Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 17th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I do not know the exact occasion on which that principle was previously tested, but I am aware of the case to which my hon. Friend refers. She and I have discussed it, and I am happy to work with her to consider whether there is a loophole in the law that should be changed.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

In 2010 the prison riot squad was called out to prisons 118 times, which was too many. Last year it was called out 223 times—a 90% increase—and that is with 18 fewer prisons than in 2010. That is a disgrace. We have fewer prisons with fewer staff, and not enough work or training for inmates. We have record numbers of deaths in custody, and prisoner-on-prisoner and prisoner-on-staff assaults have surged. We heard a lot in 2010 about a rehabilitation revolution. Where did it go wrong?

[Chris Grayling]

Let me tell the right hon. Gentleman what is actually happening. The number of prisoner qualifications is up, as is the number of hours worked in prisons. On the size of our prison estate, we will go into this election with 3,000 more adult male prison places than we had in 2010, and we have done that while bringing down the cost of the prison estate to sort out the mess left behind by the previous Government. The Labour Government brought about a crisis in our prisons that led to them having to let offenders out early because they ran out of space in our prisons. I will take no lessons from Labour about how to run our prisons.

[Sadiq Khan]

Evidence, if it was needed, of a man completely out of touch. Most judges, lawyers, probation staff, prison officers, victims, court staff, and people denied access to justice believe that the right hon. Gentleman has been the worst Lord Chancellor since Lord Shaftesbury in 1673—the two of you have a thing or two in common, so you should check him out. In a poll commissioned last month, 82% of people in the legal sector said that they were more likely to vote Tory if the Justice Secretary was replaced. Why does he think the figure is not higher?

[Chris Grayling]

In the last Justice questions before the election, all I get from the right hon. Gentleman is abuse. Do you know why, Mr Speaker? Since he has no policies and ideas, all he can do is resort to abuse, and that is all he ever does.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 3rd February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

We continue to work to expand education in our prisons, and I am pleased that this year we expect a significant increase in the number of prisoner qualifications. Great work is done by our education professionals in our prisons. We will look to expand and develop that as far as logistically possible.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

The Justice Secretary was warned about the risks of the appointment of Paul McDowell as chief inspector of probation, but he arrogantly ignored them. Despite the clear conflict of interest, he defended his decision at the Dispatch Box when I raised the matter. He has shown a clear error of judgment. At a time when an independent inspector is needed the most, we do not have one. Will he confirm that the taxpayer will now be left with a further bill of £70,000 for his error of judgment, with the former chief inspector free to join one of the private companies that are now running probation?

[Chris Grayling]

I have to say that the right hon. Gentleman’s comments are an insult to a fine public servant, who has taken a brave decision this week. I am not of the view that someone should be denied the opportunity to apply for a job because of the possibility that in the future their wife’s company might win contracts and she might be promoted. I regard Paul McDowell as a fine public servant who has done a good job for this country. I hope he will return to a new post somewhere else supporting our public sector in the future, because he deserves it. He has done a very good job.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

We already know how little the Justice Secretary thinks of our international human rights obligations, given that he wants to repeal the British Human Rights Act and walk away from the European convention on human rights. What is the Ministry of Justice’s motivation for signing a £5.9 million contract with a country whose justice system is widely condemned for the use of torture—which is what a sentence of 1,000 lashes amounts to—and of execution by beheading?

[Chris Grayling]

We have not signed a contract. Under this Government and under the last one, our Departments have worked with other Governments around the world to try to encourage improvements and best practice in their justice systems. I believe that that is the right thing to do. We should try to influence countries to move their justice systems in the right direction, and we will continue to do that.

[Sadiq Khan]

I look forward to hearing about the best practice for beheading.

We have a prisons crisis here, with the chief inspector of prisons being sacked. The chief inspector of the probation service has resigned. We have judges criticising Ministry of Justice policies on a daily basis, we have had disks containing sensitive information lost by the MOJ, and the legal profession is boycotting the summit to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, at which the Secretary of State is the keynote speaker. Why does he think that those who work in and use the justice system think so little of him?

[Chris Grayling]

The right hon. Gentleman cannot even gets his facts right; I am not the keynote speaker at the global law summit. It is being run independently with a number of key people from around the world, including the wife of a former Labour Prime Minister. The reality is that a leading figure in the justice world said to me last week, “Do you know, I may not agree with your policies, but at least you’ve got some; the other party hasn’t got any.”

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 16th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

That is precisely what we are trying to stop. My hon. Friend makes the valid point that those opposed to essential developments in our country are able to use judicial review, on technicalities, to try to prevent them from going ahead or to delay them. It does nobody any favours that that can happen. It uses up huge amounts of taxpayers’ money, it wastes the time of essential projects and project teams, and it must change.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I find the Justice Secretary’s answer interesting, because there is a widely held view that one of the reasons why this Justice Secretary is so hostile to judicial review is that it means the unlawful decisions he makes can be challenged in court. In the past few days, he has been held to have acted unlawfully in relation to his decision to ban the sending of books to prisoners. Does the Justice Secretary accept the decision of the court and, very simply, will he now acknowledge that it was a stupid policy and that he acted unlawfully?

[Chris Grayling]

Let us be absolutely clear: I took no decision to ban the sending of books to prisoners. I simply unified across the whole of the prison estate the rule that existed under the previous Government, in almost all of our prisons, not to allow parcels to be sent into prisons. Once again, we hear the hypocrisy of the Opposition.

[Sadiq Khan]

The right hon. Gentleman briefs his Back Benchers and the right-wing media that he is banning books, but when he has been found to have acted unlawfully he says something very different in the Chamber of the House of Commons.

We know this Justice Secretary is obsessed with repealing the Human Rights Act 1998, walking away from the European Court of Human Rights, making it very difficult to bring a claim for judicial review, and making access to justice almost impossible for people with limited means by ill-thought-through deep cuts to legal aid. When the highly respected, legally qualified and knowledgeable former Attorney-General, the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), talks about politicians who risk “eroding” Britain’s legal framework for the sake of populism and short-term political gain, who does the Justice Secretary think the former Attorney-General is referring to? Why does he think that a highly respected and knowledgeable colleague has views so different from his own?

[Chris Grayling]

What I know is that I am pushing forward the policies that the public want. The fact that the right hon. Gentleman is opposed to them might explain the fact that his party’s ratings have been sliding persistently in the polls over the past two years.

Prison Communications

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 11th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I thank the Justice Secretary for advance sight of his statement, the contents of which are truly shocking. What he has outlined is a very serious breach of confidentiality involving MPs and their constituents. I welcome the speed of his response and today’s statement after first hearing about this issue only six days ago. I also thank him for his phone call to me this morning.

The ability of a Member of Parliament to maintain confidential channels of communication with his or her constituents is fundamental to their role as a Member of this House. Interception of MPs’ telephone calls has been governed by the Wilson doctrine since the 1960s, which, as the Justice Secretary has said, is made clear in prison rules and policy, so any breaches of confidentiality must be taken very seriously indeed.

Many of us will deal on a regular basis with constituents in prison—I remind the House that many of them have not been found guilty of any crime—as part of our duties as good constituency MPs. Often, our staff speak to prisoners on our behalf, as they do in other casework. I am sure that I am not alone in being shocked in hearing today’s news that some of those conversations have been listened in to and recorded.

That is why it is important, as the Justice Secretary has said, that we get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible, find out the extent to which it was taking place, and put in place a system that prevents a repeat in the future. I welcome the inquiry to be led by the chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick.

I have a number of questions for the Justice Secretary. If he cannot answer some of them, I hope that either he or the chief inspector of prisons will respond in the near future.

Does this issue in any way contravene the Wilson doctrine on intercepting the telephone calls of MPs? In how many prisons has it taken place? The Justice Secretary referred to the PIN phone system in public sector prisons. What about private prisons? Will Nick Hardwick’s inquiry look into private prisons as well?

Is there any evidence that any of the information gained from the calls was fed up to senior officials in NOMS or passed on to any third parties? Can the Justice Secretary confirm that all remaining recordings and any transcripts have been destroyed, and that those that have not will be destroyed?

The Justice Secretary mentioned 32 current MPs. What about ex-Members of Parliament? Have they been informed that their conversations may well have been recorded and listened in to?

The Justice Secretary also mentioned the one incidence of a phone call between a prisoner and their solicitor being listened in to. As part of the inquiry, will Nick Hardwick look into whether other communications between prisoners and their lawyers may have been listened in to and recorded?

Is there any evidence that there has been any interference with postal correspondence between MPs and constituents or between prisoners and their legal representatives—the so-called rule 39A correspondence? The Justice Secretary rightly referred to the improvement of the audit trail post-2006. Can anything be done with regard to issues before 2006?

In conclusion, the Justice Secretary rightly reminded us why it is important for prisoners to be able to talk to family members, friends and others. He also rightly reminded us that, in facilitating prisoner phone calls, it is important that safeguards are in place, to ensure that prisoners do not abuse the system by, for example, contacting victims or continuing their involvement in criminality while still in prison. Of course, Members on both sides of the House agree with that. Today’s revelations are a worrying development and it is really important that we get to the bottom of what the Justice Secretary has revealed.

[Chris Grayling]

I thank the shadow Secretary of State for the measured way in which he has responded to the issue. Let me answer his questions in turn. The Wilson doctrine applies to intercept activity, so the routine monitoring of calls of this kind, while not within the prison rules, is not covered by the Wilson doctrine.

I cannot give the right hon. Gentleman an answer on the number of prisons. We have been able to identify the number of calls and MPs, but that has been done through telephone records, so I do not yet have information on the origins of the calls and the number of prisons. I expect we will see more information about that as the inquiry progresses.

I have as yet seen no evidence that information was passed on to anyone else. I do not believe that this was part of a concerted attempt to monitor; it was simply part of the routine checking of the process to make sure that nothing untoward was going on. Clearly, however, that is something I will ask Nick Hardwick to confirm.

I believe that all recordings have been destroyed—they are kept for only a limited period—but I assure the right hon. Gentleman that if any have survived, which I do not believe to be the case, they certainly will be destroyed.

Work relating to ex-Members of Parliament has not been done, but I assure the right hon. Gentleman that we will ask that question and notify them. Until now, it has been a question of cross-referencing current Members of Parliament in order to identify issues.

On solicitors, I have asked Nick Hardwick to look at the full range of confidential calls. The reality is that occasionally mistakes will be made in a large organisation dealing with such issues. The total number of calls handled by the Prison Service over this period is about 16 million, so I will be up front with the House and say that occasionally mistakes will be made. I want Nick Hardwick to make sure that we have every possible safeguard in place to make sure that this cannot happen as a matter of routine.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about rule 39 mail. I do not have any evidence that such mail has been inappropriately intercepted. We keep rule 39 under regular surveillance and review. Although it is of paramount importance that it remains a conduit for prisoners to receive confidential material from their solicitors and to send such material to them, he will know that there have equally been suggestions over the years that rule 39 has been abused. I try to make sure that we continue to monitor it properly and respect its confidentiality, but governors are instructed to look at it if they have reason to believe—they must have such a reason—that rule 39 is being misused.

On the audit trail before 2006, we have looked at this practice from 2006. It may predate 2006, but the work that has been done with BT simply covered the period from 2006 onwards.

I share the right hon. Gentleman’s concern: in all aspects of what we do, it should be possible to have confidential conversations with constituents. Something has clearly gone wrong, and I need to rectify it. It goes back over many years, but it needs to be rectified now, and I assure the House that it will be.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 11th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I understand my hon. Friend’s concerns. Under the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, there will be a much closer link between a prisoner, their place of detention, the area into which they are released and the plans for supporting them after they leave prison. Should they need or wish to move to a different area, they will need consent from the probation service and their local probation officer to do so. My hope and belief is that this will lead to much better post-prison support, and in particular post-prison support close to their natural home, rather than the kind of issues that my hon. Friend has experienced.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

The independent chief inspector of prisons appointed by the previous Government is well respected by prison governors, prisoners, experts, the wider community and on both sides of the House. As the Justice Secretary will be aware, he is not afraid to make critical reports. At a time of huge turmoil in the probation service, with massive problems throughout the country, why does the right hon. Gentleman think that the newly appointed chief inspector of probation, who has links to six of the 21 preferred bidders, has been so silent?

[Chris Grayling]

May I put it on record that I regard the current chief inspector of probation as a man of the highest integrity and of great professional expertise who has started to make a positive contribution to the probation arena. I recognise the issue raised earlier by the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman). I indicated that I would make further comments to the House in due course. We are only at the stage of preferred bidders. As I said earlier, there are many people in public life who are married to other people in public life. We should be extremely careful before we start to damn them because of that situation, or we risk losing some extremely able people from our public life.

[Sadiq Khan]

Maybe the Justice Secretary can reassure us. Has the chief inspector of probation at any time raised concerns with him or his Ministers about the Transforming Rehabilitation programme? If so, what were they?

