Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

The Minister, in his characteristically disarming way, advances some propositions that, had we the time, deserve rather better scrutiny. Discussion on this group of amendments will have to be concluded by, I think, 5.13 pm. There is not therefore much time to discuss the merits or demerits of Lord Carter's recommendations, which have been—I was going to say—spatchcocked into the Bill at this late stage. Whichever expression one cares to use, the detail of the new clauses and Government amendments betrays a worrying pattern. The genesis of the new clauses and amendments is the Government's mismanagement, which is not only of the prison estate. It is no longer controversial to say that the prison estate is woefully, and I would suggest, dangerously and inhumanely overcrowded, and that all the promises made by the Prime Minister, Secretary of State and Minister of State about a new building programme for prisons will not deal with the issues faced. The prison overcrowding is easy to see, because we can see that there are two or even three people in one-man cells, and because the Government introduced the end of custody licence programme last June to release 25,500 people over a 12-month period. What one has not been able to see—it is difficult to assess—is the equivalent overcrowding or overstretching of the probation and community punishment system. It is clear—the Minister confirmed it in a written answer last year—that each qualified probation officer now has to supervise between 20 and 80 individual offenders. If that is not the equivalent of overcrowding, I do not know what is.