Guardianship (Missing Persons) Bill

Philip Davies Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 24th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I beg to move amendment 1, page 1, line 19, leave out subsection (4):

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 2, in clause 2, page 2, line 17, at end insert—

‘(2A) Before hearing an application for a guardianship order the court may require the applicant to take such further steps by way of advertisement or otherwise as the court thinks proper for the purpose of tracing the missing person.”.

Amendment 3, in clause 3, page 2, line 27, leave out “90 days”’ and insert “6 months”.

Amendment 4, in clause 7, page 5, line 18, leave out “4 years” and insert “2 years”.

[Philip Davies]

Let me set out from the start that these are probing amendments and I do not intend to push any of them to a Division. By anyone’s admission, this is quite a meaty Bill, running to 25 clauses, but we have had no scrutiny of it in the Chamber. It received its Second Reading on the nod, without any debate whatsoever, and here we are, with time pressing on, and we have had no opportunity before now to debate any of its provisions. I therefore tabled some probing amendments to tease out from my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) why some of the Bill’s provisions—the timescales, for example—are as they are.

Amendment 1 would remove subsection (4), which states:

“A person who is detained, whether in a prison or another place, is to be treated for the purposes of this Act as absent from his or her usual place of residence and usual day-to-day activities.”

I want to tease out from my hon. Friend the reasoning behind the subsection, because there was no scrutiny of it on Second Reading.

In passing, I should say that we are discussing the Guardianship (Missing Persons) Bill, and a Missing Persons Guardianship Bill is going through the House of Lords. I am not sure whether that Bill’s provisions are different from this Bill’s, but perhaps Members in the other place are trying to achieve the same thing.

In 2014, the Government held a consultation entitled “Guardianship of the property and affairs of missing persons” in which, as far as I could see, the issue addressed by subsection (4) was not mentioned once. Furthermore, I checked the reasoning behind the inclusion of the subsection with the House of Commons Library, but the staff there confirmed that they had not been able to find out anything about its background. They could not explain why it was in the Bill, beyond its inclusion as an example.

After speaking to Library staff at further length, they said:

“The Bill defines a missing person as someone who is absent from their usual place of residence or their usual day-to-day activities. The reason for being absent may be because the person is detained. However, in addition, as in other cases, the first or second condition set out in subsections (2) or (3) must also be met. In most cases, the first condition is likely to be relevant—that is, that the person’s whereabouts are not known, or not known with sufficient precision to enable contact to be made.”

That was the Library’s explanation of why the subsection might be in the Bill but, given that the staff there were not entirely clear about it, I thought it important to table an amendment so that we could hear my hon. Friend explain it at first hand. That is why I see it as a probing amendment.

Amendment 2 would insert into clause 2:

“Before hearing an application for a guardianship order the court may require the applicant to take such further steps by way of advertisement or otherwise as the court thinks proper for the purpose of tracing the missing person.”

That would ensure that all reasonable steps had been taken to try to locate the missing person.

[Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)]

On reflection, does my hon. Friend agree that the court probably has that power anyway? Someone seeking to obtain an order must surely have to show the court that they have taken all reasonable steps to discover where the missing person is..

[Philip Davies]

I very much hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton will be able to confirm that, which is why I described the amendment as a probing one. I want it to be clear, on the record, that that is the case, because it was not entirely clear from looking through the Bill. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight) is right—I am sure he is—but, as I said, it is a probing amendment so that we can get it confirmed on the record.

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a valid point, but as far as I understand it good systems are already in place to determine whether a person is missing and all that side of it. There is, however, no system for looking after their estate or anything that they own if they are declared missing. The Bill is about helping the people left at home to deal with the property or the estate, or, indeed, to deal with the hardship that they might be facing because they cannot access funds or money, or get into the house and all those sorts of things. It therefore seems eminently straightforward and sensible.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right. She is referring to the principle of the Bill, which I absolutely support. I do not intend to do anything to stop the Bill proceeding—that is not the point. The point I am making is that we are looking at the detail, and I want to ensure that we get it right. All hon. Members support the principle of the Bill. I do not want to scupper or affect the principle—she and I are as one on that. The purpose of the amendments is to ensure that we are happy that the details are right, because it is quite a chunky piece of legislation that deserves such scrutiny.

Amendment 2 is based on a requirement in the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1993—I do not know whether I need to refer hon. Members to my registered interest as a landlord, but I have now done so—section 26 of which addresses applications when the relevant landlord cannot be found.

Similar legislation elsewhere in the world contains similar requirements before a guardian can be appointed, including in three Australian states—New South Wales, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory—which set out a process under which an individual can seek to be appointed to manage the affairs of a person who is missing. There is a similar provision in Canadian law. That is the purpose behind the amendment. I want to ensure that we are happy that we have the detail right.

As hon. Members can see, amendment 3 would increase the amount of time from 90 days to six months for which an individual must be missing before a guardian can be appointed. This was specifically designed as a probing amendment, because it was the only way I could think of to tease out from my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton why he set 90 days as the limit. The only way I could think of doing that was to propose an alternative. My alternative is six months, and I wonder whether 90 days is too short a time.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s scrutiny of this important legislation. He mentioned other territories around the world that use such legislation—New South Wales, Victoria and British Colombia—all of which use that 90-day period. It is therefore a sensible starting point.

[Philip Davies]

I have read the consultation, to which there were 40 responses, of which eight commented on the proposal that applications should be made only after 90 days. Some of the responses said that 90 days was too long—I accept that—but practical points on timing were made, including by the Finance and Leasing Association, which had concerns about the 90 days. The consultation response therefore states:

“We accept that the 90 day period may create problems in some cases, but are also conscious that over-hasty applications may result in unnecessary expenses being incurred.”

The period is 90 days and not 60 or 100, so I am seeking the rationale for 90 days. My hon. Friend was helpful in his intervention and has made it clear why he has gone for 90 days, and I am grateful to him for that.

As hon. Members can see, amendment 4 would reduce the maximum period of guardianship from four years to two years. Clause 7 sets out the period of guardianship and requests that the period for which the guardian is appointed be stated in the court order. The maximum possible is four years, and I propose to halve it. Again, I am trying to tease out from my hon. Friend why he believes four years is right, and why the period should not be longer or shorter. I can see the attractions of making it longer to avoid people having to go back time and again, given the cost of doing that. I was not sure whether the primary purpose was to avoid that or there was another rationale as to why four years was the appropriate time.

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

My concern arises from the same issue, and it is what happens when a missing person is found. That does not automatically negate the guardianship, as I would have hoped that it would, and is an argument for saying that the guardianship should be for a shorter period. Otherwise, as soon as somebody is found, the guardian will have to apply to the court to end the guardianship before they can again be treated as a normal person.

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[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. That is why I proposed a shorter period rather than a longer one.

[Sir Greg Knight]

I think that my hon. Friend has inadvertently misled the House. As I read the Bill, the term of four years is a maximum, and the court has power to make an order for any length of time up to four years.

[Philip Davies]

Yes, that is right. If I did mislead the House, I certainly did not intend to. I thought I had made it clear that it was a maximum of four years, but if I did not, I apologise to my right hon. Friend and to the House. He is right: it is a maximum, and it does not need to be exactly that. However, that does not necessarily overcome the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) that a decision for four years could be made in good faith and is then superseded, possibly causing an issue.

Again, I pray in aid the consultation on these matters. It received a range of views on the appropriate duration of guardianship appointments. Two respondents said they agreed with the proposed maximum term of four years, while there were suggestions from four other respondents, including for a shorter period of just one or two years, with one proposal of eight years. Perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton is saying that we should split the difference and go for four years, and that is the consensus—I do not know. As I said, there are examples in other countries. In Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, the administrator or manager is appointed initially for up to two years, which can be extended for a further two years. I wonder whether that might have been a more sensible way of going about it. It is the same in Irish law, with an initial two years that can be extended for a further two years. That might be better than a straight four years right from the word go.

My amendments are in no way seeking to cause any problems for the Bill; they are simply to give it some scrutiny that up to this point it has not had, as I am sure my hon. Friend will be the first to concede. Legislation does deserve some scrutiny, particularly when it is as meaty as this. I look forward to his and the Minister’s response to the issues I have raised and their explanations for some of the details in the Bill.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Sam Gyimah)]

I am keen for this Bill to progress.

Amendment 1 relates to the definition of when a person is missing for the purposes of the Bill. The amendment would remove clause 1(4), which relates to the absence of the missing person. Without that subsection, it would be unclear whether, for the purposes of the Bill, the person detained in prison or otherwise would be treated as being

“absent from his or her usual place of residence and usual day-to-day activities.”

Amendment 2 addresses a different aspect of the question of whether a person is missing for the purposes of the Bill. First, the Bill already provides in clause 20(1) that the application must be advertised in accordance with the rules of the court. The subsection provides that

“notice of the application and any other information specified by rules of court”

must be sent

“to the persons specified by rules of court”.

Secondly, the procedure for hearing the application will be governed by rules of court. Those rules have not yet been written, but they will specify the information that needs to be provided to the court with the application. That is likely to include a requirement that the application is supported by evidence of the various issues on which the court must be satisfied before it can make a guardianship order in accordance with the Bill.

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In summary, the four-year period is a maximum, and even when it is applied, it can be cut down if circumstances so require. A two-year maximum could be unduly restrictive and result in unnecessary expense for those affected. In the light of that explanation, I hope that my hon. Friend will withdraw his amendment.

[Philip Davies]

I am very grateful to the Minister for his explanation. We have not yet heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), the promoter of this Bill, on whether he endorsed the Minister’s points.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. The Minister laid out his responses in a very comprehensive fashion. I have nothing significant to add. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) talked about the other Bill in the House of Lords. That Bill would not be required if this Bill passes through this House today. He mentioned removing clause 1(4). This deals with a situation in which somebody is detained as a hostage or something similar. Terry Waite springs to mind, as he was could not be contacted for five years.

[Philip Davies]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for that addition to the Minister’s explanation. I absolutely accept the points that have been made. It is important that we had them put on the record, and that we teased out from the Government why they set the rules as they have. I am sure that that will be useful for people to know. Therefore, I am happy to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Third Reading

Prisons and Courts Bill

Philip Davies Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 20th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

My hon. Friend is correct. As well as making sure that these commercial courts cover all the regions of our country, we need to make sure that there is mutual enforcement of judgments elsewhere. We have a commitment to do that as a Government; it is something that I have agreed with the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, and it is a priority for the Government’s negotiations.

This Bill introduces a new online court which will enable people to resolve civil claims of up to £25,000 simply and easily online. These online services will increase access to justice. It will reform procedures so that people can make witness statements rather than statutory declarations in relation to certain traffic and air quality offences in the county court. It means that people will not have to go into court to go through this process. The Bill will also streamline the use of “attachment of earnings” orders, giving the High Court the same power as the county court to make attachment of earnings orders in relation to judgment debts, and on the basis of a fixed deduction scheme.

We also want our excellent judiciary and magistrates to be better supported in the work they do. This Bill will allow judges in all our courts and tribunals to make greater and more effective use of authorised court staff, to assist them with tasks such as dealing with routine applications or ensuring compliance with court directions. This will allow our judiciary to prioritise their time and expertise on the matters where they are needed most. 

The Bill will bring the legislative framework for the employment tribunal system into closer alignment with that of the wider tribunals system. It will confer responsibility for making procedural rules to the Tribunal Procedure Committee. Employment judges will be able to delegate routine tasks to appropriately trained or qualified staff. Overall, these reforms will benefit tribunal users, whose cases will be resolved more quickly and proportionately.

We have the most highly regarded judiciary in the world; they are a beacon of independence, expertise and commitment to the rule of law. The Lord Chief Justice and I are working closely together to make sure that we have the strongest possible role for judges and magistrates in a transformed and modern justice system. We are putting in place reforms that recognise magistrates as an integral part of this judicial family. The judiciary is an important part of our constitution and its continued independence is vital for the rule of law. We must continue to uphold the very high standards and to select its members purely on merit. That means ensuring that people want to apply, feel valued and have good working conditions. I value the work that the judiciary does, from the magistrates and tribunals to the High Court and the Supreme Court. As Lord Chancellor, I am determined to support them in all they do.

Part 4 takes forward measures to ensure that our judiciary have the support and opportunities they need for a fulfilling and successful career. This Bill will strengthen leadership structures in the judiciary, supporting our wider work to provide clear career progression for judges, and ensuring that the widest possible range of talent comes into our judiciary. It will make it easier for the judiciary to deploy judges more flexibly, allowing judges to gain experience of different types of cases and helping with their career progression. The Bill will also enable the Judicial Appointments Commission to assist with selection exercises in other parts of the world, sharing the leading expertise within the commission.

Part 5 tackles the rampant compensation culture that has developed around whiplash claims—

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Just before my right hon. Friend moves on, may I ask her a question about magistrates? She rightly values the work that they do, so when can we expect the Government to allow them to send people to prison for 12 months, rather than six? This Government have been promising to do that for quite some time.

[Elizabeth Truss]

I thank my hon. Friend for his dogged support for magistrates; he is absolutely right about the fantastic work that they do. I am looking into this issue, and I would be happy to discuss it with him further.

Part 5 tackles the rampant compensation culture that has developed around whiplash claims. The number of road traffic accident personal injury claims is over 50% higher than it was 10 years ago, despite there being fewer accidents and safer cars on our roads. The Bill will enable us to introduce a transparent tariff system of fixed proportionate compensation for whiplash claims with an injury duration of up to two years, and to ensure that all claims will be supported by good quality medical evidence provided by accredited experts.

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[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I start by echoing the Justice Secretary’s comments about the young prison officer Ryan Goodenough, who was attacked in Oakhill secure training centre last week. I pay tribute to all our prison officers, who do such a good job in such difficult circumstances.

I thank the Secretary of State for telephoning me the evening before the Bill’s publication to discuss its contents, and the Minister for Courts and Justice for meeting me last week to discuss the Bill in further detail. Even though I have been in this place for only a limited time, I understand that that is a custom more often honoured in the breach than observance, so I was pleased that they contacted me in a courteous and informative way. I also thank the House of Commons Library for its thorough and clear briefing, which has assisted me and my staff, and doubtless many other Members and their staff, too.

We are discussing a Bill to amend the procedures in our prisons and courts. The Bill has been trailed since the Queen’s Speech last May—back in the days when the former right hon. Member for Witney was Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) was Justice Secretary, and the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) could not find the time to edit a daily newspaper. Much has changed since then—we have waited a long time for this Bill.

We are not opposed to the Bill. Indeed, we welcome and support much of its content. However, when we disagree with provisions or believe that the Government should go further, we will pursue amendments in Committee. The Bill comes at a time of dual crises: a dangerous and declining prison estate; and thousands of people being priced out of access to justice. I will set out the reasons for those crises and what the Bill must offer to make a real difference.