[Chris Grayling]

The chief inspector of probation has done a detailed piece of work on the Transforming Rehabilitation programme, and that report will be published shortly. He has highlighted a number of areas we are addressing. The report will set out in detail some issues, many of which preceded the current reforms and go back many years, on how to improve performance on probation. As I said to the House recently, I have asked the chief inspector and all inspectors to come to my office immediately and tell me if they identify anything in the reforms that gives cause for concern about public safety. They have not done so.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 9th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

These reforms are going exactly according to plan and no test gate was due to start in June. We are on time and the teams on the ground are making good progress. I and my colleagues have visited the trust’s successor organisations, and members of my team are going out to hear what is happening on the ground. This is a nine-month process of delivering change in the public sector, before we reach the point of a change of ownership. We are trying to ensure that the new system is bedded in well, and so far I am happy with the progress being made. There is, of course, still work to be done, but good progress is being made.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

As usual, the Justice Secretary has his head in the sand. He was warned against his plans to privatise the probation service, but he ignored those warnings. Preferred bidders were supposed to be announced this week, but now he tells us it will be before the end of the year. There were supposed to be dozens and dozens of private companies, charities and voluntary groups bidding for the contracts, but there are not—in some areas, only one company is bidding for a contract. Staff—both those who respond to surveys and those who do not—are complaining of chaos at the probation service. Morale is at a record low and experienced and dedicated staff are leaving. Given that, are there any circumstances in which he would put a stop to the botched privatisation of the probation service?

[Chris Grayling]

I am afraid the right hon. Gentleman is plain wrong. He needs to stop listening to the trade unions; of course the trade unions still think this is a bad idea, but in reality our reforms are bedding in well and we will deliver the changes necessary to provide support and supervision to people who get none at the moment. The Labour party has no answers about how it would deliver that.

On competition, the right hon. Gentleman’s facts are plain wrong. I think we have 86 bids, with an average of four bidders in each area and a good mix of organisations from the public, private and voluntary sectors,. I am completely confident that we will shortly deliver a really innovative approach to rehabilitation, despite the blind opposition of the Labour party.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State has previously said, and he said it again today, how proud he is of his prison reforms. The Ministry of Justice’s own figures show that suicides are up 69% in a year. More people died in prison last year than ever before. Self-harm is up 27% since 2010. Serious assaults are up 30%. The riot squad has been called out 72% more times than it was in 2010 and one in five prisons are now rated as “of concern”, double the figure 12 months earlier. We heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) that four reports by the chief inspector of prisons have been pretty damning; the reports on Glen Parva, Doncaster, Isis and Wormwood Scrubs. What will it take for the Secretary of State to accept that we are in the midst of a prison crisis?

[Chris Grayling]

As always, the right hon. Gentleman paints a very partial view of what is going on in our prisons. Our prisons are less overcrowded than they have been at any point since 2001. They are less violent than they were under the last Government. More work is being done in our prisons today than under the last Government. The number of prisoners going through education is rising. Today we have an excellent report on Chelmsford prison, which I visited last week. Two weeks ago, we had an excellent report on Parc prison in south Wales.

There are staff shortages in parts of our prison system but across the prison system we have a dedicated staff working hard and doing the right job. I take very seriously the issue of suicide in our prisons. We saw a rise in numbers earlier in the year. We saw a fall in numbers across the summer. We may see a rise or a fall in future. These things are difficult to track. We work very hard to tackle what is a real problem.

[Sadiq Khan]

This is classic, head-in-the-sand syndrome.

“The Government cannot pretend any longer that there is no crisis in our prisons.

Even their own backbenchers say the system is shambolic.

Mr Grayling’s priorities, regardless of his budget, must be the security of the public and prison officers—and the welfare of inmates.

His department’s failing on all three.”

Those are not my words. They are from an editorial in The Sun. The House should bear in mind that the Secretary of State was appointed by the Prime Minister to appeal to the red tops. What has gone wrong?

[Chris Grayling]

I will think that I have a problem in our prisons when I am forced through bad planning, as the last Government were, to release tens of thousands of prisoners weeks early to commit crimes that they should not have committed. I will know that I have a problem when I have to hire thousands of police cells when we do not have enough space in our prisons. The truth is that we have space in our prisons. They are less overcrowded. We are increasing education. They are less violent than they were under the last Government. We face challenges given budget pressures but we are doing a much better job than they did.

Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Bill

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Monday 21st July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

The right hon. Gentleman should give me a chance to complete my speech. Then we can discuss what we are going to do. He has been here for many Parliaments and he will know that we take the opportunity where we can to improve Bills, even five-clause nonsense Bills, in Committee. I look forward to working with him to improve the Bill during the remaining stages of its passage through the Commons.

I have referred to the fact that the Bill has only five clauses, and I accept that we should not necessarily judge its quality by its length, but if we strip out the first clause, which sets the scene, and the fifth, which deals with extent and commencement, it is only a three-clause Bill. It is so small that the short title is almost longer than the Bill itself. Does the content really warrant a Bill of its own?

It goes without saying that we all support those who volunteer. We want to see even more people contributing their time to good causes and to the vibrancy of civil society and communities throughout the country. We do not want to live in a country where there are unnecessary barriers in the way of those who want to donate their time to helping in the local community, nor do we want to live in a society where people feel unable to help out in an emergency because of a fear of litigation. But the premise of the Bill is built on sand. The Justice Secretary has stated:

“All too often people who are doing the right thing in our society feel constrained by the fear that they are the ones who will end up facing a lawsuit”,

and he repeated that in his Second Reading opening speech. One might think that such a sweeping statement would be followed up with some concrete examples of where that has happened, or perhaps some statistics to back it up, but no. Instead we are given generally wishy-washy scenarios where people and organisations might—I stress the word “might”—be put off by fear of litigation.

[Chris Grayling]

How does the right hon. Gentleman therefore explain the 30% increase in three years in personal injury claims?

[Sadiq Khan]

I am pleased that the Justice Secretary asks that question because the Ministry of Justice has confirmed that the number of civil cases is going down, not up. It would be worth his spending some time looking at his own statistics. He spent a great deal of time during his speech talking about all the progress that he has made in reducing the number of personal injury cases. Either his reforms are not working or the statistics from his Department are wrong. He must decide which it is.

During his 30-minute speech he gave us no hard facts, no proof and no evidence. We know he has previous when it comes to lack of evidence. We have seen the meltdown in probation that has come about because of his Government’s reckless and half-baked probation privatisation—all done, again, without any evidence, let alone testing or piloting; nothing to show it would work or would not risk public safety. The Justice Secretary said at the Dispatch Box that he trusted his instinct ahead of hard statistical evidence—the same instinct that brought us the Work programme and that delivered a prison crisis has now brought us SARAH.

The Justice Secretary tried to give the impression that there was a problem, and he referred to the impact assessment. I can imagine the fear in his officials’ eyes when they were told to go and find some evidence—any evidence—to support the aims of his Bill. But the Justice Secretary should have been worried when all they could come back with was a survey—a survey—from 2006-07, when the ink was not even dry on the Compensation Act 2006. How can he use as evidence a survey done when the 2006 legislation, which many people think deals adequately with the problems that he says he wants to solve, had barely come into force? In fact, there is plenty of evidence out there, as the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd) said, that contradicts the Government’s claim. A Cabinet Office report from 2013 shows not a fall but a rise in volunteering, confirmed also this week by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. Volunteering is going up, not down.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sadiq Khan]

I have great respect for the hon. Gentleman, but he was not in the Chamber when I referred to the Master of the Rolls. We need to make sure that employees who do not know the position are educated and told the position, and that those who are not properly trained are properly trained. Debating a three-clause Bill today, and even passing it in the next few months, will not make a jot of difference. We need to make sure that the public and those who work in the emergency services are better educated and know what obligations and duties are placed on them, without the risk and fear of litigation.

Let us be clear: this Bill is targeted at negligence and not at health and safety at all. When the Justice Secretary claims, as he does, that his Bill will

“finally slay much of the ‘elf and safety’…culture”,

he must be honest about the fact that he is being disingenuous, to say the least. If this Bill were really about health and safety, he would be telling the House about the conversations he has had with the Health and Safety Executive and its views on the necessity for such legislation. Again—I think for the seventh time—I will happily allow him to intervene on me to update the House on those conversations with the Health and Safety Executive. Silence again.

We will use the Committee stage of the Bill to scrutinise in more detail its ramifications, both intended and unintended, because it might end up having the opposite effect to that which the Justice Secretary wants. A single act or omission is all that is needed to be negligent. That act or omission might be so serious, causing injury, pain or even death, as to outweigh any amount of good behaviour. He likes talking about hypothetical situations, so what about this one? You are the parent of a child. Would you want them to go on a trip knowing that if they are injured owing to a fault on the part of the school, youth club or scouts, they will not get compensated? The Bill creates the impression that this is the Government’s intention. Or this one: the chairman of a local football team cuts corners when vetting volunteer coaches working with children in the belief that he is protected by the law because in providing coaching for children, he is, to quote clause 2,

“acting for the benefit of society”.

The ramifications of this Bill are that children risk being more exposed to risk. Is that the Government’s intention in introducing it?

If that is not the Government’s intention, this three-clause Bill will not make any difference to the current state of play, as the former Solicitor-General made clear in his intervention. When assessing negligence claims, courts already take into account whether somebody is doing something for the benefit of society, as is recognised by the impact assessment of the Ministry of Justice. That is why organisations have insurance. Although they may be defendants in a claim, they would not be financially liable and their insurer would pay out.

That leads me on to another point. It is interesting that the impact assessment states:

“Insurers and other defendants may gain from slightly reduced aggregate compensation paid and this may feed through to lower insurance premiums.”

However, there is no attempt whatsoever to quantify that, and nor is there any undertaking from insurance companies that it will be passed on to customers—all of which leaves us questioning whether any of that will actually happen in practice, or will insurance companies just end up with higher profits? We all know, by the way, that those companies have donated millions of pounds to the Conservative party’s coffers over recent years.

The House must also steel itself for the inevitable last-minute tabling of a slew of Government new clauses and amendments. The Justice Secretary has a very bad habit of doing that. Such proposals get a cursory amount of scrutiny at best, but they are designed to get the good media hit he so craves and to raise a cheer from his beleaguered Back Benchers. We are very alert to the possibility of new things being added to the Bill at later stages.

Short though today’s Second Reading debate will be, given the paucity of Government speakers, it would be helpful if the Justice Secretary could provide a number of reassurances. Will he reassure us that the Government have no intention of watering down the duty on businesses, particularly small firms, to take out employers’ liability insurance, and that there are no plans to make individual employees take out their own insurance as an alternative to employers’ liability insurance?

[Chris Grayling]

Given that the right hon. Gentleman is opposed to every aspect of what we are proposing, I am baffled that the serried ranks of Labour Bank Benchers do not plan to vote against the Bill.

[Sadiq Khan]

I appreciate that the Justice Secretary is demoralised because he has not been moved from the Justice Department. When the Prime Minister asked Cabinet members to volunteer Bills and the Justice Secretary put up his hand and said, “Please, sir, I’ll put forward a Bill,” he thought he would have moved on by the time it came to Second Reading, so I am sorry that he has to deal with this pathetic and embarrassing Bill. Given that it is the Justice Secretary’s Bill, we expected dozens and dozens of his MPs to be present saying what a wonderful Bill it is, but they are not piling up behind him to say so.

The Justice Secretary has claimed that years of work—that is what he said—have gone into this pathetic and embarrassing Bill. It confuses important legal concepts and it is not properly thought through, so it could have negative knock-on effects as a result. It lacks an evidence base and seeks to legislate on the back of myths. It will not do what the Justice Secretary claims it will. It is UKIP-friendly, but it is more like something out of “The Thick of It”. It does not seem to do anything that the current law—section 1 of the Compensation Act 2006 —does not already do.

Members should not just take my word for it. Today’s briefing by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, which was mentioned by the former Minister for Civil Society, who has now left the Chamber, says:

“NCVO does not expect this bill to significantly alter the current law, with similar provisions already made in the Compensation Act 2006.”

Therefore, the only people whom the Justice Secretary could pray in aid say that the Bill will not make a jot of difference. All three main aims of the Bill are covered by that existing legislation. In fact, the MOJ’s own impact assessment also notes that

“the courts are already very experienced in dealing with these cases”.

It is a sad indictment of this Government that this is the best they have to offer in the final year of this Parliament, when prisons are in crisis, probation is in meltdown and access to justice is under attack on a daily basis. If the Justice Secretary was told by the Prime Minister that he had to introduce a Bill in this Queen’s Speech, we would have thought that he might have chosen a better one. What about a victims’ law? He could have used this window to put the rights of victims and witnesses into primary legislation. Instead, we have the SARAH Bill—a turkey of a Bill, a vacuous Bill—which, without doubt, is the most embarrassing and pathetic Bill that the Minister of Justice has published since the Department was first formed.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

Mr Speaker, I can reassure you that the proportion of offenders who are sent to open prisons and who subsequently abscond is 20% of what it was when Labour was in power a decade ago. My question to the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan)is—[Interruption.] Over the past few weeks, as this has become a more high-profile issue—[Interruption.] I do not believe that it is sensible for this country to scrap open prisons. I believe it is sensible to have tougher risk assessment procedures and not to transfer people to open conditions if they have previously absconded, and we have put those changes in place in the past couple of weeks. To listen to the right hon. Gentleman, anyone would think that he believed in scrapping open prisons altogether. Actually, they are helping to rehabilitate offenders. They need to be there; they are there for prisoners who are in the last few months of their sentence. Almost everyone who goes to an open prison behaves well and is able to be released safely at the end of their sentence. Is he actually saying that that should change?

