Fiona Mactaggart
Main Page: Fiona Mactaggart (Labour - Slough)Department Debates - View all Fiona Mactaggart's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(9 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend makes an important point. Those who have visited prison libraries will know that they are well stocked and well supported by high-quality staff. In most prison libraries one will find local projects helping prisoners to read, and I pay tribute to the work done by our prison librarians in tackling literacy problems in our prisons. My hon. Friend is absolutely right: the fuss made about this issue has been wholly disproportionate and detached from the reality.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
But will the Secretary of State give Parliament a report on how many minutes each week each prisoner is able to visit a prison library? We regularly hear reports of lack of staff preventing prisoners from visiting prison libraries, and lack of space preventing toe by toe and similar reading programmes from being mounted.
Chris Grayling
The challenge we have in our prisons is not making space available in libraries for prisoners to visit but encouraging them to visit. That is why we are pursuing projects such as toe by toe and encouraging literacy programmes. To be frank, I wish more prisoners wanted to go to our libraries.