It has been the Secretary of State’s misfortune to inherit a brief that has been dominated from day one by the crisis in our prisons. That crisis is not of the Secretary of State’s making, but it was created by the Conservative Government’s cuts agenda. The relevant statistics are often cited in this place, but they are worth repeating. There is overcrowding in 68% of our prisons, with more than 84,000 people for approximately 77,000 places. In the 12 months to September 2016, there were more than 25,000 prisoner assault incidents, which represented a 31% increase on the figure for September 2015. Assaults on prison staff reached 6,430, which was an increase of 82% since 2006 and a 40% increase on the year before. There were more than 37,750 incidents of self-harm, which was an increase of 61% compared with September 2006 and a national increase of 23% on the previous year. In the 12 months to December 2016, there were 354 deaths of prisoners in custody, 34% of which were self-inflicted. This Government’s decision to cut 7,000 frontline prison officers no doubt contributed in large part to the crisis, but that was allied with the disastrous decision to part-privatise our probation service, meaning that the effective rehabilitation of offenders has become all but extinct under successive Conservative Governments.

[Philip Davies]

I, too, want to support and help to protect our prison officers. I intend to table an amendment whereby a prisoner who assaults a prison officer should no longer be automatically released halfway through their sentence. That would have a big impact on the Prison Officers Association—it would welcome that support—and it might deter some of the violence in prisons. If I table such an amendment, will the hon. Gentleman show his backing for prison officers by supporting it?

[Richard Burgon]

In Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) and others will look at ways of ensuring that we put the safety of our prison officers first, and on a par with the safety of police officers. Overcrowding, violence and failure to reform are all challenges that the Bill must confront and surmount.

The Bill sets out proposals to modernise the way in which our courts and tribunals operate, which is welcome. I can testify from my decade as an employment tribunal lawyer that when Dickens complained in “Bleak House” about the turgid pace with which courts dealt with cases, he could have been speaking for our age, too. However, technology has begun to appear in courtrooms, from which it was previously glaringly absent.

It is vital that such innovations do not come at the expense of access to justice, because in recent years, when the Conservatives have released documents with the word “transforming” in the title, that has usually been shorthand for cutting, diminishing and failing—think of “Transforming Legal Aid” and “Transforming Rehabilitation.” “Transforming our Justice System,” which is one of the papers that has influenced this Bill, must not result in the same.

The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, was certainly correct when he said last year:

“Our system of justice has become unaffordable to most.”

I was glad that the Secretary of State praised Lord Thomas in her speech, but I would welcome it if she went beyond praising him and agreed with his analysis of the barriers to access to justice.

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[Robert Neill]

The hon. Lady, who follows these issues closely, makes a very fair and reasonable point. That is a significant factor.

I practised as a criminal lawyer for the better part of 30 years. I both prosecuted and defended, so I have had no compunction about sending away people who have committed serious crimes. Equally, when I defended people and when I looked at some of those whom I prosecuted during that career, I saw some who were dangerous, unpleasant and, frankly, in some cases downright evil. They deserved to go to prison, and some of them deserved to go to prison for a very long time.

There were others who were weak and stupid, and some who were greedy. Sometimes—particularly for those who were greedy—that, too, deserved punishment, and prison was an apposite and appropriate punishment. There were also those who were weak or vulnerable, or who found themselves in situations where they were easily coerced. There were people who had made a series of errors in their lives, and others who suffered from physical or mental illnesses or from real social pressures around them.

We have to be much more discriminating and sophisticated in how we deal with defendants in our justice system. Prison does not always work. It works for some people, but not for everybody all the time, and we need to be brave enough to say that in political debate. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier), the former Solicitor General, rightly says, the public are much more alert to and realistic about that, and much more willing to buy that argument. We simply need to have the courage to make it.

[Philip Davies]

I do not know where my hon. Friends go out of an evening or during the day, but I am not sure that lawyers’ dinner parties accurately reflect public opinion at large. Does my hon. Friend accept—it is a fact—that since Michael Howard started the trend of sending more people to prison, the crime rate has fallen? What does my hon. Friend make of that direct correlation?

[Robert Neill]

To be blunt, I rather suspect that I met a broader cross-section of society in practice as a criminal lawyer than one would meet in the average bookmaker’s. We must be prepared to stand up and challenge stereotypes, wherever they come from on the political spectrum.

We diminish the value of prison if we adopt a knee-jerk approach and say that locking people up and throwing away the key is the best solution in all circumstances. It is the best solution for the dangerous. I had no compunction about saying that those in the Brinks-Mat trial, in which I was involved, deserved to go to prison for a very long time. One was later convicted of a very serious murder, and I thought that they should stay in prison for a very long time indeed. Equally, those who commit crimes to feed drug habits are not served by lengthy prison sentences. More to the point, the public are not served in the long run either.

The real difficulty that we face is that we incarcerate more people per 100,000 of population than virtually any of our western European comparators. That is more than Spain—and more than France, which has demographic, sociological and economic problems and indicators very similar to ours; it is a good comparator, in many respects. We incarcerate more than 140 people per 100,000 of population, while France incarcerates about 98. Our rate of incarceration is practically double that of Germany, a country that is also very similar to us in many other respects. That cannot be because of some greater inherent criminality on the part of the British people. It is simply that we do not have a sufficiently sophisticated suite of alternatives to custody to provide robust and publicly credible options, so sentencers often feel obliged to fall back on custody more than they do elsewhere.

The other point to bear in mind is that Germany and the Netherlands, in particular, do a better job of rehabilitating those who are in custody. We know that because their reoffending rates are much lower. I think the Government recognise, as do all other commentators, that short sentences very seldom have a positive effect. The Government are to be commended for saying that not only do we need to look at prison reform, in terms of what happens in prisons, but we need to look at what happens when people come through the gate; at the support that they get within the community; and at what diversionary activities can be established early on when people—particularly young people—come into contact with the criminal justice system, to make sure that they proceed no further down that path. It is an holistic approach, and the Government are right in that regard.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is being typically gracious and kind in giving way. Notwithstanding the point that he made, the fact of the matter is that for every 1,000 crimes committed in this country, only about 19 people are sent to prison. That is one of the lowest ratios of any country. Perhaps he can tell us in which countries the ratio of people who are sent to prison per 1,000 crimes committed is lower? That is the best measure of how many criminals we send to prison—not proportion of the population. We send very few criminals to prison per 1,000 crimes committed.

[Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend perhaps neglects to say that the reporting arrangements are very different in other countries, particularly when dealing with younger people in the criminal justice system. The different diversion work done in those countries does not allow for that kind of correlation.

I am not just talking about Europe. A number of states in the United States—we do not always think of them, particularly in current circumstances, as beacons of social progressiveness—are more effective than we are at rehabilitation, meaningful community penalties and reducing recidivism. Some of that work, I might add, has been carried out on the watch of Republican governors. There is often a value-for-money case for imprisoning fewer people, as well as a social outcomes case. We ought to be prepared to make the case for prison reform as an important objective of any Government.

To return to the thrust of my argument, the Bill is an important step in achieving such reform. Of course, there is a lot more that we need to work on which is not in the Bill. The statutory purpose of the Bill is a good one. I understand the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter) about what, specifically, should go in it, but I think that its overarching purpose is correct. The balance between the safety of the public and the inmate on the one hand, and reform, rehabilitation and improvement on the other, is the right set of principles to have.

New duties on the Secretary of State are important. I suspect that they probably are justiciable; none the less, it is important to have proper accountability mechanisms. The new power for the chief inspector of prisons—the right to a response to his reports—is especially important. The current chief inspector, Peter Clarke, is an excellent appointment. I had the privilege of shadowing his team while they carried out a prison inspection—it happened to be at the prison local to my right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary, in Norwich—and I saw how thorough and professional they were.

As my right hon. Friend and the prisons Minister know, and as we in the Select Committee know, one of the chief inspector’s great frustrations is the fact that in some cases, the bulk of his recommendations—not just a few, but sometimes an overwhelming majority—are not taken on board. It is important he can make sure that they are taken on board, and that a proper reason is given if they are not. Too often, his recommendations are repeatedly ignored by the same serial-offender prisons. This is an important legal step, which underpins progress.

The point has already been made about the prisons and probation ombudsman, and I agree with it entirely. These are important and welcome measures, as far as the prisons dimension is concerned, as are those to do with new psychoactive substances and interference with mobile phones. They are all important steps forward.

In the rest of the Bill, the modernisation of court proceedings is important and valuable. As the Bill progresses, I hope that the Government will bear in mind some of the caveats raised by practitioners, such as the Bar Council, the Law Society, the Criminal Bar Association and the Criminal Law Solicitors Association, to avoid unintended consequences. When dealing with things that might give rise to a conviction online, it is important for people to have the resources necessary to make an informed decision in relation to the plea, the means of election and so forth. Having such access will be important. This could be a very useful tool, and I know that the judiciary believes that it can be a good tool, but it is important to have informed decisions, and making guilty pleas online is an obvious example. Similarly, there is often a good case for having virtual hearings, but we need to make sure it does not drift into being the default position. We would obviously not have that for a trial, but we can think of other forms of interlocutory proceedings in which physical presence is appropriate, and we must make sure that we do not have too much of a broadbrush approach. However, the principle is good, and I have no problem with it.

On the whole question of dealing with the abuse of litigants in person in family cases—chapter 8 of the explanatory notes—I think the case is accepted across the piece. Such a system has worked well in the criminal jurisdiction for many years. When we set up in regulations the system of how this will work, I hope there will not be an attempt to over-complicate or over-engineer it. I urge my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to take the criminal system and, as far as possible, lift it across with adjustments, which seems the sensible way to do it. Practitioners have made the point that when advocates are asked to take on such a role—in effect, on behalf of the court—they often take on a heavy burden. The instructions can be detailed and complex, and in my experience of such cases they frequently change depending on the nature of the person being dealt with, so the task is not easy. I therefore hope that rates of remuneration will not be any worse than in the criminal jurisdiction, because it is important to get good people to undertake this work.

Judicial appointments, which are important, have been mentioned. It is also important to bear in mind that leadership roles should be recognised, given the difficulty we have at the moment in recruiting proper High Court judges.

Moving on to part 5 on the whole question of whiplash—I will finish on this point—I do not think we can pretend that there is not an issue. The Select Committee has already heard evidence on this, and we will want to take more. Nobody can reasonably pretend that there is not an issue about whiplash, although there are disputes about whether the evidence base is strong, as was apparent in our hearings. I am glad that the Government have taken the step of moving to a system of tariffs, rather than having an outright prohibition on general damages. However, we will need to consider the devil in the detail in relation to the definition of whiplash in clause 61 and its subsections. At the moment, there is an ouster of the tariff system for breach of statutory duty, but, as practitioners have raised with me, one can of course envisage a number of circumstances in which it is possible to plead both negligence and a breach of statutory duty as alternatives. It might be self-defeating if we get an industry of people always seeking to put in an alternative head of claim to take it immediately out of the pure negligence category. Some careful drafting may be needed to look at the practical effects as far as that is concerned. Above all, we must not allow this to cause us to take our eye off the ball of the abuse by claims management companies. Good work is already being done by the Ministry and the Information Commissioner’s Office, but a lot of the problems stem from the work of the claims management companies, and it is important to look at that.

On that basis, I wish the Bill well. It is an important and valuable Bill. I am sure we will have lively and constructive debates, and I hope that I and other members of the Select Committee will, as appropriate, endeavour to assist the Government in making a good Bill better. I wish it well in its passage through the House.

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[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for North West Norfolk (Sir Henry Bellingham), whose speech was very articulate. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate ahead of serving on the Bill Committee over the next few weeks.

With the Government’s White Paper, which was published in November last year, and the Bill before us today, I welcome many of steps being undertaken to get to grips with the challenges in our prisons and the justice system more widely. Greater scrutiny and more transparent allocation of responsibility are positive steps but, as others have already said, the Bill will succeed only once we have comprehensively got to grips with overcrowding and safety in our prisons. Without an effective, functioning prison system with reform at its very core, the wider justice system simply fails to function. When he appeared before the Justice Committee back in November, the Minister for prisons and probation admitted that all the numbers relating to prison violence, self-harm and deaths in custody are pointing in the wrong direction. I shall therefore use my role as constructively as possible to make sure that the Bill goes far enough and fast enough in improving those numbers.

In part because of several high-profile incidents, Members will be well aware of the prevalence of overcrowding in prisons, which is so commonplace that it sadly now seems to have become institutionalised in the justice system. When they gave evidence to the Justice Committee, both the Minister and the chief executive officer of the National Offender Management Service were in agreement that overcrowding has been a sustained problem for the past decade. The prison population rose from 43,000 in 1993 to just over 84,000 in 2016. Despite this increase, the number of uniformed prison officers tasked with managing and caring for those in prisons has decreased. Following the closure of 18 prisons since 2010, the prison estate has seen a reduction of around 6,000 places, at a time when the prison population is increasing. Although there are plans for new prisons and extensions at existing sites, at this rate such measures will not alleviate overcrowding in this Parliament or the next.

Overcrowding is a problem in 69% of prisons—that is 80 out of 116 establishments. My nearest prison, HMP Leeds in Armley, is one of the most overcrowded in the country. The Prison Reform Trust found that although it was built to accommodate 669 men, as of October 2016 it held 1,145, meaning that it is populated at 171% of its intended capacity. What is the impact of overcrowding on the conditions inside prisons? We have already heard statistics from the House of Commons Library, which reveal that, in the 12 months to September 2016, the number of prisoner-on-prisoner assaults increased by 31% on the previous year, with just over 25,000 recorded incidents. There were nearly 38,000 incidents of self-harm, which is an increase of 61% compared with 2006. In the 12 months to December 2016, there were 354 deaths in custody, 34% of which were self-inflicted and 1% the consequence of homicide.

A report by the Prison Officers Association revealed that there are more than 42 incidents of violence in prison establishments every day. Given, as the Minister said, that all the numbers by which we measure the effectiveness and safety of our prisons are pointing in the wrong direction, it is perhaps surprising that we have seen a reduction of 7,000 prison officers since 2010. I appreciate that the Government have closed 18 prisons in that time, but the prison population has still increased. In fact, it peaked at an all-time high in 2011. By any analysis of prisoner to prison officer ratios, the number of officers will surely be found to be inadequate to meet the challenges, and I support the call from my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) to look at how we can introduce ratios into the Bill.

I welcome the decision announced in the White Paper to recruit 2,500 more prison officers, and I am glad that the Secretary of State was able to tell us more about that recruitment process, and that 400 more prison officers have been recruited for the 10 most challenging prisons, but I hope that the Minister can go further in outlining what the next steps will be in recruiting for the remaining 2,100 posts.