[Sadiq Khan]

Nice soundbite, but people are absconding after the Secretary of State has made his changes. So much for keeping the public safe. Let me move on to the subject of temporary licence. Not only are the wrong sort of offenders being sent to open prisons, but the wrong sort are also being released on temporary licence. The use of these ROTL procedures has increased by 24% since 2010, with breaches of licence arrangements up by a staggering 57% in that period. Can the Secretary of State confirm that, in 2012, this Government relaxed the rules on temporary licence, and that PSI 21/2012 accepted that

“there will be an increase in the number of ROTL applications”?

[Chris Grayling]

The number of prisoners absconding from open prisons and while on temporary licence is a fraction of what it was a decade ago. I keep going back to that point. It is all well and good for Labour Members to rail against things when they are in opposition, but they now purport to be a potential party of government and yet they have nothing positive to say on how they would manage the system differently. I have tightened the regime and introduced tougher penalties for those who abscond. If the Opposition think that we should close down open prisons altogether, they should say so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Grayling]

It is worth putting on the record the fact that the most recent figures show that the level of overcrowding in our prisons has fallen, not risen. Of course, there are challenges in parts of the prison estate—

[Sadiq Khan]

What?

[Chris Grayling]

Go and look at the figures. I can assure the shadow Secretary of State that the most recent figures show a reduction in the level of overcrowding in prisons. We are not in the position, as the previous Government were, of having to let prisoners out early because we have run out of space in our prisons.

Prison Overcrowding

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Monday 16th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice if he will make a statement on the Government’s response to the prison overcrowding crisis.

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

Let me start by challenging the premise of the question posed by the right hon. Gentleman. We do not have a prison overcrowding crisis. Today’s prison population is 85,359, against a total useable operational capacity of 86,421, which means we have more than 1,000 spare places across the prison estate.

By next April, we will also have opened an additional 2,000 places. That includes four new house blocks, which will start to open from the autumn. We also have a number of additional reserve capabilities to cope with unexpected pressures. At the time of the election next year, we will have more adult male prison places than we inherited in May 2010, despite having to deal with the financial challenges that the last Government left behind.

Since last September the prison population has started rising again. This has happened for a number of reasons, including the significant increase in the number of convictions for historic sex abuse. These are people who committed appalling crimes and probably thought they had got away with it. I am delighted to find the space for them behind bars.

As that increase has been greater than expected, I have agreed to make some reserve capacity available to ensure that we retain a sufficient margin between the number of places occupied and the total capacity of the system until the new prison buildings come on stream later this year. That means in reality that in a number of public and private prisons a few more prisoners will have to share a cell for a few weeks. We might not need those places, but I would rather they were available in case we did need them.

I am also taking steps to address what I believe is a weakness in our prison system: the fact that we have no access to the kind of temporary or agency staff routinely found in our health and education systems. I am establishing a reserve capability among former staff to give us the flexibility to adapt to short-term changes of population by bringing reserve capacity into operation. We currently have some staff shortages in London, particularly because of the rapid improvement in the labour market, and this step will help us to cover any gaps.

Let me also set out for the House how we are managing the prison estate. My objective is to bring down the cost of running the prison estate while maintaining capacity levels. An important part of that is replacing older, more expensive prisons with new or refurbished capacity that is less expensive to run. For example, in the past two years we have opened 2,500 new places, with a further 2,000 places due to open in the next nine months. That has enabled us in that period to close a little over 4,500 places in older prisons, saving us a total of £170 million during the current spending review period.

In addition, we have launched a benchmarking programme across the prison estate to bring down costs. I introduced this programme in the autumn of 2012 as an alternative to privatisation, at the request of the Prison Governors Association and the Prison Officers Association. Indeed, the leaders of the Prison Officers Association sat in my office and described my decision to do so as a “victory” for them. I am grateful to our staff for their hard work in taking these difficult changes forward.

The programme of change has been praised by the National Audit Office and by the Public Accounts Committee and its chairman. The National Audit Office said recently:

“The strategy for the prison estate is the most coherent and comprehensive for many years, has quickly cut operating costs, and is a significant improvement in value for money on the approaches of the past.”

We will end this Parliament with more adult male prison places than we inherited, more hours of work being done in prisons than we inherited, more education for young detainees than we inherited, and a more modern, cost-effective prison estate than we inherited. That is anything but a crisis.

[Sadiq Khan]

The complacency of the Justice Secretary and the extent to which he is out of touch are breathtaking. He appears to think there are no problems in our prisons and that MPs can be kept in the dark about the fact that Ministers are demanding that already overcrowded prisons squeeze in another 400 inmates over the next few weeks. For example, Wandsworth prison in my constituency, which should have 943 inmates, currently has 1,597 and is operating at 169% capacity. But that is not the worst of it. This Justice Secretary has asked it to provide even more spaces.

MPs are kept in the dark about the fact that over the past five months 600 emergency places have been bought from G4S, Serco and Sodexo—at what cost we do not know. We are kept in the dark about the fact that prison staff who were made redundant and paid off are now being paid to return to work owing to the chronic shortage of staff—at what cost we do not know.

The Justice Secretary seems to think that there are no problems in our prisons. The NAO and the PAC do not agree with him. The chief inspector of prisons disagrees, as we heard this Saturday, and as he has said in every report he has written over the past two years. We disagree, prison governors disagree, prison staff disagree, experts disagree, and bereaved families disagree. Last month alone there were 11 self-inflicted deaths in our prisons. The Education Secretary may laugh; those families do not laugh. Can the Justice Secretary confirm that that was the case last month? Can he also confirm that last year self-harming, suicides and assaults on staff in adult male prisons went up?

Since May 2010, this Government have closed 18 prisons and cut 6,000 staff, yet the prison population remains broadly the same. This crisis is of the Government’s own making. Does the Justice Secretary think that there is any link between that and the 60% rise in the use of the riot squad to deal with serious disturbances in our prisons last year? Does he accept responsibility for the fact that it is his policies that have led to the wrong sorts of prisoners being sent to open prisons and released on temporary licence? Does he agree with the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), in whose constituency Ford prison is located and from which 90 offenders are currently on the run? He said on Saturday:

“It’s becoming a pattern…the wrong people are being sent to Ford.”

When did the Justice Secretary’s officials first warn him about the need to take emergency measures to deal with the most recent shortage of prison places? How many prisons are currently operating on half regime because of staffing shortages, meaning that prisoners are not working or going on courses, as they should be? What additional contingencies does he intend to put in place to deal with the possibility of disturbances in prisons?

On this Government’s watch our prisons have become unsafe warehouses, rather than places where offenders can be rehabilitated. It is important that we get answers to these crucial questions if the public are to have confidence that prisons will continue to punish and reform while keeping prisoners, prison staff and the public safe.

[Chris Grayling]

Having listened to those comments, Members might never know the truth. Prison overcrowding is lower under this Government than it was in the last four years of the previous Labour Government. Let me walk the right hon. Gentleman through the operational capacity for adult males in our prisons: in May 2010 it was 80,269; today it is 82,395; and in 2015 it is predicted to be 85,133. That means the capacity for men in our prisons is increasing. The tornado squads, which deal with serious incidents, have dealt with half the level of activity seen in 2007.

I think that the right hon. Gentleman needs a little bit of a lesson in what a prison capacity crisis really is. It is having to introduce a special scheme to let prisoners go home after serving a quarter of their sentence because there are not enough places to keep them in. That is what Labour did. It is deciding to shorten everyone’s sentence by a few weeks because they did not plan for the places needed. That is what Labour did. They let out more than 80,000 people early, and 1,500 of them committed suspected crimes when they should have been in prison. That is my definition of a prison overcrowding crisis, and it happened under Labour. Now they have the nerve to call sensible contingency planning a crisis, even though they were the ones who were forced to rent out thousands of police cells across the country because they ran out of space.

I make no apology for the fact that under this Government more people are going to prison, and they are going to prison for longer. I have a strategy in place to ensure that we will always have the space for them.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 6th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

That issue applies particularly to judicial review. The proposals set out in the Bill currently before the House would set an appropriately high bar that will do precisely what my hon. Friend says. There must be a bona fide strong case that goes forward to the courts before the taxpayer will pay the bill.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I welcome the Justice Secretary’s reassurance, in answer to the question of my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter), that families like those of Jean Charles de Menezes and Jimmy Mubenga would get legal aid at inquests even though they are not British citizens. But can he explain to the House how it is in the public interest, and somehow good, for the women at Yarl’s Wood detention centre who were sexually assaulted by guards, for the Gurkhas refused entry to the UK or for care home residents like those at Winterbourne View to be denied legal aid?

[Chris Grayling]

What divides us is the fact that the Government must take hard decisions. The Labour party has argued for reductions in legal aid; it had plans for reductions in legal aid in its manifesto but now, in opposition, it is trying to prevent reductions in legal aid. That is, I am afraid, another example of the Labour party saying one thing and doing another.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Grayling]

I expressed a willingness to work with the criminal Bar to try to create a more streamlined, more efficient, less expensive system. It is a matter of regret to me that the criminal Bar continues to decline to take important cases, and that is a matter that we are addressing hard at the moment.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

The hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans), whom I have notified of this question, had private means so he could afford the best defence, and justice, in his case, was done; but he finds himself more than £100,000 out of pocket. That has caused him publicly to question his support for the Government’s legal aid plans, which have led to a two-tier justice system. What advice does the Lord Chancellor give to anyone charged with a serious criminal offence who is not fortunate enough to have their own private means, to help them get a fair trial?

[Chris Grayling]

My advice to such people is simple: to apply for criminal legal aid. In a serious case such as the one to which the right hon. Gentleman refers, they will have access to a QC, who will represent them.

[Sadiq Khan]

That is not the experience. The CPS has a QC and two barristers, but all people get on legal aid is a junior barrister. That leads to a two-tier criminal justice system. In answer to a previous question the Justice Secretary said that he could not answer questions about Operation Cotton because it is sub judice. I understand what sub judice is. My question is simple. How many other cases are similarly affected by applications to stay the trial because a fair trial cannot take place? The answer is not sub judice.

[Chris Grayling]

These are matters for the courts. I have no idea how many cases are subject to a request for a stay because those requests do not come to me personally. Two years ago Labour attacked our changes to civil legal aid. The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) attacked our changes to civil legal aid, saying that we should be looking for reductions in criminal legal aid instead. Two years later the Opposition have conveniently forgotten that and have changed their position totally. That is a party that says one thing and does another.

Justice and Home Affairs Opt-out

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Monday 7th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I say to the hon. Gentleman that it would not be right for me to deal with a constituency case at the Dispatch Box. I suggest he write to the Home Secretary about that. I am still confused as to what he wants, however. He appears to be expressing scepticism about the European arrest warrant, but his party’s policy is to rejoin it. I am confused about what the Opposition really want. We have set out a clear view for Parliament, but we still do not know where the Labour party stands on all this.

I am grateful, too, for the excellent work done by the European Scrutiny Committee, the Justice Committee and the Home Affairs Committee, not only through their extremely thorough and thought-provoking reports, but through the contributions their members have made on the Floor of this House. Their work has been and will continue to be important in informing the Government’s view as this process proceeds. May I express my particular thanks to the Chair of the Justice Committee for his analysis of the decisions we took earlier? Extremely important issues are involved and we gave them careful thought, and I am glad that his report recognised the process we have gone through and that he felt we had reached the right decisions in that area.

Let me touch briefly on the issue of the amount of time provided to this House, which a lot of right hon. and hon. Members have raised today. Last summer, we gave this House a clear opportunity, which it took, to support the Government’s decision in principle to exercise the opt-out, and I am grateful to the House for giving us that support. We will come back to the House at the conclusion of the negotiations with the Commission and the Council to offer the House the further opportunity to endorse or reject what we are doing. If this House rejects what we are doing, clearly it will not be possible for us to return to the Commission and simply override the view of this House. We will of course give this House an opportunity to vote and decide what should happen, but I do think the House needs to give the Government the opportunity to negotiate unfettered by a fixed mandate, because these are complex issues and we need to reach the right decisions in the interests of this country. That is what we are seeking to do.

[Sadiq Khan]

The Justice Secretary just said that he would give the House a chance to “endorse or reject”, but will he give it the chance to amend?

[Chris Grayling]

We will discuss the detail of that motion in due course, but of course we will give the House the opportunity to express a very clear view on the conclusion of the negotiations that we have reached. That is what we said at the start and it is what we will deliver.

