Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Simon Hughes)]

The position is clear and I tried to clarify it in my letter to the hon. Lady. Sadly, there has been a drop in the number of cases that are going to mediation. There has therefore been a drop in the number of cases that are going through the process. The percentage of successful mediations has not dropped. That is the issue to which the Secretary of State was referring. The Government are committed to doing what she would want, which is to ensure that from next month, when the law changes, there is an increase in referrals to mediation and an increase in successful mediations.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

Her Majesty’s prison Northumberland was privatised on 1 December 2013. In the four months since, there have been 180 redundancies. Nearly a third of the work force have been released. Is the Secretary of State confident that HMP Northumberland is a safe place for prisoners and staff?

[Chris Grayling]

We are having to take difficult decisions about staffing levels across the prison estate. I am confident that every one of our prisons is a safe place to detain prisoners. I have not pursued a privatisation strategy across the prison system but accepted the recommendations of the Prison Governors Association and others, and the benchmarking programme that we are putting in place across the prison system was recommended in-house by the public sector team.