Member

This Government’s policy in the Bill is all about reducing reoffending, and fundamental to that is having adequate reports on rehabilitation activities and on the success of the struggle to reduce reoffending. We must keep a handle on progress on both fronts: offenders who serve in custody and those who serve community sentences; only in that way can we monitor and foster improvements. In that context, part of the rationale for the conclusions of David Gauke’s sentencing review and of this Bill—to move towards a reliance on community orders and on the Probation Service, rather than on custodial sentences, particularly short custodial sentences—has been to foster those ends. It is right that the success of that shift in emphasis should be monitored and considered, with practice adjusted if and as necessary. For that, we need data and information, which would be available from the reports suggested. Failing that information and consideration, significant aspects of the reforms would risk failure without our being able to tell where they are failing.