We have been through detailed discussions both with the Select Committees and within the Government. We are now going through detailed discussions with the Commission and we will return with the conclusions in due course.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. I am looking forward to visiting Northumberland shortly and seeing some of the work that is being done. This is enormously important. It is particularly important that we have really close links between the efforts provided to help people into employment and the efforts put into helping them to sort their lives out once they have left prison. Those two areas are integrally linked, and that work is immensely important.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

Does the Justice Secretary think there is a problem with young men in particular being radicalised in our prisons? If so, what is he doing about it?

[Chris Grayling]

There is certainly a real issue. We have seen over the years the radicalisation of young men in prisons. We now have a first-rate team of imams in our prisons who are carefully selected and I have met a number of them. They are putting together carefully constructed programmes to help steer people away from radicalisation. I pay tribute to the work they do in often difficult circumstances and I believe they can really make a difference.

[Sadiq Khan]

The sorts of things that the Prime Minister’s extremism taskforce, experts, governors and staff are saying are required are enhanced monitoring, better intelligence gathering, staff trained to recognise and deal with the issue, a dedicated expert unit within the Prison Service, a specialist programme to target prisoners and spare capacity for governors. What resources and how much personal attention is the Justice Secretary giving to that?

[Chris Grayling]

Let me assure the right hon. Gentleman that all of those things are, in fact, currently happening. The last meeting I had to discuss those issues took place in the past two weeks. It is a matter of great concern to my colleagues on the Front Bench and to me, and we will continue to work at it. I again pay the greatest of tributes to the staff involved in this work on the front line and the imams who are doing such good work in shaping the education programmes that can make a real difference. I think that there is agreement across the House that we need to ensure that the work is effective and delivers real results for us. I am very confident in the team who are doing it.

Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Monday 24th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

I am really pleased that the right hon. Gentleman asked that question. This is the third justice Bill of this Session. Two of the Bills have not yet received Royal Assent, and the Government are having a third bite of the cherry. Furthermore, the Justice Secretary tried to rewrite history. During our 13 years in government, crime did not go down by 5%, 10% or even by 20%; it went down by 43%, and that was according to independent statistics and not to dodgy figures that the Justice Secretary likes to rely on.

This latest criminal justice Bill is having its Second Reading before either of the other criminal justice Bills —the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill and the Offender Rehabilitation Bill—that the Chair of the Select Committee was so keen to support have even received Royal Assent. Talk about desperation! The Select Committee Chairman should listen. We know the Government are in a mess when they bring in new laws to amend laws that they passed only a year ago, as some parts of this Bill seek to do. That is the mess this Government are in, and that is the shambolic way they are running our justice system.

I will not go through every one of the Bill’s 63 clauses, but I want to make myself clear. There are some elements of this Bill we support, some need further work and there are some we downright oppose. In part 1 of the Bill, the Government attempt to make up for the error they made when they abolished indeterminate sentences for public protection. I know that the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) feels strongly about that. They cannot admit they got it wrong and do a 180° U-turn, so they are doing a partial U-turn by bringing in a raft of new sentence proposals

Of course we support keeping the public safe from the most serious and violent criminals. That is why we opposed the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), the previous Justice Secretary, when he removed from judges the power to make IPPs to protect the public. To be fair to the current Justice Secretary, he would never have countenanced abolishing that power, but he cannot admit that because he voted for its abolition. We therefore have clause 3 and schedule 15 eligibility for life sentences and extended determinant sentences to try to address the mistakes of the Legal Aid, Sentences and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012.

Giving the Parole Board a say in whether some of the most serious criminals should be released at half time or when they reach two thirds of their sentence is no substitute for judges having the power when sentencing to impose an indeterminate sentence to protect the public. That will give the Parole Board an extra work load, yet I bet that the Justice Secretary cannot tell the House what extra resources he will give it to do its job properly. Silence. The Ministry of Justice’s impact assessment estimates that there will be at least an extra 1,100 parole hearings owing to the Bill. If all the supplementary work involved is added, there will be a huge addition to the Parole Board’s work load. How will that be resourced? Silence.

Surely even this Justice Secretary understands that a poorly resourced Parole Board making the wrong decisions about whether to release someone is as bad as automatic release. Wrong decisions made by the Parole Board because of an overburdened and stretched staff help no one; nor do delays in getting a hearing because of a backlog. There are problems and delays in prisoners getting the courses and treatments that they need as part of their sentencing plans and delays in getting a parole hearing, but let us imagine what the future holds.

Increasing the maximum for a handful of offences still leaves many offences uncovered that would have previously allowed a judge to give a more appropriate sentence to protect the public. By the way, although we do not oppose them, let us be clear that the provisions to increase the maximum life sentences for certain terrorism-related offences look tough, but the Ministry of Justice impact assessment confirms that this is a classic con trick. Do hon. Members know how many offenders were convicted in 2013 for the offences of either weapons training for terrorist purposes or training for terrorism? None. What about 2012? None. This new toughness will affect no one. None of those offences is being brought before the courts, so there is no one to punish and no one to deter. I wonder how the Justice Secretary intends to measure the impact of the change. He does not know. This is all about appearing to look tough.

[Chris Grayling]

If the right hon. Gentleman looks back, he will see that in the latter part of the past decade in the wake of the London bombings, our security services did a fine job of intercepting a number of terror plots. In that time, a number of people received 10-year jail sentences, which is the maximum available to the courts. On at least one occasion, the judge bemoaned his inability to provide a longer jail sentence because of the risk he believed the individual posed to the public. Happily, there are not large numbers of such cases. I think we would all agree that we do not want to see more of them. I hope that the provision will not be used very often, but it needs to be there in case it is necessary.

[Sadiq Khan]

The right hon. Gentleman confirms that he made a huge error in abolishing the indeterminate sentence to protect the public. He is trying to give the impression of being tough and providing the facilities that our security services need, but in fact the evidence suggests that there have been zero prosecutions for such offences.

Labour has led calls for something to be done about the inappropriate use of cautions for serious and violent offences, such as rape, and to stop those who repeatedly receive cautions. Those are not my words but something that the Library paper that accompanies the Bill says. The shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), has raised this, as indeed have I, at Justice questions. It has taken the Government some time even to admit that there is a problem with the growth of inappropriately used cautions for serious and violent offences.

I can remember the Justice Secretary getting into a tangle at Justice questions when trying to explain cautions for rape and saying that victims are to blame and that cautions are given because victims withdraw their statements. We must study in detail the proposals to see whether they will indeed address the public’s growing concern that the overuse of cautions is another example of this Government’s doing justice on the cheap.

[Sadiq Khan]

If the hon. Gentleman had done some more research and read the Bill as well, he would have seen not only that the number of cautions had started going down considerably but that this Bill does nothing to address the increased use of fixed penalty notices, penalty notices, warnings and conditional cautions. I expect that he will support our amendments in Committee when we try to improve this hopeless Bill.

Taken as a whole, the changes in part 1 of the Bill will see more people in our prisons. Indeed, the Government’s own impact assessment estimates that an additional 1,050 prison places will be needed. However, as of last Friday there were just 510 places left in the whole prison system, with the secure estate operating at in excess of 99% capacity, which usually sees Operation Safeguard kicking in. The Justice Secretary needs to be straight about where he plans to keep these additional prisoners: with his flagship Titan prison not due on stream until 2017, the public have a right to know that.

[Chris Grayling]

If the right hon. Gentleman looks at the numbers, he will see that we are planning in the next 15 months to open up around 2,000 new adult male prison places.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sadiq Khan]

The problem is that the Justice Secretary is closing down prisons and does not explain where the money for these additional prison places will come from. His own impact assessment is silent on that.

[Chris Grayling]

There is a simple answer—those figures are in the budget.

[Sadiq Khan]

They are not in the budget, because the average cost of a prisoner is £42,000 a year. If we multiply that figure by the increased number of prisoners that the Justice Secretary’s impact assessment says there will be—1,050—it comes to a total of £44 million a year. That is not in the budget.

[Chris Grayling]

The right hon. Gentleman needs to spend a bit of time doing maths. I simply point, for example, to the new house block that will open at Parc prison in south Wales in the next few months, where the average cost per prison place is about £15,000.

[Sadiq Khan]

I am happy to have a ding-dong with the Justice Secretary. That figure applies in prisons such as Oakwood, which are failing—new purpose-built prisons. In a prison such as the one I visited last week in Winchester the average cost is £42,000; in a prison such as Wandsworth, it is £44,000; in Brixton, £46,000; and in Pentonville, £48,000. He is just plucking figures out of thin air and assuming that all 87,000 prisoners have the same £15,000-a-year cost. That is not the case and he has to be honest enough to recognise that there are far too many expensive prison places because of the legacy of his cancelling the new prisons and closing down too many over the last four years.

The concern is that the Justice Secretary talks a good talk, especially when briefing the right-wing media, but he simply does not care about or pay attention to detail, as he is working on the basis that he will be long gone before any of his mess needs to be cleared up. After all, he left a huge mess in the Department for Work and Pensions with his Work programme. He is assuming that somebody else will be left to pick up the pieces of privatising probation, of legal aid and of this prison population crisis.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sadiq Khan]

Absolutely. The concerns are that as a consequence of the changes decisions made by Ministers and other public authorities will be put above the rule of law. Those authorities will almost be free to do as they please, to the ludicrous extent that breaking the law appears to be of no concern to the Justice Secretary.

It is clear the Justice Secretary’s measures are underpinned by a majoritarian view of the world in which democracy is only about elections, and those who win can do as they please in between. I would be more sympathetic if the Conservatives had actually won the last general election. The Justice Secretary’s policies are dangerous. Democracy is more than elections: I am not alone in that view, and neither is my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston. Lord Dyson, the Master of the Rolls, said that

“there is no principle more basic to our system of law than the maintenance of the rule of law itself and the constitutional protection afforded by judicial review.”

The former Lord Chief Justice, the esteemed Lord Woolf, said:

“In our system, without its written constitution embedded in our law so it can't be changed, judicial review is critical.”

He also said that the Ministry of Justice has shown a

“remarkable lack of concern for the precision of the facts”.

Joe Rukin, co-ordinator of the Stop HS2 campaign—that infamous left-wing dominated campaign group—said:

“The government seem to be making out that they believe any of their infrastructure plans should be above the law and do not realise that it is essential in a democratic society to be able to hold the government to account”.

[Chris Grayling]

It is the case, if I am not mistaken, that HS2 can happen only if the relevant measure is passed in legislative form by both Houses of Parliament. Does the right hon. Gentleman believe that the courts and people outside Parliament should be able to override democratic decision making by the elected House and the House of Lords?

[Sadiq Khan]

That question raises so many concerns about the Justice Secretary’s lack of knowledge that it is really worrying. Citizens should be able to challenge the decisions that are made by Ministers, including him and Labour Ministers. That might mean that the courts find that some Government decisions are wrong. For example, they might find against plans to expand Heathrow with a third runway. We have to accept that decisions made by the Executive should be able to be challenged by the judiciary. He should accept the important concept of the separation of powers. We provide checks and balances for the judiciary, the Executive and the legislature. We are not a country in which the Cabinet can do whatever it likes.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

We have looked at a variety of ways of minimising the impact on different parts of our justice system of the difficult decisions that we have had to take. I reassure my right hon. Friend that the decisions that we are taking on legal aid are in proportion to the decisions that we are having to take in the rest of the Department—the legal aid budget is coming down by the same proportion as the overall departmental budget. In relation to the Bar, I have sought, where I can do so, to put in place ameliorating measures, such as the offer to introduce a staged payment system, which at the very least will improve the cash flow of working barristers, even if we have to take tough decisions about the amount that we pay.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I, too, welcome the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) to his position and congratulate him on his promotion.

The Government’s salami-slicing of civil legal aid over the past three years and of criminal legal aid over the next 15 months will, according to independent experts, deny hundreds of thousands of citizens access to decent advice and representation. Law centres and high street firms are closing down, as we have heard, and junior barristers are leaving the profession. That should worry us all. If the Justice Secretary was provided with costed proposals that would make similar savings over the next 15 months but without the devastating consequences, would the Government reconsider their plans?

[Chris Grayling]

I sometimes find the Opposition’s attitude completely breathtaking. It is but two and a half years since they attacked our proposals to reform civil legal aid, saying that the savings should be found from criminal legal aid instead. Now they appear to have done a complete U-turn. Is the right hon. Gentleman prepared to commit in the House today that if a Labour Government are elected at the next election, they will reverse the cuts? I suspect that the answer is no.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Grayling]

I very much enjoyed that visit, and I pay tribute to the work being done in Rugby. In setting out our probation reforms, we have taken steps to ensure that smaller organisations not only have the opportunity to participate in that way but have the simplest possible mechanisms to enable them to do so, with transparency of risk in the supply chain, with common contracts to save on bureaucracy and with measures to prevent anyone being used as what is commonly known as bid candy. We want to guarantee that supply chains will remain intact—without changes—through our consent.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

Having seen the way in which the Ministry of Justice has been taken for a ride by G4S at Oakwood prison and by ALS in relation to the court translator services—both of which contracts were awarded by this Government—will the Secretary of State tell us just how bad a private company running a probation contract will need to be in order to be sacked?

