Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to reduce the prison population in Wales.

On 16 October, the Lord Chancellor announced additional, longer-term measures to reform the justice system and continue to address the prison capacity challenges. The Lord Chancellor’s measures apply to England and Wales and include:

o Extending the Early Removal Scheme (ERS) for foreign national offenders;

o Introducing a presumption that sentences of twelve months or less are suspended to reduce reoffending;

o Legislating to allow prisoners to be held in overseas prisons;

o Reviewing the incentives around early guilty pleas to save the courts time, spare victims the ordeal of giving evidence in court, and cut the number of people in our prisons on remand;

o Looking at options to tackle the injustice of the now abolished Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence and how the licence period could be reduced to restore greater proportionality to the IPP sentence;

o Reviewing our Home Detention Curfew (HDC) policy to increase the number of prisoners eligible for this successful rehabilitative measure;

o Reviewing the use of recall for offenders on release who infringe the terms of their licence; and,

o A new annual statement on prison capacity and up to £400m of funding for more prison places (enough to buy 800 new Rapid Deployment Cells).

The Government will continue to carefully monitor the evolving situation with demand for prison places so that we can make sure we have the right approaches in place to maintain the capacity required for a safe and effective criminal justice system.