Community and Suspended Sentences (Notification of Details) Bill

Chris Clarkson Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 23rd February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)]

I am very pleased to be supporting the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones). I am what would be typically referred to as a Tory wet, which means that I do not think locking up everybody is always a panacea for everything. Community centres have an important role to play; not only do we have a particularly crowded prison estate as it is, but the prison estate is not the best place for the rehabilitation of offenders who have shorter sentences because their crimes are their first offence or relatively minor. If we are talking about a proper lag or villain, then let us lock them up for 20 years, but fundamentally we should be trying to get people into the habit of improving their lives. We should be creating productive citizens.

I support the Bill very much; the hon. Lady has alighted on an important point. When somebody leaves a custodial sentence, there are rules and regulations in place to ensure that they do not change their identity or somehow get around the system in order to reoffend, although there will be some who go on to reoffend. There will sadly also be those who go on to reoffend after having had one of these non-custodial sentences. By applying to them the same regime that applies to people who have been in the prison estate, we are not introducing a new special punishment and they are not under any extra burden. They are being asked to comply with a perfectly sensible regime. I therefore very much welcome what the hon. Lady has done.

We will all know of at least one or two heartbreaking cases from our constituencies where the system has not worked quite as it should. When I first started in this place, I met the family of a constituent who had been murdered by somebody who was out on parole. There had been a similar issue with identity: documents had been lost; meetings were not taking place. This man had basically just disappeared into the ether of the system. I cannot guarantee that, had the safeguard in the Bill been in place, it would have saved my constituent’s life, but it certainly would have made it much less likely that a little boy was left without his dad and parents were left without their son.

I congratulate the hon. Lady on introducing this Bill, and I look forward to supporting it.