Lord Garnier (Con)

My Lords, I remind the noble Lord, who I believe is actually interested in this subject, that this is not a zero-sum game and year zero is not 2024. I pointed out to the then Justice Secretary Jack Straw in July 2007 in the other place that, thanks to the Blair-Brown regime creating 3,000 new criminal offences through 65 new Acts of Parliament that affected the criminal law, the prison population increased. What they forgot about was the need to create prison capacity to put all these new prisoners in. When Lord Hurd of Westwell was Home Secretary in 1990, the prison population was 40,000; it is now just short of 88,000. I am not making a party-political point, I promise, but I do find it a bit boring when Ministers in this Government say it was all the fault of the 2010 to 2024 Government and has nothing whatever to do with what happened before. Let me give the Minister a gentle suggestion. His noble friend Lord Woodley, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and I earlier this year put forward Amendment 96 to the then Sentencing Bill, which would have allowed a panel of judges to reconsider the imprisonment of those prisoners on IPP sentences. Could he have a look at it and see if he can bring it back? It would take a one-clause Bill, which we could get through this House in 20 minutes—and through the other House in God only knows how long. But we could pass that law to improve the condition of the people my noble friend Lord Clarke has mentioned, and to some small extent reduce the overcrowding of our prisons, which cannot function if they are overcrowded. We just churn people round and round and round. It is an expensive waste of human life.