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Prison Population

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who has a thoughtful approach to such issues. One of the Ministry of Justice’s prime jobs is to try to prevent reoffending. We need to examine several long-term solutions, such as how we can have an impact on drugs and alcohol treatment, how we can work in the community, and how we can invest more in giving additional treatment to people in prison. However, I cannot get away from the fact that the public need to be protected from the growing number of serious and dangerous offenders. We are examining how we can build extra prison places. Our strategy involves building prison places and examining the wider issues of community sentencing and the way in which to prevent reoffending. There is work to do on foreign national prisoners, whom the hon. Gentleman mentioned. There are still people in prison who need to be deported back to their home countries, or transferred to the immigration estate. The Ministry of Justice needs to work with its colleagues in the Foreign Office and other Departments to make progress because the small yet significant issue needs to be addressed. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the report by my right hon. Friend Baroness Corston. I said during Justice questions that my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor and I welcome the Corston report, which we intend to examine in detail. The Lord Chancellor has tasked the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Redcar (Vera Baird), with looking at the details of the report to determine not how to reject the recommendations, but how and when we can implement them. It is our objective that there should be fewer women in prison. With the benefit of that report, we can achieve that over time, with difficulty, with resources and by examining the prison estate as a whole as part of Lord Carter’s review. I have already said that I expect the Government to respond to that report by late autumn at the latest, and I very much hope that we can do that. Finally, in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 we put in place drug treatment orders and alcohol orders, which we need to examine more imaginatively and use again in the future. The only area in which our views do not chime with those of the hon. Gentleman are his views about my right hon. Friends who have previously held positions in the Home Office. They were faced with difficult issues and had to make difficult decisions in respect of not only the prison estate, but terrorism and other matters. They did the best job they could in difficult circumstances. As the Ministry of Justice, we have assessed those issues, targeted a way forward and got the resources from the current Prime Minister and the future Prime Minister to see those proposals through, and I commend them to the House.