Lord Reay (Con)

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for introducing this debate and all noble Lords for their speeches today, with congratulations to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson of Liverpool, on his excellent maiden speech. The capacity of prisons across the country remains a concerning problem, with the prison population expected to reach between 92,400 and 100,000 by November 2032. Although the Government have pledged 14,000 new prison places by 2031, serious progress is needed to meet that target—progress that is not yet apparent. The Government have delivered 700 fewer prison cells than last year and no new prisons have been planned or approved since the Labour Government took office in 2024. These new prisons will be essential to increasing prison capacity, so I hope there will be evidence as to how they will reach that pledge. There is also a problem now. The problem of immediate availability is similarly severe. As was discussed only last week on the criminal justice reform Statement, there are “4,000 operational prison places not in use”.—[Official Report, 8/9/26; col. 568.] The Minister did not set out what steps the Government were taking to ensure that these existing places could be utilised, so I pose the same question: how will the Government address the issues of officer shortages to allow those places to be used? We have heard from the sector that retention is a huge problem among prison officers. What specific steps are Ministers taking to improve retention? I turn to the probation system, where serious concerns have been raised about the electronic tagging system. In July, the National Audit Office expressed concerns regarding public safety if the electronic tagging system was rapidly expanded to reduce the prison population. Its report noted that between 10% and 50% of alerts resulted in breach notifications being sent to the relevant officials. Further to that, serious and minor breaches were both treated the same. Will the Minister ensure that all tagging breaches are dealt with? Last week, my noble friend Lord Wolfson asked about the barriers posed by Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and targets for the number of foreign national prisoners being deported, to which the Minister said that he would come back. Will he do so now and share how they intend to address these barriers? I look forward to his response.