Sentencing Reform/Legal Aid

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s welcome for our policy. Let no one underestimate: it is going to be difficult to extend the work ethic and a work programme throughout prisons. It will steadily be achieved and we are embarking on it. There are good examples in the Prison Service now—one or two, where a working week is in place for the prisoners. That needs to be rolled out throughout the estate. I will certainly take advantage of looking at the approach in the military prisons and their work-based ethic, which I understand to be the case, though I have not visited one for many years.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I am beginning to wonder whether it was a mistake to separate the Ministry of Justice from the Home Office, because we now seem to have one Ministry for arresting people and another for letting them go. If the right hon. and learned Gentleman wants to get rid of his reputation as a wishy-washy liberal, will he go the whole hog and rename his Bill the “Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (Hang ’em, Flog ’em and Birch ’em) Bill”. That might satisfy Members on the Conservative Benches.

[Mr Clarke]

I have to admit that I thought that was a rather extraordinary way of reorganising the Departments when it was first done, and so did the judges. They greatly resisted going into the Ministry of Justice because they could see that the vast explosion of expenditure on prisons would crowd out the budget for the courts. The Ministry of Justice is a bit like a nest with a cuckoo in it—[Interruption.] It is not me. The previous Government kept feeding the Prison Service—exploding the Prison Service—and then cutting expenditure on every other aspect of the Department’s activities as it was thrown out of the nest. We need to stabilise the prison population, get the costs under control, use it more effectively and have a more intelligent way of working with the rest of the Department to deliver things.

The long-term future of the Department will be looked at. In my experience, the reorganisation of Departments hardly ever achieves any worthwhile objectives, whatever the Prime Minister of the day thought he was achieving. Too much confusion is caused by moving them all around and it is best to stick with the structure that we have, but I would not have gone for the present structure in the first place, if I had had anything to do with it.