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Employment, Universities and Skills and Housing

May I, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) and the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr. Anderson), congratulate the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Lindsay Roy), who made his maiden speech this evening? It is a privilege, as he accepted, to be elected to the House, and I congratulate him on his election. I join the hon. Gentleman in his praise for his predecessor, John MacDougall, whom I proudly claim to have been a friend of mine. We were colleagues on the Anglo-Netherlands all-party group. He was the chairman and I was the treasurer. We travelled to Holland and we met delegations from the Dutch Parliament here on a number of occasions over the past few years. I mourn with the hon. Gentleman and his constituents the loss of John MacDougall. He was a great man and a great servant of his constituency. The hon. Gentleman quite properly spoke of him this evening and I am delighted that he did so. The hon. Gentleman said that he wanted to change the name of his constituency to Glenrothes County, I think. Perhaps I misunderstood him, in which case the remark that I am about to make will be even more laboured than the one I intended. Glen Roy might be the better name for his constituency, if the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr. Kennedy) would allow him to use the name of a place in his constituency near Roy Bridge, near Spean Bridge in north-west Scotland. I congratulate the hon. Member for Glenrothes and wish him well. I trust that his remarks about the Prime Minister propel him or project him into the place where he no doubt wishes to be. It was a fine speech and I look forward to hearing more from him. I return to the Queen's Speech. Although I shall concentrate on housing, I shall briefly mention another aspect that interests me, criminal justice policy. I want to discuss the way in which the Government are pushing their policy of building titan prisons—the large human warehouses that will incarcerate upwards of 2,500 inmates. They propose to build three of these, at the moment, in order to relieve prison overcrowding—a problem that they created and have made worse. Since they came to office in 1997, the prison population has risen from about 61,000 to some 83,500, and they have introduced a number of panic, reactive measures in order, as they see it, to deal with and mitigate the problems caused by prison overcrowding. Not one of them has worked. Since they introduced early release from custody on licence, far from the prison population going down, it has gone up. They have now come up with this hare-brained scheme to introduce titan prisons in Britain, which has been criticised right across the globe—in the United States and in Europe. Today, Professor Bryan Stevenson of New York university gave a lecture in which he deprecated the Government's policy of introducing titan prisons and urged this country to learn the lessons of what has gone wrong in the United States. The US has huge prisons containing not just 2,500 but many thousands of prisoners, and they are very dangerous places. One need only look to today's experience at Her Majesty's young offender institution, in Aylesbury. It houses only 435 young men, yet there was an incident there today that the Ministry of Justice described as the result of ““concerted indiscipline””. That is probably new Labour-speak for ““deep trouble””. I dare say that not all 435 inmates were responsible for the concerted indiscipline, but it does not take much to spark trouble in a prison, and crowding people into big prisons and simply controlling the perimeter is asking for trouble. I urge the Government to think very carefully in this debate about what they do to deal with our overcrowded prisons. I intervened on the Secretary of State earlier to urge him to do rather more about education in prisons. Although he said that there have been improvements, he was candid enough to accept that there is a lot more to do. That, if I may say so, is the understatement of the evening. The current state of the management of the education system in our prisons is wholly inadequate not because the prison staff are not doing their best—they are—but because prisoners are ““churned”” from prison to prison to prison. They barely get on to a course when they have to move. They barely get into that new prison when they are moved again, and their educational records, curriculum vitae and medical records—their drug, health and rehabilitation records—follow behind, probably two or three prisons after the individual prisoner. We are building in and reinforcing failure, and it is high time that the Government got beyond the departmental silos, so that adult education Ministers speak to Ministry of Justice Ministers and we have a sensible way of educating prisoners. We should bear it in mind that many prisoners go into prison unable to read and write, and come out unable to read and write. One has to have a reading age of about 14 in order to get a job of any description nowadays in this country. Those without such a reading age cannot read the safety notices in factories or the instruction leaflets that machinists are required to get their heads round. We continue to allow a system that breeds lack of achievement and an inability to get a job, and which is ultimately responsible for the high reoffending rates that we see in the adult cohort, but—even worse—in the teenage cohort, as well. The reoffending rate among those under 18 is in the high 80s; among those of between 18 and 21, it is in the mid 70s. The reoffending rate among those over 21 leaving custody is about 66 per cent. within two years. We should not be proud of those figures; apart from anything else, they represent a total waste of public money. It costs £50,000 a year to keep each adult prisoner, and if they reoffend within two years, that is a waste of public money. The Government need to apply themselves rather more vigorously to that issue.