Oral Answers to Questions
Alex Chalk Excerpts(4 weeks, 1 day ago)
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Simon Jupp (East Devon) (Con)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
To govern is to choose. Choices we have made mean that the most dangerous offenders—the acid attackers, the rapists, the knife-point robbers—who are sentenced to seven years or more are required to spend longer in custody. The Sentencing Bill goes further: murders involving sexual or sadistic conduct will lead to a whole-life order unless there are exceptional circumstances, and those convicted of the most serious sexual offences, including rape, will serve 100% of their custodial term in prison.
Simon Jupp
I welcome the measures that my right hon. and learned Friend has outlined, as will my East Devon constituents. Rapists deserve the most severe possible custodial sentences. Will he update the House on how sentence lengths have been increased for that utterly vile crime since 2010?
Alex Chalk
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that rape is an appalling crime. In 2010, the average custodial sentence for adult rape was six and a half years, and prison governors were required to release offenders at the halfway mark. Today, the average sentence is over 40% longer, and offenders serving more than four years must serve two thirds of that sentence behind bars. As I say, we are going further still.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
For all the positive words from the Secretary of State, the reality in our prisons is that people are being sent out, and the prison estate has not kept pace with the rhetoric that we hear from the Government. The Government are constantly sending criminals on to our streets because they do not have the prison facilities to house them. Is not the reality that we need fewer fine words and more action from the Government to keep our streets safe?
Alex Chalk
That is not a fair characterisation. The capacity in our estate is much greater than when we inherited it—that is point one. Point two is that we have kick-started the largest prison expansion since the Victorian era: £4 billion has been allocated, and we have opened His Majesty’s Prison Fosse Way and HMP Five Wells. HMP Millsike will open next year; we have planning permission for Gartree and Grendon Springhill, and we also have more spaces—rapid deployment cells and so on—coming on at Liverpool, Birmingham and Norwich. We believe that those who commit the most appalling crimes should be locked up for longer. As I say, it was wrong that, in 2010, rapists would be automatically released at the halfway mark. We are the Government who are putting that right.
Sir Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)
I commend my right hon. and learned Friend for building on the work that he and I did together to ensure that the most dangerous and serious offenders spend longer behind bars. The consultation on sentencing in cases of murder concluded a few weeks ago. When can we reasonably expect a response on that sensitive and important issue?
Alex Chalk
My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right to say that it is a sensitive issue. As he knows from practice, those who commit the offence of murder outside, using a knife that is brought to the scene, can expect a starting point of 25 years. However, as the Gould and Devey families have made so powerfully clear, where the crime takes place inside the home, there are very difficult sentencing decisions for judges. The consultation has ended, and I pay tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Gareth Bacon), who has spoken to a number of people about it, as indeed have I. We will respond in the coming weeks, but this matter requires careful thought. I pay tribute to my right hon. and learned Friend for his work on it.
Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)
Barnaby Webber from Taunton was described by his family as an “extraordinary ordinary person”. His killer was found guilty of manslaughter, rather than murder, on the basis of being subject to paranoid schizophrenia. Barnaby’s mother, Emma Webber, says it is “abhorrent” that murder charges were not pursued against her son’s killer. Will the Secretary of State consider re-categorising homicide laws to introduce first-degree and second-degree murder?
Alex Chalk
There is nothing I could say from this Dispatch Box that would put right the horror that the poor families of Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Austin suffered in those appalling attacks from Valdo Calocane. The law of homicide has been considered greatly—in fact, as a Back Bencher, I led a debate on the issue of first-degree and second-degree murder. It is of course something that we keep under careful consideration; there is complexity to it, but it is certainly a matter that we will consider.
Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)
Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
Reducing reoffending is a core mission of this Government. That is why, for example, we rolled out the genuinely transformational policy of 12 weeks’ guaranteed accommodation for offenders on release, and it is why we have invested heavily in employment; there are prison employment leads in every resettlement prison. The plan is working: the reoffending rate has fallen significantly since 2010, from 31% to 25%, and in the two years to March 2023, the proportion of prison leavers in employment six months after release more than doubled.
Stephen Crabb
I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend for his answer. He may be aware that the Welsh Affairs Committee has recently heard from businesses such as Timpson and Williams Homes about the work being done to train and recruit prisoners in Wales. While there was a lot of praise for the New Futures Network, which brokers partnerships between employers and prisons, what is being done to expand the number of release on temporary licence schemes? As we have heard, they are really important for improving employability and giving prisoners a better chance of holding down a job when they get out of the gate.
Alex Chalk
I thank my right hon. Friend for the interest he is showing in this issue. He is absolutely right to pay tribute to the New Futures Network, which does exceptional work in custody. Of course, it is very often able to liaise with employment advisory boards—local business people in the area—to ensure that prisoners are trained in the skills that they need for jobs in that area. When I went to HMP Berwyn, which is of course in Wales, one of the things that I was so impressed by is that its employment hub has a video suite, so that prisoners can be interviewed by employers on the outside. On my right hon. Friend’s point about ROTL, that is something that prison governors keep under review. Certainly in the right cases, where ROTL is safe for the public, it can be a useful tool to ensure that prisoners are rehabilitated and get into work, so that they can be law-abiding citizens in the future.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
The Secretary of State will know that one of the ways to reduce reoffending is to break the cycle of drug misuse. The problem of course is that in too many prisons there is a high incidence of drugs getting in, so what is he doing to reduce the amount of drugs in our prisons?
Alex Chalk
The hon. Member is right: it is of course really important that we tackle drugs coming into prisons. We have rolled out £100 million in prison gate security, to ensure that there is airport-style security. There are scanners, including body scanners with very high resolution, so that people coming into jails can be scanned for illicit contraband that may be being transported internally; that is important. We are also rolling out additional technology that can scan mail for psychoactive substances impregnated into the paper. That is just one of a suite of measures that we are taking—plus there are the drug abstinence wings.
May I take this opportunity to say that I misspoke earlier? Ian Coates was the third victim of the Nottingham attacks.
Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I welcome my right hon. and learned Friend’s comments about the progress made on tackling reoffending, but he will be aware that it remains stubbornly high. We are in an unfortunate position: we imprison more people than most of our neighbours in Europe, but still have higher rates of reoffending. Does that not posit the fact that we need to make more intelligent use of prison, and of alternatives to custody, as parts of a joined-up system? Would he agree that the Sentencing Bill is particularly valuable in this regard, and can we hope for its swift return to the House?
Alex Chalk
I thank my hon. and learned Friend for his excellent point. He says something with which I passionately agree: strip out the emotion and follow the evidence. The evidence shows that there are tools available to this generation of politicians that were not necessarily available 10 or 15 years ago. I am talking not just about GPS tags, which we have doubled, but alcohol tags, with which there is a 97% compliance rate. The reoffending rate among those who live with the sword of Damocles hanging over them can be much lower than for those who spend a short time in custody.
Alex Chalk
Absolutely. Importantly, we are rolling out a prison education service, with a considerable sum of money—about £150 million a year, which is significant. However, it is critical to have tie-up between the local employment advisory boards, liaising with the governor, and the New Futures Network to ensure that the education provided is tailored to the jobs on the outside. People are being assisted with literacy, for example, so that they can do jobs in hospitality, kitchens or horticulture. Education works when it is tailored to job opportunities on the outside. That is how we get prisoners motivated and engaged—and yes, I am happy to engage in the way that the hon. Member proposes.
Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab)
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
More than 90% of all criminal cases are resolved in the magistrates court, which includes burglaries, thefts, assaults, criminal damage and drugs offences. Thanks to magistrates’ exceptional efforts, the caseload has come down significantly from its post-pandemic peak, and cases are being heard promptly. To help bring down the caseload in the Crown court, the Government have invested heavily to allow courts to operate at full throttle. We have recruited around 1,000 judges and tribunal members across all jurisdictions this financial year. We have kept open 20 nightingale courtrooms to boost capacity, and we are on track to increase spending on criminal legal aid by more than £140 million a year.
Stephanie Peacock
In Yorkshire, Sheffield Crown court has been forced to shut twice in the last two years due to flooding. That is in addition to the already record-breaking court backlog across the UK of 67,000 cases. What measures have the Government put in place to deal with unplanned court closures, to ensure that people still have access to justice?
Alex Chalk
One of the first things I did when I took on this role was to extract from the Treasury an additional £80 million to go into our court maintenance fund. That is important because it allows us to plan not just reactively this year, but proactively over time. That will create more efficiencies and get us more for our money, and will mean that great courts such as those in Sheffield can continue to do the business.
Debbie Abrahams
How does the backlog in criminal court cases vary by region? What discussions has the Secretary of State had with local judicial teams on prioritising and communicating those backlogs?
Alex Chalk
The senior presiding judge will keep a close eye on regional discrepancies. In certain cases, there is the power to transfer them from one court to another, but that will depend on the suitability for defendants, and witnesses and victims who need to attend hearings. It is important that we send the message from this Chamber that more than 90% of all criminal trials—the cases that people want resolved such as criminal damage, drugs matters and common assault—are dealt with in magistrates courts, and magistrates up and down our country are doing an excellent job at getting through those cases.
Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)
I absolutely endorse the Lord Chancellor’s comments on magistrates working incredibly hard to clear backlogs in courts. He will have seen recent journalistic reporting relating to single justice procedure, which is an important element of magistrates’ work. The principle behind the single justice procedure is good, and I have sat on cases in SJP courts, but there are some concerns, in particular around vulnerable individuals who may have mitigation that is not necessarily being addressed. Does he agree that perhaps he could remind Members that magistrates can already use their discretion to refer cases back to open court, where prosecutors can review cases to ensure that individuals who are vulnerable are not served with un-justice?
Alex Chalk
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and his colleagues for the exceptional work they do to ensure that justice is done. On the single justice procedure, fairness is non-negotiable, so it is critical that every person who comes before the courts, whether via the SJP or an open court, gets that fairness. There is an issue about transparency. Some important points on that have been raised, and echoed by the Chair of the Justice Committee, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill). It is something that we ought to consider recalibrating. Everyone accepts that the SJP works well and is a useful addition. We just need to see whether it ought to be refined in the interests of promoting transparency.
Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
Since the last session of Justice questions I have visited HMP Liverpool, a prison that received a poor inspection report some years ago, and I saw how it had been transformed. Prisoners were engaged in constructive activity in the cycle repair workshop and elsewhere, cells had been refurbished, and there was a clear sense of pride among prison officers, who were determined to deliver safety, decency and rehabilitation. Prisons as well as prisoners, it seems, can be redeemed. I have also visited Liverpool Crown court to see our “intensive supervision courts” in action, tackling the root causes of offending with treatment for addictions. In Coventry I saw rapid deployment teams of offenders who had been sentenced to carrying out unpaid work clearing up local neighbourhoods, visibly atoning for their crimes, and doing so within 48 hours of the project being nominated by the public.
I was pleased to support the important Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation Bill, promoted by the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David), which is intended to tackle abusive and chilling lawsuits. We have also brought forward legislation on litigation funding agreements to ensure that third parties can continue to fund court proceedings on behalf of individuals or small businesses. That support enabled the sub-postmasters to make their successful civil claim. Our legislation will bolster access to justice, boost our legal sector, and ensure that in our courts David can still take on Goliath.
Mr Dhesi
The Government have achieved only 5,900 of the promised 20,000 new prison places, resulting in them having to release prisoners up to 60 days early to alleviate overcrowding, thereby directly impacting on public safety. How does the Secretary of State reconcile this with the Conservative promise of being tough on crime, especially when his end-of-custody supervised licensing scheme expansion significantly deviates from judicial sentencing?
Alex Chalk
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. When I was in practice, I had to listen to the then Labour Home Secretary say that he was going to cancel the three Titan prisons that he had boasted he would open. Not one was built. We have opened Five Wells and Fosse Way, and Millsike is under construction. We have more cells coming online in Birmingham, Liverpool and Norwich. We have rapid deployment cells, and we have new houseblocks in Guys Marsh, Rye Hill and Hatfield. This is the party that is delivering. We will be tough on crime.
Mr Speaker
May I gently say that there a lot of people I need to get in? If we could shorten the answers, that would be helpful.
Alex Chalk
Resolution does exceptionally important work, and in the Budget the Chancellor announced an additional £55 million of support for separating parents, including £12 million to deliver a new pilot. We are working with Resolution and other organisations to implement the pilot, which we aim to launch in September this year.
Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)
This Conservative Government promised 20,000 prison places by 2025, but so far they have only delivered under 6,000. The Justice Secretary is letting violent offenders out up to two months early because, as we found out from press briefings about dire warnings to No. 10, he has literally nowhere to put them. Instead of focusing on what happened 14 years ago under the last Labour Government, will he level with the public about the true scale of the prisons capacity crisis that is unfolding on his watch?
