Lord McNally (LD)

My Lords, by this time, the Minister must be thinking that this is going to be an easy job. I am afraid he has to learn, if he has not learned already, that the House of Lords is not the best place to assess either public opinion or opinion in the other place about penal policy. Nevertheless, the contributions that he has heard today should give him confidence that if, as most of us are hoping, he will lead the charge in genuine prison reform, he will not be without support. Fourteen years ago I arrived at the Ministry of Justice with the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, as Secretary of State. One of the first things we did was to send a memorandum to No. 10 suggesting that we manage down the prison population to under 80,000 during the course of the Parliament. The message came back from No. 10: “Not politically deliverable”. The truth is that today it is not politically deliverable to continue longer sentences, with more and more people in prison and a criminal justice system at the point of collapse. In some ways, the Minister has come to office at just the right moment to press the arguments that he has heard from all parts of the House: there is another way, a better way, a more civilised way of treating offenders. That is not to move away from the need for them to take responsibility for their crimes, but in many of the suggestions that he has heard today there are real and positive ways that we could cut prison numbers, make the public safer and do a really good job in our criminal justice system.