[Chris Grayling]

Let me tell the House what being taken for a ride is. It is what happened under the last Government, under the contracts for electronic tagging, and we have been dealing with that and clearing up the mess in the past few months. I will take no lessons from Labour Members, who presided over an appalling system of contract management and exposed the taxpayer to considerable risk, leaving behind the mess that we have had to clear up. They are shocking, they were shocking, and I will take no lessons from them.

[Sadiq Khan]

The Justice Secretary has been in the job long enough to understand that the way it works is that I ask the questions and he answers them. He and the Minister with responsibility for probation claimed that the main reason for privatising probation is that the savings can be used to provide probation services to those who currently do not receive them as their sentence is less than 12 months. The Justice Secretary has refused to publish costings and to pilot his plans, and he is already two months behind schedule. I will ask him a simple question, and I hope to get an answer: by what date will all those on sentences of less than 12 months be receiving through-the-gate supervision?

[Chris Grayling]

We will begin rolling out the part of the reforms set out in the Offender Rehabilitation Bill in the latter part of this year. I say to the right hon. Gentleman that he represents a party that was in government for nearly 15 years, during which time tens of thousands of offences were committed by people on short sentences who had no supervision when they left prison. The Labour Government did nothing about it. We are doing something about it, and it is not before time.

Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the six-month time scale.

No one can disagree with the objective of extending supervision and the accompanying help to all those released from prison. In this regard, I want to place on record our admiration for the massively important work that professional probation staff around the country do to rehabilitate some of the most troubled individuals while keeping the public safe. Much of the public do not realise the work of the probation service, and it is a sign of its success that the Government will leave to it the most high-risk offenders. It is welcome that offenders released from sentences of less than two years will be subject to at least 12 months of mandatory supervision in the community, but it is multi-national companies with no track record in this area that will be responsible for this, rather than the probation service, which we know can do the job very well.

It has always been an anomaly that short-sentence prisoners—the group with the highest risk of reoffending —are the ones left to their own devices when released from prison. As has been mentioned and the House knows, the previous Labour Government tried to address this with custody plus, but financial constraints prevented it from being implemented. The House also knows, from Paul Goggins’ Second Reading contribution, that by contrast the Government have no idea how much the extension of supervision to those serving 12 months or less will cost. Their impact assessment skirts around this, saying that

“the cost will be dependent on the outcome of competition”.

The Government have done nothing to update the House on this and so the plans remain uncosted.

The Justice Secretary and the Minister with responsibility for probation say that extending supervision will be paid for by privatising probation. But if that is the case, one would assume that the Justice Secretary and his officials must have figures to support it. It is hardly surprising that experts and others are suspicious about why the Government will not come clean on the numbers. The Justice Secretary has linked the cost of extended supervision to savings delivered by privatising probation, so the Bill is directly related to the wider probation privatisation plans. The two issues simply cannot be separated, which is one of the reasons new clause 1 was inserted by the other place.

The changes that flow from the Bill are untried and untested and will see supervision of serious and violent offenders fragmented. I must give credit to the Justice Secretary, whose plans have created an impressive coalition of those opposed to them: probation officers, chief executives and chairs of probation trusts, The Economist, his own officials and, most recently, the chief inspectors of both probation and of prisons, who questioned the system’s ability to cope with his plans. The chief inspector of probation warned that the plans would lead to

“an increased risk to the public.”

The Economist called the plans “half-baked.” The Ministry of Justice’s own risk register warns that there is an 80 per cent. risk of an unacceptable drop in operational performance, which when dealing with offenders can only lead to higher risks to public safety.

But still the Justice Secretary pushes ahead, with the same arrogance and dismissal of expert advice that led to the disaster that is the Work programme—a Work programme so bad that someone has more chance of still being in work after six months if they do not go on it.

[Chris Grayling]

We may be going slightly off track, Mr Speaker, but may I just point out that the Work programme is doing about twice as well as the predecessor programme that we inherited from the last Government?

[Mr Speaker]

That is totally irrelevant to the Third Reading of the Bill.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 17th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

This is an extremely important area. A change is long overdue, and we will proceed with it in the next few weeks.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

You will be aware, Mr Speaker, that the Justice Secretary is unwilling to publish the MOJ’s assessment of the risks attached to his plans to privatise probation. Will the Secretary of State tell the House whether his plans will see the risk to public safety higher, lower or the same as it is now?

[Chris Grayling]

I owe the right hon. Gentleman an apology from last time, when I implied that his campaign to be Mayor of London had him trailing in third place. I have now discovered that that is not the case, and I wish him well. I have watched his progress carefully.

On the risk registers, I would say to the right hon. Gentleman that he never published them because they are a working tool for the civil service. This Government will not do anything that leads to a greater risk to public safety. Bringing supervision to under-12-month groups will make the public safer, rather than more at risk, through a system that he and his Government admitted was wrong but never did anything about.

[Sadiq Khan]

The Secretary of State’s response is even more surprising, bearing in mind the very damning joint report from the chief inspectors of prisons and of probation, which is published today. They believe that the scale of the problems they have identified means that

“the entire thrust of the Government’s rehabilitation plans”

is undermined. We know that he ignored their last report in 2012, but bearing in mind the seriousness of the issue, will he meet the inspectors as a matter of urgency to hear their concerns that his plans could in fact make matters worse rather than better?

[Chris Grayling]

I hate to disappoint the right hon. Gentleman, but I last met the probation inspector about three days ago. I meet both inspectors regularly, and I take their views immensely seriously. That is one reason why we have put in place radical changes that will create a through the gate rehabilitation service to deal with many of the issues that they have highlighted. Unfortunately for the right hon. Gentleman, their report is not about our plans, but about the system we are trying to change, and that is why we are trying to change it.

EU Charter of Fundamental Rights

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I commend the Justice Secretary for the cool, calm way in which he answered these questions today, in contrast to the way in which he spoke to the media about the case last week. The position is clear: in 2007, Britain specifically opted out of the charter of fundamental rights being enforceable when the Lisbon treaty was signed. There is no ambiguity about that, as even Mr Justice Mostyn agrees. In his judgment, after quoting the relevant protocol, he said:

“To my mind, it is absolutely clear that the contracting parties agreed that the Charter did not create one single further justiciable right in our domestic courts.”

Labour sought and successfully negotiated an opt-out from the charter. I commend the cool, calm way in which the right hon. Gentleman has explained the timeline and the judgment in 2011.

The right hon. Gentleman has explained why he did not appeal the judgment in Luxembourg in 2011, but he has also heard the concern about the confusion that that could cause in the judiciary. Will he publish the relevant legal advice so that all members of the judiciary can be made aware that there is no confusion, and that the charter is not enforceable in the UK courts? Will he also confirm that he understands that the concern relates to a ruling by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, which arbitrates on matters relating to the EU, and not by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which deals with the European convention on human rights? For the avoidance of doubt, I am willing to work with the right hon. Gentleman to ensure that the UK’s opt-out from the EU charter of fundamental rights, which we negotiated, remains in place?

[Chris Grayling]

With apologies to the House, I am not prepared to take any lessons from Labour Members who landed us with a treaty and a charter that did far more than we were promised. I also apologise to the former Europe Minister, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who is in his place, for taking his name in vain, but it was he who said in 2000 that Europe’s new charter of fundamental rights

“would have no greater legal standing before EU judges than a copy of the Beano or the Sun.”

He knows that that is simply not what happened, because the previous Government signed us up to something that we would not have chosen to sign. The right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) talks about an opt-out, but that is not what the Labour Government actually negotiated. They negotiated a protocol that stated that the charter would be applied only to EU law. That is the situation today, and it does not enable us to opt out of the charter. We are still subject to it in EU matters. Again, that is not what Labour said would be the case.

The right hon. Gentleman asked me to publish the legal advice. His party has a long track record of not publishing legal advice. As he knows, Governments have always resisted its publication, and that will continue, because it is an important part of a Minister’s job to be able to take advice in confidence from our Law Officers. He also made a point about the European Court of Human Rights. The truth is that we need change in both areas. We need change in our relationship with the European Union and in our relationship with the European Court of Human Rights. They are separate institutions, and we need change in both of them. A majority Conservative Government would deliver those changes.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I can give my hon. Friend the absolute assurance that both the Home Secretary and I are looking at ways of tightening the rules. There are provisions relating to article 8 in the Immigration Bill, and I am hopeful that our proposed reforms to human rights laws will strengthen the position of victims of crime in the terrible situation that his constituents have found themselves in. We will make sure that the offenders do not get away with it.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

As a number of Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members have commented, the Justice Secretary is cutting and changing the funding for innocent victims of crime. For example, spending in Surrey and Hertfordshire will be £21.14 per victim, while the average in England and Wales will be £15 per victim. Why, under his plans, will spending per victim in London, at just £10.11 per victim, be 41% less than the national average?

[Chris Grayling]

It is nice to see the right hon. Gentleman launching his London mayoral campaign. I follow his Twitter feed, and for every tweet about justice, there are six about London. I will tell him simply and straightforwardly that under this Government the funding available for victims of crime in London has increased significantly, as it has across the whole country.

[Sadiq Khan]

It is funny that the Justice Secretary says that, because I used the Mayor of London’s figures for that question. According to the Mayor, the reason for the cut in London is that the Justice Secretary has decided to use a formula based solely on population, while failing to take into account crime levels and the number of victims in police force areas. That means that London loses more than £3 million a year, according to the Mayor of London. As the Justice Secretary said, our justice system relies on the confidence of victims and witnesses, so he should be aware that the Metropolitan police have the lowest victim satisfaction rate of any police force in the country. What impact does he think his decision will have on that?

[Chris Grayling]

I wish the right hon. Gentleman well with his campaign, but I know that the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) is the frontrunner at the moment, so he has a bit of catching up to do.

Only in the world of Labour party mathematics and economics could an increased budget be described as a cut.

Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

I will; I will come to that in my speech, if the hon. Gentleman gives me time, but as the Justice Secretary would know if he got out of his office, some probation trusts supervise short-term prisoners now, within their budgets, because they believe that it is very important to do so.

On one side of the debate, there are at least three probation trust chairs warning the Justice Secretary to delay probation privatisation or risk deaths: the chief inspector of probation warns that the plans will lead to

“an increased risk to the public”;

The Economist magazine calls the Justice Secretary’s plans half-baked; and probation staff warn that the fragmentation of the service goes against everything that we know about what works in supervising offenders. The Ministry of Justice’s own risk register warns that there is an 80% risk of an unacceptable drop in operational performance; with regard to dealing with offenders, that can only lead to higher risks to public safety. [Interruption.] The Justice Secretary is saying “No.” Will he publish his risk register?

[Chris Grayling]

Will the shadow Secretary of State remind the House how many times the previous Government published risk registers, which are, after all, only a management tool?

[Sadiq Khan]

Let’s make a promise: if the Justice Secretary publishes his risk register now, when I am Justice Secretary, should I do what he is trying to do —God forbid—I will publish the risk register. He crosses his arms, but he cannot deny that his risk register says that there will be an 80% risk of an unacceptable drop in operational performance. That is playing fast and loose with public safety. He is not willing to publish his risk register.

I have not finished listing those who are on the first side of the argument. I have mentioned the probation trust chairs, the chief inspector of probation, The Economist, probation staff and the Justice Secretary’s risk register. The former chief inspector of prisons, Lord Ramsbotham, said that the Bill was “being rushed through”, and that “Many…questions remain unanswered”. That is not all. The former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, has said:

“I am afraid it is obvious that, because they are…in a hurry, the preparations that the Government have made for the introduction of this scale of change are very modest indeed.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 May 2013; Vol. 745, c. 653.]

--- Later in debate ---

[Sadiq Khan]

I want to make some progress, then I will give way.

The Bill does make specific mention of the probation service, and I pay tribute to those in the other place for their work in trying to get proper scrutiny of the Justice Secretary’s plans. Clause 1 says that no changes may be made to the probation service without the approval of both Houses. That was the result of a successful amendment tabled by Lord Ramsbotham in the other place, not of anything that the Government did. It has taken almost five months since the Bill’s Third Reading in the other place for us to have a Second Reading debate today. Could the reason for that delay be that the Justice Secretary was desperate to begin the tendering process by which privatisation could occur before this important clause could be debated, because he was afraid of Commons scrutiny?

We understand why the Justice Secretary wants to get on with his plans and avoid proper scrutiny. Just two years ago, the Ministry of Justice—none of its then Ministers are now in post; all have been sacked—published a comprehensive competition strategy for probation services, and proposed

“the commissioning of six new PbR pilot schemes to carefully develop and rigorously test PbR for reduced re-offending”.

Note the phrases “pilot schemes” and “rigorously test PBR”. The Ministry of Justice knew that the Peterborough pilot, which was designed by Labour and began in 2010, was a very different beast altogether, and its results are not directly comparable with the Government’s probation plans.

In March last year, the Ministry published a further paper, proposing

“a stronger role for Probation Trusts as commissioners of probation services and a stronger emphasis on local partnership working”.

