Little AndrewHon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): Thank you Mr Chair. It's a great pleasure to take a call on the Appropriation (2016/17 Confirmation and Validation) Bill and in this case on the theme of the justice sector. I just want to begin by saying how this new Government has inherited an absolute crisis in the criminal justice sector. There can be no question about that. In one sense the previous Government inherited problems that other Governments have had and we've had 30 years of growing expenditure and growing problems in the criminal justice sector. But actually it reached a crisis point a long time ago and what I charge the previous Government of is having had the opportunity to actually do something meaningful about the challenges facing this sector they did absolutely nothing. They talked long and hard about how they didn't like prisons. They described them as a moral and fiscal failure" but did they do anything to reduce the rapidly growing prison population? Absolutely nothing and they relished the opportunity to make it worse. They passed more and more laws to imprison more and more people for longer and longer periods of time—Simeon Brown: Who are you going to release? Hon ANDREW LITTLE: —and the real pity of it is that the apprentices who have come in in this season now want to add more and more crimes and extend more and more prison sentences for more and more people. No one on that side of the House wants to step up and face up to the problem and when you look at it look at their legacy of failure. So they set targets to reduce offending. They set a target to reduce violent crime offences in their last term of Government—to reduce them. They went up by nearly 5 percent. They set a target to reduce reoffending by prisoners. They said they'd have a target to reduce it by 25 percent. They reduced it by under 5 percent. No real effort at all—no real effort at all—and now we have the crisis we've got right now. Nearly 11000 people in prison and they've got no answers on how to deal with it. It is time for a shake-up and this Government is committed to a programme of change that achieves the objectives that you would expect of a responsible modern criminal justice system: to keep the innocent safe and for those who offend make them accountable but actually fix the problems that they've got so they can turn out of the system and be productive responsible citizens again. That side of the House turns people away casts them aside rejects them and wants nothing more to do with them. That is not an expression of humanity. That's not an expression of a criminal justice system that is doing its job of keeping people safe. I want to mention briefly too one other aspect of the justice system that has turned out to be a complete and utter failure on their part and that's the Family Court. So they introduced all these changes on the basis that separating couples would quite happily cooperate with each other work with a mediator and sort out all their issues and it hasn't happened because that approach denies the fundamentals of humanity that when people are in disagreement with each other and when their emotional commitment falls apart and they want to sort it out they cannot do it on their own. They cannot do it on their own. I am looking forward to the reforms to come through because they will be shown up as the party that does not understand basic human endeavour basic human emotions basic human contact. They don't get it—they don't get it. They are the party of anti-humanity. You know the secret about most Tories is they don't actually like people. They don't like ordinary people. They like the privileged. They like the privileged they like the elites but they don't like ordinary people—they hate them. So when people have the problems that ordinary people have they do not know how to deal with it. So they kind of look at what works on a piece of paper and it saves a bit of money and they go away and do it. Well I can tell this committee that is changing too because we are going to have a justice system—whether it's in criminal law whether it's in family law or whether it's in all aspects of civil law—that is humane that understands people and that gives people access to justice so that we can once again claim to be a country that respects all people."