Alex Chalk
I have been very candid in saying that there are pressures in our prisons. But here is the thing: first, capacity in our jails is significantly higher than it was under Labour’s watch; and secondly, we have a record of delivery and there will be 10,000 places by next year. Here is the really important point. There are two questions that I posed in my statement. First, would Labour have let out up to 16,000 people during covid—yes or no? We said no. Secondly, would Labour have got rid of jury trials? We did not, but the Opposition would have. If they had made the same decisions that we did, they would have faced the same pressures. This is opportunism, it is silly, and Britain deserves better.
Shabana Mahmood
Bring on the general election and I will happily answer those questions. I am not surprised that the Secretary of State does not want to acknowledge the truth. Probation officers have told me that they genuinely fear not being able to keep the public safe, because they are being forced to rush through the early release of violent men in order to free up space. He will have heard the same concerns, so what is he going to do about it?
Alex Chalk
It is really important that the public are not inadvertently misled. Early release does not apply to those on life sentences, those on imprisonment for public protection sentences, those on extended determinate sentences, any sex offenders, any terrorism offenders and any serious violent offenders. The difference between our scheme and the Opposition’s is that, under their scheme, governors had no discretion to block the release of prisoners; under ours, they do. That is the difference: we prioritise public safety; the Opposition prioritise politics.
Elliot Colburn (Carshalton and Wallington) (Con)
Alex Chalk
Many people in this House will have heard about some appalling cases, but this case is truly one of the most shocking and upsetting that any of us will have encountered. I of course pass on my deepest sympathy to Cindy Legg for the tragic loss of her daughter Victoria. I can indicate that I did enter an overarching view opposing release, and I can announce that he will not be recommended for release. I hope that will be of some comfort to the family. In the Victims and Prisoners Bill we are introducing an additional safeguard: specifically, a power for the Lord Chancellor to order a second check on the release of the most serious offenders to keep the public safe.
Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)
Alex Chalk
I thank my hon. Friend for raising this incredibly important case and for taking it up so powerfully on behalf of his constituents. In the Sentencing Bill, we have a proposal such that people who commit crimes of murder involving sexual and sadistic conduct will not be released, because they will be expected to serve a whole-life order. That is just, on behalf of the British people, and it also helps to keep communities such as that of my hon. Friend safe.
Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)
Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con)
Does the Secretary of State for Justice agree that in England and across the United Kingdom, the ancient principle of innocent until proven guilty should be upheld and restored, and that the punishment should never be the process?
Alex Chalk
I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I was asked about my priorities when I was appointed to this role, and I said that the guilty should be convicted, that the innocent should walk free and that the public should be protected. It is very important that people who are accused of an offence have confidence that the process will be prompt and humane. Ultimately, the British people are fair minded. They want people to be rightfully convicted, but they also want the innocent to walk free.
Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)
Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
When the National Crime Agency briefed Members who are interested in the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill, it estimated that between 550,000 and 800,000 serious sexual offenders are at large in this country. What are the Government doing to identify them? How many more prisons will we have to build to accommodate them?
Alex Chalk
I am proud that, since 2010, the number of people prosecuted for rape is up 32%, sentences are around 40% longer and the proportion of those sentences spent in custody has increased. We are determined to do everything possible to send a clear message that addressing serious sexual offending is a priority for this Government. We will clamp down on it, and those who perpetrate this vile crime can expect the punishment they deserve.
Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)
Alex Chalk
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising this important issue. I am aware of the issues that have been raised. There is plainly a delicate balance to strike. It is incredibly important that individuals can access the courts to get a remedy in appropriate cases, and we want to make sure that the balance is properly struck. We will consider the amendment with care, as I have with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. If the hon. Lady wants to make representations to me, I will listen to them very carefully.
Brendan Clarke-Smith (Bassetlaw) (Con)
Worksop witnessed the horrific murder of Pauline Quinn by a man who had been released after serving time for a double murder. The probation service has since admitted that mistakes were made. However, the public still have many unanswered questions. Does the Minister agree that, although it is understandable that all the information sometimes cannot be put in the public domain, the probation service should seek to be as transparent as possible and give communities that information, where possible?
Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
Joshua Rozenberg KC has presented “Law in Action” on Radio 4 over the past 20 years, and it has frequently shed important light on areas of our justice system that need attention. Does the Secretary of State share my disappointment that today’s broadcast will be the programme’s last, because it has not been recommissioned? Will he also pay tribute to Joshua Rozenberg for his work?
Alex Chalk
I am very grateful to my hon. and learned Friend for raising this point. Joshua Rozenberg has made a profound and important contribution to our country. Indeed, he is required reading, and I read him most days. I share my hon. and learned Friend’s profound regret, and I echo his sentiments. I think the whole House will wish Joshua Rozenberg well.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
All through Lent, women nationwide have faced intimidation from the anti-choice group 40 Days for Life blocking their entrance to abortion clinics daily. Why is that happening, given that MPs voted by a ratio of 3:1 in 2022 for safe access zones, with the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) being one of them?
Alex Chalk
Probation officers do an exceptionally important job, as I believe we all agree. Let me set out what we have done in respect of prison and probation staff. First, we accepted every penny of the Prison Service pay review body recommendations. We have injected extra funding of more than £155 million a year into probation. Prison officers do a tough job, as do probation officers, but I am delighted to report that the retention of prison officers is improving, with the staff resignation rate in prisons dropping from about 10.7% to 8.3%, and their numbers have increased. As for probation, we have recruited about 4,000 people in the past three years. That is positive and we will continue to support them every step of the way.
Sir Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Do we have enough crematoriums in the UK, given that many families are now having to wait three, four, five or six weeks for a funeral slot? Why is there such a gap between the cheapest crematorium in the country, which charges £408, and the most expensive, in Stevenage, which charged £1,400 last year?
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Speaker. The Justice Secretary did not quite answer my question on where the 67,000 criminal cases in the backlog are, and how they are being prioritised and communicated. I do not want another historical child sexual exploitation victim to be told by a Crown court that her case has been cancelled twice because it is not a priority.
Alex Chalk
The point I was endeavouring to make, although I perhaps did not do so well, is that listing is a judicial function. We have seen the senior presiding judge make a decision that certain sex cases and those most serious rapes, for example—all of them are serious, of course—will be given an early listing. As I say, I do not have complete control over that, but I do discuss it with the Lady Chief Justice and I know that the senior presiding judge is keen to get through those cases at the earliest opportunity.
Judicial Conduct Investigations Office: Annual Report 2022–23
Alex Chalk Excerpts(1 month ago)
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The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
With the concurrence of the Lady Chief Justice, I will today publish the seventeenth annual report of the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office (JCIO).
The JCIO supports the Lady Chief Justice and the Lord Chancellor in our joint statutory responsibility for judicial discipline.
The judiciary comprises approximately 20,000 individuals serving across a range of jurisdictions. Over the past year, the JCIO received 1,620 complaints against judicial office holders. A total of 36 investigations resulted in disciplinary action.
I have placed copies of the report in the Libraries of both Houses, the Vote Office and the Printed Paper Office. Copies are also available online at: https://www.complaints.judicialconduct.gov.uk/reportsandpublications/
[HCWS360]
Prisons and Probation: Foreign National Offenders
Alex Chalk Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
With permission, Mr Speaker, I shall make a statement about criminal justice in England and Wales.
Keeping our people safe requires a relentless focus on cutting crime, cutting reoffending, and making sure that those who pose the greatest risk are imprisoned for as long as necessary to protect the public. That is why it is welcome that crime has fallen significantly over the last decade, in particular with falls of over 50% since 2010 for offences of violence and burglary. In addition, the reoffending rate has fallen over the last decade from 31% to 25%. That has happened not by accident, but as a result of prioritising measures ranging from the tagging of acquisitive offenders post-release, to giving the police the powers they need such as stop and search.
At the same time, to take the worst offenders out of society for longer, we have taken action on sentencing, and those committing the most serious crimes are being sentenced to 40% longer behind bars. That is because, first, we acted to end the injustice of automatic release at the halfway point for the worst offenders. Instead of getting out at the 50% mark come what may, serious sexual and violent criminals must now serve at least two thirds of their sentence in custody. Rapists are now serving nearly three years longer on average than they did in 2010, and we are going even further by legislating to ensure that rapists service their whole term behind bars.
Secondly, we have increased sentence maximums for the worst offenders, such as those who cause death by dangerous driving or who cause the death of a child; and, as a result of our reforms currently before the House, those who kill in the context of sexual or sadistic behaviour will in future expect to spend the rest of their natural lives behind bars. Life should mean life for those who commit the most heinous crimes.
Thirdly, we have introduced a power to enable the Secretary of State to block the release of offenders such as Robert Brown, where release would pose an unacceptable risk to society.
Meanwhile, we are pushing ahead with the biggest prison building programme since the Victorian era. We are on track to deliver 10,000 new prison places by the end of 2025 and are committed to building 20,000 places overall. Today I can announce that we are going even further to make sure that we have the prison places we need to continue locking up serious and violent offenders for longer. I want to focus in particular on foreign national offenders, whom I will call FNOs.
The number of FNOs has increased over recent years to 10,500—around 12% of prisoners—in England and Wales, at an average cost to the taxpayer of around £47,000 per prisoner per year. These foreign criminals are not only putting a strain on the public purse but reducing the capacity of the prison system. We believe that they should, wherever possible, be removed back to their countries of origin, and we have made progress: last year the Government returned from prison and the community nearly 4,000 foreign criminals, which is a 27% increase on the year before—and we are going further.
In October, I set out in the House our plan to reduce the FNO population. We have extended the early removal scheme from a maximum period of 12 months to 18 months, so that eligible FNOs can be deported up to six months earlier. Almost 400 have already been removed from the UK through this and similar schemes since January. That is a 61% increase compared with the equivalent period a year earlier. We have also signed a robust new agreement with Albania, which has restarted transfers of Albanian offenders—the largest single cohort in our prisons—and we are legislating in the Criminal Justice Bill to rent prisons overseas, as other European countries have done.
This is important progress, but we must build on it by making sure that even more FNOs are removed from the country and spurious barriers to their removal are quickly removed. I can tell the House that we will radically change the way that FNO cases are processed. We have created a new taskforce across the Home Office and Ministry of Justice, including the Prison Service, Immigration Enforcement, and the asylum and modern slavery teams. We have surged 400 additional caseworkers, who will be in place by the end of March, to prioritise these cases, and we will streamline the end-to-end removal process.
We are also expanding the number of FNOs we can remove—for example, by bringing forward legislation to allow us to remove foreign offenders with limited leave to remain under conditional caution, and amending our deportation policy so that we can remove those on suspended sentences of six months or more. We are making more use of the diplomatic levers we have to remove people back to their home countries, including by expediting prisoner transfers with our priority countries; concluding new transfer agreements with partner countries such as Italy; and being prepared to make use of the powers provided under the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 to restrict visas for any country where no progress on FNO removals can be made. That will allow us to deport more FNOs directly from prison in 2024—more than double the 1,800 we removed last year and more than in any year since 2010.
Let me now turn to the unsustainable growth in our remand population since the pandemic and the Criminal Bar Association action. This is important. When covid hit, we were confronted with two momentous judgment calls. The first was whether to order mass release of prisoners. Public health advice in this country, as in many others, was to release thousands and thousands of prisoners, given fears that the pandemic would rip through the prison estate and take countless lives. We declined to do that, and in the event—although every death is of course a tragedy—the total number of lives lost in prisons was under 200, thanks to the excellent efforts of His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service officers. Other nations took a different approach. In America, where I discussed the matter recently with my counterparts, tens of thousands were released; in California alone, the figure was 11,000. In France, nearly 13,000 were released. It is for each nation to take their own course, but I am clear that we made the right decision for public safety in our country.
The second judgment call was whether to heed the clamour to end jury trials. I believe that would have been a grave mistake, shattering a fundamental British freedom and dismantling the centrepiece of our justice system. The decisions that we made were right for access to justice, right for public protection and right as a matter of principle, but have contributed to the increase in the number of defendants held on remand while awaiting trial or sentencing by over 6,000 since 2019 to about 16,000 today.
Let me turn to what we are doing. On pre-trial detention, the Lady Chief Justice has confirmed that if bail applications are made to the magistrates court or renewed before the Crown court, the courts stand ready to hear them within the short time limits provided in the criminal procedure rules. We are also exploring at pace with the judiciary the roll-out of a remote nationwide pilot Crown court capable of hearing new bail applications. The pilot would monitor whether these additional measures result in an increase in the use of tagging and appropriate support packages in bail applications.