Michael Spurr, chief executive officer of the National Offender Management Service, confirmed to the Justice Committee in November that the rate for new prison officers leaving within their first year is 13.5%, and has been as high as 16% in the past three years. I would be interested to know whether the Secretary of State has factored in that retention rate when recruiting those new officers. If 13.5% of the 400 already recruited leave within their first year, we will need to find 54 additional officers. I have set out the context not simply to make the case for sufficient prison capacity to meet demand, but to make the case for my amendments on prison officer safety, which is an area in which this Bill could go much further.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham talked about how two officers were left to cover a wing of more than 150 prisoners. Members can appreciate that sense of being outnumbered when they think about the reality of those figures. What needs to change to make sure that prison officers do not leave in their first year, are safe at work and are staying in post until retirement? Colleagues will be aware that, since having had an eye-opening experience while shadowing a lone police officer in my constituency last year, I have been campaigning for greater protections for emergency service workers, and prison officers are no less deserving of those same protections.

A report by the Prison Officers Association revealed that eight staff members are assaulted every day and that, in 2010, there were 24 sexual assaults against prison staff. That is just unacceptable. Section 8 of the Prison Act 1952 says:

“Every prison officer while acting as such shall have all the powers, authority, protection and privileges of a police constable.”

In the event that a prison officer is assaulted, and where the evidence affords, the prosecutor has a choice between pursuing common assault charges, under section 39 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, or assault police charges under section 89 of the Police Act 1996. Assault police is a summary only offence and as such carries a maximum of 24 weeks custodial sentence, with community resolution orders and fines the most common outcome. I will not share the details now, but I can recommend the report “Prison Violence—How serious does it have to get”, which is published by the Prison Officers Association, for harrowing testimonies from prison officers, complete with photos of their injuries. It is well worth a read if anyone is in any doubt about the need for having the toughest possible deterrents in place to protect prison officers.

[Philip Davies]

I commend the hon. Lady for all her work on this matter and also with regard to police officers. It is very much appreciated by them. She says that the number of assaults on prison officers is going up, but is she also aware that the number of extra days given for the assault of a prison officer by a prisoner is going down? The average number of extra days given for a prisoner assaulting a prison officer was 20 five years ago, and it is just 16 now. Does she agree that that is completely inadequate punishment for a prisoner assaulting a prison officer?

[Holly Lynch]

I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I wonder whether the pressures of overcrowding are starting to reflect in those sentences handed out in prisons, which do not then serve as a proper deterrent. I would be more than willing to consider that point and others when we debate the Bill in Committee.

This is why I am calling on the Government to consider making it an aggravating factor to assault a prison officer under existing common assault, grievous bodily harm, actual bodily harm and malicious wounding charges. That would give the judiciary much greater flexibility when considering sentencing. Sentencing must be about effective deterrent. It is about not exacerbating the existing conditions in prison, but ensuring that there is a real incentive not to assault officers.

There is also the practice of “potting”, where urine and faeces are thrown at a prison officer as a means of assaulting them—it seems to be female prison officers who are singled out for this treatment—and it is simply horrific. Those acts must be followed up and charges brought against every individual who engages in that activity. It is no wonder that there is a 13.5% drop-out rate in the first year when that is what we ask our prison officers to face every day they go to work.

The second part of my campaign relates to spitting. As well as being horrible, spitting blood and saliva at another human being can pose a very real risk of transmitting a range of infectious diseases, some with life-changing or even lethal consequences. In presenting my ten-minute rule Bill, which addressed that very issue, I shared with MPs the story of Arina Koltsova, a police officer in Ukraine who died after contracting tuberculosis from an offender who spat at her while she was trying to arrest him. At the moment, if a prison officer or any other emergency service worker is spat at, they can take a blood sample from an individual only if they give their permission. Needless to say, in most cases in prisons, prisoners are deliberately seeking to inflict the maximum distress on a prison officer, and so decline to provide a sample. This then leaves the prison officer or staff member with no choice other than to take anti-viral treatments and face a six-month wait.

To address this issue, I have looked to laws in Australia where refusal to provide a blood sample can result in a fine of 12,000 Australian dollars and a custodial sentence. Adding such a measure to the Bill would mean that to refuse to provide a blood sample would in itself be a crime, punishable by a fine or an additional custodial sentence. If a prison officer has already had to endure being spat at or bitten, this measure would hopefully save them having to endure a six-month ordeal waiting to see whether the consequences are much more serious. I hope to demonstrate the merit of these amendments in Committee and hope that the Government will work with me on these measures.

On behalf of my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens North (Conor McGinn), who cannot be in the Chamber today, I wish to raise his commitment to Helen’s law, which would deny parole to those convicted of murder who refuse to reveal the location of their victim’s remains. He will be seeking to build support for that change and amend the Bill to that effect, and I will be supporting him in doing so.

I have been particularly animated about the closure of both the magistrates court and the county and family court in my constituency. I am grateful to the Minister for Courts and Justice for keeping me informed about this Bill. He knows that I am particularly passionate about the provision of justice.

Last week, having attended the briefing on the sweeping reforms to access to justice, I can see that there is a lot to be optimistic about. When starting from a position of what is best practice for supporting vulnerable victims and witnesses through the justice system and when giving evidence, I accept that our old-fashioned court buildings and outdated systems are just not up to the job. However, having accepted some of the reasoning for the closure of the courts—to facilitate this revolution in access to justice which promised to make justice more available than ever before—what happened in Halifax was that the courts closed, and people now have to travel much further than ever before to attend old-fashioned court buildings and use outdated systems. With a six-year roll-out on the measures that we are all looking forward to seeing, my experience in Halifax is that there has been a massive step backwards in justice provision in the intervening years. I have engaged with this process, accepted that there were inefficiencies across the two courts, and even lobbied to merge them, which would have returned a cost saving for Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service.

I visited Kent police’s excellent video-enabled justice system, and bought the Government’s arguments, but, through no lack of trying, I have failed to get HMCTS to engage with me on how technology can be used to the benefit of my constituents and to deliver a justice system that is indeed fit for purpose. I am really grateful that the chief executive of HMCTS, Susan Acland-Hood, has offered to meet me to discuss this matter further, following similar pleas that I made at that briefing hosted by the Minister for Courts and Justice last week. I genuinely hope that we can get a video hub in place to mitigate some of the impact of the court closures in Halifax.

I genuinely welcome the move to introduce modern technology into the justice system, so that vulnerable victims can record their evidence just once to save potentially painful and unnecessary repetition; so that we can cut down the time spent by police officers in court; and so that justice can be accessed on an iPad in a front room. Such changes would be fantastic. I will use my time in Committee to outline examples of where court closures have left a void, which this Government have failed to bridge, and work towards practical measures for delivering a better service as soon as possible.

I look forward to examining and debating the Bill in more detail in Committee. I welcome many of the measures. While the situation remains so pressing—I would go so far as to say pretty desperate—in some of our prisons, the pressure to get this right and quickly weighs on us all. I intend to work constructively to firm up the Bill as it relates to prison officer safety. Given the recruitment and retention pressures they face, I hope that the Government will be receptive.

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[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson).

I have been disappointed to hear prison being disparaged so much in this debate, as prison is actually a pretty successful place. According to the Ministry of Justice’s own figures, the longer people spend in prison, the less likely they are to reoffend. The Ministry’s latest figures, released in November 2016, show that although 60% of those released from a sentence of less than 12 months go on to reoffend, only 37% of those who serve a sentence of between 12 months and four years, 24.7% of those who serve a sentence of four to 10 years, 15.6% of those who serve a sentence of 10 years or more, and 11.4% of those sent on an indeterminate sentence go on to reoffend after release. Prison is clearly not the problem because the longer people spend in there, the less likely they are to reoffend. Perhaps the problem is that they are not spending long enough in prison. That seems to be the lesson from those figures.

[Kit Malthouse]

I have some sympathy with part of what my hon. Friend says, but does he accept that those statistics ignore the nature of the offence? For instance, quite a lot of people are serving very long sentences for murders—crimes of passion—that they may have committed only once in their life and are unlikely to go on to commit again, whether they go to prison or not.

[Philip Davies]

The problem with that is the example of those who serve less than 12 months. If my hon. Friend looks at the figures, he will find that it is very difficult to be sent to prison for a first offence and a short sentence. People who are eventually given short prison sentences have been given community sentence after community sentence, which have not worked. The reason that these people end up in prison on a short sentence is that the courts eventually say, “We have no other option but to send you to prison because every other intervention we’ve tried has failed.” The reoffending rate for the cohort of people who end up in prison after community sentences was 100%. The fact that they have a reoffending rate of 60% when they leave prison is a greater triumph than was shown by community sentences for that cohort of people who end up in prison.

[Kit Malthouse]

rose—

[Philip Davies]

I do not have time to give way to my hon. Friend again.

The Bill contains provisions to toughen up the current position on the use of mobile phones. I am sick to death of seeing pictures of smiling criminals from within prison cells, surrounded by all kinds of creature comforts and ill-gotten gains courtesy of the use of mobile phones in prison. More concerning is the use of phones to intimidate or threaten victims, or to ensure the continuation of crimes, so I welcome the steps the Government are taking to deal with that scourge.

I have some concerns about extending the use of video links in certain cases, and I am certainly not comfortable with people using video equipment in all kinds of venues that are not courts. I shall listen to the points made by those promoting such technology, but sometimes, in the interests of justice, saving a few pennies should not be the overriding factor. We need to be very careful that, in trying to protect victims, we do not affect the scales of justice and end up with a situation where it is difficult for defendants to have a fair trial. Having a fair trial should be paramount, just as it is essential to deal appropriately with those found guilty. I am not overly keen on the sound of the online conviction process, so I will be listening with interest to the types of offences it might cover. The Magistrates Association also has concerns about this, and I hope they are considered carefully.

I am concerned about the abolition of the local justice areas, which organise magistrates and their work within geographical locations. I understand that some work can be done in different areas, but there is something to be said for the argument that justice should be dispensed locally. I hope we do not end up with a situation whereby all kinds of cases are being heard randomly all over the country for no good reason.

I have a bit of concern about judicial appointments and the drive for diversity. Surely we should just be interested in recruiting the best people. It should be irrelevant whether they are men or women, black or white, Christian or Muslim, gay or straight. Who cares about any of those things? We want the best person for the job, irrespective of their gender or race. Surely that is what equality means in this day and age—not just giving somebody a job out of tokenism because they happen to tick a particular quota box. Let us stick to appointing people on merit alone, and ignore every other irrelevant factor about them.

In my brief contribution, I want to focus on what is missing from the Bill, which is more important than what is in it. I would like the whole sentence given by the courts to be served. People should certainly should not be automatically released halfway through their prison sentence, as is the case at the moment. That was a scandal when it was introduced. The Conservative party was apoplectic when the last Labour Government introduced it, but we now seem to think that it is wonderful to release people automatically halfway through their sentence, irrespective of how badly they behave in prison. I will certainly table an amendment at a later stage in the passage of the Bill to ensure that any prisoner who assaults a prison officer cannot be released automatically halfway through their prison sentence. We must have some proper punishments for assaulting prison officers. The least that prison officers deserve is that kind of support.

One reason for the breakdown of order in prisons is that prisoners know that no matter how badly they behave, they will be released halfway through their sentence. All that is given for assaults on prison officers is extra days. As I indicated in my intervention on the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch), who has done a great job and should be commended greatly for all her work on defending prison officers and police officers, the average number of extra days given to a prisoner for assaulting a prison officer was 20 days in 2010 and 16 days last year. That is completely and utterly unacceptable. I am sure that the Prison Officers Association would welcome the Government saying that if a prisoner assaults a prison officer, their opportunity for automatic early release halfway through their sentence will end, and that their position will be judged on whether they are safe to be released out into the public.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I presume that the sentences should, at the very least, be the equivalent of the sentence for someone who does that outside prison.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for what I consider to be his support for my amendment. I only need the support of the Opposition and about eight more on our side and we should be in business. I will put my hon. Friend’s name down as a likely supporter.

The Library briefing paper confirms:

“There were 6,430 assaults on prison staff, 761 of which were serious. This was an 82% rise on the number of assaults on prison staff in 2006 and was a 40% increase from 2015.”

Prison officers have a very hard and, at times, dangerous job. I am sick of hearing about the pathetic additions to sentences for prisoners who assault them. I hope the Government will deal with that in the remaining stages of the Bill.

I would also like to see an amendment to limit the use of fixed-term recalls. When prisoners are released early, they do not even go back to serve the remainder of their sentence when they are convicted of a further crime. They just go back into prison for 28 days, for what I would consider a mini-break. They can usually keep an eye on their criminal activities knowing that they will be back in prison for only 28 days. I hope the Government will deal with that.

I would recommend giving consideration to making judges accountable for their decisions, particularly when they do not hand down custodial sentences that are perfectly justifiable and possibly even expected, and particularly when the offender goes on to reoffend. I do not need to say now what the consequences of collecting such information should be, but it should be clear to many that where a judge consistently allows offenders to avoid prison, and those offenders go on to make others suffer as a result of their continuing crime spree, there should be accountability and consequences for that judge.

I would like to table an amendment to allow magistrates to sentence people to prison for up to 12 months for one offence, instead of the current six-month limit. We already have the law in place to do that, and it just needs a commencement date. That is something the Government have been promising for years, but they still have not got round to doing anything about it. When the Minister winds up, perhaps he can tell us when he intends to activate this part of Government policy.

I would like to recommend increasing the age limit for magistrates and judges to 75, and I will table an amendment to that effect. As of 1 December 2016, the Government increased the age limit for jurors to 75, and I cannot really see any difference between being a juror and determining someone’s guilt or innocence in a serious criminal trial, and, for example, sitting as a member of a bench of magistrates. Surely, the same rationale applies to both.

I am not a fan of release on temporary licence, unlike my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole. If prisoners serve only half their sentence, the least they can do is actually serve that half in prison, rather than being released in advance of the half for which they are automatically released. It is ludicrous to count time out of prison as time in prison, and I am considering tabling amendments to cover some instances of release on temporary licence.

[Michael Tomlinson]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Philip Davies]

I am not going to give way, because my time is almost up, and I want other people to have the chance to speak.

I want to place on record my continued interest in seeing male and female offenders treated equally by the courts, not only for sentencing purposes but in all aspects of the criminal justice system. It is increasingly accepted that women are treated more leniently than men. For every single category of offence, a man is more likely than a woman to be sent to prison. In the interests of equality, this matter needs to be looked at. However, we should look after women in the criminal justice system by abolishing sharia councils, which discriminate against them terribly, although the Government sit idly by and allow that to continue, which is an absolute disgrace.

Finally, on a more positive note, I am delighted to support the Secretary of State when she said in a speech last month that:

“the wrong way to address the problem would be to shorten sentences or to release offenders earlier. That would be reckless and endanger the public. And it would restrict the freedom of the independent judiciary to choose the most appropriate sentence for each offender.”

