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Coroners and Justice Bill

Yes, I am entirely committed to the idea of reducing prison population in the long term. That is very desirable. My view has always been that the first step in reducing prison population is to provide adequate prison facilities for rehabilitation and training. That cannot be done in an overcrowded environment, which is why more prison places are needed at present. Moreover, when the Secretary of State quoted my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) earlier, he failed to add the final sentence of the comment that my hon. Friend made at the time:"““That is entirely different from proposing that sentences should be limited by the resources made available by the Government after the framework is set.””—[Official Report, 28 November 2007; Vol. 468, c. 359.]" On that score, the attempt to suggest that there is a difference of view between my hon. Friend and myself is nonsense. The Bar Council called the move that the Government propose on the sentencing council a ““dangerous”” politicisation. We will deny the courts the discretion that they need and one of the reasons for that is that the Government have squandered so much taxpayers' money that there is none left to discharge Government's first duty to protect the public. The Secretary of State challenged us to say how the Conservatives would approach these matters differently. I had not intended to go into this, but I am sure we would not have wasted £70 million on a computer system to link prisons to the probation service, which does not work. We certainly would not have spent £100 million to put the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council into a new Supreme Court, which must be one of the greatest extravagances and wastes of the Government's period in office. Furthermore, we would not be spending £131 million to house the Secretary of State in his new accommodation. All that is quite apart from the £5 billion that has effectively been wasted on the National Offender Management Service—a subject that the Government are only too keen to gloss over. I note in passing that £27 million was spent on external consultants in 2007. If the Secretary of State wanted me to, I could run on with an endless list and point out all sorts of areas in which sensible savings can be made on foolish Government expenditure. If the Government had not been so profligate and foolish in some of the projects on which they embarked, the Secretary of State's Department would not have its spending crisis, which has been afflicting it for a considerable period.