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Penal System

If I may return the compliment without ruining a fine career ahead of him, I have always had great respect for the hon. Gentleman. We have always had sensible and respectful conversations about these matters. It is true of all Administrations that some of their proposals, which they think will work—especially in the area of criminal justice, where they are inevitably dealing with the most unpredictable, chaotic members of the community—will not work. That does not necessarily mean that they should not try them. I personally thought that night and evening courts would work, but that turned out not to be the case. That has worked in other countries, but not here. The hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs made much of the fact that rates of opening new places had not kept pace with some estimates of likely demand for places. Forecasting in this area, I readily accept, is not an exact science, but before the Opposition start pulling the mote from our eye, they ought to examine the beam in their own. The record of the previous Administration was dire. Shortly before I became Home Secretary, more than 1,000 police cells had been used to cope with overcrowding on a considerable scale throughout the early and mid-1990s. Yes, I did ask the Prison Service to double and in some cases to treble accommodation because I judged, and so did the Prison Service, that that was a far better way of accommodating the increase in the prison population than by the use of police cells. We have had to use police cells again. I regret that, and I am working very hard to reduce that. However, it was at the end of the 1980s, 10 years into the then Conservative Administration, that the biggest crisis ever hit the service. It was so bad that the then Home Secretary, now the noble Lord Hurd of Westwell, had to come to the House—I remember sitting on the Opposition Benches and listening to the statement—to announce not that over a period 1,500 to 2,000 places would be saved, but that at a stroke 3,500 places would be saved by extending remission of sentences of less than 12 months from one third to one half of sentence length. The hon. Gentleman says that we have done that, but I remind him that that was supposed to be a temporary measure. It was made permanent in the Criminal Justice Act 1991. The end of custody licence is necessary to cope with the current prison numbers, and it is proportionate to the problem. It involves the early release of prisoners who are serving less than four years just 18 days—[Interruption.]