victoria Prentis]

My hon. Friend is making a fabulous speech. Will he comment specifically on the evidence we heard this morning showing that one in five prisoners have nowhere to sleep on the night they are released?

[Robert Neill]

That was very shocking evidence indeed. Frankly, it is an indictment of every one of us that we are releasing people under those circumstances. I have here a piece of evidence from, I think, a visit to a CRC premises in south-east London, not far from my constituency, that was trying to supervise people who were sleeping in church halls, or sleeping rough in a graveyard or on the night bus. It is an obscenity, frankly, if we are releasing people from prison, with the objective of trying to get them to turn their lives around, and they are trying to live under those conditions. It makes rehabilitation work impossible. Getting those things right is actually much more important than the argument about who owns, manages and runs the service; they are fundamental issues. I believe that the Secretary of State has the opportunity, the willingness and the determination to do that.

Both the Secretary of State and the new Minister of State, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Robert Buckland), are used to working on the basis of the evidence. Both they and I are also proud to hail from the one nation tradition within our party. That tradition reminds us that Conservative Members have always had a long-standing belief in social reform, as Members of other parties do, too. No one party has a monopoly on that. Getting prison and our criminal justice system right is a great cause of social reform, and I believe that the Secretary of State and the Minister get that and understand it. Equally, though, if all the evidence points one way, then that is the decision that the tribunal comes to. If they put those two things together, we have an opportunity to make progress in the coming weeks—I hope—and months.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the powerful speech by the hon. Member for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock) and friends from across the House who broadly take the same view on the progress we need to make with the probation system. I am not going to focus on that. My views are carefully set out in the report of the Justice Committee and have been well rehearsed by my colleagues from the Committee on both sides of the House. However, I noted carefully what the Secretary of State had to say, and I am extremely hopeful that we will have an announcement or statement from him in the very near future. I hope the result will be one that we all applaud.

As ever, I would like to talk about prisons. It always shocks me how empty the Chamber is when we discuss prisons. If we are serious about helping the lowest strata of society, we surely have a fairly obvious place to look to find them. I for one was very grateful that the Opposition chose this subject for today’s debate.

I am fortunate to represent one of the biggest constituencies in the country. The number of my electors is broadly the same as the number of adult men in prison. The point I am making is that there are a lot of people in prison, a lot of families affected and, perhaps more importantly, a lot of future victims who are affected by our failure to treat people and by the breeding of future criminals in prisons as they are run at the moment. We must accept that about a fifth of prisoners are sex offenders and that nearly all of them will be released into our communities. Members know that I spend a lot of my time here arguing in favour of prison reform, but the most compelling reason for me to do that is that we must save future victims from crimes that will ruin their lives.

The Justice Committee has written not only a marvellous report about transforming rehabilitation, but a big report on the prison population—for me, it is our magnum opus—which I hope the new Minister, the hon. and learned Member for South Swindon (Robert Buckland), has read and digested and will return to many times during his tenure. I will whizz through the main recommendations of that report and then give him some jobs for the rest of the week.

Our report’s first recommendation is that:

“The prison population has become increasingly challenging in nature, with prisoners often having complex health and social needs. Many have learning disabilities or mental health conditions”,

and that the Ministry of Justice needs to

“acknowledge the challenge it faces and demonstrate that it has a long-term strategy”.

Secondly, the prison population is projected to grow, and the existing approach “limits the scope” for the Ministry thinking more laterally about planning for that growth. The report states that the “more challenging mix” of those sentenced to custody is likely to be partly attributable to the impact of wider social factors over which the Ministry has no control, but the Ministry and prison officers have to pick up the pieces.

The third recommendation is that

“Trends in ethnicity and the social drivers of complex and challenging behaviour should be more explicitly identified”.

Fourthly:

“To close the large gap between the money allocated to prisons by the Treasury and the current costs of running and maintaining them, the Ministry of Justice has estimated that it would have to reduce the prison population by 20,000 places. By the Ministry’s own admission this is not achievable under existing strategies and funding arrangements.”

How will the Minister possibly close that gap?

