Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

Just wait a second, please. The Lord Chancellor's preposterous suggestion that this policy would increase the prison population by 60,000 is clearly based on the fact that he has not read what we said. Given that we have not said what the minimum and maximum should be, there is no way that he can calculate what the increase in the prison population would be. All that we have had is a series of increasingly fanciful projections from the Lord Chancellor about what the increase in the prison population might be under an alternative Government. One day it is 60,000; another day, it is 320,000. Instead of spinning in this way, he should address the serious overcrowding problem in his jails; he has to decide what he is going to do about that. It seems that this Government have learned nothing from the last week—from the spin that has so damaged them.