I could not agree more. She is certainly on the right lines. If she sticks to that kind of principle, she will be doing okay. I hope to be able to support the Bill by strengthening it in its remaining stages.

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[Richard Arkless]

I reciprocate the hon. Lady’s views on our friendship, for various reasons. I would of course be delighted if the Chair of the Select Committee agreed to visit Parc prison, and I would be even more delighted if the hon. Member for Shipley was with us so that I could take photographs of his ever-changing complexion as he saw the progressive benefits.

[Philip Davies]

I have visited lots of prisons, and the hon. Gentleman might be surprised to hear that one of my favourite visits was to Grendon prison in the Speaker’s constituency. It is a therapeutic prison, and I was most impressed on my visit there. One of the things I learned was that all the things about being in prison that we would find terrible, most prisoners find easy, and most things that we would find easy, most prisoners find difficult. That taught me—I hope others will take this on board—that we should look at prisons through the eyes of the prisoners, not from our particular perspectives on what might work and does not work in a prison.

[Richard Arkless]

When I hear interventions of that nature, I sometimes feel that the hon. Gentleman has cultivated an unfair reputation. As I said when I talked about his speech, he made some pragmatic points, and if there are elements of enlightenment about his thought process, I will of course welcome that, as we do on these Benches.

I am conscious that we want to hear from the Opposition spokesman and from the Minister, but I have one or two final points to make. The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston touched on prisoner numbers. Scotland is not immune to having an inordinately high prison population. We do not hide from that fact, but we are committed to challenging the basis on which it arises and to examining the effectiveness of short sentences. We have had a presumption against short sentences and we are consulting on that further. We will be led by the evidence.

I was delighted to hear the Chairman of the Justice Committee, almost at the close of his remarks, very lightly touch on short sentences. Perhaps he and I can work in Committee on that matter, because the cycle of violence and reoffending is not assisted in any way, shape or form by young people going in and out prison for one, two or three months at a time. It does not achieve anything. Effective community payback orders, where those young people are in touch with the community, face the consequences of what has happened and deal with the other aspects of their behaviour would be a much more efficient process.

I am very conscious of the time. I will not touch on the other two or three parts of the Bill, because I am very keen to hear the Front-Bench speakers sum up the debate. I wish the Ministers and the Lord Chancellor well. If it is her ambition to be known as a great prison reformer, then this is a decent start. If she is determined to tackle the public perception myth, then I wish her all the very best in that endeavour.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)]

I refer at the outset to my relevant entry in the register as a non-practising barrister at Civitas Law.

I thank Members from all parts of the House for the quality of this debate on Second Reading. There is much in the Prisons and Courts Bill that the Opposition can support, not least the very welcome prohibition in the family courts of cross-examination of victims by alleged perpetrators—something that was raised in an urgent question only a couple of months ago by my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle).

We welcome modernisation and innovation, but we will seek to amend this Bill in Committee to embed the principles of justice and fairness and to ensure that innovations come with safeguards and appropriate statutory reviews. Indeed, our approach to this Bill of holding the Government to account and of not giving them a blank cheque was summed up in the contributions of my hon. Friends on the Opposition Benches. I commend the work that is done by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) in her chairing of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. She spoke very movingly about the problem of suicides in our prisons.

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) for her campaign for protections for emergency workers, including for our prison officers, and for speaking up for local justice in Halifax—Halifax could have no finer voice speaking up for it than that of my hon. Friend.

I am grateful too to my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) who spoke very movingly about mental health in our prisons—something that has come up in a number of contributions this afternoon—and the excessive number of women in custody in 2017. I am also grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) who drew on his extensive experience. In particular, he highlighted the issue of prisoners in prisons far too far away from home.

I also commend my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) for her contribution. It was great to hear about Her Majesty’s Prison Parc and the charter mark that it has received. I am grateful, too, to my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West (Rob Marris) who made a number of very useful and important interventions as the debate progressed.

With regard to the success of this Bill, it is difficult at times not to draw the conclusion that factors outside it will be at least as important, if not more important, than what is inside it. We are all in favour of rehabilitation and reducing the reoffending rate. The 2,500 extra prisoner officers are welcome, but they do not compensate for the 6,500 jobs that have been lost since 2010.

We are in favour of modernisation of our courts system, but the cuts to legal aid have meant that there are far more litigants in person within our courts system. Similarly, there are measures on employment tribunals in this Bill, but they do nothing to take away the ideological vandalism of the employment tribunal fees that were introduced in 2013. We welcome online courts, but they should not be at the expense of local justice; they should be a complement to it. In relation to the measures on small claims, I never thought that I would find myself at this Dispatch Box agreeing with the hon. Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), but he was entirely right when he said that if we want to tackle fraudulent claims, the way to do it is not to penalise everybody who brings legitimate claims.

We will judge the Bill on whether it will actually deliver. Prisons are its centrepiece, and we know of the problems of violence, overcrowding, drugs and the shortage of prison officers, which the Government have to tackle. The Lord Chancellor, in her opening remarks, talked about turning the situation around, but I remind Conservative Members that their party has been in power for seven years.

I have a confession to make: I have been reading the memoirs of the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke). I was interested in what he says about his time as Justice Secretary. He says that when the Conservatives came into power in coalition in 2010, he consulted the Conservative party website to find what its justice policy was, but was somewhat disappointed to find that it was based on

“trying to respond to the various campaigns in the tabloid press”.

He added:

“Thereafter I did not consult my party’s website again.”

That is probably good advice for the Ministers on the Treasury Bench tonight. The right hon. and learned Gentleman said of his successor:

“When Chris Grayling took over from me as Justice Secretary, he was not at all interested in reforming the prison system in a liberal direction, nor in reducing the prison population.”

[Philip Davies]

Hear, hear!

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I will come to the hon. Member for Shipley later. The right hon. and learned Gentleman continued:

“Inevitably, therefore, he had to return to seek more savings from the legal aid system. He revived the disastrous proposals for criminal legal aid, which dragged him into prolonged and unsuccessful controversy during much of his term of office”.

I entirely agree that the criminal legal aid changes were disastrous. Those cuts have produced a false economy, because of the proliferation of litigants in person in our courts. That, in turn, puts the success of measures such as live and virtual courts at risk, because one of the risks in that situation is that the person appearing in court is not able to follow or understand the hearing. That might be a challenge in a virtual court with a lawyer present; it is an even greater challenge where there are litigants in person. The Government have to be clear and careful that virtual courts are managed properly and do not end up costing more money than they save.

Similarly, I place on record a note of caution about the idea of online guilty pleas. Although I can see an argument in favour for very simple offences, such as motoring offences that are readily understood, the defendant must know and understand their right to legal advice and understand too their right to challenge the charge. An online plea removes the opportunity that sometimes comes later in prosecutions before the courts when different charges are ultimately pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service. Nor must online guilty pleas be the thin end of the wedge to extend them to far more complex offences. Finally on online courts, we must never lose sight of the fact that we must have a criminal justice system that is open and visible to the public.

Nowhere is the problem of what is not in the Bill summed up more clearly than in the iniquitous employment tribunal fees, which with issue fee and hearing fee can reach £1,200. If someone has been subjected to discrimination or unfair dismissal, such a fee will be extremely hard to find. Early in the debate, Members discussed the effect that the fees have had, but I will quote the report of the Select Committee on Justice. Incidentally, I commend the work of its Chair, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), who makes such an important contribution to our debates on justice matters. After the introduction of the fees in July 3013, there was

“an undisputed and precipitate drop in the number of cases brought, approaching 70%”.

The Minister made a point about conciliation when intervening on my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon). Well, let me quote the Justice Committee:

“We heard a considerable amount of evidence that, far from encouraging early conciliation and resolution of disputes, employment tribunal fees were having precisely the opposite effect, because there was no incentive for an employer to settle in cases where the claimant might have difficulty raising the fee.”

Therein lies the crux of the problem.

I heard many erudite contributions from the Government Benches, but the one that will really reverberate on employment tribunal fees is the one made by the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), who, when my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East talked about the need to abolish these fees, said that that would encourage something for nothing. Let me say quite openly that someone who has suffered discrimination at work or been subject to an unfair dismissal does not seek something for nothing. They seek access to justice and to assert their legal rights.

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[Sir Oliver Heald]

I have not got much time, I am afraid.

I think the right hon. and learned Lady made the point that we might want to see whether there was a solution in secondary legislation, as well as in primary legislation, that might address some of the important points she raised. Of course, the prison rules are secondary legislation, and they already contain a lot of detail about the way in which prisoners should be treated. So it is possible to look at those issues, and I will certainly do that.

The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) mentioned the Prison Reform Trust and its suggestion that we should add fairness and decency to the statutory purpose. It is right that those are important considerations in running prisons, but we need to remember that there is already an interlacing of legal obligations that apply in prisons. The right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham, with her background in the Joint Committee on Human Rights, mentioned that there are basic human rights—articles 2, 3 and 8—that apply to the way in which prisoners are treated. There is health and safety legislation. There is the duty of care that comes through the law of tort. So it would be wrong to think that there is not protection already, but this is certainly something we can examine further in Committee. I would like to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North, who has done so much as the rapporteur for the JCHR on the issue of deaths in prison.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough and others asked what happens if a prison does not meet the purpose set out in law. The purpose of prisons is in the Bill, and it is underpinned by the inspectorate’s duty to inspect against the purpose and the aims. It is also protected by the Secretary of State having to respond. I would not say that it is impossible that a case could be mounted for judicial review—to even say that is to press the case too far—but I think it would only be in a case where an individual prison totally ignored or disregarded the purpose, or something of that sort, that it would be grounded. Possibly, these things could also be considered as a factor in another case, where other aspects were being raised.

The right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) asked about the update on HMIP’s protocol with the MOJ, and I pay tribute to his experience in this area. Earlier this year, a draft protocol was shared with the Justice Committee and other bodies. The final protocol will be available very shortly, and I can promise that it will be there before the Committee stage. [Interruption.] Very shortly—imminently.

I could say a lot about family engagement, and the Farmer review looks very much at it. It is well understood that maintaining family relationships is a key element in trying to set prisoners on the straight and narrow and that it is very important in rehabilitation.

The hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) asked about the time limits for responding to inspection reports. Action will be taken from day one of an urgent notification by the chief inspector, so immediate energy will be brought to bear. Twenty-eight days is the appropriate period in a really urgent case of that sort. On the Law Society’s concerns about safeguards for online conviction, defenders must opt in to the new procedure, and proper warnings will be available making it clear that if a defendant wants to challenge the case in any way—for example, if they want to argue that time to pay is needed for a financial penalty or that the penalty should be lower because of means or circumstances—then all these things will be made clear. The Bill also provides that in the event of a mistake made, for whatever reason, it will be possible to set aside the conviction or the sentence in order to have the matter dealt with in the traditional way. I am sure that we will discuss this more in Committee, but certainly the idea is to have those protections in place.

My hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon asked about successful prosecutions of fraud cases in relation to whiplash. The insurance industry data show that in 2015 there were 70,000 cases of insurance fraud worth £800 million. The City of London police insurance fraud enforcement department has secured over 200 prosecutions in the past four years, resulting in over 100 years’ worth of jail time for insurance fraudsters. A lot of action is being taken on this.

On whiplash more generally, the Government note that over a 10-year period when we have seen the number of road traffic accidents falling and car safety improving, we have had a more than 50% increase in the number of whiplash-related cases. These cases are obviously exaggerated to some extent, and perhaps fraudulent. No Government could ignore these sorts of statistics and not take action. We have not taken extreme options but gone for moderate options such as a tariff of damages for the very minor cases. The tariff does not apply in a serious case of whiplash where the damages would be substantial—it is for cases where the pain and suffering lasts less than two years and is of a minor nature. Against that background, such a tariff is surely a reasonable approach. If there is any element of exceptionality in these cases, then there is a provision to uplift. We say that this approach is proportionate to the scale of the problem.

My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) talked about violence against prison officers. I do not totally agree with him about this. I think that if there genuinely is violence against a hard-working and dedicated prison officer—he has been assaulted and it is an offence—we should go further than my hon. Friend suggests. I think that the perpetrator should be prosecuted in court for that violent offence, that he should face swift justice, and that the court should give the full penalty that is right for the offence. I would not say that it is a question of him serving his full time for the original offence, but that he should serve the full time for a serious offence of attacking a prison officer. I take a slightly different view from my hon. Friend on that.

[Philip Davies]

Can the Minister explain why, with all the assaults on prison officers at the moment, the average amount of extra time that prisoners spend in prison for assaulting a prison officer is 16 days, which is, quite frankly, pathetic and insulting?

Prisons

Philip Davies Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon]

I thank my right hon. Friend for making that important point. In Justice questions yesterday, the Minister with responsibility for prisons, the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr Gyimah), said that he was in discussions with the Department for Exiting the European Union about the matter. We need to hear more about the progress of those discussions.

The Justice Secretary frequently points to the emergence of new psychoactive substances as a major factor in the current crisis. Does she know that in Scotland, where prison policy has been stable for some years and where staffing has remained constant, violence has not rocketed as it has across the rest of the prison estate? Scotland has NPS issues, too, but it did not axe staff in vast numbers.

Our prisons are overcrowded. Armley prison, in my city of Leeds, holds nearly twice the number of prisoners that it was built to house. Wandsworth, Swansea, Brixton and Leicester are not far behind; they are all full to capacity with another 50% on top.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Richard Burgon]

This will be the final time that I give way, if that is okay.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman; he knows that I hold him in very high esteem. Lady Chakrabarti, the shadow Attorney General, said recently that she wanted half the prisoners in the UK prison estate to be released immediately. Is that Labour’s official party policy? My constituents would be very interested to know.

[Richard Burgon]

I am certainly not aware of any such policy announcement being made. [Interruption.] Conservative Members are making some strange gesticulations. It is not Labour policy to release half the prisoners. Why on earth would that be the case?

We need a lasting way to manage the prison population. In November 2016, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, appeared before the Justice Committee. Not surprisingly, he was questioned on the prisons crisis, and he offered a view on what could be done:

“The prison population is very, very high at the moment. Whether it will continue to rise is always difficult to tell, but there are worries that it will. I am not sure that at the end of the day we can’t dispose of more by really tough—and I do mean tough—community penalties.”

