Robert Jenrick

Of course, Mr Speaker. The Ministry of Justice’s own pilot scheme found that 71% of tagged offenders breached their curfew. When it comes to stopping reoffending, tags are about as useful as smoke alarms are at putting out bonfires. What is the Justice Secretary going to say when she meets the victims of offenders that she let off? How is she going to look them in the eye and say with a straight face, “I’m sorry—we are looking into how this criminal escaped from their digital prison cell.” Her reforms are a recipe for carnage. I urge the Justice Secretary to change course and to make different choices—yes, choices—from the ones that we knew the Government would make from the day that the Prime Minister hand-picked Lord Timpson as Minister of State for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending, a man who is on record as saying that “a lot of people in prison…shouldn’t be there”— two thirds of them in fact, he said— “and they are there for far too long”. The Labour party is clearly ideologically opposed to prison and that is why the Government are letting criminals off with a “get out of jail free” card, rather than deporting the 10,800 foreign national offenders in our prisons—one in every eight cells—a figure that is rising under the Justice Secretary’s watch. If she is actually serious about keeping violent criminals off our streets and finding the cells that are needed, will she bring forward legislation, tomorrow, and disapply the Human Rights Act 1998, which is stopping us from swiftly deporting foreign national offenders? Some 17,800 prisoners are on remand awaiting trial—another figure that has risen under the Justice Secretary. In fact, her own Department’s figures forecast that it could rise to as many as 23,600. If she is serious, will she commit to taking up the Lady Chief Justice’s request for extra court sitting days to hear those cases and free up prison spaces? Will she commit, here and now, to building more than the meagre 250 rapid deployment cells her prison capacity strategy says she is planning to build this year? They have been built in seven months before, and they can be built even faster. If the Justice Secretary were serious, she would commit to striking deals with the 14 European countries with spare prison capacity, renting their cells from them at an affordable price, as Denmark is doing with Kosovo. Between 1993 and 1996, her beloved Texas, the state on which she modelled these reforms—a state that, by the way, has an incarceration rate five times higher than that of the United Kingdom—built 75,000 extra cells. If the Government were serious, why can they not build 10,000 over a similar time period? Labour is not serious about keeping hyper-prolific offenders behind bars. In fact, there is nothing in the Justice Secretary’s statement on locking them up or cutting crime, because the Labour party does not believe in punishing criminals and it does not really believe in prison. The radical, terrible changes made today are cloaked in necessity, but their root is Labour’s ideology. It is the public who will be paying the price for her weakness.