I am grateful to the Lord Chancellor for very timely advance sight of her statement. May I take this opportunity to congratulate her on her appointment, as well as the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones)? I congratulate the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the hon. Member for Swindon South (Heidi Alexander) on her return to this place. Notwithstanding the occasional tussle across the Dispatch Box, I look forward to working constructively with Lord Chancellor, and to holding her and the Government to account. She is of course a decent, courteous, and incredibly able person, and I wish her well in her role.
We recognise the challenges and pressures facing the prison and criminal justice system, and the need to ensure that our prisons function effectively. Of course, the Government were well aware of those things when they were in opposition, as I know from challenging oral question sessions. In Government, we took the right decisions to significantly toughen up sentences for those who commit the worst crimes, in order to ensure that society was protected. To reflect that, we set in train the biggest prison building programme since the Victorian era. More than 13,000 additional prison places were delivered while we were in government. Two new prisons opened; one prison is under construction; there are two prisons with planning permission; and one prison is on the cusp of a decision. Labour’s planning permission proposal for prisons would not impact any of those developments. In that respect, it is simply a gimmick.
Crucially, in the covid pandemic, supported by the then Opposition, we made the tough but correct decision not to mass-release prisoners as other countries did, and we maintained that bedrock of our justice system, trial by jury. Those correct decisions meant less space, and the number of people on remand waiting for trial or sentencing dramatically increasing from around 9,000 to 16,500, with resulting additional pressures.
In deciding to reduce capacity pressure, the paramount consideration for the Lord Chancellor must always be public protection. With that in mind, although we will of course have to scrutinise the detail of her proposed sentence reduction scheme, I must say that we have significant public protection concerns about what she has announced so far, and I hope that she will be able to address those concerns today.
The Lord Chancellor set out plans for limited exclusions relating to domestic abuse, but can she confirm that if a domestic abuser is convicted of, say, common assault, as is often the case, they would not be exempt from this policy? What exclusions does she plan to put in place to ensure that the worst, persistent, repeat offenders cannot benefit from this scheme? She set out that this was a temporary measure that will be reviewed after 18 months. What criteria will she set for its ending? Better still, will she commit to sunsetting the measure in the delegated legislation, and to returning to the House on this afresh in 18 months, if needed?
What additional resources are being made available to probation? We hear what the Lord Chancellor says about getting 1,000 more trainee probation staff by March 2025, but how many of those will actually be new? How many will be additional to those whom we already planned to have in place through the existing trajectory for new trainees? Can she guarantee that no prisoners will benefit from her early release scheme without GPS tags and strict conditions? Indeed, will she mandate the imposition of GPS tracking? Can she confirm to the House progress on bringing HMP Dartmoor’s places back into use, and her long-term plans for HMP Dartmoor’s places? The previous Government committed £30 million to acquire land for building new prisons, and had already begun drawing up a site longlist. Is she expanding that fund, or merely re-announcing the same thing?
More widely, the Lord Chancellor states that this is a temporary measure to ease pressure, so what are her long-term plans for meeting demand? Is she planning to scrap the tougher sentences for serious crimes that the Conservatives put in place to protect the public, and so to reverse our changes, or is she planning to build more prisons over and above the six that we committed to funding, to meet future demand? If it is the latter, has the Chancellor agreed the significant extra funding needed? Those are the long-term questions to which she and the Government owe this House and the public answers, given the changes that she is making today. I hope that she will be able to give clear answers.