Note the reference to “probation trusts as commissioners”, not abolition, and to “local partnership working”, not control freakery from Whitehall. I have got to honest: we agreed with that approach.

[Chris Grayling]

As the right hon. Gentleman will know, something like 3,000 serious, violent, sexual and similar crimes were committed by people who received sentences of less than 12 months and were released unsupervised last year. He talks about testing. Given that situation, how many years would he wait before he introduced a scheme that supervised those offenders?

[Sadiq Khan]

If the right hon. Gentleman had taken the trouble to speak to the probation trusts, he would know that in Manchester, for example, the trust is already working with the voluntary sector, the private sector and charities to address those who receive sentences of less than 12 months. If he had spoken to those in Avon and Somerset, he would know that the probation trust is already doing that. If he had spoken to the South Yorkshire trust, he would know that it is already doing that. If he took the trouble to speak to them, rather than G4S and Serco, he would know what works and what does not work. Instead, he wants to give contracts to untried, untested private companies, with no experience in criminal justice. If I were the Justice Secretary, I would have consulted the probation trusts. What does he do? He does not wait for any evidence or trials. Forget testing or rigour; he cancels the pilots and does a complete somersault, hoping that no one will notice either his change of mind or the fact that it is being done without any evidence, taking huge risks with public safety and reoffending rates.

Another important issue is how the plans will be resourced. A number of Back Benchers, reading the script, have asked about resources, and how we will we do this in the public sector and not use G4S and Serco to save money. As I have already said, extending supervision to those on short sentences is to be welcomed, but this cannot be taken as a resource-free commitment. An additional 50,000 offenders on top of the current 250,000 a year would need support and supervision. The impact assessment is of no help at all in shedding light on this issue. It says that

“the cost will be dependent on the outcome of competition”.

So, basically, the Government are asking for Parliament’s support, but will not say what the cost implications are of implementing the plans. Call me old-fashioned, but I would like to know how much it will cost before I decide to vote for it.

That is important for two reasons. First, if it is the case that there is going to be a considerable additional resource demand for these plans, but the Government do not want to commit more money—they may indeed wish to save money—existing resources will have to be spread more thinly. So while the Justice Secretary refers to the 3,000 short-term offenders committing offences, that could increase exponentially, because medium and low-risk offenders will be supervised less well because of his plans to increase supervision without proper resources. There are implications for the quality of supervision, and it is important that Parliament debates this.

Secondly, if the Government need to commit more resources, it is only right that Parliament should scrutinise those plans. Either way, the Justice Secretary must be honest with Parliament about the cost of the plans he wants us to vote for today. I find it hard to believe that the Ministry of Justice has not done any number crunching on those issues. Why is it not being made public?

That is all the more pertinent given the excellent contribution my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) made in the Opposition day debate 12 days ago—I am not sure whether the Secretary of State was still in his place, but the Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright), was. My right hon. Friend pointed out that Labour had a similar scheme for extending supervision called custody plus, which a number of Back Benchers who have read their Whips’ briefing have referred to. He said, because he is an evidence-based politician:

“Ten years ago, it would have cost £194 million a year”.

That would have been for 50,000 offenders, the same figure the Government are proposing. My right hon. Friend went on to attack the lack of costings for the Justice Secretary’s similar plan—he will forgive me for embarrassing him—stating:

“I can put a figure on it, but he cannot. All we are told is that it will be paid for by the savings generated by the competition for low and medium-risk offenders. Frankly, I just do not believe it. Either that supervision will be inadequate or the existing provision will be weakened and reduced in quality.”—[Official Report, 30 October 2013; Vol. 569, c. 1003.]

The Justice Secretary, who is still here for a change, has an opportunity today to respond to that stinging criticism from a respected and senior Member of this House with considerable experience in this area, because so far he has failed to do so. I know that he has a supper to go to, but he still has some time to respond to that point before he leaves.

The Justice Secretary’s incompetence is compounded by his calculations on other matters. According to the MOJ’s impact assessment, extending supervision to prisoners serving less than 12 months will lead to around 13,000 offenders being recalled or committed to custody, increasing the number of prison places needed by around 600, at a cost of £16 million. Where will that £16 million and those additional 600 places come from? Last Friday we were told that there were only 658 prison places left in England and Wales, and next March he will close a further four prisons, with the loss of a further 1,400 places. That is from the Government who cancelled our prison building programme. He will forgive me if we lack confidence in his plans for probation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sadiq Khan]

Well, I lost the trail of the hon. Gentleman’s intervention after the third minute. His party has been in government for three and a half years. It has had three and a half years to change the way probation trusts are measured. According to his measurement, every trust is either good or excellent. What is his policy solution? It is to abolish them. Call me old-fashioned, but that seems absurd, bearing in mind the evidence. Why not speak to the probation trusts and say, “Listen, we want to try to supervise those people who are not currently receiving supervision, so are you going to consider doing that?”, rather than taking forward back-of-the-envelope policies that all the evidence suggests will not work.

[Chris Grayling]

The right hon. Gentleman’s policy appears to be to ask the probation trusts whether they would consider supervising people sentenced to less than 12 months. Will he say very clearly before the House whether or not, if this country is unlucky enough to have a Labour Government after the next election, he will commit to providing supervision for those prisoners sentenced to less than 12 months?

[Sadiq Khan]

If the Justice Secretary has his way, within the course of 12 months those who receive a sentence of less than 12 months will be supervised and we will have to wait and keep our fingers crossed that there will be no risk to public safety. If there is no such risk and the Justice Secretary finally oversees a rehabilitation revolution, of course we will not stop that supervision—that would be ridiculous. The Justice Secretary’s problem is that he cannot tell us how much it will cost, how much reoffending will go down by, or how many fewer crimes will be committed. That is the big flaw in his plan. It is not evidence-based. It has been worked out on the back of an envelope. The last time he tried to do that was the Work programme, which was not a huge success.

Probation Service

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

We are trying to do the things that experts have told us need to happen. They tell us that we need to support people through the gate and support those who have sentences on the edge of 12 months.

[Sadiq Khan]

We are not against that.

[Chris Grayling]

The right hon. Gentleman says that he is not against that, but Labour Members have come up with no suggestions whatever on how to achieve it, and did not do so in 13 years in government. This Government will make that difference. The reason is that that group of people—the ones who walk the streets with £46 in their pocket—are being abandoned by the system. Many have deep-rooted problems, such as drug, mental health and educational problems. We currently expect them to change on their own. When we do nothing, they carry on reoffending, which means more victims and more ruined lives. As my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) has said, it also means a cost, as estimated by the National Audit Office, of between £9.5 billion and £13 billion a year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Grayling]

Let me answer that question specifically. First, the categorisations are existing categorisations—they are not mine—and are part of a triage process within the existing probation system that we will continue to use. Secondly, on moving people from one category to another, it will be the responsibility of a national probation trust to carry out risk assessments at the beginning, or later if circumstances change that require a new assessment to take place. The two organisations will be in part co-located, so it will not be a complicated bureaucratic process—people will be sitting in the same office. The national probation service will carry out assessments when they need to be carried out. I can explain this to the right hon. Gentleman separately and at much greater length if he would like, but that is how it will work.

On voluntary sector organisations, we are making absolutely sure that smaller organisations have a place at the table.

The shadow Justice Secretary’s comments about the Work programme were complete nonsense. When I left the Department for Work and Pensions, the voluntary sector was supporting about 150,000 people. It was by far the biggest voluntary sector programme of its kind ever seen in this country, with organisations such as the Papworth Trust delivering the programme across large areas of the country and making a real difference. I pay tribute to those charities. The story about bid candy is simply not true. In the two years I was employment Minister, fewer than 10 of the 250 to 300 voluntary sector organisations involved left the programme, and all of them did so for reasons unconnected with the programme. So I am afraid he is plain wrong.

[Sadiq Khan]

indicated dissent.

[Chris Grayling]

Well, I did the job.

Section 3 of the 2007 Act provides a clear and unambiguous power for the Secretary of State to

“make contractual or other arrangements with any other person for the making of the probation provision.”

On Second Reading, the then Home Secretary said:

“The Secretary of State, not the probation boards, will be responsible for ensuring service provision by entering into contracts with the public, private or voluntary sectors. With that burden lifted, the public sector can play to its strengths while others play to theirs.”—[Official Report, 11 December 2006; Vol. 454, c. 593.]

I could not have described our plans better. Furthermore, on Report, the hon. Member for Bradford South (Mr Sutcliffe) said:

“Most services will be commissioned from lead providers at area level, which will sub-contract to a range of other providers.”—[Official Report, 28 February 2007; Vol. 457, c. 960.]

Again, that is very close to the plans before the House today. The shadow Justice Secretary must also know that in another place Baroness Scotland said that the Act

“places the statutory duty with the Secretary of State, who then commissions the majority of services through a lead provider”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 27 June 2007; Vol. 693, c. 639.]

We have two options. Either the Opposition are not being up front with the House about what they really intended to do in the 2007 Act, or they were so incompetent they did not know what they were doing. The House can choose which is most likely.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 8th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

We are keen to see as many work and training opportunities in our prisons as possible and we continue to look for more such opportunities. I pay tribute to the team in Lincoln for achieving that. Causing damage to a prison is wholly unacceptable. We have taken steps that will lead to inmates being charged for the damage that they cause from their prison pay. That has not happened in the past, but it must happen in the future.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

If I may correct the Secretary of State, it was the Minister without Portfolio, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) who decided that Oakwood should be run by G4S. He may be socially liberal, but he is not Labour. I echo the comments that have been made about the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara) and welcome him to the Front Bench. It really is nice to see him there.

“We have a very good model for prison development in Oakwood… That site has multiple blocks and first-class training facilities. To my mind, it is an excellent model for the future of the Prison Service.”—[Official Report, 5 February 2013; Vol. 558, c. 114.]

That is what the Secretary of State for Justice told us earlier this year. Oakwood was his blueprint for the future. In the light of today’s damning report, which states that the prison has failed at every level, does he stand by those words?

[Chris Grayling]

I invite the right hon. Gentleman to go to Oakwood to see the facilities, which were praised in today’s report. I am afraid that he is just not right. I have checked this information today. The contracting process, including the invitations to tender to the private sector to run Oakwood, started under the last Labour Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

This Justice Secretary and his Government have failed to stand up to G4S or Serco, which, as my hon. Friends have reminded the House, failed with the electronic tagging of prisoners and with the transfer of prisoners, and are failing in Oakwood prison, and he is refusing to rule out both companies from the process in relation to probation. Why should we believe that his plans for privatising probation will fare any better?

[Chris Grayling]

It is important to make two points. First, the investigation into the contracts for electronic monitoring refers to events that took place in 2009 and to contracts that were let in 2005 by the previous Government. It is also important to bear in mind that these very serious issues are currently subject to investigation by the appropriate authorities. The right hon. Gentleman will therefore understand that there are strong legal reasons—this is easy to avoid when in opposition but not when in government—why we have to be measured about what we say, and I intend to continue to do that.

[Sadiq Khan]

He may be six foot four, but he is weak. Experts, the Ministry of Justice’s own risk register and Opposition Members have all warned about the dangers to public safety from putting private companies such as G4S and Serco in charge of people who have committed serious and violent offences in the way the Government plan—and all this is to be done with no piloting. Why is the Justice Secretary playing fast and loose with public safety?

[Chris Grayling]

Let us be clear what our proposed probation reforms do. At the moment, and during all the years the previous Government were in power, anyone who goes to jail in this country for less than 12 months walks on to the street with £46 in their pocket, but no help and no supervision whatsoever, and the majority of them reoffend. It is time that changed, and that is what our reforms will do.

Transforming Legal Aid

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Thursday 5th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I shall start by thanking the current Lord Chancellor for giving me advance sight of his oral statement just over an hour ago. However, I am still somewhat puzzled as to why today’s edition of The Times was considered a more important outlet for the public announcement of this climbdown than the proper place for such an announcement, which is here in Parliament. Can the media-shy Lord Chancellor explain that rather odd decision to the House?

Let me reiterate Labour’s position. We support efforts to find savings across our criminal justice system. We support making those who can afford to pay their legal fees to do so and restricting legal aid to those truly most in need. We also support using the frozen assets of criminals to fund their legal costs, and we want a more efficient system. We offered months ago to work with the Justice Secretary, but he arrogantly refused, although I note that he has taken on board many of our concerns, which we welcome, and adopted our idea of having a review and asking experts to look at the legal processes to see whether further positive reforms can be made. Will he please give the House more details of this review?

Today’s statement provides confirmation that the Justice Secretary’s plans—and they were his plans—really were half-baked, legally illiterate nonsense. He has been forced to climb down, and the sloppy way in which he goes about making policy has been exposed by experts in the field—from judges to rape victims, and from high street solicitors to the victims of miscarriages of justice, who really know what they are talking about.

This Justice Secretary was warned—by us and others—that his plans would see the destruction of a swathe of legal small and medium-sized enterprises across the country, yet he denied that it would happen. He was warned that the removal of client choice would undermine confidence in our legal system; he denied it. He was warned that a flat fee would put pressure on the innocent to plead guilty; he refused to accept that, either. Does he now agree with all those criticisms of his original proposals?

