I also welcome the Lord Chancellor to her new position, and thank her for advance sight of her statement.
It has been apparent for months that measures of this sort would be necessary. These are described as temporary measures, but 18 months is a very long time for temporary measures. There would be a real danger of damaging public confidence in our criminal system if the measures were to be extended beyond that point.
The answer surely has to be more than just building more prison capacity. The problem is not that our prison estate is too small; it is that we send too many people to prison, and that the time they spend there does nothing to tackle the problems of drug and alcohol dependency, poor literacy and numeracy skills, and poor mental health, which led to their incarceration. Can we hope to hear in the very near future the Government’s comprehensive plan to tackle the issue of the time that people spend in prison?
Finally, may I bring to the Lord Chancellor’s attention the report published this morning by His Majesty’s inspectorate of probation on the failings of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough probation delivery
unit? That report outlined that our duty of care to those whom we lock up should not end the day they leave custody. When will we have a response to that report?