To support that, the Government will invest £53 million of additional funding to expand the bail information service—part of the productivity package announced by the Chancellor at the Budget—which will enable our court system to operate as efficiently as possible by increasing the court-based staff and digital systems that can provide critical information to the judiciary, making the bail process more streamlined. To support that work, a further £22 million of additional funding will be available over the next year to fund community accommodation. We will also increase awareness about the availability of tags—especially high-tech GPS and alcohol monitoring tags—to ensure that offenders can be monitored in the community where appropriate.
We will also extend the existing end-of-custody supervised licence measure to around 35 to 60 days. We will enable that to happen for a time-limited period and work with the police, prisons and probation leaders to make further adjustments as required. That will be only for certain low-level offenders. Where necessary, electronic monitoring will be applied to enhance public protection. Ministers will, of course, continue to keep use of this measure under review. The extension has been requested and supported by leaders in the Prison Service and the police.
All these measures rely on a probation service that focuses its resource on the most critical points of the justice system, especially when an offender is first released from prison. In 2021, the Government reunified the probation service, which brought together all probation functions into a single national organisation. We have invested £155 million of extra funding each year in the service and onboarded more than 4,000 trainee probation officers since then, and I will be taking steps to refocus probation practice on the points that matter most to public protection and reducing offending.
From April, we will reset probation so that practitioners prioritise early engagement at the point where offenders are most likely to breach their licence conditions. That will allow frontline staff to maximise supervision of the most serious offenders. Similarly, for those managed on community orders and suspended sentence orders, probation practitioners will ensure that intervention and engagement is prioritised towards the first two thirds of the sentence, as experience shows that that most effectively rehabilitates offenders. To be clear, none of the changes will apply to those convicted of the most serious offences, including those subject to multi-agency public protection arrangements.
I express my deep gratitude for the efforts of all those working in the criminal justice system: prisons, probation and courts staff, the police, prosecutors, lawyers and the independent judiciary. They are exceptional public servants. The Government will do what is necessary to remove foreign national offenders from our country and we will do whatever it takes to ensure that the British people are kept safe from the most dangerous criminals. I commend this statement to the House.
Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)
I am grateful to the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. Late in the hours of yesterday evening, the Government tried to slip out quietly an announcement that they will be releasing prisoners up to two months early to deal with the lack of space in our prisons. Let us be in no doubt that this is the most drastic form of early release for prisoners that the country has ever seen, yet in the Secretary of State’s 11-page, 10-minute statement it merited just one paragraph. This measure will cause shockwaves and deep concern across our country and he seems to think that a quiet written ministerial statement published late last night and one paragraph today is good enough. It is not.
Prisoners will now be released not 18 days early but up to an unprecedented 60 days early. No other Government have ever found themselves having to do that on such a scale. It is nearly three times the number of days on licence seen under any previous scheme. Let me be clear that there are consequences. This scheme will seem wrong in principle to victims and the public—that people who have done wrong and have been sentenced under due process of law can be released as much as two months before a court intended. That means that people who have broken the law and, in many cases, pose an ongoing threat to the law-abiding public are directly benefiting from the Government’s complete incompetence.
It is small wonder that the Government have refused all requests to be transparent about the scale and the impact of the scheme. That is no way to run the criminal justice system—or, indeed, the country—not least because when the Secretary of State announced the scheme last October, he was explicit that the power would
“be used only for a limited period and only in targeted areas.”
He said that the scheme was to be
“a temporary operational measure to relieve immediate pressure.”—[Official Report, 16 October 2023; Vol. 738, c. 59-60.]
Last month we learned from a leak to the media that the scheme had been expanded to more prisons and, according to unpublished guidance to prison governors, activated for an “undefined period”. He will surely acknowledge that this will strike many people as a novel definition of “temporary”.
Now we learn that the scheme is due to be expanded very significantly—an unprecedented 60 days ahead of when a prisoner would ordinarily be released. I repeat the questions that I first raised all those months ago. How many prisoners have been released early under the scheme to date? Which prisons are using the early release scheme? Which types of offenders are being released early under the scheme? Are domestic abusers and stalkers eligible for release under the scheme? Why has it been expanded to early release of up to 60 days? Why has the scheme been activated indefinitely? Will the Secretary of State finally commit to publishing all the relevant statistics about the early releases scheme on the same basis that prison data is published—on a weekly basis, rather than the wholly inadequate commitment to publish on an annual basis, not least because there will have been a general election before then?
The Secretary of State has acknowledged, at last, that all the changes put real and profoundly concerning additional pressure on our already overstretched and understaffed probation service. He tells us that there will be a reset for probation to ensure that it prioritises early engagement, but it is not clear what that means or what part of its vital work he is suggesting probation officers will not do as a result of today’s statement. What is glaringly absent is any additional resource to support the thousands of cases that will now have their release dates brought forward.
It is wholly inevitable that rushing out such measures will increase the risk to the public. I hope the Secretary of State will have the honesty to admit that in his response. Again, what measures have been put in place to ensure that probation has the time and the resources to assess risk adequately and protect the public? Has there been a risk assessment of the expansion? If so, will he publish it? How will the Government ensure that inexperienced probation staff are not left unsupported to supervise dangerous offenders?
The Government tell us that they will free up more spaces in our prisons by cracking down on the number of foreign national offenders who are taking up space that we can ill afford to spare when they have no right to be in this country. The Secretary of State has not pointed out that the numbers that the Government deported last year are significantly lower than those they inherited in 2010—5,383 foreign national offenders were deported in the last year of the Labour Government. Meanwhile, thousands of foreign national offenders are living in the community post release for several years without being removed. We welcome any improvement that the Government intend to make on this pretty poor record, but if the public are to believe that any of these measures will make the necessary difference, the Secretary of State needs a more credible plan, such as a new returns and enforcement unit with up to 1,000 new staff—more than double his 400 announced today.
Unprecedented is a term that is far too often bandied around in politics, but these changes are, by any measure, truly extraordinary. The Secretary of State has not been transparent with this House or with the public. They deserve answers, and it is about time that he started giving them.
Alex Chalk
I thank the hon. Lady for her points. She addressed a number of issues, but not the fact that when Labour were in government, it ran a similar scheme for three years. Does she want to explain how many were released during that scheme? I am sure that she will welcome the opportunity to update the House. She talks about risk, and she is right to raise these important issues, but it is also important that we set them out clearly and calmly. First, unlike the Labour scheme in which those who had been sentenced to under 12 months were released with no licence conditions, everyone will have a licence condition. We need to be clear about what that means. Under Labour’s scheme, which ran for three years, there were no licence conditions at all. Under our scheme there will be licence conditions.
Secondly, Labour’s scheme operated in a blanket way across every prison. Ours is targeted and calibrated. Thirdly, and importantly, under this scheme there will be the opportunity for a gold command veto, where the governor has concerns about an individual—[Interruption.] If the hon. Lady could just listen for a moment. Those concerns will be escalated to a panel of senior officials, who will make a decision based on the offender’s history, the proposed bail address and the conditions that could be imposed—not to contact, not to enter, to abide by a curfew or potentially to be tagged. If the governor has concerns about safety, that person will not be released. That safeguard was not available under the Labour scheme, which ran for three years. It is critical to prioritising public safety, which is our focus.
In the hon. Lady’s response there was the eloquent sound of silence in relation to the specific questions that this Government and every Government around the world face: should we have let out thousands of prisoners? She has given no answer to that question, but it is important, because if she aspires to stand here, she will have to say whether that should have taken place. Not doing so has contributed to the pressures that we face, but it would have been the wrong thing to do, because it would have prioritised prisoner safety over public safety. We did not do it, and we were right not to do it. Principle has a cost, and we have taken a sensible decision.
The second thing that the hon. Lady did not address is whether we should have listened to those who clamoured for the end of jury trials. I do not think she is suggesting that we should have, but there is an inevitable effect to that. When we came into office, the number of cases in the Crown court was around 48,000. Pre-covid, it was 39,000, but as it has gone up, inevitably as a result of keeping the jury trial system, a higher proportion of people have been in custody awaiting trial. That is a matter of remorseless, arithmetic logic. There are an additional 6,000 people now. We made the right decision, but we have to take a sensible step.
The final point that the hon. Lady failed to address is what she would have done in these circumstances. She knows, as I know, that she would have taken exactly the same step. To seek to make political capital is beneath her.
Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
I commend the Secretary of State for his characteristically thoughtful and measured approach. Does he agree that it does no one any good service to try to reduce this issue to simplistic arguments? The truth is that dealing with prison capacity, where everyone has recognised for many years that there are real pressures, demands a careful set of checks and balances. Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that those are in place? Does he also agree that we need to be honest with the public in saying that, however much we try, prison places are expensive and finite. Therefore, the system must make judicious and intelligent use of prison, which includes locking up those who are dangerous and having alternative ways of dealing with and punishing those who are not dangerous to the community. Is that not the objective?
Alex Chalk
My hon. Friend makes an exceptional point. We have to proceed on the basis of evidence, not emotion. We choose to lock up the most dangerous offenders for longer, which is why those who murder in the context of sexual or sadistic behaviour should be in custody for the rest of their lives, because the threat to the population is so great. Where people can be reformed using technology, which was not available a long time ago, we should use that, not just because that works as a matter of common sense but because the data shows that it works.
On my hon. Friend’s specific point, anyone who looks at this issue calmly and in an adult way will see that there have been pressures in moments in history. There was one in 1997 and another in 2007, when Jack Straw had a terrible argument with Lord Falconer about the use of cells in Inner London Crown court. Those of us who have been in the system remember that. The key is whether to deal with that in a sensible, calibrated and proportionate way. We will take every step to look after the safety of the public, and we will not score political points in the process.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Last week, the Prisons Minister and I visited Wormwood Scrubs, where we found doubling up in single cells, with unshielded toilets, and overcrowding affecting people’s time out of cell and access to work. The education service was described as poor, and food budgets are £2.70 a day. Staff told us that assaults on officers are not being prosecuted. What is the Lord Chancellor doing to improve conditions in our Victorian prisons, as that is vital for the welfare of staff, the rehabilitation of prisoners and the protection of the public?
Alex Chalk
First, I commend the hon. Gentleman for visiting his local prison, as doing so is extremely valuable and I am grateful for his feedback. He raised a number of issues and I would be happy to write to him, but may I just deal with one thing in particular? We ask prison officers to do an extremely difficult job; they need to be robust, but sometimes they have to be sensitive. To assist them in doing so, we are ensuring, first, that they are paid properly, and so we accept every last penny of the Prison Service pay review body recommendation. Secondly, we are rolling out body-worn video, so that they know that if a situation looks like it is escalating, the evidence will be there—that provides a powerful deterrent effect. Thirdly, and finally, we are reducing attrition. I hope he will agree that experienced prison officers are the ones who can make those tough decisions on when to be tough and when, metaphorically speaking, to offer that hand of support.
Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)
Clearly, there is pressure on the prison estate. I appreciate that some of the challenge to the Justice Secretary’s statement today is about many thinking that we are not keeping in prison people who should be there, but there is also a problem of some people being sent to prison who should not be there. He will be aware of my police officer constituent who one minute was hailed a hero for apprehending a violent criminal and the next found himself in Wandsworth prison.
There is a slight irony, given this statement, that the Government intend to put further pressure on the estate through clauses in their Criminal Justice Bill proposing the imprisonment of beggars and rough sleepers. Given what he is saying today, will he consider supporting the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), and supported by myself, my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken) and many others from across this House, that would remove the intention to imprison rough sleepers and beggars?
Alex Chalk
My hon. Friend assiduously raises matters on behalf of her constituents and is going to be such a loss to this House. She indicates in that question why she will be. Of course, I cannot comment on the specific circumstances relating to her constituent, because of the independent trial process. The Criminal Justice Bill contains Home Office measures, but I will ensure that the Home Secretary is aware of the points she has raised.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
The number of cases disposed of by our courts is down by 200,000 from its pre-pandemic level—a reduction of 12%. What is the Secretary of State doing to eliminate that backlog? What impact does he think there will be on prison numbers in the event that he is successful?
Alex Chalk
That is a fair question. It is always worth remembering that more than 90% of cases are disposed of in the magistrates court, where we are getting through a very significant number. He makes a fair point about the Crown court, because we are prosecuting 32% more rape offences than before, so the plea rate is lower, because—guess what?—people do not plead guilty to rape in the way that they might plead guilty to handling stolen goods, for example. So we address that by putting additional money into the system, with £141 million going into legal aid, and by ensuring that section 28 is used, with pre-recorded video evidence and so on. We make no apology for the fact that we have to let the system take its course on these appalling crimes and we will do everything we can to increase resources so that people—victims and witnesses—get the justice they deserve.
Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)
I very much support the carefully considered moves announced today by my right hon. and learned Friend, which reflect the reality of the pressures on our prison estate and on our excellent prison officers, following the extraordinary impact of covid. I especially welcome the additional steps he has announced to remove more foreign national offenders. He spoke of a reset in probation, so will he set out in a little more detail how he hopes it will reduce reoffending and so cut crime? What we all want to see, of course, is fewer victims of crime.
Alex Chalk
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point. Probation is critical and I have made a point since coming into this role of speaking not only to senior probation officers, important though they are, but to probation officers on the frontline. That has been an incredibly instructive experience. One I spoke to in Luton and Dunstable told me that the measures we have taken to roll out 12 weeks’ guaranteed accommodation were the most significant steps that any Government had taken in the 30 years he had been a probation officer. The reset I referred to will follow evidence, not emotion. In other words, it will allow probation officers to calibrate and prioritise their resource to those parts of the licence period where reoffending is most likely to take place. That is common sense and it follows the evidence. Ultimately, measures such as that are why reoffending has gone down from 31% to 25%, thus saving a number of people from being victims of crime in the first place.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the Minister for a comprehensive response, as always; he is certainly across his subject. It is great that action has been taken to ease prisoner overcrowding. An element of concern must, however, be expressed at the thought of criminals being released early, even though their crimes are being deemed “low level”. What procedure will be followed to ensure that those being considered for early release pose absolutely no threat to the public? What is the Minister’s plan should one reoffend upon release?
Alex Chalk
I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising that matter because it is important that we in this House, no matter where we sit, ensure that a clear and accurate message goes to the public. The people who are out will be out on conditions. If a condition is breached—this is not necessarily about committing an offence—not only will they be recalled for the period of the end of custody supervised licence, but they could be recalled for the entire balance of their sentence. That is an important point to understand. We could be talking about a contact condition, a residence condition, a co-operate with probation condition or a “not to go to Strangford town centre” condition. These things are important conditions to ensure that the public are protected and society is kept safe.
James Sunderland (Bracknell) (Con)
I welcome today’s statement on foreign national offenders, but this is ultimately about law-abiding British people. Does the Justice Secretary agree that we should instantaneously remove any right to remain at the end of their sentences for those who abuse our hospitality by committing the most serious crimes?
Alex Chalk
My hon. Friend is absolutely right about this; people who come to our country and enjoy its hospitality should expect short shrift if they repay that with crime, because that is an offence against not just the individual, but our entire community. That is why we are taking robust action to deport foreign national offenders. I am afraid to say that this is action not shared by the Opposition; in 2020, a letter was sent to the then Prime Minister urging him not to allow a planeload of foreign national offenders to take off. Who signed it? It was the shadow Secretary of State.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
Is the Lord Chancellor alive to a principal concern and source of frustration among Crown court judges: the frequent delisting of cases at short notice, with all the consequences that then follow for delay and increasing numbers of prisoners on remand, occasioned by a growing shortage of criminal barristers? That, in turn, will lead to a reduction in both the quantity and quality of future judges.
Alex Chalk
I am so grateful to my right hon. Friend for raising that issue, because ensuring that there is a vibrant profession is crucial, not only in order for the machine of justice to continue, but to provide the pipeline to which he referred. As for the specific issue of listing or delisting, as he referred to it, that is a judicial discretion—it is a matter for the judges. However, he is right about wanting to ensure that there is a pipeline, which is why we are investing more than £140 million into legal aid, so that instead of talented young professionals thinking, “I am off to the private sector to earn a fortune at the chancery Bar,” they will be there at the legal aid Bar, following in the footsteps of my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), the Chair of the Justice Committee, prosecuting and defending criminals so that we can ensure that justice is served in our country.
Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)
Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that under the new scheme victims will see justice prevail, while foreign national offenders will efficiently be processed to leave the country? That contrasts with what happened under the previous Labour Government, who had people who had already served their sentence languishing in prison beyond their sentence while the deportation court caught up with the process.
Alex Chalk
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is a matter of basic justice. The British people expect that those who offend against our country, as well as against victims of crime, should receive short shrift. That is why we are absolutely clear that if violent thugs who rape, murder, steal and rob are in our country from overseas, we will put them on a plane and get them out.
Bills Presented
Bereavement Support (Children and Young People)
Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)
Christine Jardine, supported by Wendy Chamberlain, Mrs Flick Drummond, Mr Tobias Ellwood, Richard Foord, Tim Loughton, Rachael Maskell, Jim Shannon and Munira Wilson, presented a Bill to require specified organisations and public bodies to inform children and young people of local, national and online support services available to them following a bereavement; and for connected purposes.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 26 April, and to be printed (Bill 176).
Personal Protective Equipment at Work (Protected Characteristics)
Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)
Emma Hardy presented a Bill to require employers to ensure that personal protective equipment provided at work to people with certain protected characteristics within the meaning of the Equality Act 2010 is suitable for the wearer; and for connected purposes.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 7 June, and to be printed (Bill 177).
Foreign National Offenders, Prisons and Probation
Alex Chalk Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
Our plan to cut crime and keep the public safe is working. Violent and neighbourhood crime have reduced by over 50% since 2010, and the reoffending rate is down from 31% to 25%. We are locking up more criminals for longer: over the past decade, the average time offenders spend behind bars increased by more than 40% and rapists now go to prison for nearly three years longer, on average, than in 2010. We have already ended Labour’s automatic halfway release for serious sexual and violent offenders so they will serve two-thirds of their sentence behind bars. We are currently legislating so that rapists serve the full custodial part of their sentence behind bars and to ensure that life means life for the most horrific murderers.
We will always ensure we have sufficient prison capacity to lock up the most serious and dangerous offenders. We are on track to deliver 10,000 new prison places by the end of 2025 and have a long-term commitment to build 20,000 new prison places overall—the largest prison building programme since the Victorian era. In addition, we are doubling up cells where it is safe to do so.
We need to go further to ensure we can continue locking up serious and violent offenders for longer. The number of foreign national offenders (FNOs) has increased over recent years and now makes up over 10,000 prisoners in England and Wales—about 12%—at an average cost to the taxpayer of £50,000 per year, reducing the capacity of the prison system. These are people who should be removed back to their own countries of origin wherever possible. We have made progress: last year the Government returned nearly 4,000 FNOs from prison and the community, a 27% increase compared to the year before.
In January, the Government extended the early removal scheme from a maximum period of 12 months to 18 months, so eligible FNOs can be deported up to six months earlier. Almost 400 FNOs have already been removed from the UK via this scheme since January—a 61% increase compared to the equivalent period a year earlier. We have also signed a robust new agreement with Albania which has restarted transfers of Albanian FNOs, and we are legislating in the Criminal Justice Bill to enable prisoners to be transferred and held in rented prisons overseas, as several EU countries have done.
We must now build on this progress by ensuring that even more FNOs are removed from the country as quickly as possible and spurious barriers to removal are quickly dismissed, so we will:
Radically change the way we process FNO cases—we have created a new taskforce across the HO and MoJ—including the prison service, immigration enforcement and asylum and modern slavery teams, surging 400 additional caseworkers to prioritise these cases who will all be in place by the end of March and streamlining the end-to-end removal process.
Expedite prisoner transfers with our priority countries such as Albania and conclude new transfer agreements with partner countries such as Italy.
Be fully prepared to make use of the powers provided under the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 to restrict visas for any country where no progress on foreign national offender removals can be made.
Amend our existing deportation policy to enable foreign national offenders given suspended sentences of six months or more to be considered for deportation under the Immigration Act 1971 on the ground it is conducive to the public good, enabling us to remove more foreign national offenders from the country.
Bring forward an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill to extend foreign national conditional cautions to foreign national offenders with limited leave. Currently, this type of caution can only be given to foreign national offenders who do not have leave to enter or leave to remain in the UK, enabling us to remove more foreign national offenders from the country.
This will allow us to return almost double the number of FNOs directly from prison in 2024, compared to 1,800 last year, and make more returns of FNOs from prison than in any year since 2010, saving the taxpayer millions of pounds and keeping our streets safe.
We must also address the unsustainable growth in the remand population since the pandemic and Criminal Bar Association action. Since 2019, the remand population has increased by over 6,000 to more than 16,000 today, in part because we made the right decision for public protection and did not release tens of thousands of prisoners at the start of the pandemic, as many other countries did. We also made the right decision for access to justice and refused calls to scrap trial by jury. This has placed additional pressure on the prison estate and on the criminal justice system as a whole. The Lady Chief Justice has confirmed that if bail applications are made to the magistrates’ court or renewed before the Crown court, the courts remain ready to hear them within the short time limits provided for in the criminal procedure rules. We are also exploring at pace with the senior judiciary the roll-out of a remote nationwide pilot Crown court capable of hearing new bail applications. The pilot would monitor whether these additional measures result in an increase in the use of tagging and appropriate support packages in bail applications.
In order to support this, the Government will invest £53 million additional funding to expand the Bail Information Service, part of the productivity package the Chancellor announced at the Budget. This will enable our court system to be more efficient by increasing the court-based staff and digital systems that can provide critical information to the judiciary, making the bail process more efficient. To support this work, a further £22 million of additional funding will be available in 2024-25 to fund community accommodation.
We will also increase awareness about the availability of tags, especially high tech GPS and alcohol monitoring tags, to ensure that offenders can be monitored in the community.
We will also extend the existing end-of-custody supervised licence measure to around 35 to 60 days. We will enable this to happen for a time-limited period, and work with the police, prisons and probation leaders to make further adjustments as required. This will only be for certain low-level offenders. Where necessary, electronic monitoring will be applied, enhancing public protection. Ministers will continue to keep the use of this measure under review.
These measures all rely on a probation service that can focus its attention on the most critical points of the justice system, especially when an offender is first released from prison. In 2021 the Government created the unified probation service, which brought together all of probation into a single national organisation. We have invested £155 million of extra funding each year in the service and onboarded over 4,000 trainee probation officers since then. That is why we will be taking steps to refocus probation practice on the points that matter most to public protection and reducing offending.
From April, we will reset probation so that practitioners prioritise early engagement at the point where offenders are most likely to breach their licence conditions, allowing frontline staff to maximise supervision of the most serious offenders. Similarly, for those managed on community orders and suspended sentence orders, probation practitioners will ensure intervention and engagement is prioritised towards the first two-thirds of the sentence, as experience shows that this most effectively rehabilitates offenders.
We express our deep gratitude for the efforts of all those working in the criminal justice system: prisons, probation and courts staff, the police, prosecutors and lawyers, and the judiciary. They deserve credit for their enormous commitment and professionalism in their vital work to keep the country safe.
[HCWS332]
Access to Justice
Alex Chalk Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
The Government are announcing today that we will introduce legislation in this parliamentary Session that will address the impacts of the UK Supreme Court judgment in PACCAR, which concerned a claim against truck manufacturers regarding anti-competitive behaviour.
Third-party litigation funding enables people to get funding to bring big and complex claims against bigger, better-resourced corporations, which they could not otherwise afford.
The Supreme Court judgment in July 2023 rendered third-party litigation funding agreements unenforceable. Uncertainty around litigation funding risks a detrimental impact on the attractiveness of the England and Wales jurisdiction as a global hub for commercial litigation and arbitration, and on access to justice more broadly.
This Bill will enhance access to justice and the attractiveness of a thriving UK legal sector, which contributes over £34 billion per annum to the UK economy.
The Post Office Horizon scandal has also underlined the importance of third-party litigation funding, as the postmasters’ claim was only possible due to the backing of a litigation funder. This highlights a clear access to justice deficit which, without legislation to mitigate the impacts of the judgment in full, would continue indefinitely.
The new legislation, which will apply to all proceedings, will remove this risk and allow the Government to deliver a return to a funding regime which promotes access to justice, as well as enhancing the competitiveness of the jurisdiction.
[HCWS306]
Oral Answers to Questions
Alex Chalk Excerpts(2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Simon Fell (Barrow and Furness) (Con)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
Since 2010, crime has fallen and so has reoffending, with the overall proven rate of reoffending down from over 31% in 2011-12 to 25% in 2021-22. That means that fewer innocent members of the public are suffering from the misery of falling victim to crime. We have gone further, building up initiatives including a new prison education service, expanded access to incentivised substance-free living wings for drug recovery, and the groundbreaking guarantee of 12 weeks’ post-release accommodation to secure that essential period of stability for offenders to turn their lives around.
