Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)

I am grateful to my noble friend for his intervention after I thought I had finished. Repeat offenders are part of a vicious cycle that needs to be broken. Part of that is due to alcohol or drug dependence and part of it is due to interventions in alcohol and drug dependence. That is part of the focus of the Ministry of Justice. The MoJ will look at many measures in relation to how we better tag, control and monitor offenders and what interventions we make to reduce their dependence on alcohol and drugs. It is important that the revolving door of prison sentences—the cycle of people going into prison for six months, coming out, committing the offences that my noble friend Lady Hazarika mentioned, going back to prison, coming out again and then finding themselves homeless—needs to be broken. I know that my noble friend Lord Timpson, who is accountable to this House, is very exercised by those issues and will bring forward a number of measures to try to improve how we deal with offenders who have a persistent offending behaviour. Overall, the issues of tolerance are still there. We should not tolerate shoplifting, attacks on shop staff or organised crime gangs, and we should look collectively at what measures we can bring. I hope that I have given some indication to the House of how we can do that.