Sir John Hayes

I noted those figures earlier. My right hon. Friend is right—we also rarely disagree, and I did not disagree with a word she said earlier—that more prison places were added, but there are two things about that. What we did not really take necessary account of was the effect of sentencing policy. If more people are sentenced to incarceration, perfectly properly, that changes the trend. We certainly could have dealt more effectively with foreign national offenders than we did, which was another growing problem. Furthermore, over a long period of time, while we were adding places we took some prison places out. We need to think about the number of prisons that closed. She is therefore right. [Interruption.] It is not that we did nothing—far from it; we did many good things of the kind she described—but, unfortunately, not enough account was taken over a long enough period. It is not largely about the immediate policy of the previous Government. It goes back much further than that to a series of Governments of both major parties over a long time indeed. The modelling that I described is decade-long modelling. It is an extremely difficult business to get planning permission to build a prison. The last Government often struggled with resistance to having a prison built or expanded in a locality. It is usually local constituency MPs—we can imagine such people: Liberal Democrat types—who come here and say one thing—[Interruption.] Notice that I said “types” rather than just Liberal Democrats. They say one thing but go back to their constituencies and campaign against opening a prison.