Rachael Maskell
With the reoffending rate at over 25%, rising to nearly 50% for burglary, reoffending is costing the country £18 billion a year and the service is failing to keep us safe. If just a small fraction of that cost were invested in probation staff to address the problems caused by 50,000 days lost through sickness and 2,000 people leaving each year, it could be transformative. Will the Justice Secretary back Operation Protect, the campaign spearheaded by the justice unions, and ensure that there is a comprehensive workforce plan to recruit, retain and return the staff needed to prevent reoffending?
Alex Chalk
The hon. Lady is right. We want to drive the offending rate down, and it is good news that it is down from about 31% in 2010 to 25% now, but we do believe in investing in probation. That is why the baseline is up by £155 million, and it is why we have added 4,000 trainees since 2020. Since the reunification of probation services, the number has risen by 17%. Probation officers keep society safe, and we will back them all the way.
Paul Howell
I recently raised the issue of social media use in prison, allegedly by one of those responsible for the murder of Jack Woodley, the son of my constituent Zoey McGill. We have a local campaign against knife crime, and at the latest working group meeting we discussed deterrents. Zoey would like to understand what consequences were suffered by this individual for the posts that he sent, but also why he should be wearing a designer T-shirt and apparently leading a cushy life. Prison needs to be seen as a deterrent, but if inmates are having it easy with designer wear and no consequences, how is that a deterrent? May I ask the Secretary of State what is being done to address this, and to make prison the deterrent that it should be?
Alex Chalk
I know that the whole House will want to send its deepest sympathies to Zoey McGill following the shocking murder of her son in 2021. It was a dreadful crime, of which 10 men were convicted and for which they received life sentences. The use of social media in prisons is not acceptable, and this content was removed from the social media platform. We have been investing £100 million in prison security and new technology, including X-ray scanners to tackle the smuggling of contraband mobile phones. Those who are caught can face loss of privileges, more time in custody, and even a referral to the police and the Crown Prosecution Service for consideration of further charges.
Simon Fell
Last year I was grateful for the Government’s support for my private Member’s Bill to limit Friday releases for vulnerable prisoners. It is an important measure and is now an Act, but it is only one of the measures that we should be taking to reduce reoffending and help people get back on their feet when they leave prison. The excellent charity Switchback has suggested that, at the very minimum, people should be leaving prison with access to ID and an internet-enabled mobile phone just to get their lives in order so that they can access universal credit and other services. What consideration has my right hon. and learned Friend given to those suggestions?
Alex Chalk
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his excellent work in successfully championing the limit on Friday prison releases. The changes for which he called came into force last November and are exceptionally helpful, and he deserves great credit for that. He is also right to point to the brilliant work of Switchback, which has supported our resettlement work. That work includes the roll-out of 12 weeks’ guaranteed accommodation and the introduction of resettlement passports, which contain precisely the basic information to which my hon. Friend referred, such as a prisoner’s name, date of birth, national insurance number and release date. They help prisoners to access essential services such as housing and healthcare, and contribute to the driving down of reoffending, which, as was recognised by the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), is significantly lower than it was in 2010.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
The wife of a remand prisoner at Wormwood Scrubs wrote to me recently to say that the prison is so cold that prisoners are shaking, that they have to choose between work, social time and showering, and that the food is lacking in basic nutrition. I can explore these matters with the Prisons Minister in a couple of weeks’ time during our joint visit to the Scrubs, but does the Secretary of State agree that such conditions are not conducive to rehabilitation?
Alex Chalk
This is an important point. We do deprive people of liberty and sometimes we have to do so in the case of those on remand, but the conditions must be safe, decent and humane—austere, yes, but humane as well. I commend the hon. Gentleman for going to see the Scrubs with the Prisons Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), and I shall be very interested to hear his views thereafter.
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
We need to tackle the revolving door of reoffending in our justice system, yet the reoffending rate, as a proportion of those leaving prison, continues to rise. Whatever the Secretary of State may say, I have heard time and again that the lack of secure housing, adequate and appropriate healthcare, education, job training and job support means that prisoners are being left to fail after they are released. It is the victims of crime who suffer when ex-prisoners reoffend. Can the Secretary of State announce when the Government expect the reoffending rate to go down?
Alex Chalk
It is important to note that reoffending is down compared with under the last Labour Government. The hon. Lady shakes her head, but one can dispute opinions in this House, but not facts. The reoffending rate in 2010 was around 31%; it is 25% now. That means fewer people falling victim to crime.
The hon. Lady refers to accommodation, and she is right to do so. What she did not advert to is this Government’s decision to provide 12 weeks’ guaranteed accommodation, which did not happen under a Labour Government. When I went to Luton and Dunstable, I spoke to a probation officer who has done the job for 30 years, and do you know what he said? It is the single most effective measure to drive down reoffending. Who did that? Not the Labour party, but us.
Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
In his excellent report, “The patronising disposition of unaccountable power”, Bishop James Jones called for the creation of the Hillsborough charter for bereaved families, as well as for the imposition of a duty of candour on police officers. We agree wholeheartedly, which is why the Government have signed the charter alongside the Crown Prosecution Service, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and others, and imposed a duty of candour on the police. We are also legislating to create a strong, permanent and independent public advocate to speak up for victims and their families, and to rigorously hold signatories to the charter to account. We stand ready to discuss what further steps may be necessary.
Richard Burgon
The parents of Zane Gbangbola are in the Public Gallery today. Zane was just seven when he died, following floods 10 years ago this month. The fire brigade detected hydrogen cyanide multiple times. His parents, Kye and Nicole, have been fighting for the truth about their son’s death ever since, and a duty of candour would have helped them to get it. In lieu of that, will the Government establish an independent panel inquiry with full disclosure, so that all the evidence can be reviewed by experts, we can finally get the truth about what happened to an innocent seven-year-old boy, and justice can be done?
Alex Chalk
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising this deeply upsetting case, and I know the whole House will be thinking of Kye and Nicole as they continue to mourn the loss of Zane. The hon. Gentleman raises a critically important case. May I suggest that he and I discuss it and see what further steps can properly be taken in this difficult case?
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
I welcome the meeting that the Secretary of State has just offered.
The problem with the Government’s response is that it ought to be centred on the experiences of families, not on the convenience of state bureaucracy, in order to ensure that they are never repeated. There is nothing in what we have seen so far from the Government that goes as far as we and, more importantly, the families believe is necessary to require public authorities to act with candour and transparency. Why is the Secretary of State persisting with a piecemeal approach, instead of committing to a clear, compelling and comprehensive duty of candour, as proposed in the Hillsborough law?
Alex Chalk
As I say, the recommendations of Bishop James Jones’s report, which we have considered extremely carefully, contained the charter for bereaved families, and it is worth reflecting on what paragraph 3 of the report says. It requires the public body to
“approach forms of public scrutiny—including public inquiries and inquests—with candour, in an open, honest and transparent way, making full disclosure of relevant documents, material and facts.”
Taken together with the powers that exist under the Inquiries Act 2005, there is potentially criminal culpability, misconduct in a public office and perverting the course of justice, but of course we will keep this under review. We want to make sure that public bodies do what they should—that is, act transparently—and we will always consider what further steps can be taken.
Marco Longhi (Dudley North) (Con)
Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
In September 2020, a public inquiry was set up into the failings associated with the Post Office Horizon IT system and it is expected to report back later this year. In addition, over £160 million has already been paid out in compensation across three schemes.
However, in its December 2023 letter, the independent Horizon compensation advisory board expressed concern that the pace of exonerations was too slow, not least because evidence had been lost and many were simply too traumatised to come forward. That is why the Prime Minister has decided to bring forward legislation to quash the relevant convictions, and the Department for Business and Trade will be announcing details shortly. These wholly exceptional circumstances have led to this wholly exceptional course.
Marco Longhi
While I welcome the Government’s commitment to quash the wrongful convictions of sub-postmasters caught up in the Horizon scandal, I also recognise that this is a complex area of law that could even raise constitutional issues. Given that some sub-postmasters have been suffering for an extremely long time, does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that any legislation should deal with these issues swiftly and avoid any further delays?
Alex Chalk
I thank my hon. Friend for the careful and thoughtful way in which he addresses this significant issue. The judiciary and courts have dealt swiftly with the cases before them, but the scale and circumstances of the prosecution failure mean that this demands an unprecedented response, and that is why the Prime Minister announced this major step forward in response to the Horizon scandal. We are keen to ensure that the legislation achieves its goal of bringing prompt justice to all those who were wrongfully convicted, followed by rapid financial redress. It is not right that wholly innocent people could potentially go to their graves with the mark and stigma of a conviction hanging over them.
Gavin Newlands
Every day we hear further revelations about the Post Office, and today’s shocking—well, it should be shocking—BBC story states that the 2016 Swift review noted that the Post Office had always known about the balancing transaction capability of Horizon and that the Government knew in 2016 that a Deloitte investigation into all Horizon transactions was under way and that this investigation was suddenly halted after sub-postmasters began legal action. Will the Secretary of State confirm whether the Ministry of Justice was aware of this, and does he believe that that apparent non-disclosure to the inquiry is a threat to judicial freedom and independence?
Alex Chalk
In 2020—coming up to four years ago now—an independent inquiry was set up under Mr Justice Wyn Williams. That is expected to report later this year, and it will go into properly exhaustive details about who knew what and when. We are absolutely clear that there has been an egregious failure of prosecution conduct—frankly, one that brings shame on those involved—and it is absolutely right that that inquiry should get to the bottom of what took place and who knew what and when.
Kirsten Oswald
The current chief executive of the Post Office said in evidence to the Business and Trade Committee last month that, despite various audits and investigations, we still do not know the full scope of the money overclaimed through Horizon, or where it went. Even the auditors are unable to give a firm figure. Postmasters such as my constituent Roger have suffered incredible stress and worry as well as significant financial loss, but the prospect of getting to the truth on these figures still seems far off.
Will the Secretary of State commit to working with the Secretary of State for Business and Trade and set out a timetable for updating the House on how much the Post Office took and what it did with the money, so that constituents like mine can start to get the answers and the justice that they deserve?
Alex Chalk
My heart goes out to Roger and people like him. I have constituents who are affected, as I am sure everyone in this House does. We are a fair-minded nation, which is why it strikes us to the core. The hon. Lady asks me to liaise with the Department for Business and Trade. Of course the MOJ will do everything it properly can, but DBT is leading on this. It is also worth reflecting that £160 million has already been paid out across the three schemes, and there is a very important, swift and robust approach of paying £600,000 to those who have their convictions quashed. That is the right approach. It is exceptional, but these are exceptional circumstances.
Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
My right hon. and learned Friend will know that, only last week, the Court of Appeal criminal division, presided over by the Lady Chief Justice, quashed in bulk a number of Horizon appeals, on the basis of a half-hour hearing. When the cases get to court, the courts can deal with them swiftly.
Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that in framing any legislation, because of the constitutional implications, it is important that we bear in mind that the failures are the failure of a prosecutor to do their duty, or perhaps the failure of the state to come to the aid of victims, but they are not the failure of the courts, which always acted entirely properly on the material put before them by the parties at the time? It was a failure of the parties, not of the courts.
Alex Chalk
As always, my hon. Friend gets to the heart of it. This was a failure of the Post Office, which is an emanation of the state, and it is the duty of the state to put it right. The courts have approached this entirely properly. The Post Office failed to discharge the solemn obligations on any prosecutor to act fairly and to comply with their obligations under section 3 of the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 to disclose material that might reasonably be considered capable of undermining the case of the prosecution, or of assisting the case of the defence. When I was prosecuting, the first rule was that we did not seek a conviction at all costs, which is an important principle that the Post Office failed to appreciate.
Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
Whistleblowers have come forward to provide information that Fujitsu was given an additional contract by the Post Office in 2013 to re-platform transaction data that was previously held on an external storage system that was considered to be the gold standard. It was replaced by a system that made it virtually impossible to investigate financial transactions in a forensic audit. Does the Justice Secretary share our concern that this decision effectively destroyed evidence, preventing exactly the sort of audit trail that would exonerate those sub-postmasters who were convicted?
Alex Chalk
The Department for Business and Trade is better placed to answer those specific points, but I would say two things. First, as a matter of sacred principle, if material comes into a prosecutor’s possession that might be considered capable of undermining the case of the prosecution, that material should be disclosed to the defence. That is one of the things that has been considered by Sir Wyn Williams’s inquiry. What did the Post Office know, when did it know it, and what did it do with the material before it? Across the House, we want to get to the bottom of those questions.
