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Criminal Justice

I thank the Home Secretary for advance notice of his statement, although I saw from my early edition of The Sun that others had received versions of it even before we had in the House. Much of the Home Secretary’s statement is arguably too little. Quite a lot of it is too late. None the less, significant parts of it are welcome. I welcome, for example, the almost surprising rhetoric that he has displayed today about prisons. He has recognised, I think for the first time, that there are people in our prisons who should not be there, including vulnerable women and those who need treatment for mental health conditions. Rather than announcing new multi-million pound budgets for investing in bricks and mortar for new prisons, does he not think it would be worth investing that money in bricks and mortar for new secure mental health treatment centres, where those offenders could be more adequately housed, dealt with and rehabilitated? Equally, there is a strong case to invest far more in visible and rigorous public punishment sentences in the community. He will be aware that, in 2004, for example, over 50,000 lesser offenders served no more than an average of eight weeks in prison. Surely it would be better to have them punished and rehabilitated for the benefit of our communities, rather than them spending a few stopover weeks in prison. The Home Secretary should be mindful that the Home Office’s own research 10 years ago or so showed that, if we wanted to reduce the overall level of crime by 1 per cent., we would need to increase prison capacity by 25 per cent. That statistic itself shows that there are limits to how much the Government can build itself out of the present prison overcrowding crisis. I am relieved to see that the Home Secretary and other members of the Government appear to have resiled from the early tub-thumping rhetoric against the Human Rights Act 1998 and the European convention on human rights, and that that approach has apparently been abandoned in favour of a more intelligent emphasis on the training and support needed for officials who have to interpret the Act. Next time there is a controversy over an issue as important as human rights, could he and his colleagues refrain from jumping on the media bandwagon and arrive earlier at the correct conclusion that he has appeared to arrive at today? On sentencing, we agree, of course, that we need to give judges more discretion in setting the deductions for guilty pleas and in removing the automatic halving of the period of custody before release can be considered. I note, however, that those welcome moves merely undo rules that were introduced by the Government in legislation passed only a few years ago. I also welcome in principle the idea that Parole Board decisions on serious offences should be unanimous, although I suspect that in practice—I would like some clarification on this—that happens most of the time any way. Can the Home Secretary explain why he has not gone further? Surely one of the greatest problems is that so many of the sentences handed down simply do not do what they say and that is one of the main reasons why public confidence in our sentencing system has been severely eroded. Life sentences, for example, do not mean life. Does he agree that public confidence would be considerably strengthened if a life sentence really meant life and applied to those cases where the courts judge that the offender should remain in custody for the remainder of his or her life?