Contribution
I am grateful for the shadow Secretary of State’s kind words of welcome. I do not know him well, but I know that he, like me, shares a love for this country and that everything he does is seen through that prism. My commitment to him is to work with him. There will be times, perhaps even including today, when we will need to disagree in the best traditions of this place, but I know there will be a lot that brings us together over the months and hopefully years to come.
On plans and changed plans, I make no apology—certainly not to the Opposition—for being able to grab hold of a system that, when we left here in July, was not going to exclude rape offences, child sex offences and those who have taken lives. We have now done that, which is good. I recognise that it has created uncertainty and I apologise to victims, but I hope they understand that it was done with noble purpose. We must now use the time available to make sure that victims get the right support, particularly when it comes to shaping restrictions on offenders if they do come out.
The hon. Gentleman mentions plans. The reality is that if we followed his plan, we would have a prison system that would be bust before Christmas. What would that mean for justice in this country? How could that be right? He jumps on the phrase “business as usual”. The point I am trying to make is that this Parliament has changed legislation. The Sentencing Act is the basis on which standard determinate sentences will be governed, and that will be the case for the foreseeable future. Linked to that, he talks about how the changes will come into force. That will be done via varying the commencement order. He talks about home detention. I can say that I have no intention of going any further. The work we have put in as a result of the Sentencing Act is our way of managing the pressure in the system.
On capacity, the hon. Gentleman asks for clarity. Well, I can provide a little bit of clarity: we should be clear that we have added 374 places in the adult male estate since the general election. Now, that is nowhere near where we want to get to as the end state—that is why our building programme has 14,000 places in it—but I would hope that wanting to do more is a point of shared interest. Of course, things do come in and out of the estate, including because of fire damage; I would not underestimate the importance of contamination either. Nevertheless, there will of course be significant places added in this Parliament and in our programme to 2031.
The hon. Gentleman also asks about the chance to scrutinise the data. He will know that, under the Sentencing Act, we are committed to publishing an annual report. That is what we will do, and I am sure that he and I will get into it at that point.
On foreign national offenders, if the hon. Gentleman has doubts, I will state my record to him and to the House. We have increased by 41% the removal of foreign offenders in this country. I gently say that that was my role in the Home Office, so he should not doubt my vigour. He mentions changes to article 3. He will know about the important work done on that at the Council of Europe. The Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Jake Richards), has done a lot of important work in that space. Similarly, our work on article 8 is important and I hope the hon. Gentleman will support that when it comes before Parliament. He should not doubt our vigour; as I say, we are already doing well better than his predecessors—they are sat next to him, so he can talk to them about that—and we will go further.
Let me finish on the IPP point, because I am really interested to see how it does and does not hold. I know that the hon. Gentleman is a champion of individual liberty and a sceptic of what he thinks is uneven justice. If I am able to make this acknowledgment, I hope he will at least reflect on it: there is a real dissatisfaction, as a result of the changes we have had to make, that some people will leave prison earlier than their sentence dictated, and that in many cases there will be people who are still there 10 years after. There is no easy solution to that. All I ask of him is to engage in a process to bring that to its resolution.