Alistair Strathern (Mid Bedfordshire) (Lab)
Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
Since 2010, we have ramped up support for victims in three main ways. First, we have driven down reoffending from around 31% to 25%, so that fewer people suffer the misery of becoming a victim of crime in the first place. Secondly, we have created new offences such as stalking, coercive and controlling behaviour, revenge pornography, upskirting and non-fatal strangulation, so that those who betray trust and shatter lives can be held to account. Thirdly, we have quadrupled victim funding, enabling massive investment in resources such as independent domestic violence advisers, which are up from barely existing in 2010 to more than 900 today, and we will go further with the groundbreaking Victims and Prisoners Bill as well.
Caroline Ansell
I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for all the sterling work that he has just outlined, which is making such a huge difference to victims everywhere. I wish to talk about a case that was raised with me at an advice surgery. After seeing an advert on the tube, my constituent—a man of very good standing—invested in what turned out to be a fraudulent company to the tune of £93,000. He was clearly a victim of crime and, mercifully, his bank reimbursed his life savings after some challenge. He did get financial restitution, but the whole experience had wider, devastating impacts. Those behind the company were registered in Serbia and, to the best of our knowledge, have never been brought to justice. As my constituent did not go through the full criminal justice system, may I ask how victims such as he can be supported in cases like this?
Alex Chalk
I thank my hon. Friend for raising her constituent’s case. Fraud is a pernicious, cruel crime and it can have an appalling impact, as I know from my own experience of prosecuting for the Serious Fraud Office. To support victims in recovering lost funds, the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 gives the Payment Systems Regulator further power to mandate reimbursement where needed, and I am glad that that took place in this case. But to bring wrongdoers to justice, prosecutors, including the CPS, the Financial Conduct Authority and the SFO, regularly co-operate with their international counterparts to make arrests and secure evidence overseas so that, in appropriate cases, defendants can be extradited to face trial in the UK. The other critical point is that the victims code has been expanded, so that people such as her constituent can get the support they need. I would invite him, perhaps through the hon. Lady’s good offices, to look at the support that is available online.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Is the Secretary of State aware of a new crime that is spreading throughout the north of England, including in your constituency, Mr Speaker, and in mine? A group is preying on people who have cavity wall insulation. Those people get themselves into the legal process and find the expenses are so high that they have to sell their home. It is an epidemic. It is also rather like the Post Office scandal. This is an early warning of a major scandal. Will the Secretary of State agree to look into this matter as it is very important, especially in the north of England?
Alex Chalk
I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising that matter on the Floor of the House. He will understand—I know that he well appreciates this—that it is not for the Secretary of State to be ordering investigations, but, plainly, the matters he raised are serious. I invite the police and prosecutors to take all appropriate steps to investigate it if that is what is required.
Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab)
Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
Since the last Justice questions, I have met with the families of those killed by Valdo Calocane: Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates. They deserve answers, and a series of reviews are taking place, including by the Attorney General, on referring the sentence in that case to the Court of Appeal.
We have announced an early legal advice pilot to help families agree child arrangements quickly. I have visited Leeds to see how £6 million is being spent to roll out state-of-the-art courtrooms as part of our £220 million investment in the court estate. I have travelled to the USA to meet my counterparts to discuss how Russia can be held financially and legally to account, and I was fitted with a GPS tag to experience for myself how effective modern technology is in holding offenders and Justice Secretaries to account—a constant physical reminder that debts to society must be repaid, court orders must be observed, and transgressors face the very real risk of the clang of a prison gate. [Hon. Members: “Do you have it on now?”] No, I do not.
Steve Double
As my right hon. and learned Friend just mentioned, he spent a day wearing a GPS tag, along with Jack Elsom from The Sun. Could he outline what he learned from that experience, and say whether he thinks GPS tags are a robust and effective means of monitoring and punishing low-level offenders? Will he reveal to the House who else from the Lobby is on his list to be tagged?
Alex Chalk
I thank my hon. Friend for his question. There is a serious point here: our modern GPS tags act as a constant physical reminder that debts to society must be repaid and that breach of a court order will be detected, so that a person who steps over the line, literally or metaphorically, and enters an area from which he is barred knows that he is liable to be returned to court and sent to prison. We could put the entire Lobby on alcohol tags, but I think that would deal a fatal blow to the UK drinks industry.
Alex Chalk
I have visited Cookham Wood. I cannot remember the precise date, but the really important statistic to note is that in the period up to the end of September last year, we recruited an additional 1,400 prison officers. The numbers are going up, and the attrition rate is going down. [Interruption.] Hold on. That is because we have introduced measures such as the new colleague mentor scheme, rolled out £100 million on security and so on. We recognise that the safety of our prisons is in large measure down to the quality and quantity of our staff, and we are improving on both counts.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
Mr Speaker
Order. Sir Edward, you should know better. This is topicals. You are a member of the Panel of Chairs as well; you are meant to set an example, not abuse your position.
Alex Chalk
I do not have the advantage of having listened to Lord Hoffmann, but we do not think that the Strasbourg Court will need to intervene, given that our domestic courts will have carefully assessed whether anyone we intend to remove to Rwanda would suffer serious and irreversible harm.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
Alex Chalk
Data on foreign national offenders is collected at the point when an individual becomes an offender—in other words, at the point of conviction—but in addition, the Ministry of Justice records the numbers in custody awaiting trial who are FNOs, and that stands at approximately 3,300. On driving the figures down, the Home Office is working to increase take-up of conditional cautions, which lead to FNOs being expelled from the UK, in place of prosecution, in appropriate cases.
Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab)
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
Under the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, there is a solemn duty on prison governors to prepare ex-offenders for life outside prison. Seven years on from the introduction of that duty, they are still not doing what they are required to do. We want reoffending ended, and if people are prepared properly for when they leave prison, we increase the chances of preventing reoffending. What action is my right hon. and learned Friend taking on this?
Alex Chalk
My hon. Friend has done spectacular work on this issue. His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service published a policy framework setting out the steps prisons and probation services must take to meet their duty to refer those at risk of homelessness. I was reading it this morning, and it contains template referral forms—and many other aids—that are to be filled out at prescribed points in the prisoner journey. Governors are now held to account, as my hon. Friend rightly indicates, for their record on preparing prisoners for life post release, which is why I am able to say that in 2022-23, some 86% of prisoners were accommodated on the first night of release. That is up from 80% in 2019.
Mr Speaker
I know that question was on the Order Paper to be taken before topicals, but if the Justice Secretary could shorten his answers to make sure everyone has time in topicals, that would help me and others.
Alberto Costa (South Leicestershire) (Con)
Last week, Colin Pitchfork, the double child rapist and murderer, successfully applied for a reconsideration of the Parole Board’s decision not to release him, on the grounds that the decision was irrational. I have issued a survey across my South Leicestershire constituency on Parole Board reform. Will the Secretary of State meet me urgently to discuss the Parole Board rules, as amended in 2019?
Alex Chalk
I certainly will meet my hon. Friend. He has been assiduous for many years in raising this matter on behalf of his constituents. The Parole Board does an exceptionally good job. There are two cases in which decisions appear to have been overturned because they were irrational, and that is why I am meeting the Parole Board tomorrow.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
The Justice Secretary mentioned the duty of candour that he imposed on the police. Has he considered legislating to introduce the same for all public bodies?
Alex Chalk
I can say that we want to extend that duty to healthcare settings, because we do not want health professionals closing ranks when something goes wrong. It is important to say that since Hillsborough there have been so many changes, including through the Inquiries Act 2005, which mean that there can be criminal liability for those who do not do what the hon. Gentleman and I must think is a matter of common sense, which is to tell the truth.
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
Wedding experts at Hitched say that independent celebrants are the biggest trend for couples getting married this year, and with the Church, registrars and humanists all providing additional options, it is about time that we updated the marriage laws, which are from 1836. Will the Government publish a substantive response to the Law Commission’s 2022 report on wedding reform?
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
What can I do to change the Secretary of State’s view on joint enterprise? Has he read Lord Finkelstein’s recent and very good article in The Times? Please can the Minister have an open mind and look at it again? There are more than 1,000 young men in prison on long sentences.
Alex Chalk
Joint enterprise is there to ensure that those who act as the burglary lookout, those who provide the weapon in a murder and those who drive the getaway vehicle do not escape the consequences of their crimes, which shatter lives. It is already the case, as in the case of Jogee, that the person must have helped or encouraged the commission of the offence and intended to do so. If the Labour party’s position is that such people should escape culpability, it should say so. Our advice on this side of the House is clear: do not commit crime.
Progress Report on the Implementation of the Rape Review Action Plan
Alex Chalk Excerpts(2 months ago)
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The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary (James Cleverly) and I have published on 14 February 2024 a progress report on the end-to-end rape review action plan—published June 2021. This is the fifth progress report on implementation and demonstrates the Government’s ongoing commitment to transparency on our progress in delivering the ambitions of the rape review.
The report details the improvements we made over the last six months, including:
Implemented the national rollout of Operation Soteria across all 43 forces in England and Wales, the highly effective police investigation model pioneered by the Avon and Somerset Police where investigations focus on the behaviour of the alleged perpetrator, not the victim.
Supported police and prosecutors as they implement this new approach, including by establishing a Joint Home Office, College of Policing and National Police Chief's Council Soteria Unit.
Ensured that police officers have the right skills and knowledge to respond effectively to these offences. We have commenced specialist training for 2,000 investigators in rape and serious sexual offences, and are on track to complete these by April 2024 with appropriate specialism in all 43 forces.
Introducing legislation to strengthen support for victims and build victim trust in the system, including ensuring police requests for third party material are necessary and proportionate, and introducing statutory guidance to embed vital roles like Independent Sexual Violence and Domestic Violence Advisors (ISVAs and IDVAs) through our Victims and Prisoners Bill.
Further improving the victim experience at the Crown Court through our specialist sexual violence support project, introducing additional measures to make sure that victims feel informed and comfortable, and are treated sensitively, through best practice in communication, trauma informed training for court staff and additional facilities.
Introducing the Sentencing Bill, which will ensure that convicted rapists spend the entirety of their custodial sentence in jail, with no possibility of early release. This builds on the Conservative Government’s strong track record of tough sentencing for rape. We previously raised the release point to two thirds of the custodial term after the previous Labour Government lowered it to the halfway point in 2003.
We are now exceeding all three of our initial ambitions to return volumes of cases being referred to the police, charged by the CPS and received in court to at least 2016 levels by the end of this Parliament. In practice, this means we have more than doubled the numbers of these metrics from the levels at which they stood when the end-to-end rape review was commissioned in 2019. The volumes of adult rape cases reaching court have continued to increase quarter on quarter, with the latest data—July-September 2023—showing that:
Adult rape cases referred by the police to the CPS—for either early advice or a charging decision—continue to increase. There were 1,470 police referrals in this period, which exceeds our ambition of 766 by 91% and is up by 219% from the quarterly average in 2019, when the rape review was commissioned.
Adult rape cases charged by the CPS stand at 668, exceeding our ambition of 538 by 24% and up by 174% from the quarterly average in 2019.
The number of adult rape Crown Court receipts has increased to 665, exceeding our ambition of 553 by 20% and up by 188% from the quarterly average in 2019.
The number of people prosecuted for an adult rape offence went up by 54% in the latest year of data—12 months to June—rising from 1,410 to 2,165. This is more than double the number recorded in 2019. Adult rape prosecutions are also up by 32% compared to 2010—2,165 prosecutions in year ending June 2023, compared to 1,644 in 2010.
While strong progress has been made, we made clear in our last progress report that we recognise that this is only a start and there is much more to do. This is why we extended our action plan until December 2024.
Beyond our action plan we are committed to addressing the remaining challenges, particularly in regard to victim attrition and court timeliness. We need to ensure that victims remain engaged in the process and feel confident that they will be supported at every stage.
To assist us in driving improvements in the criminal justice system, we have recruited a new Independent Advisor to the rape review, Professor Katrin Hohl. Professor Hohl is an internationally recognised academic specialising in serious sexual offences and domestic abuse. She was the joint academic lead behind Operation Soteria and her work with victims and frontline services will be invaluable in unlocking the most challenging issues that remain.
The action set out in this publication forms part of the Government’s ambition to improve the experience and ensure justice for victims.
[HCWS259]
Tribunal Capacity
Alex Chalk Excerpts(3 months, 1 week ago)
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The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
The Illegal Migration Act 2023, once commenced, will provide for accelerated claims and appeal timescales for individuals subject to the “duty to remove” provisions of the Act when making suspensive claims relating to the narrow grounds of serious harm and removals conditions. The Act provides that these appeals are to be heard in the upper tribunal—Immigration and Asylum Chamber—rather than the first-tier tribunal.
