Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Ian C. Lucas Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

I should like to start by offering an apology to the House and to you, Mr Speaker. I shall not be able to be here for the wind-ups at the end of the debate because, in my role as Lord Chancellor, I have to take part in the formal proceedings of the Lord Mayor’s banquet this evening. I have written to the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) and to the Chairman of the Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), to explain the position.

I have read with interest the reasoned amendment tabled by the Opposition, and it might be helpful to explain to the House what the Bill will do, and what it will not do. It will make reforms to the sentencing framework so as to bring to an end the situation in which a prisoner can walk out of the prison gates with £46 in their pocket and with no one to meet them, no one to plan for their release, and no one to ensure that they do not return to the same streets and the same people and commit further crimes with no one to try to stop them. The Bill will not make any changes to the probation service.

It is the plans to put an end to prisoners walking out of prison with no support that the Opposition are planning to vote against tonight. They are planning to vote against our plans to end the situation in which drug addicts serving short sentences are simply stabilised on methadone for a few weeks because the prison staff know that they will not turn up for rehabilitation when they leave and therefore think that it is not worth starting it. We also want to put an end to the situation in which a young person freshly out of care finds themselves in our criminal justice system and has no help or guidance to sort out their life when they are released. The Opposition are planning to vote against that proposal tonight.

Despite what is suggested in the completely flawed amendment, which is supported by the Opposition in the other place—and which on one reading would make it impossible for even the current probation trusts to alter their local delivery units without parliamentary approval—the Bill will do nothing to reorganise or restructure our probation services. It is not about probation. The changes that we debated two weeks ago are not part of the Bill. They are about our decision to put into action the reforms set out by the Labour Government in their Offender Management Act 2007, which provides us with the legal basis for our probation reforms. This Bill is not about those reforms.

[Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)]

What will be the additional cost of the Government’s proposals?