Sentencing Bill

Catherine Atkinson Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 16th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Catherine Atkinson (Derby North) (Lab)]

Madam Deputy Speaker, put yourself in the place of a victim of crime. You want to go out for a walk with your family, out to the park or to the other side of town, but you are worried that the perpetrator might see you there. You want to go for a night out or to support your football team, but you are worried about what they might do or how you might react if they are there too, so you do not. They are the one who was convicted, but you still feel like the prisoner. They received the sentence, but you are being punished. It happens too often, and I have come across cases like these not just as an MP but in my time as a barrister.

This is a Bill whose time has come, because it turns that injustice on its head. Currently, some offenders can be excluded from certain limited areas, but under this Bill, they can be restricted from all areas apart from a limited one. Whether it is the pub, the match or driving around, expanding community punishments and licensing conditions will ensure that it is the offenders who face restrictions on what they can do and enjoy, not the victims.

I do not need to tell my constituents in Derby North about the situation inherited from the Conservatives—a broken justice system, prisons full and in crisis, severe criminal court backlogs and decaying infrastructure—because too many of them live the reality of having to deal with the thousands of antisocial behaviour incidents that we see in our city every year. There is a need to tackle prolific and persistent offenders with strict monitoring and co-ordinated support. The expansion of intensive supervision courts is designed to do just that, and it is hugely welcomed by those I have spoken to who work in our criminal courts. They have said to me, “Roll this out as fast as possible.”

The additional £700 million that this Government are investing in our Probation Service—with the recruitment of 1,000 trainee probation officers already and 1,300 more to be recruited in the next six months—is rebuilding that service. We are rebuilding after the Conservative Government’s vandalism, their failed experiment in privatising probation, which pushed it to crisis, and their having to bring it back into public hands. Probation officers work incredibly hard to keep our communities safe, and I am grateful that this Government are investing in their essential work.

May I also take this opportunity to thank those who work in our prisons? The number of prisoners will, of course, still go up. The Government are building more prison places—something that the previous Government all but failed to do—and more offenders will be behind bars than ever before under this Government. We therefore need to turn prisons from creating better criminals to creating better citizens. The earned progression model rewards good behaviour and punishes bad behaviour in our prisons. It is an important tool to break the cycles of offending that we have seen for far too long, and when offenders stop offending, our communities are safer.

The Minister of State for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending—a businessman who throughout his career enabled offenders to turn their lives around and to break those cycles—knows better than anyone how to make this work. I recently visited HMP Ranby to see how it is increasing the type of work that the prisoners there undertake, from creating furniture and doing laundry for prisons and other public services, saving taxpayers’ money, to working on reading and writing, or undertaking work for the private sector, giving offenders the skills to secure work on release. Utilising and increasing the opportunities for offenders to work in prison can build on the important measures in the Bill, reducing reoffending by giving them purpose and skills, while instilling a work routine. I will make that case in an Adjournment debate on 15 October.

I am grateful for the opportunity to highlight these three aspects of the approach: the intensive supervision to tackle antisocial behaviour and prolific offending; measures to help end the revolving door of offending; and new restriction zones and community punishments to give freedom back to victims. The Bill was born of necessity, because of the mess in which the Conservatives left our prisons and criminal courts. While born of necessity, though, I am excited about the transformative difference that the Bill will make, so that fewer offenders reoffend, victims are where they must be—the focus of our criminal justice system—and our communities are safer as a result.