Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

No, of course I will not. The explanatory memorandum makes exactly the same point. Let me address the issue of indeterminate sentences for public protection. I entirely endorse what my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) has said from the Front Bench. The Secretary of State made one of his sweeping statements, saying that those sentences have been discredited. No, they have not. Who has discredited them? He has, because he has been forced to save money on indeterminate public protection sentences s having had to surrender the 50% cut in the bail discount, as he well knows. IPPs have worked. The Secretary of State comprehensively failed to answer the hon. Member for Shipley yesterday, when the hon. Gentleman brought out that the reoffending rate for IPPs has been spectacularly successful—of the 1,449 people released, only 11 have reoffended. The Secretary of State laughs, but what we are dealing with here is the most serious offenders who, under the law, are expected to show that they would go straight, if they were released. He is laughing, but the laugh will be on the other side of the Conservatives' faces when and if his measures go forward and people are released before it is safe for them to be released and they commit further offences. He will be the person to blame for that.