Sir John Hayes

I imagine you will not allow me to talk about the fall from the state of grace and the character of sin, Mr Deputy Speaker, but let me say briefly to the hon. Lady that human beings are capable of the greatest wickedness and the greatest good. When they choose to do good, they can do immensely joyful things. I hope that the people in this Chamber all seek to do good, which is why I began my speech by wishing the Government well. My experience of this place is that people, regardless of party, are here because they want to make their constituents better off and the country they live in a happier and more agreeable place. Of course people have the capacity to do good, but we know too that people can do the most dreadful things, and when they do so it is absolutely right that law-abiding decent patriotic people see that they get their just deserts. That is not a strange or curious idea; it is one that has informed most criminal justice systems in all civilisations for all of time, and the most obvious way of ensuring that people who do harm get their just deserts is to incarcerate them. That brings me to the second principle of the criminal justice system, which is that we take people out of harm’s way. The best way of doing that is to imprison those who seek to do harm. I am shocked, as are my constituents, that the Government now intend to let more of those dangerous people on to our streets. We are now told that people will be released—including people who have done violent things, who have hurt and damaged other people’s lives—after they have served 40% of their sentence. When most people I represent hear of a sentence for such crimes, they assume that people will serve 100% of it. Of course, that has not been the case for a long time, but we now know that the Government, on the grounds of prison overcrowding, are to release many more of these dangerous people on to our streets. I am afraid that the wishful thinking I described earlier will soon turn to the wish that the Government would see the sense of why that is an entirely unacceptable course of action. The last Conservative Government added to the number of prison places, but not enough and not fast enough—I think all of us on the Conservative Benches would acknowledge that—but given where we are, we simply cannot subject the British people to the fear, and not only fear but the reality, of letting out of prison others who would do them harm. Let us deal with the third aspect of criminal justice, which is to try to prevent recidivism by reforming those in prison. As a Minister, I worked on prison education, because it is important that we try to ensure that people who have committed a crime and have been punished for doing so do not commit another, but that cannot be the only or defining characteristic of criminal justice. We have to recognise what Philip Bean, the criminologist in the 1970s said: retribution has to be a core part of what the public see in order to maintain their faith in the system and in what the Government and the authorities are doing. Yes, let us have a debate about rehabilitation; let us try to save souls, not only because it prevents recidivism but because it is the right thing to do for those individuals. But we should understand that punishment is not a dirty word. It is what most of our constituents take for granted, yet I never hear those sentiments expressed with any vehemence or conviction by the liberal establishment in this country, which unfortunately is too well represented in this place.