Prison has always been seen as a punishment. A person breaks the social contract that governs much of our relations with one another, and they may be imprisoned. Members from across the House rightly see prison as a fitting sanction, and it must be right that when a convicted person is a danger to the public, they are kept away from the public until such time as they no longer pose a threat. A significant minority may never be safe to release. But we must ask whether prison is the right place for some of those who offend. We should always reflect on that, because if we do not, we find ourselves in the position that the Government are in now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Elizabeth Truss]

In any case, we are setting up a parliamentary scheme so that we can work more closely with prison officers and give them the kudos they deserve, because they do an incredibly important job, often behind walls. As part of the reform programme, I want to see prisons reaching out more into the local community and working with local employers. As the shadow Secretary of State said, ultimately, the vast majority of people in prison will one day be on the outside and be part of the local community, so we need to work on that.

While we are putting in place the long and medium-term measures to get additional staff in to reform our prisons, we are taking immediate action to improve security and stability across the estate. That includes extra CCTV, the deployment of national resources and regular taskforce meetings chaired by the prisons Minister. He holds regular meetings with the Prison Service to monitor prisons for risk factors, and that allows us to react quickly to emerging problems and provide immediate support to governors, on anything from transferring difficult prisoners to speeding up the repair of damaged facilities.

Hon. Friends have talked about psychoactive substances, which have been a game changer in the prisons system, as the prisons and probation ombudsman has acknowledged. In September, we rolled out to all prisons new mandatory drug tests for psychoactive drugs, and we have increased the number of search dogs and trained them to detect drugs such as Spice and Mamba. We are also working with mobile phone operators on new solutions, being trialled in three prisons, to combat illicit phones, and we have specific powers to block phones too.

[Philip Davies]

I am disappointed that my right hon. Friend has not mentioned the impact on the behaviour of prisoners of automatic release halfway through sentence. If someone is sent to prison for six years but knows that by law they will be released after three, irrespective of how badly they behave in prison, surely their behaviour in prison will be worse than if they know they might have to do the full term if they do not behave. Is she not going to address that issue?

[Elizabeth Truss]

Clearly, if people do not behave, they will receive additional days. That is an important part of the levers that governors have in reforming offenders.

I was talking about security issues. We are also working to deal with drones, rolling out body-worn cameras across the estate and dealing with organised crime gangs through a new national intelligence unit.

Hon. Members have also talked about mental health. We are investing in specialist mental health training for prison officers to help to reduce the worrying levels of self-harm and suicide in our prisons. The early days in custody are particularly critical to mental health and keeping people safe.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I want to confine my remarks to the subject of fixed-term recalls, which I wish were much more widely understood by the public and in this House. They represent one of the biggest outrages of our prison system, and yet hardly anyone knows anything about them. Most people believe that if someone is let out of prison early—whether halfway through their sentence, a quarter of the way through the sentence on a home detention curfew, or at some other point before they actually should be let out—and they reoffend or breach their licence conditions, they should at least go back to prison to serve the rest of their original sentence. Unfortunately, that is often not the case. In reality, the overwhelming majority of the public believe that offenders should serve the whole of the sentence that they were given by the courts in the first place. In a survey carried out by Lord Ashcroft, 82% of those asked thought that prisoners should serve the full prison sentence handed down by the court. That, for many, is not rocket science; it is just common sense.

Fixed-term recalls were introduced to reduce the pressure on prison places in 2008, and many people do not know about what is going on. A fixed-term recall is when the offender breaches their licence or reoffends and is returned to prison not for the rest of their prison term—not even for most of it—but for a mere 28 days. When fixed-term recalls were introduced, they excluded certain offenders. However, when my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) was Lord Chancellor, he relaxed the rules by way of a change to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 in a bid to reduce the prison population still further. As of 3 December 2012, fixed-term recalls were made available to previously denied prisoners: offenders serving a sentence for certain violent or sexual offences, those subject to a home detention curfew and, most shockingly, those who had previously been given a fixed-term recall for breaching their licence in the same sentence. Now, I do not think that many people out in the country know that, but I certainly know that many people will not like it.

Fixed-term recalls do not happen just occasionally. They were given to 42% of all offenders who were recalled in both 2013 and 2014 and to 28% in 2015. That is an awful lot of people going back to prison for only 28 days instead of the rest of their sentence. Those 28-day recalls relate to sentences of one year or more, so we are talking about the most serious of offenders. Recalls of 14 days apply to shorter sentences, but they are a much more recent concept.

The more I investigated 28-day fixed-term recalls, and as more figures have been released, more disturbing things have become clear. In 2014, 7,486 prisoners were recalled for just 28 days. Of those, 3,166 had been charged with a further offence. That means that 3,166 people were charged with a further offence when they should have been in prison in the first place and then escaped serving the rest of their original sentence despite committing this further offence. The vast majority had 15 or more previous convictions. Burglary is the most common original offence for which a fixed-term recall is given for a breach or a further offence. Over half of all those given this pathetic slap on the wrist were people who had committed a very serious crime. They were also given to people convicted of manslaughter, attempted homicide, wounding, rape and robbery.

Perhaps the icing on the cake in this whole sorry state of affairs is that, in 2015, 816 offenders were allowed more than one fixed-term recall on the same original sentence for another breach or offence. In just three years, 3,327 of the most serious offenders in our prisons were released from prison, breached their licence, were returned to prison for 28 days, released again, were returned to prison for just 28 days for a further breach of licence and then released again. That is a complete failure of policy and is completely indefensible. I raised fixed-term recalls in Justice questions yesterday, and the Minister’s reply about risk was very interesting, but this is a sad joke. As far as I am concerned, these people should not have been released early in the first place but, having been released, there should be no other option but for them to be returned to prison for breaching their licence, especially for reoffending, for the remainder of their original sentence at the very least.

Finally, the weak response to reoffending is becoming so well-known in the criminal community that some people are taking the chance of getting recalled knowing that the punishment is pathetic. It is like a 28-day, all-inclusive mini-break. Worse still, some prisoners who have been released deliberately try to get themselves back into prison to give themselves enough time to see how their criminal operation in prison is carrying on while they are out, knowing that they will only be there for 28 days. That has been confirmed in research by Manchester Metropolitan University, which stated that prisoners had reported being able to earn £3,000 in just 28 days by bringing in drugs. One prisoner said that

“everyone keeps going and coming back in on these recalls with more drugs.”

This is an absolute farce. The criminals are laughing all the way to the bank while nothing is being done to stop this nonsense. When will the Minister get a grip and end this fraud on the public?

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Oral Answers to Questions

Philip Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

3. What recent assessment she has made of the effectiveness of fixed-term recalls.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Sam Gyimah)]

An offender who is assessed as presenting a high risk of serious harm will receive a standard recall. Thereafter, they will be re-released before the end of their sentence only if the risk they pose is reduced and they can be safely managed in the community. In cases that are not high risk, however, a fixed-term recall is often a more appropriate response.

[Philip Davies]

It is bad enough that prisoners are automatically released halfway through the sentence, whether or not they still pose a risk to the public, but when someone released on licence from prison then reoffends, surely the least the public can expect is that the criminals concerned are sent back to prison to serve the remainder of their prison sentence in full. Instead, a huge number of these people are simply recalled to prison for just 28 days on a fixed-term recall, sometimes on multiple occasions. How does the Minister justify this fraud on the British public?

[Mr Gyimah]

As I said, where a high risk is posed, the prisoner will not be re-released before the end of their sentence. Offenders on licence who are charged with a further offence and assessed as presenting a high risk of serious harm receive a standard recall. If they are convicted of a further offence, they get a fresh sentence.

Oral Answers to Questions

Philip Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gyimah]

As my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice said, every death in prison is a tragic one. Such people are in the care of the state, and we have to make sure that we take good care of them in that respect. I am willing to look in more detail at the situation that the hon. Gentleman has outlined.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

As I have mentioned on a number of occasions, there is no real incentive for prisoners to behave themselves in prison because of the law introduced by the previous Labour Government that prisoners have to be released halfway through their sentence irrespective of how badly they behave or whether they are still a danger to the public. I am still waiting for the Government to give an explanation of why they think this law should still be on the statute book, and I have yet to receive a satisfactory response. Will the Minister now give us the reason why, by law, prisoners should be released halfway through their sentence irrespective of how badly they behave or whether they are still a danger to the public?

[Mr Gyimah]

My hon. Friend raised this issue at the Select Committee last week, and I will give him the same answer I gave then. When prisoners are released, even at the halfway point, they remain on licence, and if there is a breach of the licence, they are recalled to prison. That remains the case.

--- Later in debate ---

[Elizabeth Truss]

My hon. Friend is right about our concerns. We launched our response to the Acheson review in the summer. I am pleased to say that all prison officers are currently being trained—and will be by the end of the year—in tackling extremism, but I would be very pleased to have a meeting with her to discuss what further measures we can take to deal with this issue.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

I think we will conclude with another dose from Shipley.

[Philip Davies]

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.

When the previous Labour Government changed the law so that prisoners had to be released halfway through their sentence irrespective of how badly they behaved or if they were still a risk to the public, the then Conservative Opposition were apoplectic and voted against the change. Do the Government think that the then Conservative party was wrong to oppose that change in the law?

[Mr Gyimah]

I refer my hon. Friend to the answer I gave earlier today and last week to the Select Committee.

Oral Answers to Questions

Philip Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lee]

I am aware of the complex problems often exhibited by women offenders—mental health and substance misuse problems—and I am actively engaged with other Departments to bring forward such a strategy in the new year.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Both boys and girls have to wear uniforms at school. Both men and women have to wear uniforms in the workplace. However, convicted men have to wear uniforms in prison while convicted women do not. Does the Minister agree with that? If so, what does the word “equality” mean to him?

[Dr Lee]

My hon. Friend has a rich track record in this area. Women are twice as likely to report experiences of abuse as a child. They are more likely than men to be primary or sole carers of their children. They are more likely to display mental health problems and, indeed, class A drug use. It is important that we have a gender-specific approach for women and if that involves different uniforms, so be it.

Sexual Offences (Pardons Etc) Bill

Philip Davies Excerpts

Friday 21st October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I commend the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (John Nicolson) on bringing forward this Bill. May I give particular praise to a number of speeches we have heard in the Chamber today? It is unfair to single people out, but I am going to, because I think there have been some brilliant speeches. I will highlight four: those of the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire himself, the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) and my hon. Friends the Members for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) and for Selby and Ainsty (Nigel Adams). They all made fantastic contributions to the debate in their own different ways.

I will say at the start that, despite what I would say is my rather unfair reputation, I have no intention of taking the clock down to 2.30 pm today. I am as keen to hear from the Minister as everyone else. But it is important that those of us who do not particularly support the Bill have an opportunity to express why. We have heard today that everyone agrees and shares the same sentiment—I will make this clear right from the word go—of the principles involved here as far as I see them; if we are asking whether the fact that someone is gay should ever have been a crime in any shape or form, the answer is quite clearly no, of course not. Should we think any less of anyone who was ever convicted of any of these crimes? No, of course we should not. I hope and believe that everyone in this House can take that as read.

The issue is whether we get involved in having a widespread and blanket pardon for these particular offences. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) said of the approach taken by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), this is not quite as easy as it looks.

The hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) has unfortunately just left the Chamber, but I want to put on the record my praise for her intervention. I thought in that brief intervention she made one of the most powerful contributions in this debate. She made two very good points that should weigh heavily on the House. Her first powerful point was about whether a gay person should ever have to come out. Of course they should not. People’s sexual orientation is absolutely irrelevant. The moment when this country gets to the stage when sexual orientation is an irrelevance cannot come soon enough in my opinion. Like the hon. Lady, I look forward to the day when no one ever has to come out as gay.

The hon. Lady’s second point, specifically in relation to the Bill, was very powerful and is something that the Government might wish to consider; I would not say that it has changed my mind about the Bill, but it has certainly weighed heavily with me. As she said, this Bill having its Second Reading, going into Committee, then coming back for Report and Third Reading would inevitably mean that these issues gain more scrutiny in the House than if an amendment were simply accepted in the House of Lords and came back to the Commons for a debate of an hour or two, maximum—perhaps not even that—and was in effect nodded through without any further scrutiny. There is some merit in that point. The Government might want to consider it. I had not given it much thought before, but I thought she made that point very well.

I must say that when I first heard about this Bill, my initial reaction was to think that it sounded as if it should be titled, “The Re-writing of History Bill”—a concept with which I am not generally comfortable. Plenty of ugly, evil and wrong things have happened in the past, but they are what they are. It is very easy for us in the House today to criticise people who were here in the past—I did it at the start of my speech when I said that these things should never have been a crime—but there will be things that we pass in this House with the best of intentions about which MPs will doubtless come along in 100 years’ time and say, “It is absolutely disgusting that they passed those laws and offences at that time, and they should have been ashamed of themselves for doing it”.

We should always be slightly wary of imposing our modern-day judgments on the past—it is easy to do, but not always fair to the people who made decisions on the basis of what they thought were in the best interests of the country at the time. We obviously think they were wrong, but they thought they were doing what was right at the time.

[Dr Philippa Whitford]

Does the hon. Gentleman not think that we should be a bit more concerned with people who are still alive and suffering, rather than our own vainglory in the future when we are dead?

[Philip Davies]

I was coming on to that point. The hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire made a fair point in that respect, but if the hon. Lady will forgive me, I shall come on to deal with her point in a few moments.

I was saying that we should be wary of getting into the habit—it seems that we are already in it—of always being anxious to apologise for things that other people have done in the past. Unlike my hon. Friend the Member for Selby and Ainsty, who is clearly a notable exception, we rarely apologise for the things that we have done. I suspect that the public are usually keener for us to apologise for the mistakes that we have made rather than taking the easy option of apologising for the mistakes that we think people made hundreds of years ago. Tony Blair is a prime example. He was very keen to apologise for slavery that somebody else had done hundreds of years previously, but he would not apologise for the mess he left in Iraq following the Iraq war. I suspect that most people would regard it as more worth while for him to apologise for the decisions that he took, rather than for the decisions that others took many years previously. I do not generally like that particular approach to politics, but I leave it there.

Although my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff North (Craig Williams) was slightly chastised for it, I think he was absolutely right to pull up our friends from the Scottish National party for coming here and chastising the Minister for introducing something late in the day, going very slowly and all the rest of it. The Bill applies only to England and Wales, and the Minister is going virtually all the way that the SNP would like him to go—not fully, I appreciate, but he is going an awful long way to meet their requests. It is slightly churlish of SNP Members not to have given the Minister more credit for that.

Moreover, the Scottish Administration have not introduced this law, even though they have had plenty of opportunity to do so. It would be interesting to carry out a freedom of information request to see how many letters the Scottish Government have received from SNP MPs about introducing this particular law in the Scottish Parliament. SNP Members should be wary of criticising this Government, who have clearly gone a lot further than the SNP Administration have in Scotland. A bit of humility on that particular point would not have gone amiss.

