I strongly welcome many aspects of the Bill, particularly the whole-life orders. They would have completely changed the treatment of Colin Pitchfork, who is widely remembered by my constituents for the rape and murder of two children. The reforms in the Bill will ensure that such people never see daylight again, and quite rightly too.
I strongly support the measures in the Bill to toughen up on sexual offences. They are long overdue and reflect the public mood to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) referred. The reforms in the Bill build on successive waves of reform over recent years, including the very welcome move to end early release at the halfway point. There is much to welcome in the Bill, and I admire much of the work of our brilliant and learned Lord Chancellor, one of the most learned people to have occupied that role.
However, there is one aspect of the Bill with which I have a serious problem. I will, of course, vote with the Government this evening—I have always voted with the Government to date, and I hope that I never find myself doing anything other than that. The issue that I am concerned about is the presumption against sentences of a year or less. There is a pragmatic argument that I am ready to hear on this measure, which says that we must do this simply because we need the places. The argument that I cannot accept is that this can make the public safer.
Let me walk hon. Members through the logic. The Ministry of Justice has conducted a study and has matched different offenders into two cohorts. They are like-for-like: people with a similar background who have done similar things. The claim that there is 4% less offending comes from looking at those two cohorts:
those who have had a sentence of less than 12 months in prison and those who have had a suspended sentence. It is claimed that there is 4% more offending from those who have had the prison sentence. However, that looks at one year from the start of the suspended sentence, but from the end of the prison sentence.
If we take an offender who has a one-year prison sentence and if, instead of looking at it from the end of that year, we look at it from the start, the comparison is with someone who cannot harm the public because they are in prison. Therefore, instead of comparing the 75.6% reoffending rate after those offenders leave jail with the 71.5% reoffending rate from the start of community sentences, we should—I heard the promise of the Lord Chancellor that he would do this analysis for us, and that is very welcome—compare that 71% reoffending rate of those on suspended sentences with the zero reoffending rate of those who are locked up for a whole year, or the much lower rate of those who are locked up for part of the year. Most normal members of the public would think, “It is very surprising that we would be safer if people who commit serious crimes are out there wandering around in the community, rather than if they were in jail.” Of course it is not intuitive because it is wrong. I am prepared to hear a pragmatic argument, but this junk analysis cannot stand. It is utterly bogus and an abuse of the statistics. It is unbelievably unacceptable.
I am ready to hear a pragmatic argument about prison places. As my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) said, sentences of less than one year are not for trivial offences. These days, a person has to go some distance to get sent to jail. Many of those offenders, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (James Daly) said, will have had many previous cautions, suspended sentences and community sentences. In a published paper on super-prolific offenders that I wrote a few years back, I laid out the staggering number of community sentences and suspended sentences. People were getting their 50th and 51st community sentences. This is soft justice, and it does not work. It is a danger to the public. Sometimes a short prison sentence is the right thing.
To rehearse what these people have done: 17% are in prison for violence against the person, 2% for sexual offences, 2% for robbery, 20% for theft, 9% for drug offences, 7% for possession of weapons and 9% for public order offences. These are really serious crimes, and the public do not think we are being too harsh; they think we are being too soft.
Let us put the saving on jail places—the one argument for this that I can accept—into context. Short sentences are absolutely not driving the upward pressure on prison places, quite the reverse. The proportion of people in jail on a tariff of one year or less has fallen from 13% in 2008 to just 6% now. It has halved, so the increasing number of people not getting short sentences has been driving down the prison population.
The estimate in the Government’s impact assessment is that this measure will save, in the central scenario, 600 prison places. Let us compare that with some of the other factors in play. Since 2019, the number of people on remand has risen by about 6,600 prison places, which is 10 or 11 times larger than the saving we are making, and that is because of delays in the courts. I hope we will look at that again.
To put it in further context, the number of foreign national offenders in our jails—foreign national offenders comprise about one in eight of all the people in our jails—has risen by about 1,200 prison places since 2019, which is twice as large as the saving we are making through this measure. In fact, the saving of 600 prison places is much smaller than the 1,900 additional places that the Ministry of Justice brilliantly created between last autumn and this summer through things like the rapid deployment cells.
If we look at it in that context, it cannot be impossible for us to find a better alternative to this measure. I understand that there are exemptions, and that those on orders will not be subject to this measure, but the problem is that many people with many previous convictions are not on an order.
By reading between the lines of the Lord Chancellor’s statement, I detect a willingness to look at this again for knife crime offences, and I hope we will have a much more wide-ranging review of the policy because, ultimately, I do not believe for one second that it can make the public safer, that it is what the public want or that there is no alternative. We have already shown that we can move quickly to increase the number of prison places.
We could look quite radically at things like jury trials to speed up our courts and the archaic practices that are causing the huge growth in remand that is driving us towards these decisions. We could look again at what we can do with rapid deployment cells to get more capacity. I am happy to look at anything, whatever it takes, but I do not believe this measure is at all desirable, even though it is part of a Bill that contains many things that are desirable.
I hope that the Lord Chancellor and the Government will look at this again and that, by Third Reading, we will have a better Bill that every Conservative Member can wholeheartedly and proudly support.
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