Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Warinder Juss and Shabana Mahmood(3 days, 1 hour ago)
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Shabana Mahmood
The right hon. Gentleman raises an incredibly important point. I am discussing with the Home Secretary the full range of powers that we need to have at our disposal, and she has already made it clear that we will not hesitate to act further if we need to. However, it is important that we are able to deport offenders who pose a risk to our country.
Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)
Last week, at a Justice Committee hearing, it was confirmed that an effective probation service is essential to the rehabilitation of offenders and to prevent reoffending. However, over the years the service has been under immense strain owing to increased demand. What steps is the Secretary of State taking to ensure that probation officers have manageable caseloads, and that support is provided for their mental health and wellbeing to avoid high levels of stress and burnout, and also to help with the recruitment and retention of staff?
Courts and Tribunals: Sitting Days
Debate between Warinder Juss and Shabana Mahmood(1 week, 2 days ago)
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Shabana Mahmood
The right hon. Gentleman is entirely right. All the mechanisms at our disposal to reduce the cost of people going to court should be on the table, and we have already been acting to try to amplify the availability of mediation and other ways in which issues can be resolved. Going to court is always very expensive, sometimes for the individuals involved and often for the taxpayer, and it is important that we keep bearing down on those costs.
Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)
I thank the Lord Chancellor for her honesty in setting out so clearly the difficult situation that we have inherited from the Conservative party, and I welcome the measures that she has proposed: the record investment in the justice system, and the measures taken to reduce the number of cases going to the Crown courts.
Warinder Juss
It has got worse, because of the Conservative party.
Does my right hon. Friend agree that, as well as focusing on the measures that she has already proposed, we should continue to focus on reducing crime in the first place, and pursue our policies for tackling youth crime, knife crime and violence against women and girls?
Shabana Mahmood
My hon. Friend is right. In order to deal with all the problems in the criminal justice system relating to policing, prosecutors and the situation in the Crown courts, we need a system-wide approach. That means taking action on the crimes that affect neighbourhoods up and down the country, which is why the Home Secretary’s recent Crime and Policing Bill is such a landmark piece of legislation. We must all play our part, because the criminal justice system has been left in a truly terrible state by the last Administration, and this Government are getting on with the job of sorting it out.
Sentencing Review and Prison Capacity
Debate between Warinder Juss and Shabana Mahmood(4 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Shabana Mahmood
Yes, I absolutely can. The whole point of the review is to ensure that the country is never again in a position in which we might run out of prison places, and to ensure that those who must be locked up to keep the public safe will always be locked up.
Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)
Keeping a prisoner in prison costs the taxpayer over £50,000 a year, whereas punishing the prisoner out of prison costs less than £5,000 a year. What is more, the prisoner is then far less likely to reoffend. Does the Secretary of State agree that taxpayers’ money would be better spent on having a much cheaper and better alternative to prison?
Shabana Mahmood
My hon. Friend makes a really important point about the relative costs of imprisonment and of punishment out of prison. Delivering the 14,000 prison places that the previous Government failed to deliver is a big cost, but it will be met by this Government. We must also ensure that we expand punishment out of prison. All options must be pursued if we are to get to grips with this crisis.
Criminal Justice System: Capacity
Debate between Warinder Juss and Shabana Mahmood(4 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Shabana Mahmood
We will of course look at improved literacy and other skills within our prison estate. The problem with running a prison estate as hot as the previous Government did, and so full to the brim, is that when we are so badly overcrowded and prisoners are locked up for 23 hours every day, there is very little other work we can do to help prisoners rehabilitate. Dealing with the capacity crisis will enable us to have a better performance and better track record on rehabilitation, which is crucial if we are ultimately to reduce the number of victims in future and cut crime.
Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)
Does the Secretary of State agree that failing to address the prisons capacity crisis and allowing the Crown court backlog to grow to unprecedented levels has meant that the entirety of our criminal justice system has been broken? I make particular reference to rape and serious sexual offences cases.
Shabana Mahmood
It is clear that the position I have inherited from my predecessors was shocking and completely unacceptable. We were, simply, one bad day away from total disaster in our criminal justice system. That is why, since we formed the Government, we have been making the difficult choices necessary to stabilise our criminal justice system and stabilise the situation in our prisons, so we can restore the system to one that the public can rightly have confidence in.