This is the first time that the Justice Secretary has participated on a debate in this Chamber on legal aid, so I have a number of further questions for him. Will he confirm that the 16,000 representations that the Ministry of Justice received about his plans is a record? I note, of course, that the Justice Secretary has made a deal with the trade union for solicitors, the Law Society, which we welcome. Does the Law Society fully accept the plans he has published today? Does he still stand by his previous public criticism of the barristers’ trade union, the Bar Council? What discussions has he had with it about these plans? Will he confirm that his latest plans still lead to a single fee for magistrates courts’ work, regardless of whether the case is a guilty plea or a trial? The right hon. Gentleman will be aware that this could lead to a perverse incentive to persuade a defendant to plead guilty when he or she is not guilty. Given that the Government have changed their mind on this issue for Crown courts, why not for magistrates courts, too?

The Justice Secretary will be aware that small and medium-sized firms undertaking legal aid work are already struggling to survive. There is a real concern about their future viability after a 17.5% cut in their fees. In that light, will the right hon. Gentleman tell us about the impact assessments he has done on his latest plans? What will be their impact on high street firms, on junior barristers, on black, Asian and minority ethnic solicitors and barristers, and on access to solicitors across the country, particularly in rural areas?

Will the right hon. Gentleman tell us what changes he has made to his plans for civil legal aid and judicial review, bearing in mind the many concerns raised across the House about them? He should now be aware that his plans for civil legal aid would have prevented the Gurkhas and the family of Jean Charles de Menezes from getting legal aid, while his plans for judicial review would create a perverse incentive for lawyers not to settle cases because they will need to get permission at a court hearing to recover costs. How is he going to address those concerns?

I am pleased that the Justice Secretary used his summer to swot up on the law and the justice system. I am glad that the primer worked. I am pleased that he appears finally to have seen sense and to have listened to those who know better. We will study the new plans closely, and consider the 270-page document published by him today. The public want confidence that the rule of law is being preserved, that access to justice is being maintained and that those truly guilty are being prosecuted and punished after due process. The justice system needs to be both credible and efficient. These are the tests we will continue to use in looking at the Government’s plans to reform legal aid.

[Chris Grayling]

The Opposition are obviously finding all this rather difficult, because they agree that we have done the right thing. It is clear to me that the days of beer and sandwiches are long gone, because the Labour party has forgotten how a negotiation works. It works like this: you put forward proposals, you listen to a representation from the other side, you engage in a negotiation, and you reach a settlement. That is what we have done, and this is a good settlement for Britain. It enables us to meet our spending review targets, which is what the country would expect. What the Opposition do not like is the fact that we have done the right thing and arrived at the right objective—and we should remember that they never consulted on anything when they were in government.

The right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) asked me about this yesterday. I should point out that I took the unusual step of briefing the Opposition on our plans 24 hours rather than one hour in advance, because I recognised the importance of talking to the legal profession, whose members are personally affected by this change. I have tried to balance the interests of the House with those who are most personally and individually affected. That is why I shared the information with the right hon. Gentleman well in advance of any norm in the House.

The right hon. Gentleman referred to the concept of debates in the House. I seem to remember his telling the House that he would use a Labour Opposition day to debate this issue, because it was crucial, and the next Opposition day debate would be about legal aid. That never happened, because, in fact, the Labour party does not take this issue seriously at all.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned magistrates courts, but, as he will know, our proposals were always about Crown courts. He asked about our discussions with the Bar Council. I have had many meetings with the Bar Council and the circuit leaders over the last few months. One of the two options that we have presented today was suggested to me by the circuit leaders and echoed by the Bar Council, namely the option of replicating more closely the way in which the Crown Prosecution Service works. I have received valuable support in relation to all this from the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General, and I hope that those two options will provide a basis for a clear discussion about the best way forward.

The right hon. Gentleman made a point about small and medium-sized enterprises. The Law Society and I are clear about the fact that we expect these changes to lead to amalgamations in the SME sector. Legal aid services are currently delivered by 1,600 firms, many of which are very small. We will continue to allow those firms to carry out their own client work, but what is most important is that I provide access to justice—to which the right hon. Gentleman referred—in every part of the country. That requires me to be sure that I have firms that are financially sustainable in every part of the country, which is why we need the contracting mechanism that I am going to introduce. It is essential to ensure that there is access to justice, and that is a key part of these proposals.

Finally, the right hon. Gentleman mentioned judicial review. We intend to produce a consultation document on changes to judicial review imminently.

Electronic Tagging

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Thursday 11th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I thank the Justice Secretary for advance sight of his statement, which I read in the presence of his officials 20 minutes ago. I can honestly say that I was left speechless.

Tagging is a crucial part of the criminal justice system, and the use of this technology has allowed the much greater use of curfews and home detention over the past 20 years. The Justice Secretary’s statement is a serious one, with wide-reaching consequences, and I have some questions for him. What other sanctions has he considered taking against the companies concerned? I remind him of what has happened: charging for people who were back in prison and had had their tags removed; charging for people who had left the country; charging for those who had never been tagged in the first place, having been returned to court; charging continuing when the subject was known to have died; and, in some instances, charging continuing for many months and years after active monitoring had ceased.

To the lay public, that appears to be straightforward fraud: obtaining property by deception. The Justice Secretary mentioned the SFO, but does he not agree that both companies should be investigated by the SFO, not simply G4S? Will he pass on all the papers from the audit to the police and the SFO and ask them to investigate whether any criminal offences have been committed? I am sure he will agree that the law applies to everyone, including big multinationals. What we need is the police and the SFO going to G4S and Serco offices and preserving evidence, not some cosy arrangement with one of the two companies. Will he confirm that all the evidence has been preserved by the two companies, as well as the Ministry of Justice? A forensic audit is one thing; what we need now, though, is the proper external authorities to investigate. I hope he agrees.

How soon will G4S and Serco be repaying the amount overbilled, or, as some will infer, claimed by fraud, and how much will it be? Have the companies concerned accepted guilt? Have the MOJ officials accepted their part in this? In May, I asked the Justice Secretary to ask the Public Accounts Committee for a full investigation into this? Will he now ask it to do so?

In 2012 and 2013, G4S and Serco were paid more than £500 million of taxpayers’ money just by the MOJ, and the MOJ paid nearly £800 million—10% of its entire budget—to five companies. Will the Justice Secretary agree an independent audit of all contracts with the MOJ? How confident is he that none of the other private companies with which the MOJ has contracts has over-billed?

I understand that G4S and Serco have a number of contracts with the Home Office and a number of other Departments—I know the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), raised a number of concerns over the past year about the conduct of G4S. Serco and G4S are two of the Government’s biggest contractors. The Justice Secretary mentioned the Cabinet Office, but in the light of his statement will he agree to the National Audit Office investigating all contracts that those two companies have with the Government?

There appears to have been a systematic pattern of fraud, and if we add to that the events of the past week and the inquest verdict, the fiasco at last year’s Olympics and the security that G4S failed to provide, we see a pattern emerging. Will the Justice Secretary confirm that those two companies will not be awarded any further Government contracts? Giving that tagging involves potentially dangerous offenders, we must be sure that public safety has not been compromised. Some 20,000 people are tagged at any one time, so what specific assurances can the Justice Secretary provide that public safety was not undermined at any time?

At the same time as serious failings have been exposed in the way the MOJ buys in hundreds of millions of pounds of services, the Justice Secretary is proposing a massive expansion in the amount of work handed over to private companies. He will be aware that the same two companies responsible for today’s statement are responsible for a number of other contracts in the MOJ—he has already referred to the prisons contracts—and they are the leading contenders for the privatisation of the probation service. In the light of that, will he confirm whether he intends to bar those companies from the retendering process for tagging and from any future contracts? He will be aware of concerns about the risk register and the privatisation of the probation service. Given today’s statement and its implications for G4S and Serco, will he delay the roll-out of the privatisation of the probation service to allow full and proper consideration of those findings?

The Justice Secretary has raised serious matters and we must not only get to the bottom of what has happened and see justice, but lessons need to be learned. We hope that the Justice Secretary will learn the right lessons.

[Chris Grayling]

On the last point, it is important to say that we are learning the right lessons. That is why the issue emerged in the first place. The tighter contract management procedures that we are putting in place have revealed shortcomings that took place under a contract that was let in 2005, and information that came to the Department in 2008. The right hon. Gentleman will remember who were in government in those two years. This Government are taking a more robust approach to contract management, and this issue has arisen as a result.

The right hon. Gentleman makes a point about the privatisation of the probation service. We are outsourcing probation to a range of different organisations not linked to today’s situation, and a large number of organisations have expressed an interest, including those from the voluntary sector that have immense skills in this area. I would not countenance a situation in which those organisations are tainted by the actions of two individual companies, or where we allowed a debate about two contractors to taint the reputations of outsourcing organisations that work and do a good job across government.

The right hon. Gentleman made some specific points about the two companies involved. Last night, we put to those companies that we would ask for a forensic audit, at a level that will meet any kind of investigative standards, to be carried out by PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of our leading independent auditors that works on such investigations. I am satisfied about the quality of the investigation it will carry out with Serco, and the management of Serco has accepted that the consequence of that investigation, if dishonesty is found, will be a joint reference to the authorities. To my mind, that audit meets any test we need to address. Unfortunately, G4S has not chosen to accept such an audit, and we have therefore passed the matter straight to the Serious Fraud Office.

I must be careful because this is a sensitive legal process. At this time, I do not have evidence of dishonesty. I have a situation of unacceptable practice, but not of dishonesty, and that is why I have commissioned a detailed forensic audit from those with expertise in such matters. For G4S we have done what people would expect us to do and invited the Serious Fraud Office to rule on the matter.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office. I confirm that the National Audit Office has been aware of this investigation from the start. It is already investigating contracts within Government, and we are liaising closely with it. He mentioned all other contracts, and my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General will today set out his plans to take forward work he has already started to address contract management across Government. The review I have announced led by Tim Breedon, our lead non-executive director, will address the issue raised by the right hon. Gentleman about all contracting with major contractors across the Department, including smaller contractors.

I can reassure the right hon. Gentleman on public safety as I sought to establish that very early in this process. I have seen no evidence whatsoever to suggest that public safety has been compromised. The issue is about people who were recalled to court or to prison but where the charging continued, so I can lay to rest the right hon. Gentleman’s concerns on that point. He also asked about the acceptance of guilt, but, in the legal process, I cannot comment on the position of the companies. They must set that out themselves. I have said that Serco is being constructive and collaborative, and I have set out the process for G4S. I say clearly that there have been failings at the Ministry of Justice that go back over the past decade, possibly longer. Those shortcomings are now being addressed but they should not have happened in the first place and I have indicated that, if necessary, disciplinary proceedings will be undertaken.

These are serious matters. We are entering a legal process and hon. Members across the House will understand that I must be cautious in what I say to avoid compromising legal proceedings. The House should be under no illusion, however, that I am dealing with the issue with the utmost seriousness. We will take all appropriate action and we cannot allow such things to continue unchecked.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

It is clearly in our interests to have a system where we encourage people who are guilty to plead guilty early. That saves money. It is the right thing to do for society. I do not believe or accept that we would be in a position where any qualified lawyer would try to encourage someone to plead guilty when they were not guilty, but of course we are listening to all the responses from the consultation and will bring forward further proposals in due course.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

May I say, in the most courteous way, to the Justice Secretary that he should revisit some of the answers on legal aid he has given today? He is just wrong on a number of points. There is now a general consensus that his Department’s reform of court translation services was a shambles—the Select Committee on Justice, the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee all agree. What differences are there in his plans to reform legal aid to avoid repeating the mistakes made in the previous set of reforms?

[Chris Grayling]

Let us be clear: it is no secret that the handling of contracting of translation services could have been better, and lessons have been learned. However, that service is now delivering to a very high standard and saving the taxpayer millions of pounds. The Opposition simply do not get that we have to take tough decisions to save money to deal with the mess they left behind.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Grayling]

I can give that assurance. As I said a moment ago, this is one of the things that has come out of the consultation—it is a genuine consultation, although I know that Labour does not believe that it should be genuine—and we are listening and I will review it over the next few weeks.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

And all said with a straight face!

It is a statement of fact that the Justice Secretary’s plans for the probation service will lead to serious sexual and violent offenders being supervised by the likes of Olympic security and Work programme experts G4S, A4e and others. Why has he refused my freedom of information request to see the risk register for these plans?

[Chris Grayling]

Labour simply will not accept the need for change and for those under-12-months prisoners to be supervised. As the right hon. Gentleman knows, when his party was in government he did not publish risk registers, either. This is another example of Labour doing one thing in government but wanting the rules to change the moment it moves into opposition. It is very unedifying.

[Sadiq Khan]

May I gently advise the Justice Secretary to seek advice from the Leader of the House, the former Secretary of State for Health, about how that movie ended for him?

The rest of us saw leaks of the risk register in last week’s media. What would the risk register need to say for the Justice Secretary to change his plans, or does he really not care?