The Act sets out that, once issued with a third-country removal notice, individuals will have eight days to make a claim to the Secretary of State for the Home Department. Having received a claim, the Secretary of State will have four days to consider the claim and decide whether it should succeed, and if not, whether to certify it as clearly unfounded.
Where a claim is certified as unfounded, there is no automatic right of appeal. The individual can be removed unless they apply to the Upper Tribunal for permission to appeal within seven working days from being given notice of the certification. These applications will normally be dealt with on the papers, noting that this is a judicial decision. The upper tribunal must decide whether to allow the appeal to proceed and notify the parties within seven working days from when the application is made—there is no right of appeal against the tribunal’s decision. The upper tribunal may not extend either of these timeframes, unless it is satisfied that it is the only way to secure that justice is done in a particular case.
Where the Secretary of State for the Home Department rejects the initial claim but does not certify it as clearly unfounded, or where the upper tribunal gives permission to appeal, the individual has seven working days from when they are notified of the Secretary of State’s decision, or from when they are given permission to appeal, to give notice of appeal to the upper tribunal. The upper tribunal must make their decision and give notice of that decision to the parties within 23 working days from the day the appeal was lodged. Again, the upper tribunal may extend either of these timeframes only if it is satisfied that it is the only way to secure that justice is done in a particular case.
The Ministry of Justice has been working to increase capacity in the justice system in preparation for the commencement of the Act. Additional hearing rooms have been prepared, making a total of 25 hearing rooms available within the existing Immigration and Asylum Chamber estate in London. These rooms are set up with remote hearing technology, allowing for either in-person or remote hearings in order to maximise flexibility. Over 100 additional staff have been recruited to support the upper tribunal’s work and are currently undertaking training ready for the commencement of the Act.
The Illegal Migration Act provides for first-tier tribunal judges to be deployed to sit in the upper tribunal to hear Illegal Migration Act appeals. The judiciary has identified relevant judges, which could provide over 5,000 additional sitting days. The decision on whether to deploy additional judges temporarily to the upper tribunal, including when they sit and the courtrooms they use, is for the independent judiciary and will be taken by the relevant leadership judges at the time and in the interests of justice. In addition, I have asked the Judicial Appointments Commission to recruit more judges to the first-tier tribunal and the upper tribunal. The recruitment will conclude in the next few months and new judges will be appointed, trained and start sitting from this summer.
We are confident that, with the additional courtroom and judicial capacity detailed above, in line with projected levels agreed with the Home Office, the vast majority of Illegal Migration Act appeal work will be dealt with by the courts in an expedited manner.
[HCWS188]
Oral Answers to Questions
Alex Chalk Excerpts(3 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
The reconsideration mechanism introduced in July 2019 is a vital tool for public protection, allowing Ministers to intervene in broad cases where there is concern that the decision to release is irrational or procedurally flawed, or where there has been an error of law. Since 2019, this Government have used the mechanism to have 17 release decisions retaken by the Parole Board. Nine of those resulted in the board reversing its original decision to direct release, including the recent case of Colin Pitchfork.
Dr Evans
The Treasurer of His Majesty’s Household, my right hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), and I have both raised concerns about the release of Edwin Hopkins, the schoolgirl killer of Naomi Smith. I know that the Secretary of State cannot retrospectively apply the law around parole, but will he assure my constituents and residents in neighbouring Nuneaton that the new laws in the Victims and Prisoners Bill going through Parliament at the moment put public safety at the heart of future Parole Board decisions?
Alex Chalk
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that extremely troubling case. The murder committed by Edwin Hopkins was a truly dreadful crime, and I understand the concern about the release of prisoners who have committed such heinous offences. The reforms in the Victims and Prisoners Bill do ensure that public safety is at the forefront of parole decisions, including by codifying the release test in law and introducing a new power to allow the Secretary of State to direct a second check on the release of some of the most serious offenders.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the Lord Chancellor for his response and his clear commitment to ensuring that victims are considered. As the Member of Parliament for Strangford, many people contact me about those getting early parole and decisions that are made. Will he reassure me and the House that victims will be considered and contacted before any person who has carried out an evil crime is actually released?
Alex Chalk
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. It is one thing being a victim of a crime in the first place but another not being kept updated on progress of the sentence of that individual, or indeed a parole decision. That is why we are absolutely committed through the victims code and other mechanisms to ensuring that victims are kept updated, including during the important parole process.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Elliot Colburn (Carshalton and Wallington) (Con)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
Supporting victims has broadly three elements. First, it means ensuring harmful behaviour is comprehensively criminalised. That is why we have legislated to create new offences of stalking, coercive and controlling behaviour, upskirting, revenge porn, non-fatal strangulation and cyberflashing. Secondly, it means ensuring that the punishment fits the crime, which is why the average sentence has increased by around 50% since 2010. Thirdly, it means supporting victims before, during and after the court process. That is why we are funding over 1,000 independent sexual violence advisers and independent domestic violence advisers by 2024-25, we have set up a 24/7 rape support helpline, and we are quadrupling funding for victims’ services in cash terms since 2010.
Julie Marson
Cuckooing is not a victimless crime. The victims whose homes are invaded are frequently extremely vulnerable. Will the Secretary of State consider a separate specific offence of cuckooing in the Criminal Justice Bill to ensure not just that the punishment fits the crime, but that the crime fits the crime?
Alex Chalk
My hon. Friend has been brilliant in raising this issue time and time again. At least in part because of the pressure she has put on, we held a stakeholder engagement exercise on this issue with the police, criminal justice system partners, local authorities, other Government Departments and so on. The exercise reveals that there are civil orders and criminal offences which are available to disrupt it. It might be, for example, that the underlying offence is the possession of drugs with intent to supply, the possession of firearms or common assault. However, this issue is worthy of further consideration, so I will invite a conversation with her in due course.
Dr Davies
Last week, I was contacted by a constituent who has been named in the local press as a victim of domestic abuse against their expressed wishes. As my right hon. and learned Friend will appreciate, naming has the potential to endanger their safety and harm their recovery. What more can be done to safeguard the confidentiality of victims of domestic abuse?
Alex Chalk
My hon. Friend raises an absolutely essential point, because giving evidence is a deeply traumatic experience. Powers in section 46 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 allow the court, on application, to make a decision about anonymity and to take account of the circumstances of the alleged offending, the alleged offender, the alleged victim, and so on. That is a matter for the court. The court has to weigh the circumstances of the case against the overarching interests of transparency. That is a matter on which the courts are well placed to decide.
Elliot Colburn
Carshalton and Wallington is supposed to be one of the safest parts of London, but it has been shocked by a number of knife and violent crime incidents recently, including a knife attack in Wallington Sainsbury’s on Christmas eve, which was traumatic not only for those involved but for those who witnessed it. Can my right hon. and learned Friend assure me that victims and witnesses of terrible crimes can get access to help and support while they wait for the police to build a case?
Alex Chalk
I thank my hon. Friend for drawing the attention of the House to that appalling incident. Yes, it is absolutely imperative that both victims and witnesses can access support in the aftermath of such shocking crimes. As I indicated, we are quadrupling funding for victims and witness support by 2024-25 on 2010 levels. This is important. Under the 2006 victims code that we inherited, support was available only for direct victims. We have changed that, so it is now available for witnesses who have suffered mental or emotional harm.
Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)
The Government left the role of Victims’ Commissioner unfilled for over a year and to this day have refused to place any duty on public bodies to co-operate with the postholder. Will the Government and the Secretary of State explain why they have not supported Labour’s proposals to give the role the same powers as the Domestic Abuse Commissioner has over public authorities such as the police?
Alex Chalk
The Victims’ Commissioner plays an important role and we are delighted that Baroness Newlove is taking it on again. She has an exemplary track record. The role sits within a wider approach that we are taking, which is to ensure, through the Victims and Prisoners Bill and through the revised victims code and so on, that victims go from being spectators of the criminal justice process to participants in it. I know the Victims’ Commissioner will help us on that journey.
Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)
What is being done to ensure that victims of crime, particularly violent crime, get the necessary mental health support they require, particularly where they can suffer ongoing mental health issues and trauma beyond the period of the crime itself?
Alex Chalk
The hon. Gentleman raises an absolutely essential point. As I indicated, we are quadrupling funding for victims’ services on 2010 levels. Part of that is directed through police and crime commissioners to procure and commission precisely the kind of support he has indicated. What I am also able to say is that in those tragic cases that result in a fatality, the Homicide Service is now better resourced to provide ongoing support. That may be physical support, but it may also, sadly, be the mental support that is desperately needed.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
The United Kingdom has a long-standing tradition of ensuring that rights and liberties are protected domestically and of fulfilling our international human rights obligations. We remain committed to a human rights framework that is up to date, fit for purpose and works for the British people. We have taken, and are taking, action to address specific issues with the Human Rights Act, including through the Illegal Migration Act 2023, the Victims and Prisoners Bill and the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021, which address the vexatious claims against veterans and the armed forces.
Stuart C. McDonald
The Rwanda Bill is the second piece of legislation that this Government have introduced that they cannot guarantee will comply with vital convention rights. Does that not illustrate the total inadequacy of UK human rights legislation? Any old Government—even a crumbling Tory Government—can rip up fundamental rights without constraint, doing over the Supreme Court in the process.
Alex Chalk
No, I reject that characterisation. The European convention on human rights, under article 13, provides a right to an effective remedy. We think there is a perfectly respectable argument that our legislation fulfils that. We are committed to human rights, and we think we have a route that safeguards those rights and delivers on the interests of the British people.
Steven Bonnar
The human rights campaign organisation Just Fair has said that a human rights Bill for Scotland would provide a blueprint for how the UK as a whole could enshrine social, economic and cultural rights in domestic law. I am certain that the Scottish Government would be happy to share their experience and expertise in this area, so will the Secretary of State commit to engaging with them, with a view to bringing forward equivalent UK legislation, following their example?
Alex Chalk
I completely agree on the common interest we share across the United Kingdom in wanting to advance social and economic rights—put another way, ensuring good jobs and good public services. Of course that is right. What is questionable is whether it is sensible to make those rights justiciable, as we would find people pursuing all sorts of actions that clog up the courts, leaving them unable to deal with other matters. The hon. Gentleman is right on the principle we all want to achieve for people in our country. Is he right in wanting more litigation and more legislation? I think we have different views on that.
Hannah Bardell
The Scottish Government will bring forward a human rights Bill for Scotland, which is the right thing to do. Given the Justice Secretary’s previous statements in support of human rights and the ECHR, will he confirm his support for the Scottish approach? Surely putting human rights at the heart of Government and the wider public sector is the right thing to do.
Alex Chalk
It is important not to conflate those two things. We are a member of the European convention on human rights—I have already mentioned article 13—but that does not, in and of itself, determine how one should give effect to those rights. We already have the Human Rights Act 1998. It is not at all clear to me that Scotland’s proposed human rights Bill would advance human rights across the United Kingdom, but of course we will listen carefully to whatever the Scottish Government decide to introduce.
Martin Docherty-Hughes
I am sure that the Secretary of State is aware that the ECHR and the HRA are integral to the Good Friday/Belfast agreement, setting out a framework for the policing and the very governance of Northern Ireland. Does he agree that any attempt to overhaul the ECHR and the HRA from this place could have serious consequences for the communities of Northern Ireland?
Alex Chalk
We have a human rights framework that we consider to be important. We are mindful of the points that the hon. Gentleman raises. We are satisfied that we can deliver on the priorities of the British people. It is a perfectly reasonable priority to want to ensure that we have warm hearts but an open front door, and we are satisfied that we can do so within our international legal obligations.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
It was revealed yesterday that, despite the best efforts of the Home Office, an Albanian-speaking migrant who has spent half his life in Serbia, and who has been jailed in this country for 18 months for cannabis farming after having entered the UK illegally, has been allowed to remain in Britain after he successfully claimed that he cannot be deported to Serbia because he no longer speaks Serbian. This is despite Albanian being a recognised minority language in Serbia, and despite him living in this country with his Serbian brother. Does this not demonstrate why we need urgent reform of the asylum system and human rights laws to allow the rapid and effective deportation of such dangerous criminals?
Alex Chalk
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that those who come to our country and betray this nation’s trust by acting illegally should not expect a warm welcome. That is why one of the things I am most proud of is signing a further prisoner transfer agreement with the Albanians to ensure that the British people, having suffered the initial crime, do not suffer the double punishment of having to pay £49,000 a year to house them in bed and breakfast accommodation in the United Kingdom. We will send them back, and that is exactly what we are doing.
Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
May I take the Justice Secretary back to his interesting observations on the Rwanda Bill? He has said that the whole debate around the ECHR
“has been tainted by a misunderstanding of what the actual rights are, as though they are a foreign import that do not reflect some of the cultural norms in our country…nothing could be further from the truth.”—[Official Report, 13 February 2019; Vol. 654, c. 376WH.]
