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Prisons and Probation

My Lords, as always, I offer my thanks to the noble Lord for repeating the Statement, but perhaps I might take him up on one or two of the figures that he has put before the House. He talks about this being the first post-war Government to have seen a sustained reduction in crime. At the same time, he boasts about having provided some 25,000 new prison places. All those new prison places seem to be full, because we know that the prisons are bursting at the seams. Why that has happened when we have had a sustained reduction in crime seems hard to understand, if one believes the government figures. Could it be that, at the same time as we might have seen a sustained reduction in crime, as the Minister has put it, we have seen a dramatic increase in violent crime? It is violent crime that most citizens in this country fear most of all. When the Minister comes to respond, will he acknowledge the fact that we have seen a near doubling of violent crime since 1997, and that is why the numbers in prison have had to go up by quite such a large number? The Minister referred in his opening remarks to the recent disturbances at Ashwell prison. I acknowledge his remarks about how the Prison Service staff acted, and we offer our full support, but we await the result of the full investigations by the Prison Service and the police into what happened there. In the mean time, I would be grateful if he could tell us what warnings his right honourable friend the Secretary of State received about any potential unrest there and what further warnings he might be receiving about problems arising at other prisons that are bursting at the seams. I shall move on to the central part of the Statement: the whole question of Titan prisons. We on these Benches welcome the fact that the Government are performing an admirable U-turn here and are getting rid of those prisons, even if they are to be replaced by mini-Titans, which we will get on to later on, and even though we suspect that this is done not as a result of the consultation—we know the attitude that this Government normally take to consultation—but merely to save money. I hope that the noble Lord will be able to start by offering some assurance to the House about what the alleged savings are likely to be from changing from Titans to mini-Titans, as they have announced today. I shall expand, because the Minister asked me to, on the comments that I made at Question Time on the parole system. I said on that occasion that I welcomed the alleged 14 per cent increase—I say "alleged" because we never know with this Government just whether they will be offering an increase or not, and because, although we might welcome more money coming in, we want to see a parole system that is working properly and will deliver genuine savings to the Prison Service by getting some people out of prison earlier. We want to know how that money is going to lead to the easing of the pressure and whether it really will do so. What will that alleged 14 per cent do and when will it come in? We have considerable fears that, although the Government may boast about an improvement in cash, as we have seen so often before in so many other parts of the Government’s activities over the past 11 years, we will not see any improvement in the actual service. On the prisons themselves, the Minister tells us that the three Titans are to go—that is, 7,500 of the places that the Government were offering. They are to be replaced by what I think we will call "mini-Titans", which will be five prisons of 1,500 places each. Just what will the saving be from doing that? As I understand it, the cost of one of the three Titans appears in the current spending round, but the cost of the other two does not. Now that we have five mini-Titans replacing three Titans, which ones appear in the current spending round and which ones do not? Is it one, two, three or whatever? No doubt the Minister will be able to tell us. When will they come on stream? The noble Lord boasted that the Government hope to get up to the order of 96,000 prison places by 2014; certainly they will need that, given the current estimates, admittedly at the high end of the scale, for the prison population being up at about that level. Can he still assure us that those mini-Titans and all the others will be built by that stage? Will he tell us by what means they will be built, on which he was faintly vague? Are they all to be built under PFI and at what cost? The noble Lord also talked about the further work to find another 8,500 spaces over the next three years. We would be grateful if he could expand on that and tell us just how he intends to do it, particularly as he also talked about ending the early release of prisoners on licence. How does that fit in with releasing the pressure on numbers, as it will obviously lead to a further increase in numbers in due course? Lastly, on probation trusts, I thought that the noble Lord was a little coy when he said, talking about the economic climate, that, ""the probation service is now being asked to make some savings of low percentages"." The House would be grateful if he could spell that out in greater detail. If the probation service is being asked to make cuts, we need to know a bit more than just that they are of a low percentage. I trust that the noble Lord will be able to answer all the other questions in due course.