[Chris Grayling]

Again, the right hon. Gentleman has conveniently forgotten what the purpose of a risk register is: it is a management document designed to ensure that we look at all the issues a project should address when formulating its plans and that we take the necessary steps to ensure that the process runs smoothly. That is what we are doing, and we are doing it because there is a large group of mostly young people on our streets who are likely to reoffend and have no support at all at the moment. I think that that is a problem worth sorting.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I am sure the Justice Secretary agrees that we need not only to ensure that people do not become victims of crime in the first place, but that those responsible for crime are caught and dealt with appropriately by the criminal justice system. Burglary can have a devastating impact on the victims of crime and leave families traumatised. What are the Justice Secretary’s views on those accused of burglary being given a caution?

[Chris Grayling]

I regard burglary as an extremely serious crime. As I have said publicly, I also have reservations about the way cautions are currently being used, and I have been clear that we are looking at this as a matter of priority. I can reassure the shadow Justice Secretary that in fact, the length of time burglars spend behind bars is increasing, not decreasing.

[Sadiq Khan]

The right hon. Gentleman may therefore be interested to know that last year, 3,359 cautions were given for burglary, and in 2010 the figure was 3,484. There is concern that the use of more out-of-court disposals such as on-the-spot fines and cautions is cheapening our justice system. Although that may be desirable for the Treasury, it is not what law-abiding victims of crime want. The use of cautions and on-the-spot fines can lead to the public losing confidence in our criminal justice system. Does he agree and what is he going to do about it?

[Chris Grayling]

Actually, I do agree. I have reservations about the number of cautions being used. Of course, one has to remember that the current culture of the use of out-of-court settlements dates back to when the last Government were in power, and the use of cautions was much higher three or four years ago than it is today. I am very clear that we have to look again at the way cautions are used, and I have reservations about the way they are used for some serious offences. It is work we are currently doing.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 5th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I only wish that I had received a good answer from the Justice Secretary. He has been busy in recent weeks chasing headlines with general statements on everything from Titan prisons to spartan prisons, and from gay prisoners to smacking children. May I ask him about the specifics? I note that his junior Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright), could not answer earlier, but then he did not do the media appearances. When will the first Titan prison open, where will it be and how much will it cost?

[Chris Grayling]

We are not planning to build a Titan prison. We have a very good model for prison development in Oakwood, which opened recently in the west midlands. That site has multiple blocks and first-class training facilities. To my mind, it is an excellent model for the future of the Prison Service. We are looking at a number of sites and hope to reach a decision in the next few months on the best option. I would like to open a new generation prison as quickly as possible, because it will save the taxpayer money and the facilities will be better.

[Sadiq Khan]

Four weeks ago, the Justice Secretary announced to the BBC, Sky and anyone else who would listen that he was going to open new super-mega Titan prisons in the near future and that he would undertake feasibility studies. Given his comments on Sunday, can he tell the House how many current prisoners are gay and are sharing a prison cell with another gay person?

[Chris Grayling]

I do not know how many people in prison are gay. I want to ensure that the regime in our prisons is appropriate, commands the confidence of the public and provides an appropriate environment for rehabilitation and training. We must have a prison system in which everyone can have confidence.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 18th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

The British Human Rights Act provides protection against cruel and inhumane treatment, including the right to a fair trial, the right to life, the right to family life and freedom of expression. It makes explicit the fact that Parliament is sovereign, and that even the Supreme Court cannot trump Parliament. Bearing that in mind, will the Justice Secretary make it clear that it is the British Human Rights Act that he so opposes, or is it the British courts that interpret the law? Which of the rights in the British Human Rights Act would not be included in his Bill of Rights?

[Chris Grayling]

The original human rights convention was a laudable document written when Stalin was in power and people were sent to the gulags without trial. Over 50 or 60 years of jurisprudence, the European Court of Human Rights has moved further and further away from the goals of its creators, and I believe that this is an issue that we have to address in this country and across Europe.

[Sadiq Khan]

I know that the right hon. Gentleman has done the primer, but I did not mention the European convention or the European Court—I mentioned the Human Rights Act. Will he answer a simple question? Will he confirm that were it not for the Human Rights Act, the extradition of the Asperger’s-suffering Gary McKinnon to the USA could not have been stopped by the Home Secretary?

[Chris Grayling]

I am a bit puzzled by the right hon. Gentleman’s comment, because the Human Rights Act enacts the convention in the law of this country. I think, and many in the House agree, that the remit of the Court has expanded beyond its creators’ original intention, which is why we need reform.

Voting Eligibility (Prisoners)

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I thank the Justice Secretary for allowing advance sight of his statement. This issue has been controversial since the 2004 Hirst v. UK case when the European Court of Human Rights ruled our blanket ban on prisoner voting was contrary to article 3, protocol 1 of the convention. The Labour Government disagreed with the Court’s decision. It is not, and never has been, Labour’s position to give prisoners the vote. That is why we appealed the decision and continued to challenge it until we lost office.

Under this Government, I am afraid, there has been a lack of consistency on prisoner voting. On 20 December 2010—the last day before the Christmas recess—this Government snuck out a written ministerial statement announcing that prisoners on sentences of under four years would get the vote. This meant roughly 30,000 prisoners getting the vote. Information we sought showed that 4,188 offenders convicted and sent to prison for burglary would get the vote—so much for this Government being on the side of innocent homeowners. Had the Government’s original plans gone ahead, 5,991 offenders convicted of violence against the person, 1,700 offenders convicted for sexual offences and even 67 rapists would also have been given the vote. I asked the Government at the time for their legal advice that supported giving violent and serious prisoners the vote, but they declined to provide it. The Government then performed one of their earlier U-turns and in a debate on 10 February 2011, Back Benchers from all sides voted overwhelmingly to maintain the status quo.

I welcome the fact that the Attorney-General appealed to the European Court again in the Grand Chamber this year, but many of us remember the previous Lord Chancellor boasting that he would use our once-in-a-generation opportunity of chairing the Council of Europe to ensure that the European Court changed the rules so that civic and social issues such as this would not be adjudicated on in this way. Once again, the Government over-promised and under-delivered.

We will digest the details of the draft Bill, and will work with the Government to ensure that it receives the pre-legislative scrutiny that it deserves. Like my predecessors in the last Labour Government, I am unhappy with the European Court’s ruling on prisoner voting. I think that the Court got it wrong. This is not a case of our Government failing to hold free or fair elections, or an issue of massive electoral fraud; it is a case of offenders, sent to prison by judges, being denied the right and the privilege of voting, as they are denied other rights and privileges. This issue should be within the margin of appreciation that nation states are given by the European Court.

Let me make clear that I am passionate about punishing and reforming offenders. I believe in intervening aggressively to address the offending behaviour of prisoners, ensuring that they can read and write, addressing alcohol and drug dependency, treating mental illness, providing job training so that prisoners can find employment later, enabling them to work in prison and to find somewhere to live, providing a mentor to help them with those tasks, and much more. I meet many offenders, ex-offenders and experts, and I know that the idea that depriving prisoners of their votes makes them more likely to reoffend —or less likely to reintegrate themselves in society—is absurd.

That being said, I respect the rule of law, and we must uphold it. We do not and cannot abide only by judgments with which we agree. This issue is part of the bigger picture of our membership of the European convention, a membership of which Labour Members are proud. We acknowledge its role in protecting human rights throughout Europe for more than 60 years, and the fact that it gives the United Kingdom more leverage over other countries that are less scrupulous in their approach to human rights. It allows us to press others to improve their human rights records, just as the Foreign Secretary rightly did this week with the Syrian opposition coalition.

Parliamentarians need to know the Government’s legal advice on what is needed to enable our obligations under the convention to be discharged. We also need to be clear about the ramifications of any decisions that Parliament makes, as there is a risk that choosing the wrong option could lead to compensation claims from prisoners and to our being in breach of the rule of law. That is why I wrote to the Justice Secretary last week—as I did to his predecessor—to request that his legal advice be published so that Members in all parts of the House could make an informed judgment. He has not responded yet.

I should be grateful if the Lord Chancellor would answer a number of questions. Will he make available to the House the legal advice on which his draft Bill relies, and if not, why not? Does he agree with all the Attorney-General’s views on this matter? When will Parliament vote on his three options, and which of them will he recommend to the Joint Committee and the House? Finally, will he confirm that no compensation will be paid as a result of the announcement that he has made today?

[Chris Grayling]

I am sorry that the shadow Justice Secretary did not take the measured approach that was taken by the shadow Home Secretary at the weekend. When he talks of a lack of consistency and commitment, he should remember that the Attorney-General went personally to Strasbourg to argue the case for this country. That does not suggest to me any lack of determination on the Government’s part.

The right hon. Gentleman also mentioned the previous Lord Chancellor. I pay tribute to him for the progress that he made in the Brighton declaration. These are not easy matters. We are dealing with a very large number of countries, and it is difficult to reach unanimous agreement. I think that my predecessor took a good first step towards securing the reforms that are needed—and I agree that reforms are needed: indeed, I personally take the view that further reforms are needed. I think that I have been very clear about that over the past few weeks. Unless and until such reforms happen, however, we must also recognise the reality of our international obligations, and Parliament must decide what approach it wants this country to take. Having heard the right hon. Gentleman’s remarks, I am not entirely certain what approach he wants us to take, but I think it important for Parliament to be in a position to make the decision.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about the legal advice. I do not think that the Attorney-General’s views on this matter are any great secret: he has given evidence to Committees of this House during the last few weeks. Furthermore, the right hon. Gentleman will recall that on no occasion under the last Government was advice given to them by the Attorney-General willingly published. However, I will give careful thought to the issues that he has raised. I want to be as helpful as possible to the Joint Committee, and I am willing to consider what methods are available to us that are appropriate and follow due precedent.

The right hon. Gentleman asked for clarification of the implications of all this. It involves complex matters that need to be discussed by Parliament, which is precisely why we need pre-legislative scrutiny and should not head straight into a Bill. Both this Government and the last Government have talked about the importance of pre-legislative scrutiny, and this is exactly the kind of Bill that requires it. The right hon. Gentleman also asked about voting intentions. That is a matter for the House to consider. When we reach the point at which a Bill is before the House, every Member will consider how he or she wishes to vote, but, for now, let us wait and see what the Committee comes up with.

As for the right hon. Gentleman’s question about compensation, I hope that the Court will—as it should—view my announcement as the first step in the process that it has asked us to complete, and that the issues to which he referred will not arise.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 13th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

First, let me explain the context to my hon. Friend. We are in the middle of a programme of new for old in the Prison Service; we are bringing on stream new capacity as well as closing down old capacity, as part of a drive to bring down the overall cost of running the Prison Service by making the unit cost of each place cheaper. We are looking at a number of options, and no decisions have been taken on Lincoln prison. There is no proposal to close it, and I can assure him that I will personally be looking carefully at this issue, as I am well aware of the geographical circumstances of Lincoln, particularly the lack of good transport to other locations in the prison system.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

The Justice Secretary referred to the Abu Qatada case. We have also recently heard the ruling of Reading county court, which held that a same-sex couple had been discriminated against by a bed and breakfast owner who refused to let them stay in her B and B. Will the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice join me in welcoming that ruling?

[Chris Grayling]

As the right hon. Gentleman knows, I never comment on individual cases, but I voted for the law behind that case and stand by the decision I took at the time to vote for it.

[Sadiq Khan]

Three minutes ago, the Justice Secretary commented on a case from yesterday. Three minutes later, he is unwilling to comment on a case from three weeks ago. He looks uncomfortable—does he think that he was wrong when, as shadow Home Secretary, he said:

“B and Bs should be able to turn away gay couples”?

Will he now apologise for those comments and commend the Equality Act 2010, which is doing so much to tackle discrimination in this country?

[Chris Grayling]

I was not aware that I was accountable to the House for Opposition roles, but I will say again to the right hon. Gentleman that I voted for the law as it stands and I stand by that decision.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Chris Grayling

Tuesday 18th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

The new Justice Secretary has already said this morning that he does not believe in reducing the size of the prison population. Will he tell the House how else his approach and policies will differ from those of his predecessor?

[Chris Grayling]

I look forward to many months of debate with the right hon. Gentleman. I believe absolutely that the rehabilitation revolution should be at the top of the agenda. We want to deliver a system whereby we no longer send young people inadequately supported back out on to the streets, to reoffend and then go back to prison. I believe in having the right number of people in prison. We need our courts to send to prison people who need a prison sentence, but I also believe in doing everything we can to prevent them from going back.

[Sadiq Khan]

We will wait and see whether the right hon. Gentleman keeps his brief, but I hope we will be debating for more than a few months; we could do with more certainty in the Justice Department. As the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) has pointed out, the National Audit Office has said today that, as a result of this Government’s botched policies over the past 28 months, there is now a £130 million black hole in the MOJ budget. We also know that our prisons and probation services are overstretched. Will the Justice Secretary reassure the House and the British public that, unlike the previous Justice Secretary, he will not risk public safety or let victims down in his attempts to fill the black hole?