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Cutting Crime (Justice Reinvestment)

Elements of the functions of the Youth Justice Board will be brought into the Ministry of Justice. It is not as though all the people who work for the Youth Justice Board will suddenly disappear in their entirety and we will do without them altogether. That is a highly incorrect caricature of the position. I do not want to get drawn into that argument; in introducing my reply to the debate, I was making a general point about the approach that will differentiate this Administration from their predecessor. Evidence will be used to pursue policies that will focus on what is achieved and what outputs are delivered, rather than a policy that mandates inputs and targets and oversees professionals in the way that we have seen over the past 13 years. In the end, that has enervated people's professionalism and detracted from the important task that we give them in offender management. The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland asked about prison places. She seemed to be under the impression that we had announced the construction of 10,000 fewer prison places. That is not the case. The only announcement that we made was the deferring of the first of the prisons in the new prisons programme, which was to produce a net increase of only about 2,000 places. It is a new-for-old programme. It would have created five 1,500 place prisons—that is 7,500 places—and would have seen the removal from the estate of 5,500 of the older and less efficient places elsewhere in the system, so the figure is not 10,000; it is 2,000. That decision has simply been deferred, and in any event those prison places would have been highly unlikely to come on-stream during this spending review period. As they were proper privately financed schemes, they will continue to be assessed and there may well continue to be an economic case for them. However, given the other changes that we shall now have to examine in prison capacity, we are looking at closures of other prisons to arrive at a position whereby we can accommodate, in our estimate, about 82,000 prisoners at the end of this Parliament. We need to remember that we inherited in May a position in which it was anticipated that there would be 96,000 prisoners by the end of the Parliament. There have been some changes to the number of people now being sent to prison. We are trying to identify why the trend has not been rising as steeply as one would have expected through the summer and autumn months. That may have something to do with the change of climate that has come with the end of the political arms race on this issue. At this point, I should like to draw attention to the Select Committee's report, which stated:"““If we are to avoid a continuation of the 'arms race' on being 'tough on crime', which dates back to the early 1990s, means must be found for encouraging and informing sensible, thoughtful and rational public debate and policy development on the appropriate balance and focus of resources.””" I think that we would accept that the Lord Chancellor has led that change of view, and both he and I now enjoy the warm appreciation of certain sections of the media for having done so, but what is welcome is that the bipartisanship between the two coalition parties now seems to have extended to the principal Opposition party with the election of the new Leader of the Opposition, who specifically endorsed the criminal justice policies of the new Administration in dissing the inheritance of his own period in government as implicitly the wrong approach.