On the substance, I said that the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire made a good point—it was a rhetorical flourish, but still a good point—when he said that we should be more concerned about the living than the dead. There is something in that. The problem is that once we start going down this route, it becomes difficult to stop the juggernaut in its process. It can become difficult if people try to draw distinctions. For example, once we have pardoned Dr Alan Turing—I have not heard anyone say that that should not have happened—it becomes an intellectual nonsense to deprive other people of the same pardon who were convicted of exactly the same offences but did not have such an exciting life and achieve as much in their jobs as he did. Dr Alan Turing’s sexuality is irrelevant to his achievements. It should not have been because of his achievements that he was pardoned; he was pardoned for something which, as far as I can see, was irrelevant to them, and if he is pardoned for that, it becomes very difficult not to pardon other people.

I think the point that the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire was rightly making is that once the Government have accepted that people who are deceased should be pardoned, it then becomes very difficult intellectually to ask why the same should not apply to people who are still alive. That is a fair point, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to it.

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point about the juggernaut and the various stages that might ensue. However, as my hon. Friend made clear in his speech, this is essentially a victimless crime. What possible harm can it do—rather than good, of course—to pardon people who, in essence, committed no crime at all?

[Philip Davies]

I do not disagree with the hon. Gentleman’s sentiment, and I made that clear at the outset. My point is that the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire has selected a certain group of offences. My hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) made a very fair point, which people ought to consider. In the past, many other offences have been committed which I would term victimless crimes.

[Stewart Hosie]

Such as?

[Philip Davies]

The metric martyrs are a prime example. Steve Thoburn sadly died with a criminal conviction for selling produce in imperial measures. That, I would argue, was a victimless crime. The customers were perfectly happy to buy the produce and Steve Thoburn was happy to sell it. There was no victim, but he died with a criminal conviction. He still has a criminal conviction. He has not been posthumously pardoned.

[John Nicolson]

I am sorry, but I am struggling to make the connection with the metric martyrs, whom I do not recall being chemically castrated, arrested or tortured. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will remind me of that detail, which I have forgotten.

[Philip Davies]

I was not aware that the hon. Gentleman’s Bill applied only to people who had been chemically castrated and tortured. Is he now saying that that is the case? The point that he is making is a complete nonsense, and he must know that. I was responding to an intervention from the hon. Member for Dundee East (Stewart Hosie), who asked whether there were any examples of victimless crimes committed by people who had a criminal record and had not been pardoned, and I gave him a perfectly good example. Moreover, he was nodding in agreement when I gave him that example. [Interruption.] The Scottish National party has become so dominant in Scotland that SNP Members are not used to hearing alternative opinions. I am sorry that they are so intolerant of anyone who holds a different opinion from theirs. It does not reflect well on them.

My point is this. I think that the Bill would have been easier to justify if it had included all past offences and all past convictions for crimes which are no longer crimes, and which were victimless. That would have been a perfectly logical thing to do. I think it is very difficult to pick out only certain crimes to justify the Bill, rather than including all convictions for offences of that kind.

[Lyn Brown]

I am genuinely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. At the beginning of his speech, he informed us that we might not be listening to one of his lengthy contributions, and said that he would sit down shortly in order to enable the Front Benchers to present their arguments. May I ask how long he thinks he might be? I ask simply because I want to put on record, very forcefully, the support of the Opposition Front Bench for the Bill, and I am worried that I shall not be able to get to my feet in order to do so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

We have an hour and five minutes left. About three hours have been taken up by people speaking in favour of the Bill. I have fielded four or five interventions during my brief comments so far. If people do not intervene on my speech, I will be able to get through it a bit quicker. It would be a sad state of affairs and a sad day for our democracy if the only speeches that were allowed to be heard in a debate were those in favour of the Bill. I am not sure if that is what the hon. Lady is arguing for. She has put on record her support for the Bill, and if she wants to say any more, she is very welcome to do so.

I am going to conclude my remarks, but it is important that the concerns that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe had while in government, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs described earlier, should be given a hearing. Legislation of this kind, and even the measure that the Government have agreed to in the Lords, will open up the probability of, and certainly the justification for, pardoning people who have been convicted of other crimes that are no longer criminal offences, and which we do not believe should be criminal offences, particularly those that were victimless crimes.

I hope that the Minister will address this point and tell us whether the Government intend to go further down this route, or whether they intend to finish here with these particular offences, in which case I would like to hear the logic behind that. For example, there are people who were found guilty of attempting to commit suicide when it was a criminal offence to do so. Are they not worthy of a pardon? I do not see why we should cherry-pick certain offences when there is a whole range of others that could be added to the list. People should be able to express these views.

I shall conclude my remarks, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I did promise you and the House that I would not speak for a great length of time. I think we all agree with the sentiment behind the Bill. Should these offences ever have been crimes? Obviously not. Should we think any less of the people who were convicted of them? No, we should not. But we cannot pass laws in this House that are simply based on worthy sentiment. Nor can we pass laws simply to send out a signal or some kind of message, despite the fact that we have heard this intention expressed in almost every speech so far today. If we want to send a message or a signal, that should be done by making a speech. Passing legislation is a very different thing.

The question should be whether this is the right kind of legislation. Should we go over these cases again? Will the Minister tell us how easy it will be to go through every single case in order to ascertain whether the activity that took place at the time still constitutes an offence today? For example, certain activities carried out in public still constitute an offence today. How will we know, when we look back over the records, whether a particular offence took place in public and would therefore still constitute an offence today? If that detail was not relevant to the prosecution at the time, it might never have been logged.

We should not underestimate the practical difficulties that will be involved, and I hope that the Minister will be able to explain how they will be dealt with. When we pass legislation, it should involve practical things that have to happen rather than worthy sentiments, and I hope that he will reflect on the detail involved. If the Bill goes into Committee and comes back here on Report, I hope that the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire will engage genuinely with the people who agree with his sentiments but have issues about the practical application of the legislation. I can see from the detail of his Bill that he has tried to address some of these points. I acknowledge that he has done that, and I hope that he—unlike some of those who have been making sedentary commentaries about my speech—will accept that while we genuinely appreciate the sentiment behind his Bill, we feel that it is important to get the detail right. I hope he accepts that we want to do this for the right reason, and not just to send a message or as a form of gesture politics that will make us all look good and feel good about ourselves. That is not the purpose of legislation in this House. We all share the same sentiment, but I hope he will engage constructively with people who hold a different opinion.

The hon. Member for Livingston is back in her place, so I want to tell her that her earlier intervention was fantastic and that I hope the Minister will address her point. Instead of just accepting a Lords amendment that will receive virtually no scrutiny in this House, we can perhaps consider the Bill in more detail if it goes through to Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gyimah]

I have done a number of these private Members’ Bills on Fridays, and it is very unusual to be doing one where the choice before the House is not the private Member’s Bill or no Bill at all, but the private Member’s Bill or a legislative vehicle—the Police and Crime Bill—that will help us achieve our aims much faster so that we can deliver justice. However, there is also an important point. It is not for nothing that they say, “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Intentions are not good enough when it comes to making law; we have to think through the unintended consequences of law, and that is what the Government’s approach tries to do.

[Philip Davies]

Perhaps the Minister would also like to make the point that if 100 MPs out of 650 had turned up to support the Bill, it would have got its Second Reading without any trouble at all. The problem is that it does not have the support of 100 MPs.

[Mr Gyimah]

We did not have 100 MPs go through the Division Lobby earlier. We have also had a substantial debate in which people in favour of the private Member’s Bill have spoken for well over three hours.

Sexual Offences (Pardons Etc) Bill

Philip Davies Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 21st October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. Indeed, when I was a Foreign Office Minister for about two and a half seconds—

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Too long!

[Chris Bryant]

Far too long. I tried to push forward some of these issues. The Foreign Office can play an important role around the world in tackling abuse in countries as diverse as Iran and Russia. I say to my Australian colleagues, “For heaven’s sake, just get your act together.” They should join the company of nations that have changed. If Argentina can have gay marriage, if Spain—so dominated, historically, by Catholicism—can have gay marriage, why on earth cannot Australia, the country of “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”?

We are debating today one of the worst periods in our history. In the 1870s and 1880s a series of scurrilous and horrible newspapers whipped up deliberate hysteria around homosexuality. It led to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, a serious piece of legislation that tried to tackle the problem of under-age women being abused in the prostitution trade. Henry Labouchere introduced a clause that I want to read out so that people realise how pernicious the legislation was. It stated:

“Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with an other male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof, shall be liable at the discretion of the Court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.”

It could not have been made more wide reaching:

“in public or private commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure”.

Any court would be able to interpret the legislation as it felt fit. The final line about “hard labour” is, famously, partly what ended up killing Oscar Wilde. The legislation led to thousands of people being sent to prison and doing hard labour.

There was a campaign in the 1920s to try to rid the country of this “scourge”. A young lad from the Rhondda, a railway porter called Thomas, was caught by the police outside the Tivoli theatre, and they tried to do him for gross indecency. He was sent to prison for three months and did hard labour. The only evidence that they had to advance was that he had his mother’s powderpuff in his pocket, but he was sent to prison for three months. I am so proud that the MP for Rhondda West at the time, a miner called William John, gave evidence on behalf of the young man, but the court did not listen.

We find the same things all over again in the 1950s. David Maxwell Fyfe, the then Home Secretary, was wonderful as one of the inquisitors at Nuremberg and in helping to draft the European convention on human rights, but he was shockingly homophobic and forced the Home Office and the police to run a campaign to rid this country of the “scourge”, as he put it, of homosexuality. One of the terrible ironies for him was that two of the first people trapped were Conservative Members of Parliament.

I listened to what the Minister said, but there is a real problem about trying to force people to go through another process. For someone now in their 70s or 80s, the conviction might have been like a brand on them for their entire life. It might have caused terrible problems in their family life. It might have meant that they were never able to do the job that they wanted to do, such as a teacher not being able to go back to teaching. Friends and relatives might have shunned them. It might have made them feel terribly ashamed. Why on earth would they want to write to the Home Secretary, asking, “Please may I be pardoned?” Why on earth would they want to go through that process all over again? Why on earth would they want someone to analyse whether they were guilty of something way back when?

The Minister made a good argument about our working together, but the way to work together is to agree to the Bill. We can then go into Committee and if things need to be put right, let us put them right. The hon. Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) said that this Bill is not watertight. I say to him: let us make it watertight. The place to do that is in Committee, rather than by turning our back today.

Several hon. Members referred to the fact this might be called the Turing Bill, but I do not want to call it that; I want to call it the Cartland, Macnamara, Muirhead, Bernays, Cazalet Bill. At the start of the 1930s, many MPs and politicians in this country, most of them Conservative—there were not many Labour MPs in the early 1930s—were convinced that Germany was a good country, because it had very liberal attitudes towards homosexuality. Berlin in the early 1930s was one of the best places for a gay man to live—we can think of Christopher Isherwood, “Cabaret” and all the rest of it. One of those MPs was Jack Macnamara, who was elected for Chelmsford in 1935; another was Robert Bernays, a Liberal who had been elected in 1931; and a third was Ronald Cartland, who was elected for Birmingham King’s Norton. They changed their minds when they saw what was happening to homosexuals in 1930s Germany. Originally, they had thought that the Versailles treaty was unfair to Germany and it should be overturned, and that Germany should be able to remilitarise the Rhineland and to change its future. In 1936 Jack Macnamara visited the Rhineland, expressly to support its remilitarisation. When he was there he “accidentally”—that was his word—visited a concentration camp: Dachau, which was the only one that existed at the time. The people who were in Dachau were the politically unwanted—a lot of Jews and some homosexuals. He saw the violence that was being perpetrated against them, and when he came back to this country he and others became the most vociferous campaigners against appeasement in this House.

Robert Bernays, Jack Macnamara, Anthony Muirhead, a junior Minister, Victor Cazalet, Philip Sassoon, Harold Nicolson and Ronald Tree were gay or bisexual, and they campaigned vociferously in this Chamber and around. They campaigned against Jew-baiting. Jack Macnamara made a speech in here about Jew-baiting and was spat at that evening when he went to the Carlton club—he never went back. Ronald Cartland, the younger brother of Barbara Cartland, was probably the most courageous in the Munich debates, saying that it was terrible that we should capitulate and appease Hitler.

What did the then Government do? What did Neville Chamberlain’s cronies do? They called these men the “glamour boys”. They got newspapers to ring them up and ask why they were still not married and why they were bachelors. They had these men’s telephones tapped and had them followed, and when these MPs made speeches, they threatened them with deselection—and yet they persisted. It is my very strong belief that had it not been for those gay and bisexual men, we would never have faced down Hitler and we would not enjoy today the freedoms that we do.

I mention some of those names because of their shields up here in the Chamber. Jack Macnamara desperately wanted to fight in the second world war, because he said, “I’ve argued for this war, I should fight.” Although Macnamara he had been in the Army before he came into the House, Churchill wanted him to serve in some capacity on the home front, and not overseas. Jack Macnamara got his mother to write to Churchill, month after month after month, until eventually he was given a posting in the Adriatic and he saw service. He was killed when the Germans bombarded him and his troops in Italy.

Ronald Cartland was disabled and failed his first medical test, but he managed to persuade somebody to perform another one and he was drafted. He was sent to France in early 1940. He and his troops were holding the fort at Cassel, in the triangle between Calais and Dunkirk, and he was one of the last people out of the fort. They kept on for four more days than they should have done for their own protection, so that thousands more British troops could escape from Dunkirk and Calais. As they left Cassel, it was one of the very few times when the commanding officer in the British armed forces actually said, “Every man for himself.” He was killed on the route back to Dunkirk.

Anthony Muirhead, whose shield is just above us, committed suicide just after the war had started. It is often said that he did so because he was not able to fight, but I suspect it was actually because the newspapers were pursing him about his private life.

Robert Bernays, the Liberal MP for Bristol North, was killed in a plane crash over the Adriatic, again in military service.

Victor Cazalet, the MP for Chippenham, died in an air crash. He had become a close friend of the free Poles and died in the air crash along with General Sikorski.

We, as a country, owe not only those people, but so many other men, since the Labouchere amendment, something that feels like an apology—something that really says, “I am sorry we got this wrong. You were brave, courageous men. We got it wrong. You were right. We owe you a debt of gratitude.” [Applause.]

Prison Safety

Philip Davies Excerpts

Thursday 15th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

It is always a great honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, and to follow the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), for whom I have a great deal of respect. As others have done, I commend our Chair of the Justice Committee, who does a great job in martialling sometimes disparate viewpoints on the Committee.

When I say “disparate viewpoints”, what I am really referring to is me. As on many issues, I tend to have a very different view of the world—particularly the world of prison and sentencing—from that of many of my colleagues, so I might put a slightly different viewpoint from theirs. That is not to say that I do not have a great deal of respect for their views and expertise on these matters; we just happen to draw different conclusions.