We have got to take prison reform seriously. This is my fourth Prisons Minister. There have been six Secretaries of State for Justice since 2010. All of them—certainly the Prisons Ministers—have been one nation, compassionate Conservatives. I stalk their every movement, as this Minister will find out, and I count them among my closest friends in this place; I hope it is mutual. It is really important that the current Minister can stay in place for long enough to make substantive change.

[Robert Neill]

Unless he is in the Cabinet.

[Victoria Prentis]

Oh no, he is not going anywhere—this is a long-term sentence! I have the highest regard for the current Minister. He has done more than his fair share of heavy lifting in the impasse on Brexit. I offer him the following suggestions with affection, but they are urgent, and I wish him to do them immediately.

No. 1, we must accept that diversion from custody is the only answer for sentences shorter than 12 months. To do that, we need robust alternatives, not a “get out of jail free” card. Once we have those in place, we need to re-educate judges, who in my experience—as the Minister knows, I know at least one extremely well—are kind, well-motivated and have seen it all before. We need legislation to reduce the number of short sentences. We have to stop churn through the prison gates.

No. 2, we need a full review of categorisation. It strikes me that several Members here today are well placed to lead that review; I am not looking too hard at any Member on either side of the Chamber. We know from Lord Farmer’s review that being close to family reduces reoffending. Current categorisation is holding us back. We have new evidence about the age of maturity, particularly in boys, which needs to be fed into decisions on where we place people.

No. 3, the Minister needs to have on his desk—in my view, every morning, but possibly every week—figures on the regime, by which I mean hours outside cells and numbers of people in segregation, for every prison in the country. Only then can he truly evaluate what is going on. I would be grateful if he shared those figures with the Justice Committee. While he is at it, could he ask for monthly figures on imprisonment for public protection and share them with us? That would be really helpful.

No. 4, we need to end Friday releases immediately. There is no excuse for releasing people at the end of the week, when services are simply not available to help them.

No. 5, we need to evaluate why and when we make children and young people disclose their criminal records. We know that it ruins their lives. A diverse group of MPs are championing that, from my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) to the right hon. Members for Warley (John Spellar) and for Tottenham (Mr Lammy). The Home Office and the MOJ need to decide who is responsible for that policy and act as soon as possible. It is not right for any child’s life to be ruined by an early misdemeanour.

No. 6, for years we described—and I described in court—our sex offender training programmes as the gold standard. A substantial amount was spent on producing those programmes, but they have conclusively been proved to have failed. Can we evaluate the programmes we have put in their place? The number of sex offenders is growing.

No. 7, we need to block mobile phone reception in prisons now—why on earth not?

No. 8, we need to provide a £37,000 scanner for every prison to stop drugs getting in. Everybody from the Minister down needs to go through them. There was a major stabbing of a prison officer in Bullingdon Prison in my constituency last week.

No. 9, prisons are places of radicalisation. We need to grasp that and not lock people of similar views together simply because it makes control easier. A categorisation review might give us evidence to help with that.

No. 10 is on race. We need to be honest. It is not right that a black woman is more than twice as likely to be arrested as a white woman. I am pleased that the all-party parliamentary group on women in the penal system will look into the arrest of women. More than half the inmates held in prisons for young people in England and Wales at the moment are from a black and minority ethnic background. That is an extraordinary figure and not one to be proud of, and real change is needed. In short, I fear there will come a point when the Minister wishes he was back with the withdrawal agreement Bill.

Oral Answers to Questions

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gauke]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising this point. I am happy to write to him on the individual case, which has a number of complexities, as I am sure he is aware. I have mentioned the joint action plan to improve IPP prisoners’ sentence progression. These measures include case reviews led by psychologists for those prisoners not making the expected progress, an increased number of places on specialist progression regimes, and greatly improved access to rehabilitative programmes. I continue to be ambitious to ensure that we do everything we can in this area, remembering that public protection must remain our priority.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for what he has said about his ambitions for IPP prisoners. Does the joint action plan have an end date—that is, is there a date beyond which we should not detain people under these sorts of sentences?

[Mr Gauke]

In the end, it comes down to the decisions made by the Parole Board, which has to make its decisions based on public protection. In some cases— regrettable though it may be—if someone is not safe to be released, the Parole Board must make that decision. We need to ensure that we do everything we can to progress these cases as best we can. As I have said, we have made progress in recent years.