It is a huge pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion). It has been a pleasure to work with her on amendments in Committee and on Report. I pay tribute to her work and to the style with which she has tried to ensure that change happens. Her approach has been to try to solve the problem, rather than to have a political debate that would create heat but not fix anything. I hope she gets the result she deserves from the Government.
I will not say a huge amount on the detail, as the hon. Lady has covered the issues very adequately. When we discussed new clause 2 in Committee, the Minister said:
“it is sensible for me to go away and reflect on what she has said, and to work out what we can sensibly do next.”––[Official Report, Criminal Justice and Courts Public Bill Committee, 27 March 2014; c. 498.]
I hope he will be able to enlighten us on what he has sensibly done next. I notice it is not yet in the form of an amendment that we brought to this House. I hope an amendment is about to be brought, even if it has to, disappointingly, go to another place. I think the change can be made. I accept totally that the exact wording might not be precisely right—it is always hard to write these things perfectly—but the intent of new clause 2 is clear. The Minister was supportive earlier. I hope he will be again.
On new clause 3, I think the wording is slightly further away from what can be achieved. There are genuine issues—if a 17-year-old can get married, it does seem a little strange. I understand why the hon. Lady was not able to capture every single aspect of this. Having tried bits of legislation, I know how hard it can be. I hope the Minister is able to be supportive, so that we can close some of the gaps without going too far and creating problems that we do not intend to cause. I hope
we can have helpful comments. I also pay tribute to Barnardo’s, which has done a huge amount of work on this issue.
I am aware of the constraints on time, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will not go through every single clause, even though I have strong opinions on some of them. The shadow Minister talked about assaults on members of the armed forces. He is absolutely right to say that we should take great care. People who serve in the armed forces do a huge number of things for our country and they deserve protection. They should not be treated in the ways he outlined. Some of the cases are absolutely abhorrent, but I am not persuaded that his exact proposal is the best way to tackle them. I hope he will seek to find a sensible way forward and not play party politics. He has avoided doing so in other areas. We want people to be treated properly and with respect, but I do not think it is right to single out the armed forces from other organisations. There are powers already—I hope the Minister can clarify this—for this to be taken as an aggravating offence. It is already possible to do what he seeks to do, so I do not think his amendment will move us forward.
Turning to the huge bundle of amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), I am happy to take credit from him for campaigning for what actually works. I know he is less bothered about that than some of us are, but I want an approach on prisons that helps people and reduces the number of offences committed. That has to be the aim. This is not just about punishment, but about not creating future problems. There is a huge amount of research on what reduces reoffending. Open prisons result in lower reoffending rates, and that is important. He would like to talk about the victims of the original offences, and I have sympathy with that approach, but I would also like to look at the victims of offences that we want to try to prevent from ever happening. That is incredibly important, and it is why I and others are so keen on evidence-informed policy making—that we should find out what happens and listen to experts rather than deal with a gut reaction.
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The hon. Member for Shipley and I have a very different approach and, as I said in my intervention, I hope he will press his proposals to a vote, so that he can see what the House thinks of them. I do not think he will get very substantial support from those of us who care about the crimes we want to try to avoid. The best way of dealing with the problem is to make sure that we do not have crimes—whether it be by preventing them from happening in the first place, which could be done through design, by the way society behaves and by reducing the opportunities for crime; or by ensuring that once people have offended, there is less chance of them reoffending later. Those must be the focus of our efforts.
The hon. Member for Shipley made a number of comments, some of which are worth picking up. One group of people who work with prisoners and who are probably the experts on how to interact with them are the prison governors and, in particular, the Prison Governors Association. I presume that the hon. Gentleman has seen some of its comments about him. The PGA does not usually wade into these party political debates, but it is said to be “appalled” by the comments made by the hon. Gentleman, following a recent abscond. It goes on to talk about the details of the use of open conditions
as an important factor for effective resettlement. It is particularly worth the House taking note that the PGA says:
“It is therefore unhelpful for Members of Parliament to make comment on areas in which they are not fully conversant.”
That is a rather polite description from the Prison Governors Association. We want to see things that work.
To my mind, it is a great shame that we have so many people in prison in this country. There are now about 85,000 prisoners, which costs around £40,000 per prisoner a year. Whenever we talk about putting somebody in prison, one thing that needs to be thought about is whether something better could be done with the £40,000 that it costs for each year they are in prison. There is a place for prison—absolutely. Yes, some people should be in prison and some for a very long time. Earlier, I argued for longer sentences in some cases. Do we think, however, that that is a good use of money? Do we think it right that this country has roughly twice as many people in prison per 100,000 of the population as in Germany? When people travel to Germany, I do not think they see that a huge amount of crime has resulted from that policy. People generally report Germany as being a safe place to be in, so why do we spend about twice as much locking up twice as many people?
The Government are making progress in specific areas, substantially reducing the number of young people and of women in prison. I welcome that, although I think more could be done to reduce the total number of people in prison by reducing the number of crimes further and by ensuring that those who have committed crimes do not reoffend and do not go back into the cycle of crime. Work is being done on that, but I hope that we can make further progress and I hope that we will firmly reject the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Shipley. I hope that he will have the courage to put his proposals to a vote.