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Welsh Affairs

On that point, I thank the Minister for the time that the he took to meet us and the sub-postmasters, who felt, as do we, that it was a constructive meeting. I hope that he will take on board the proposals arising from the consultation exercise that my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire mentions. In essence, such proposals can be summarised as creating a one-stop shop where people can buy their TV licence, renew their car tax and pay council tax and other bills. We also encourage the Minister to think creatively about bringing in new business to rural areas. Could post offices be used to process livestock movement forms, for example? Can a concerted effort be made to encourage Welsh councils to use post offices for council tax and rent payments, and perhaps even for the payment of parking fines? The trend to move local services away from rural and sparsely populated areas is tragically reflected in the threatened closure of local tax offices in regions and constituencies such as mid-Wales, Montgomeryshire and Ceredigion. Do the Government not know that, far from being under-employed, these offices help to deal with the backlog from centralised offices such as that in Wrexham? In fact, they are totally overloaded. I seek an assurance from the Minister that the Wales Office will listen to the case for maintaining those local offices and help us to get the Treasury to think again, not least because the possible reduction in the tax collected could exceed the superficial saving made through such closures. Given that all those offices are fully employed, it is fairly difficult to see how any saving in staff numbers can be made. I hope that the Minister will comment on that issue. Another sign of a healthy community is how it tackles crime. Welsh prisons were effectively full in 2000; now, they are roughly 140 per cent. above their original design capacity. Over that period, staff to prisoner ratios have fallen, while violence in Welsh prisons has, unsurprisingly, more than doubled. This prison crisis was not unexpected—all the warning signs were there long before the media started covering the issue. In the last four years alone, there have been 900 incidents of prisoner-on-prisoner violence at Parc prison, in Cardiff. Under such circumstances it is extremely difficult to rehabilitate prisoners, and efforts are hampered by the stress caused within the culture of the prison itself. In fact, that might partly explain why reoffending rates have risen from 57 per cent. in 1992 to 67 per cent. today.