Alex Davies-Jones

I thank the Liberal Democrat spokesman for his comments, and he is right to raise the issue of reoffending. It is important to note that we have prison capacity available to protect the public, to lock up high-risk offenders and to ensure we have public safety measures available, but we obviously see tackling reoffending as a serious priority. We are looking at it across Government and pulling every lever available to us. Every Department must come together to tackle it, and part of that is the independent sentencing review. As he knows full well, however, when we have a prison population that is running at boiling hot, we cannot get into our prisons and do rehabilitation work. Yesterday, I was really pleased to visit His Majesty’s Prison Downview and see the vital work being done with the women in that prison, which is really important to achieve rehabilitation on the outside, prevent reoffending and protect the public. On SDS40, the hon. Member will know that we had to take immediate action within days of coming into office to protect the public, and to ensure we had places in our prisons to lock up high-risk offenders and keep the public safe. Legally, we could only exclude offences, not offenders, and we did introduce a wider set of exclusions than under the last Government’s early release scheme. All offenders released under the scheme are on licence and are subject to recall. We are working to ensure that we never again get into the position of having emergency releases, and that we have prison places available and can work on rehabilitating our prisoners so that they can serve a vital role in society.