When it comes to the Rwanda Bill, why is he failing to uphold the ECHR and the Human Rights Act, which embody so many of the legal principles that the people of these islands hold so dear?
Alex Chalk
Respectfully, I completely reject that characterisation. We are remaining within the four corners of our international legal obligations. Our legislation is novel and contentious, but it remains within the four corners of our international legal obligations and delivers on the proper, insistent requirements of the British people, which are that we protect our borders and ensure fairness for all—for not only the British people, but those who have played by the rules and done the right thing when they have come to the UK. They will always have a warm welcome in our country. Those who act illegally can expect short shrift.
Chris Stephens
Of course, the Government state on the front page of the Rwanda Bill that they cannot guarantee that it complies with the ECHR, as the Justice Secretary well knows. The Bill also makes direct intrusions into devolved areas, because human rights are devolved to the Scottish Parliament. So will he confirm that a legislative consent motion will be sought from the Scottish Parliament on the safety of Rwanda?
Alex Chalk
The first point the hon. Gentleman was referring to is about the section 19(1)(b) statement, and such statements are not unusual—the much-missed Tessa Jowell took one through in the Bill that became the Communications Act 2003. There is nothing unusual about this, which is precisely why this provision was put in the Human Rights Act 1998. As for further LCMs, we will of course proceed in the normal way, and I will give that matter further consideration.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
Protecting the public is our top priority. Offenders are subject to strict licence conditions on release, which can include tagging and exclusion zones, and they can of course be returned to prison if they breach those conditions. Victims of violent and sexual offenders serving prison sentences of 12 months or more are legally entitled to request protected licence conditions on release, including exclusion zones. The probation service works with partners including the police under the multi-agency public protection arrangements, to closely manage the risk presented by the most serious offenders.
Liz Saville Roberts
Rhianon Bragg’s attacker was convicted of stalking, possessing a firearm and making threats to kill. Only two months ago, the Parole Board decided that his probation release plan could not ensure public protection, yet he will be automatically released next month. I have sent numerous letters to Ministers on this matter but have received not a single reply. Given that the victim lives in a remote area, which makes conventional surveillance methods virtually impossible, will the Secretary of State finally provide a credible response to the urgent safety risks faced by victims such as Rhianon?
Alex Chalk
First, I thank the right hon. Lady for raising this case. I do know about the case of Rhianon Bragg—in the interests of complete transparency, I should say that I was at school with her. The Government introduced extended determinate sentences in order to better protect the public from dangerous offenders by making their early release dependent on the Parole Board. Offenders on extended determinate sentences must be released. As the right hon. Lady knows, there are no legal powers to hold them for longer at the end of that custodial term. However, they face years of strict supervision by the probation service with strict licence conditions, such as exclusion zones and curfews, and they will be returned to prison if they breach them. I am aware of the letter that was sent on the 14th to my right hon. Friend the Minister of State. He will of course be happy to meet the right hon. Lady to discuss those points.
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
I thank the many His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service and His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service staff who continue to work hard over the Christmas period to deliver justice and keep us safe. Since the last Justice questions, the Victims and Prisoners Bill has passed its Third Reading in this House. It will enshrine the overarching principles of the victims code in law. It will establish a permanent independent public advocate for victims of major incidents, and it will enable a second check on Parole Board decisions in the interests of public safety. The Sentencing Bill, which is cracking down on the worst offenders by extending whole-life orders for any murder involving sexual or sadistic conduct, also passed its Second Reading, as did the Criminal Justice Bill, which will ensure, among other things, that criminals face up to the consequences of their appalling actions by requiring them to attend their sentencing hearings.
Finally, in December, I took part in a park run at HMP Onley alongside prison staff and serving prisoners. Congratulations to all who took part, except perhaps my private secretary, who had the audacity to beat me.
Mike Kane
The Minister mentions sexual offences, but it frustrates me beyond belief that my constituents have to wait on average 839 days for their cases to be heard. Is the distress caused taken into account, or is the system too broken?
Alex Chalk
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to raise the issue of victims of serious sexual offences. We take that incredibly seriously, and that is why we have introduced measures such as section 28, which enables evidence to be taken and recorded in advance. We have increased the fees for barristers to make that more straightforward. We have also increased the number of independent sexual violence advisers, who accompany, as it were, those victims on that journey. That is very important to prevent dropout rates. This is an important point: the sentencing levels are much higher—up by 30% compared with 2010.
Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)
The Children’s Commissioner’s report on family contact in the youth estate states that at the weekend, in two young offenders institutes, boys spent only up to one hour outside their cell each day. We can clearly see why that has led to an increase in violence. What is the Minister going to do about it?
Alex Chalk
It is important to note that, since 2010 when we came into power, the number of under-18s in custody has dropped dramatically. The cohort now in young offenders institutes is, to put it politely, highly complex. We take that extremely seriously and want to ensure there are sufficient staff. We do not give up on people, but it is important to recognise that that cohort will have been convicted of extremely serious offences, and we want to ensure there are sufficient resources to try to get the best out of them.
Dr James Davies (Vale of Clwyd) (Con)
Chris Law (Dundee West) (SNP)
Alex Chalk
We of course welcome any reduction in crime, and I am happy to congratulate Police Scotland on its work. It is encouraging that across the United Kingdom, and certainly across England and Wales, crime and reoffending are down. However, I urge the hon. Gentleman to ensure that Scotland does not anything that would be regrettable, such as rolling back on jury trials, which are a critical part of maintaining public confidence in the criminal justice system.
Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)
Alex Chalk
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point. Alcohol tags are hugely valuable and are being used increasingly to tackle alcohol-related offending, including violent crime, successfully. Around 2,800 individuals were wearing an alcohol tag at the end of November 2023, 900 more than in the same period the year before, and alcohol bans imposed in community sentences were complied with for 97.3% of the days monitored since their introduction in October 2020. They are a vital crime-fighting tool.
Mr Speaker
Order. This is topical questions. I have to get everybody else in. If the hon. Lady is going to ask a topical question, it must be short and quick to allow others to ask theirs. Has the Minister been briefed on what is being asked?
Mrs Lewell-Buck
Little Tallulah passed away aged two on 2 November last year after those services failed her. How can her parents get some justice?
Alex Chalk
This sounds like an absolutely appalling case and my heart goes out to Tallulah and her family. I am unaware of the details of the case, but if the hon. Lady writes to me, she will get a response.
Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)
Dozens of businesses have signed up to Torbay Council’s safety of women at night charter, which is being championed by Councillor Hayley Tranter. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that those who pose a threat to women, for example by spiking drinks, get the type of deterrent sentence that such disgraceful behaviour deserves?
Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
My constituent was the victim of a violent attack, but because the perpetrator got a sentence of less than 12 months, she was not told when he was released from prison. The police say that it is impossible for them to go through the records of everybody who is released in order to advise her, so there is a gap in victim support. Will the Secretary of State commit to resolving that?
Alex Chalk
The hon. Lady raises an important point. I take that extremely seriously. Certainly, under the victims code, the rights of victims to be kept informed are far tighter than ever they used to be. If we need to go further, that seems to be a sensible conversation and I would be happy to have it.
Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con)
For too many years, this House has been witness to wrongful convictions in the Post Office-Fujitsu scandal. There remain 800 Post Office convictions based on bad data. Until those convictions are overturned, the victims cannot claim compensation. We could do something good together if the Justice Secretary brought a simple Bill to quash all 800 convictions immediately.
Alex Chalk
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who, with his customary precision, puts his finger on that appalling injustice. The suggestion that he makes is receiving active consideration. I expect to be able to make further announcements shortly.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
I add my support to the comments made by the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Julie Marson). Cuckooing is a terrible activity, and making it a specific crime not only makes sense but would, I suspect, lead to the prosecution of other crimes such as drug dealing.
Alex Chalk
As I indicated, I will have a conversation with my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Julie Marson) about that. There is very likely to be a substantive underlying offence, be it handling stolen goods, possession with intent to supply or firearms matters. This has been considered by way of discussions with criminal justice partners, but if there are further matters to consider with my hon. Friend, and indeed with the hon. Gentleman, I would be happy to have those conversations.
Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)
January is often considered family breakdown month. Anybody taking the terrifically difficult decision to separate this year will face not only a divorce costing over £14,000 on average, but months, or potentially more than a year, of resolving child and financial disputes. We need reform of focus in a range of areas. Will the Lord Chancellor kindly agree to meet me and the formidable Baroness Deech and Baroness Shackleton to look at our campaigns?
Sir Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)
In a perfect world, the victims of the Horizon IT scandal would have their cases individually assessed by the Criminal Cases Review Commission and the Court of Appeal, but we are not in a perfect world. The scale of the miscarriage of justice is enormous, and there are hundreds of victims who understandably do not want to come forward because they have lost faith in the process. Will my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor now consider the exceptional and unique step of legislating to quash the convictions?
Alex Chalk
I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend, who speaks with such authority. The circumstances are truly exceptional. When I was a Back Bencher, I went on the record as saying that Horizon is the most serious miscarriage of justice since the Guildford Four or the Birmingham Six. But the clue is that there were four in the Guildford case and six in the Birmingham case; we are talking about hundreds of people. The situation is truly exceptional and unprecedented, and it will need an appropriate resolution.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
Under the Illegal Migration Act 2023, victims of human trafficking who arrived in the UK via irregular routes would not have legal recourse to receive support under modern slavery provisions. Are Ministers comfortable with that? They do not look like monsters, so I assume not. If they are not, what will they do about it?
Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
Precisely because legislating to overturn convictions would be so unprecedented, will my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor make sure that before such a step is taken, he is satisfied from conversations with the senior judiciary that the means of triaging and consolidating appeals that currently exist may not be capable of delivering justice within an acceptable timeframe?
Alex Chalk
That is precisely the point, and my hon. Friend has put his finger on it. Of course, we would not want to stray into the normal lane of the judiciary; we have huge respect for our independent judiciary, who do an exceptionally good job of ensuring that there is fairness on the facts before them. As I have said, the case is wholly unprecedented, and we will want to have exhausted all alternatives before taking radical action.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Spending on housing legal aid has fallen by more than half in the past decade, from £44 million to £20 million. Is this a proper response to growing insecurity, overcrowding and poor conditions in the housing market, or might it be a contributing factor?
HMP Wandsworth
Alex Chalk Excerpts(3 months, 2 weeks ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
I wish to inform the House that the independent investigation into the alleged escape of Daniel Khalife from HMP Wandsworth on 6 September 2023 has concluded.
Escapes from the prison estate are extremely rare—there were 16 escapes from establishments between April 2010 and March 2023, compared with 146 escapes from establishments between April 1997 and March 2010. However, it is vital for both public protection and confidence in the criminal justice system that our prisons are secure.
On 7 September, I committed in the House that, in addition to the immediate internal investigations and reviews into the circumstances of the alleged escape, the categorisation decision, the placement and categorisation of all prisoners in HMP Wandsworth and the location of all those in the custodial estate charged with terrorism offences, I would commission an independent investigation into the incident.
I appointed Keith Bristow QPM to lead this and asked him to consider whether the relevant protocols were in place at HMP Wandsworth and whether there were the means to apply them, including whether staffing was sufficient to do so, and whether and how they were applied at the time of the event. I also asked Mr Bristow to consider the facts of the case, including the categorisation of the prisoner, risk assessments and decisions around employment in the prison, the processes and actions that enabled access to materials that might have facilitated the alleged escape, the implementation of the counting protocol, and relevant security measures, including checks relating to the delivery vehicle. I asked him to produce findings and recommendations which can be implemented at HMP Wandsworth and, where relevant, in the wider prison estate. On behalf of the Government, I would like to thank Mr Bristow for his rapid, clear and thorough work.
Due to the ongoing criminal proceedings, and the need to protect prison security, it would not be appropriate for me to provide a detailed account of the investigation’s findings and recommendations at this time. The criminal investigation could also uncover further evidence and we will keep this under close review.
However, I can assure the House that I, and the Government, take the findings and the recommendations of the independent investigation extremely seriously and I am committed to minimising the likelihood of any such incident occurring in the future. Mr Bristow has made recommendations of both an operational and strategic nature. In addition to the measures taken immediately after the alleged escape to ensure the security of the prison, and further improvements in the weeks since in response to internal investigations and reviews, I have asked HMP Wandsworth, HM Prison and Probation Service and the Ministry of Justice to take forward the independent investigation’s recommendations as a matter of priority.
I am committed to sharing what further information I can when the criminal proceedings conclude.
[HCWS164]