MINISTRY OF JUSTICE — House of Commons, 2018-07-02
Topic: Law and Crime
Richard Burgon (Labour, Centre-left): The Conservatives need to take responsibility for their giveaway to billionaires. If balancing the books is so important, why give billions away to those people Whole communities are affected by rising crime, because under the privatised probation system offenders are bizarrely dealt with over the phone. Young people are threatened by street violence because of the Government’s decision to cut Youth Justice Board funding in half. On this side of the House, we will be fighting every single one of the cuts that the Government plan for the justice system over the next period, because we cannot do justice on the cheap. Our communities should not pay the price Turning to prisons, the Conservatives recklessly axed nearly 7,000 prison officers from 2010. These layoffs are the root cause of much of the unprecedented levels of violence and chaos in our prisons. Faced with a crisis of their own making, the Government have recruited 3,000 new officers over the past 18 months, yet there are still over 4,000 fewer frontline officers now than in 2010 There is no clarity on whether there is extra money to recruit any more officers. If so, how much? Are the Government committing to reversing all the prison officer posts cut since 2010? If not, how many new officers will be recruited by 2020, and when will they be on the landings? In short, when will there be sufficient staffing to keep both inmates and staff safe This is not just a simple numbers game. Officers with many tens of thousands of years of collective experience have been lost since 2010. That is creating a dangerous cocktail of inexperienced officers and experienced prisoners. What is the Government strategy to end this exodus of experienced officers from our prisons? This year’s real-terms pay cut of £980 a year will only make retention more difficult. Do the Government have any intention of ending below-inflation pay awards for prison officers? Labour would do so What about the new female offender strategy? Good ideas, and even good intentions, are not enough. Even the Minister’s former ministerial colleague has said this strategy is not properly funded. The Government’s own advisers say this plan faces a £15 million shortfall. With no serious funding, it risks being yet another missed opportunity for reform. Likewise, the Government’s new education and employment strategy seems to be based on governors doing more with less—another recipe for failure As the prisons budgets are cut, the push for outsourcing and privatisation increases. Some people might even suggest that that is the intention. It is clear that we cannot hand over huge swathes of the justice system to mega-corporations and expect anything other than profit to be put first. We need only look at Serco’s role in ripping off the public by overcharging for tagging prisoners, including dead prisoners. That is so serious that there is an ongoing Serious Fraud Office investigation against Serco, yet it somehow continues to have £3.6 billion-worth of contracts with the Ministry of Justice; given the new Justice Minister’s previous role as spin-doctor-in-chief at Serco that is something we will all need to be shining a light on Beyond Serco, public cash was thrown at Amey and Carillion for prison maintenance works despite cells being rat-infested and left in disrepair. And beyond Serco, the Sodexo-run Peterborough Prison recently became the first women’s prison in years deemed not safe enough by inspectors, and the G4S Oakhill child prison is no better, yet last week the Government announced yet another privately financed prison and are preparing the ground for more to follow. So I want to make one thing clear to the Government and to those who wish to bid for any new private prisons: a Labour Government will end the discredited outsourcing of prison maintenance works and bring them back in house. We will oppose the building of more private prisons. We will put an end to the wasteful scandal of PFI in our prison system. And we will use every power possible to bring the work of underperforming private sector companies in our prisons back in-house at the earliest opportunity Of course, the Tory privatisation of probation has not just put the public at greater risk, but has left the taxpayer out of pocket, just as we warned it would. The Select Committee on Justice recently labelled this part-privatisation a "mess", yet the companies delivering this mess received £342 million in a bail-out last year. Imagine what we could have done to transform our justice system with those resources, instead of giving them to line the pockets of private companies Press reports suggest even more changes to the contracts to boost the profits of the private companies. We in the Opposition will oppose that all the way. The Government should stop rewarding failure. They should commit today that not one penny more will go on bailing out these failing companies, and then they should terminate their contracts. Probation should be brought back in-house where it can focus on reoffending rather than making profits for private companies Justice and access to justice have been seriously undermined by the Tory cuts agenda. With sweeping cuts to legal aid, this cruel Tory Government are not only attacking people’s living standards but deliberately undermining their ability to defend themselves against those very same attacks. When people cannot afford to enforce their rights, those rights are worth nothing more than the paper they are written on—so much for equality before the law At last, the Government have launched a review of their legal aid polices, but if they are serious about reversing the damage, proper funding is needed. That means new Treasury money, not more rearranging of the deckchairs. We need to fund legal aid properly; we need to value legal aid and access to justice Finally, I raise our concerns about the funding of our courts. A £1 billion-plus courts reform programme is under way that will fundamentally change the way justice is delivered in this country, but it is being done with no real piloting, with no parliamentary or public scrutiny, and without legislation, and with financial decisions that could lead to long-term costs for our justice system—and it seems that it is in danger of coming off the tracks.