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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My hon. Friend is quite right. Churning, or the constant movement of prisoners from prison to prison, is one of the fundamental problems that we have to face up to at the moment. The Government are responsible because they have so mismanaged our prison estate that prisons are woefully overcrowded. Roughly, the prison population now stands at about 81,500—[Interruption.] I hear 79,000 being mentioned from a sedentary position. I hope that the Minister can tell us that that population is the result of planned sentencing and sentencing progression rather than panic measures. In fact, there are some panic measures in this group of amendments. In the brief period that remains, let me return to the new clauses and amendments in the group. New clause 26—I leave aside new clause 25, which simply introduces one of the Government's many new schedules—deals with the courts' requirement to give credit for periods of remand on bail. It affects the way in which a court comes to consider the appropriate custodial sentence. One of the greatest concerns of the public is that the current system leads to dishonesty in sentencing. People do not seem to understand that when a person is sentenced to two years in prison, that actually means that he will be in custody only for one year. It provides yet another example of how the Government, in order to overcome the difficulties of prison overcrowding, are guilty of promoting an untruth. Subject to some exceptions, provided for in subsections (8), (9), (10) and (11), the court will be required to act in this way. When a man has been convicted—I say a man because it usually is a man—the court will place him on remand and on a tag, pending sentence. The Minister says that some people spend up to nine hours on curfew, supervised by means of a tag. That may be true, but as a recorder who has made orders relating to curfews I can tell him that most curfews last from, say, 6 or 7 pm until 6 or 7 am the following day. They are adjusted to allow people to go to and return from work, for instance, but they are designed to prevent people from wandering around the streets at night causing trouble. For most or at least a good part of that time, the individual concerned may well be in bed. He will certainly be at home, or at an address of which the court has been notified. That cannot be considered the equivalent of having spent time in prison awaiting sentence, but the new clause directs the court to take all that time—described as ““the credit period””—into account in reducing the custodial sentence. I am afraid that the public will find that rather difficult to understand. If someone has committed an offence that crosses the custody threshold—an offence that is serious enough to warrant a custodial sentence—it will cause a great deal of scepticism, undermine public confidence in the justice system and make the Government look increasingly ridiculous if the court is then required to say, ““By the way, all the time that you have spent at home in bed is time that can be taken away from your custodial sentence.””