One thing that never gets talked about with regard to prison safety that I want to talk about, and that I raised with the Secretary of State on her initial performance before the Justice Committee last week, is the change brought in under the last Labour Government: it has done immense harm not only to public confidence in the criminal justice system, but to safety in prisons.

That Labour Government passed a law, and this is a welcome opportunity to make a public service announcement to the many people who are not aware that it is on the statute book. The law stated that everybody who had reached halfway through their prison sentence had to be released from prison, irrespective of how disruptive they had been and whether they were still considered a danger to the public. Those prisoners have to be released halfway through their sentence.

The law had nothing to do with any great rehabilitation revolution, or with making our prisons or streets safer; it was introduced because the last Labour Government got themselves into a crisis over prison numbers and could not meet the capacity. They were desperately looking for ways to reduce the prison population. Anything would do.

One method they used was letting everybody off 14 days before the end of their prison sentence. The second method was to say that people had to be, by law, automatically released halfway through their sentences. It does not take a genius to work out that that will have—and this has proved to be the case—a negative impact on safety in prisons.

If prisoners have a six-year sentence, become eligible for release after three but could still serve the whole six years, the chances are that there will be an incentive for them to behave themselves in prison, get their heads down, work hard and do the things that are asked of them; if they do, the parole board may well let them out of prison when the three years come up. If they know they will be released from prison after three years no matter how well or badly they behave, what on earth is the incentive to behave in prison? There is none at all. It does not take a genius to work out that that is pure common sense.

If the Government want to get to grips with safety in prisons—and, as a by-product, instil a bit more public confidence in the criminal justice system—they must deal with that issue. They must repeal that terrible law and say to prisoners once again, “You become eligible for release halfway through your sentence, but only if you are considered to be safe to release to the public and if you have been behaving yourself in prison.”

I remember when the last Labour Government introduced this law—the Conservative party was apoplectic. What have we done in our six years in government? Absolutely nothing. That is a disgrace—certainly for the millions of people who have gone down to the polling station to vote Conservative at a general election. Those people would expect a Conservative Government to deal with this, and I hope the Minister will not only address the issue in his remarks but will act on the situation in his time as prisons Minister.

[Alex Chalk]

My hon. Friend is setting out his characteristically robust and principled position, with which I do not disagree. But even if that welcome repeal were to happen, is not the difficulty that it would lead to such additional pressures on the prison system that, frankly, we would not be in a position to absorb the extra numbers at this juncture?

[Philip Davies]

I understand my hon. Friend’s point, but he is looking at it from a perspective different from mine. My view is that we should not manage the prison population to fit an arbitrary figure that we have decided is the limit that we will allow in prison; we should imprison the people who should be in prison, and it is the Government’s job to build the capacity in the prison system to cope with those people. That is the bit on which the Government need to get a grip.

I was going to come to this later but, as we are on the subject, I will deal with it now. One area on which I happen to disagree with the Chairman of the Select Committee, although it pains me to do so, is the size of the prison population. We have to address the myth that has been perpetuated that the UK has a very high prison population. The fact of the matter is that we do not, and I will explain why. Yes, the absolute number of more than 80,000 represents a high prison population, but the UK is a very highly populated country so of course we have a high prison population. That is a meaningless measure.

If we look at the number of people in our prisons as a proportion of the population as a whole, we are not at the top of the table by any means, but I concede that we are above average. We are in the highest quartile but, again, it is a meaningless measure. The only meaningful measure of prison population is the proportion of criminals that we send to prison. In other words, for every 1,000 offences committed in the UK how many people go to prison? That is the most meaningful measure of whether we send a lot of people, or not many people, to prison. Comparing those figures with the figures for other countries across the world shows that we have a very low prison population. For every 1,000 crimes committed in the UK, we send some 18 people to prison. I challenge anyone to name four or five countries that send fewer people to prison, because they will be hard pressed to do so.

Our prison population is very low, so we have to end the myth that has been built up by these prison reform groups, which frankly just do not like anybody being sent to prison. We have to address the myth that has built up over the years that we have a high prison population. We send very few people to prison. Everyone knows that it is difficult to be sent to prison in the UK. People get community sentence after community sentence—the only people sent to prison are either very persistent offenders or very serious offenders. Courts bend over backwards not to send people to prison. We have to nail that myth.

Contrary to what my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) said in his opening remarks, I do not think that public opinion is that we should have fewer people in prison. I do not think public opinion has moved an awfully long way. Clearly, my hon. Friend is much more expert than I about public opinion in Bromley and Chislehurst, and I bow to his superior knowledge, but I invite him to come up to Shipley. He can knock on the door of any 100 houses he wants to ask people, “Do you want to see more criminals or fewer criminals in prison?” I suspect that a number in the high 90s would say that they would like to see more criminals in prison, not fewer. I accept that Bromley and Chislehurst may differ, but I am here to represent Shipley.

[Robert Neill]

I respect my hon. Friend’s point, but I want to put my point to him in a different way. I suspect that both his constituents and mine would like to see fewer victims of crime and fewer crimes being committed, so they also might like to see people in prison being more effectively rehabilitated so that they reoffended less. Does he accept that overcrowding in our prisons prevents rehabilitation? Reducing such overcrowding would be in his constituents’ interest.

[Philip Davies]

I agree with one part of what my hon. Friend says, which is that we should be doing our best to rehabilitate people while they are in prison. I do not see how anyone could possibly disagree with that. What I do not accept is that we should have fewer people in prison. I want more people in prison.

The Minister and I were discussing this not too long ago, and we observed that the UK prison population has increased quite substantially over the past 20 or 30 years. Lo and behold, what has also happened in the UK over the past 20 or 30 years is that the crime rate has gone down. Members here might want to try to pretend that those two things are alien to each other, but I contend that one follows from the other.

To be honest, it is not rocket science. It is blindingly obvious, certainly to most of my constituents, that the more criminals there are in prison, the fewer criminals there are out on the streets committing crimes. It is obvious that the more criminals we lock up, the less crime we will have. I accept that we want people to be rehabilitated while they are in prison, but I do not accept that the answer is to send fewer people to prison in the first place. In my opinion, it is too hard to be sent to prison and most people are not sent to prison for long enough.

The idea that short sentences do not work is another myth. The reoffending rate for people on short sentences is 60-odd per cent. Virtually every single person in prison on a short sentence has had community sentence after community sentence. The reoffending rate for that cohort while they were on a community sentence was 100%, which is why they ended up in prison in the first place, so a 60-odd per cent. reoffending rate for the cohort on short sentences is actually a rather good record compared with the alternative. We do our prisons a disservice. The longer people spend in prison, the less likely they are to reoffend. That point is made clear by all the Government statistics.

Prison safety is also undermined by fixed-term recall, which is little known. We have a system in the UK whereby people are released halfway through their sentence. If a prisoner reoffends, most people would expect them to go to prison to serve the remainder of their original sentence, but I am afraid not. The last Labour Government did for that, too. They introduced fixed-term recall, whereby people are sent back to prison not to serve the remainder of their sentence but to serve 28 days. Again, people have no incentive to behave themselves when they go back because they know they will be out in 28 days, come what may—that is the whole principle of fixed-term recall.

There is no incentive in our sanctions for these people to behave themselves when they go back into prison, and there are lots of them—I think there were some 7,000 people on fixed-term recall last year. In fact, many of them make a point of going back into prison just to see how their illicit operations have been doing while they have been out. They know that they will get only 28 days if they commit another offence, which gives them enough time to see what is going on before they are back out again. The whole thing is an absolute scandal. These are the things that the Minister needs to get a grip on if he is to do anything about prison safety.

Drugs are clearly a massive issue in our prisons, and the number of people who take drugs for the first time in prison astounds me. It cannot be beyond the wit of the Government to address drugs in prisons. They have to be much more robust on that, too.

Members will know that I have an interest in the comparative treatment of men and women in prisons. More women than men, per 100 of the prison population, have been punished for disciplinary offences while in prison. There were 130 adjudications per 100 women prisoners, compared with 106 adjudications per 100 men prisoners, according to the Ministry of Justice’s publication “Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System 2011”. We have a massive problem with violence by women offenders in our prisons. This is not a men- only problem.

The other thing that I wanted to mention is radicalisation in our prisons, which is a massive cause for concern. I put in a freedom of information request to the Ministry of Justice a year ago asking which prisons had reported instances of or concerns about religious radicalisation in the last year. The MOJ’s reply did not tell me which prisons had had such reports; it told me which prisons had not, because there were so few of them. When I totted them up, there were only seven prisons in the whole UK that had not reported instances of or concerns about radicalisation. If we are to do something about prison safety, tackling radicalisation in our prisons must be a top priority for the Government. It is a massive area of concern. We cannot let political correctness be an excuse for inaction; we must get to grips with that particular problem.

I agree with the right hon. Member for Delyn about prison officers. We clearly need more of them in our prisons. To me, that is blindingly obvious. They do a valiant job of trying to keep order in our prisons in difficult circumstances; we cannot keep cutting their numbers, as has been done in recent years, and expect there to be no consequences. We must invest in our prison officers.

In summary, I look at the issue from a different point of view from the Chairman of the Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst. He said that he did not think the public wanted more public spending on prisons. I disagree; I think that our constituents do want it. They want less public spending on things like international aid and more spending on locking up criminals in our prisons. I genuinely think that that is the public mood. They do not think that too many people are being sent to prison; they think that it is too easy for people to get out of prison, or not to be sent there in the first place. We should be wary of getting out of touch with public opinion on this issue.

There are many areas that the Minister can attend to in order to improve prison safety while also improving public confidence in the criminal justice system. He must not be seduced by the bleeding-heart liberals whose basic agenda is that they want fewer and fewer people in prison because they do not believe in sending people there. He must be robust and stick up for public opinion a bit more, ensuring that criminals are in prison and that they serve the sentences handed down by the courts, preferably in full.

The Minister certainly should not allow them to be released halfway through their sentences when they are still a danger to the public and have behaved badly in our prisons. That is not fair to the public, and it is not fair to the prison officers who have to deal with such people and see them released halfway through their sentences, much to their disgust. I welcome the Minister to his position, and I trust he will tackle some of those issues and not be seduced by the bleeding-heart liberals.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer.

At this stage in the proceedings, there is perhaps little that one can say that has not already been said, particularly by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), the Chairman of the Justice Committee. However, I will add my comments to the excellent work that my hon. Friend does in that capacity.

I was also a member of the previous Justice Committee and I say that for a number of reasons. It is not simply because Ministers come and go, whereas we members of the Justice Committee continue examining these issues, which we inherited and which we return to, time and again. I also say it because in the report that we produced at the end of the last Parliament—“Prisons: planning and policies”—we examined safety issues. Indeed, I disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), as I think the Government and the National Offender Management Service completely underplayed the deterioration of safety in the prison system.

However, that situation was partially improved—indeed, it became a much better situation—by the previous Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who focused on the issue of safety and admitted that our prisons were in a serious crisis. All the speakers today have acknowledged that. Also, a common theme has emerged throughout this debate and it is about the Government response to our report. I will come to that shortly.

Other speakers have already asked whether we have a higher or different prisoner population, compared with the low staffing numbers that we have in prison. Nevertheless, the point that we made in one of the Justice Committee reports—namely, that those factors had been there all along—means that they are not the answer to the problem and none of them is the overriding factor that determines that the situation is as bad as it is. We have to consider other reasons why the situation is so bad.

If we consider what action has been taken so far, we see that it has principally been around legislative change, without much emphasis on implementation of legislation. It is very easy for us as legislators to introduce legislative change and then just believe that the job has been done, whereas the real job comes in ensuring that any new legislation is implemented.

One issue that the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) raised—fortunately, he did not amplify it, because that means that I can amplify it now—was mental health needs, which fully illustrates this point. It is not operational action that is required to deal with mental health needs, particularly the prevention of suicide; the needs in question go beyond the drugs that are available to treat them, whether those are traditional drugs or new psychoactive drugs. Indeed, the prisons and probation ombudsman, Nigel Newcomen, has said:

“It remains the case that I am frequently obliged to repeat recommendations and lessons and it can be depressing how little traction we appear to have on occasions”.

That statement applies not only to the issue of mental health but to the whole of prison safety. As a Committee, we ourselves have frequently issued “recommendations and lessons”, but there is “little traction” to them and they are rarely taken up. Nevertheless, the mental health needs of the prison population must be taken very seriously. The big area of untapped resource, if you like, is being able to deal with those needs.

Since we are also considering the issue of self-inflicted deaths, I will comment on the Government reaction to the Harris review, which I also found to be a disappointment—indeed, Lord Harris himself found it to be a disappointment. It is a disappointment because the Government have not sought to take into account a number of the recommendations that Lord Harris made and so the issues involved have not been addressed. At a recent session that our Committee had with the Secretary of State for Justice, I asked her whether she was aware of Lord Harris’s report or had talked to him. She was aware of the report; I do not think that she had talked to him at that point, but she needs to do so.

[Valerie Vaz in the Chair]



Let me re-echo the point that others have made by saying that I found the Government response to our report flimsy; it was no more than a holding reply. There was a lot of talk about monitoring and some operational improvements; there was the use of what I would call the bogus figure of a net increase of 300 officers, which disguised the reduction in officers; and there was also the hint that we were building five new prisons. I ask the Minister who is here today to comment on those five new prisons and the progress being made on them, to say when we are likely to see them come into operation and to explain how they will improve prison safety.

[Philip Davies]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Vaz.

I agree with my hon. Friend that the Government response to the Committee’s report was thin and “flimsy”; it would be impossible for anyone to disagree with that assessment, really. However, is he being slightly harsh on our ministerial colleagues, given that the Minister who is here today and the Secretary of State have only just taken up their new positions? Perhaps we should give them some opportunity at least to examine these matters themselves before they rush to a conclusion on the Committee’s report. Perhaps we should just give them a bit of time to get their feet under the table and give these issues serious consideration themselves.

[John Howell]

I thank my hon. Friend for those comments, but I take a different view. We are still the same Conservative Government who were elected to deal with these issues. Whether it is a new Secretary of State or an old one, the issues are the same. A list of actions was put in place to deal with the issues. I cannot understand why a series of new Ministers want to take the time to throw all those things up in the air and start again. That is precisely what I meant by saying that the Committee has the longevity with these issues to see their continuity on the ground. I do not think I am being too harsh. I bear no grudge against the Minister; I appreciate that he is new to his job, but there are some things that should be continued, and we should be able to pick them up.

One thing that I stress is the changes proposed to the role of prison governor, since those could be introduced pretty quickly. There is a lot in the Government response about empowering prison governors. Can the Minister provide more information on that? I do not mean the detail of how we will empower prison governors or the detail of exactly what powers will be transferred. We should be looking for broader areas of principle to be set out and discussed with the Committee, to show where those are going to go, because governors feel completely left out.

As a Committee, we have come across that issue quite a lot in our visits to various prisons. They see themselves as bit managers of a whole range of different resources that are brought in to their prisons. That situation does not help them get control of their prisons or prison safety. I would like some information about how the role of prison governors will be defined and circumscribed. It will need to be circumscribed, but in the definition we will get the detail of what the Government want for that. What will the nature of the measures be to hold prison governors to account? That is the other side of the question. I do not yet want the specifics of how that will work, but in what areas will that work and how will it continue?

Finally, I want to comment on the action plan. We need considerably more flesh on the bones. That expression has been used by many speakers in this debate. I repeat what I said in an intervention: when we had a meeting with the Secretary of State, I asked how she would take forward the previous Secretary of State’s plans. Her response caused the press to argue that we were going back on our commitment.

I fully accept what my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst has said about the role of the press, but there is an issue here, and there was no need to put the whole thing into reverse and suggest that we were going backwards on this matter. As the Minister said, dealing with this issue remains a high priority for Government. I am happy to wait to see the detail of the action plan and how it will control safety, but I would like some more information about whether it will move beyond the legislative and the obvious to empower prison officers to take action and get to grips with a major problem in our prisons.

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[Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz, and I welcome the prisons Minister to his new role. This is our first occasion debating opposite each other in Westminster Hall and I hope it is the first of many. I also thank the chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) for bringing this matter before the House today. I will not comment on the speech of the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), as much comment has already been made, but there have been very knowledgeable and expert contributions to today’s debate. There is a very large measure of agreement, which I hope bodes well for the future of prison policy implementation and scrutiny.

[Philip Davies]

I am sorry that the hon. Lady is not able to engage in a debate and only wants to deal with people who agree with her. Will she set out for the public’s benefit whether she therefore agrees that people should be automatically released halfway through the sentence, irrespective of whether they are still a danger to the public and of how badly they have behaved in prison? Is that Labour’s official policy—those people should be automatically released halfway through the prison sentence by law?

[Jo Stevens]

People are released from prison when they no longer pose a risk to public safety and when the Parole Board considers that they are fit.

There have been some great speeches today. The Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, spoke of his concern that the less safe prisons are, the harder it is to achieve reform. I think we can all agree on that. He also observed that he does not detect a sense of urgency from the new Secretary of State. I agree with him on that point, and I sincerely hope that he and I are both wrong.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) spoke of the staggering statistics on homicides, violence, self-harm and riots, which illustrate the serious problems in the Prison Service at the moment. I am glad that he also mentioned the unique situation, as did the former prisons Minister, the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), of IPP prisoners, which is a legacy that needs to be dealt with urgently. Perhaps the best line from my right hon. Friend’s speech was that autumn leaves are falling and we are still awaiting the autumn plan.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) talked about the lack of zeal and knowledge that became apparent from the new Secretary of State’s appearance before the Justice Committee last week, which is of some concern. He also talked with great knowledge about his local prison Wormwood Scrubs and, most worryingly, the staffing reductions on the horizon in that already very volatile prison.

The hon. Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), who has now left her place, talked about the strong leadership and statements on reform from the previous Secretary of State and Prime Minister and the then ministerial team. I echo her view that we need to see that from the new ministerial team. I am sure that we will.

I enjoyed standing across the Dispatch Box from the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire and we had many exchanges. I was pleased to hear his very knowledgeable and measured comments today, on both what is not in the response to the report and what is. I share his concern that, in terms of holding prison governors to account, accommodation outcomes and employment are missing from that response.

The state of our prisons and the growing levels of violence in them shame our nation. Today, there has been a large measure of agreement, despite party allegiances, that the current state of affairs is simply not acceptable. That is why I, along with my former Front-Bench colleagues in the shadow justice team, welcomed the former Prime Minister’s speech and the former Justice Secretary’s commitment to place prison reform at the heart of this year’s Queen’s Speech. We heard a lot about good intentions. Prison staff, prisoners and their families, stakeholders and the public had their expectations raised that finally the need for prison reform was being seen as part of a wider social reform agenda to help people change their lives for the better. It is very unfortunate that they appeared to have been let down last week by the new Justice Secretary in her evidence—but more of that later.

In his last report as chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick stated that prisons were

“in their worst state for 10 years.”

In his short tenure, the new chief inspector, Peter Clarke has realised that the situation has got “even worse” since then. As the Government presses ahead with cuts to the Ministry of Justice’s budget, our prisons become even more dangerous places in which to live and work. I make no bones about putting this on the record—it has been said before. On a daily basis, prison staff are being attacked, prisoner-on-prisoner assaults are increasing, time out of cells for offenders is being cut, more offenders are being forced to share cells, rehabilitation and training programmes for offenders are being cut, education provision is being reduced and services are being privatised or delivered through untested payment-by-results programmes. Prison officers have been living with the reality of working within a prison system that is creaking at the seams, due to starvation of the funds it needs to function effectively and safely. Overcrowded prisons where people spend 23 hours a day locked in cells on wings with too few staff inevitably leads to violence, suicide and self-harm. We need to take bold action to reduce the size of the prison population in order to improve safety.

I welcome the Committee’s recommendation that the Ministry and NOMS draw up together an action plan to improve prison safety, but in order for prisons to be safe, secure and the places of rehabilitation that they are supposed to be, we need to employ more prison officers. I cannot stress enough the simplicity and importance of that fact, which has been repeated by many hon. Members in the debate today. There is very little that we can do with high-quality health and education services in our prisons if we do not have enough prison officers to escort prisoners to lessons, to hospital or even—in some cases—just to get their food.

I want to make it clear that I am not criticising those currently working for the Prison Service and I would like to take the opportunity to praise hard-working prison staff across the country. They are vital to ensuring public safety and their work is often overlooked. It is an extremely complex job and the role that they play in rehabilitation is one that we must never underestimate or take for granted. They are a dedicated group of public servants and they do vital work, which is why it is so disappointing that the numbers of front-line staff have been slashed in recent years to meet the budget cuts imposed by the Treasury.

As we have heard, there are 7,000 fewer prison officers than there were in March 2010. The loss of that many uniformed staff from the Prison Service continues to undermine the safety and security of our prisons and puts staff and offenders at even greater risk. We now have the toxic combination of prisons full of inexperienced prison officers and experienced prisoners, which is a recipe for violence.

I share the Select Committee’s concern about the Government’s failed recruitment drive. Given the growing prison population and the rise in staff assaults, it is no wonder that it is a struggle to recruit into the Prison Service and that retention is so poor. We must properly protect the health, safety and wellbeing of those who work in our Prison Service. I also welcome the Select Committee’s call for quarterly progress reports, and I am waiting with interest to hear what plans the Minister has lined up to ensure better and more successful recruitment and retention of prison staff.

I have heard at first hand from countless organisations and individuals about the dangers and implications that the lack of safety in our prisons has for prison staff and prisoners. Each time I raised that issue with the former prisons Minister, the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire, he agreed that the current safety levels are unacceptable. He said that the new Bill, which we were awaiting, would include measures to tackle those issues.

On 6 September in Justice questions, I raised the issue with the new Justice Secretary, who said:

“I fully acknowledge that we do have issues with violence and safety in our prisons. The levels are unacceptable. I am determined to deal with this issue and I will lay out my plans very shortly.”—[Official Report, 6 September 2016; Vol. 614, c. 202.]

Yet not even 24 hours later, in her evidence session with the Select Committee, she point blank refused to guarantee that the Government would proceed with prison reform legislation to improve prison safety, much to the astonishment of the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst.

The same evidence session also revealed that, despite the fact that the report was published in May, there had been no response to it. We received the response only two days ago. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith said, it is a paltry two and a bit pages. That does not suggest that the Government really are taking the issue of prison safety seriously. If I were a member of the Justice Committee, I would be pretty insulted by it.

In the same evidence session, the new Justice Secretary said she was looking into a number of urgent issues raised by Committee members. In fact, she said that 39 times. My question for the Minister is, is the plan for prison reform shelved or delayed? When are we going to see it? As far as I can see, there is no strategy for improving a decimated, but previously award-winning, probation service, and no idea about the benefits of our Human Rights Act. What exactly has the Justice Secretary been looking into during the summer recess? It certainly does not appear to have been a proper and timely response to the Justice Committee’s report.

The response contains no commitment to meet the Committee’s central recommendation of producing quarterly progress reports on prison safety and staffing numbers. To add insult to injury, the Government said that prison officer staff numbers have risen. That is unacceptable. The numbers are clearly lower than they were 12 months ago, as I pointed out to the Justice Secretary during Justice questions on 6 September. We now have 421 fewer full-time equivalent front-line prison officers working in our public prisons than we did a year ago.

I have some questions for the Minister, in addition to those of my hon. Friends, which I hope he will answer. Where is the promised programme of prison officer recruitment, which was to deliver the real and necessary increases to officer numbers required to provide a safe, decent and secure regime? Where is the national strategy, highlighted by the chief inspector of prisons, to help to make our prisons drug-free? Where is the commitment to the plan and the timetable for increases in prison capacity that will see an end to the institutionalised overcrowding of our prisons?

It has been said that we are going to have five new prisons by 2020. I would like the name of the builders—they are obviously very quick at their job, given that they have not done much of it yet. I am very interested to hear from the Minister more detail about where, when and how that is going to happen.

Finally, time after time and at great cost to the public purse, reports into the dangers, problems and failures faced by the Prison Service have made many, often repeated, recommendations for improvements, but they have not been implemented. Will the Minister, in his new role, change that pattern? I hope he will say yes.

Today another 15 prison officers will have been assaulted at work. The same will happen tomorrow and the next day and the next day. We need to take urgent action to put a stop to that. I welcome the Justice Committee’s report, and I urge the Justice Secretary and her Ministers to implement its recommendations urgently. We cannot afford further delay on this matter. Lives are being lost, serious injuries are being sustained and livelihoods are being ruined. This issue is too big and important to be kicked into the long grass.

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[Mr Gyimah]

I, as well as NOMS, am in constant contact with the governor, to work with him to do what is appropriate and what works in order for the prison to function as well as it should.

More broadly on education reform, the recommendations made by Dame Sally Coates have been mentioned. We remain committed to improving prison education and supporting offenders into meaningful employment. We want to learn from the good practice that already exists in our system, such as the recently reported efforts at HMP Swaleside, where there is an ambition to change how education is delivered in prison. The prison’s A-wing is being redeveloped to create an education academy, with the hope that inspiring prisoners to learn will empower them and stop them reoffending.

A number of steps have already been taken to get prison reform under way. Six reform prisons went live on 1 July. The four executive governors, who have been unshackled, took control of their budgets and are now empowered to run their prisons as they see fit, which includes delivering bespoke services and having the option to move away from central contracts and policies.

I have seen for myself what is going on at HMP Coldingley. Contrary to some of the pictures that have been painted, every offender has a job in one of the impressive workshops at that industrious jail, and the governor, Nick Pascoe, is working closely with the community and with rehabilitation companies to help former prisoners even once they have left his care. HMP Wandsworth, which was also mentioned in the debate, is piloting a new “recruit in a day” scheme, which will radically speed up the process of getting new officers into the prison. In addition, HMP High Down has introduced a “recommend a friend” scheme to incentivise current officers to promote available roles to friends and family.

I will turn to a number of points raised in the debate before I bring my speech to a close. One was about our confidence in being able to deliver the estates programme. The Secretary of State will roll out the details, but, to provide assurance, we have closed 15 prisons in the past 10 years. There have also been two partial closures and two re-roles to immigration and removal centres. The Department has got quite good at ensuring that we can close down old prisons and open new ones, such as HMP Berwyn—new for old. As I said, the Secretary of State will set out the detail shortly, because that is a Government commitment.

My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley made a number of points, one of which I will tackle: offenders being released halfway through their sentence. If someone has been sentenced to 10 years, they are eligible for release at five, which is a particular concern of his. I remind the House that, even in those instances, that person remains under licence, so the system still has a hold over them, and if they were to reoffend they would go back to prison. If someone were sentenced to five years, served five years and then left, we would not have any hold over them at all. I want to put that to him as a point of clarification and to add nuance to the point I made earlier.

[Philip Davies]

rose—

[Mr Gyimah]

I knew that my hon. Friend was going to intervene.

[Philip Davies]

The Minister is giving the impression that if someone is sent to prison for 10 years and are released after five, if they commit another offence they will go back to prison for the remaining five years. If that were the case, some of us may not feel so strongly about it. However, as he well knows, they do not; they go back in for a fixed-term recall of 28 days, which is pathetic. There is not the great deterrence that he suggests.

[Mr Gyimah]

If they commit another offence, they will not only go in for a period of time but serve the sentence for the new crime they have committed. My hon. Friend suggested that somehow we are managing the prison population to an arbitrary figure, which is simply not the case. Our job, as I said, is to deliver the orders of the court.

On rehabilitation, on which I would say my hon. Friend has quite an exotic view, if we are to be a country that works for everyone, we have to fix prisons. That is particularly important.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I will give the Minister the same test I gave the shadow Minister. Is he telling me that he thinks it is absolutely right for a prisoner to have to be released by law halfway through their sentence, irrespective of how badly they have behaved in prison and whether they remain a danger to society? As a Conservative Minister, does he think that is right?

[Mr Gyimah]

What is right is that, before any prisoner is released, there is a careful assessment of the risk they pose to society. That risk assessment is the most important thing—obviously within the confines of the sentence handed down to them by the courts.

Improving safety and reform are two sides of the same coin. We want to empower governors to tackle the challenges they face and support them to run regimes in which they can facilitate the rehabilitation of offenders in a modernised estate. However, if we are to do that, first and foremost prisons need to be safe, decent and secure places to live and work. The ministerial team understands that, and the Government are aware of it.

I am grateful to the Justice Committee for its scrutiny and its report. If there are any points that I have not covered in my speech, I will be happy to deal with them afterwards. I look forward to scrutiny in the weeks and months ahead and to discussing detailed plans to ensure that our prisons are safe and secure places.

Oral Answers to Questions

Philip Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lee]

We want to make sure that all vulnerable and intimidated witnesses can give their best evidence in court and feel less anxious. We are committed to making sure that victims of crime get the support they need. We have protected the overall level of funding for victims across the spending review period, and we announced funding of more than £95 million in 2016-17 to fund critical support services. We will bring forward our legislation, as promised, in due course.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Victims of crime want to see the perpetrators of that crime properly punished. Is the Minister happy that prisoners are automatically released halfway through their prison sentence no matter how disruptive they are or how much of a threat they still pose to the public, or does he agree with me that prisoners should serve the sentences handed down by the courts in full?

[Dr Lee]

The purpose of justice and the primary goal of the justice system must be to reduce reoffending. If somebody in prison has been assessed, is deemed not to be a risk to society and has been properly rehabilitated, it is in the best interests of that individual and of society for that person to be released.