Justice secretary to announce phasing out of short-term prison sentences

At the SNP conference in Aberdeen the party yesterday agreed a new version of its plan to use the general election as a test of whether it should have a mandate for a second independence referendum. Severin Carrell and Libby Brooks have the story here.

Keith Brown MSP, the SNP’s deputy leader (or depute leader in Scotland – the party uses the Scots word) has been doing an interview round this morning and he told the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland that the the party took the view it would still have a mandate for independence negotiations if it won the most seats in Scotland – even it its support was down from the result in 2019. He said:

If in the UK, a party of government, as has happened many times in the past, have won the election again with fewer votes – you’re saying they didn’t have a mandate. Of course, that’s not the case.

We would have that mandate because we would have won the election and I think people understand that.

And if we do that, then we will enter independence negotiations and set in train in other processes, which will lead to Scotland taking a different path from the rest of the UK.

Brown is addressing the SNP conference later. According to extracts released in advance, he will say Scots will have a choice between “Westminster control and independence” at the next election. He will say:

The next election in Scotland will be a clear choice between Westminster control and independence.

Scotland can escape the chaos of Westminster mismanagement – from the hard-right economic destruction of a Tory budget to the lurch to the right from Labour on everything from workers’ rights to immigration.

Now, with the party united behind the independence strategy, our job is to take the substance of the independence debate to the people – to build support and to deliver independence.

James Heappey, the armed forces minister, was doing a morning interview round on behalf of the government earlier. Speaking about the Israel-Hamas war, he told LBC that he thought Israel was “balancing correctly” the need to protect protect innocent lives against the need to deal with Hamas effectively.

Asked whether the government supports the blockade of water, medical supplies and power from Gaza, Heappey told LBC:

I think what we are recognising is that there is military necessity rubbing up against humanitarian necessity and what we’re saying to Israel is that they need and are, need to show the balance between those two imperatives.

Echoing the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, Heappey said democracies hold themselves to a “higher standard” and “of course we are encouraging Israel to make sure it does hold itself to that higher standard”. He went on:

It is the devil’s own choice that Israel has got to make but for my money they are balancing correctly the need to preserve innocent human life as best they possibly can while accepting that the adversary that they will soon launch an attack on, uses humans and shields and deliberately seeks to hide within civilian population and infrastructure.

Good morning. Governments that have been in power a long time often have to reverse decisions they have taken earlier, but under this administration this practice has become endemic. Two of the most important acts of public service reform under David Cameron were privatisation of the probation service and the Health and Social Care Act 2012, which put competitive tendering at the heart of the provision of NHS services. Both reforms were subsequently regarded as flawed (or disastrous in the case of probation), and reversed. On tax, the Tories spent the first half of their time in office reducing corporation tax, and putting the income tax allowance up. Now they’re doing the opposite. At the Tory conference Rishi Sunak announced a colossal U-turn on HS2, one of the biggest infrastructure schemes in British history. And today, on sentencing police, Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, is set to announce another U-turn.

Arguably, it’s a U-turn on a U-turn. When David Gauke was justice secretary in 2019, he announced plans to abolish short-term jail sentences. A few months later Boris Johnson became MP, Robert Buckland replaced Gauke as justice secretary, and the plans were ditched. Today, in a statement to MPs, Chalk will revive them.

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday, Chalk said:

We need to keep people safe – and that means moving away from short-term prison sentences that make hardened criminals rather than rehabilitated offenders. So we need to look again at low-level offenders. Because while the overall reoffending rate is 25%, the rate for people who spend fewer than 12 months in prison is over 50%.

A short stretch of a few months inside isn’t enough time to rehabilitate criminals, but is more than enough to dislocate them from the family, work and home connections that keep them from crime. Too often, offenders routinely turn back to crime as soon as they walk out of the prison gates.

No prison system should further criminalise offenders or trap criminals who might otherwise take the right path in a cycle of criminality through a merry-go-round of short sentences. This is the wrong use of our prison system and taxpayers’ money. It doesn’t deliver for victims and it doesn’t cut crime. We need to fix this.

There are alternatives to having low level offenders languishing in prison. Judges can make them repay their debt to society in communities – cleaning up neighbourhoods, scrubbing graffiti off walls, and even helping to plant new forests. And with technology moving on rapidly, these options are growing. The latest GPS tags, for example, offer many more options than the radio frequency versions, which were the only ones available to the court when I first started my career as a prosecutor.

All this sounds quite liberal – and not the sort of thing likely to appeal to the Tory core vote which, as the party conference revealed, seems increasingly to be the focus of government policymaking. But Chalk is in a bind because the prisons in England and Wales are full. And so, as Helen Pidd reports, his announcement about phasing out short-term sentences will be combined with one about deporting more foreign criminals.

Ingeniously, the Ministry of Justice has even managed to put a punitive spin on abolishing short-term sentences. The Sunday Telegraph wrote a story based on Chalk’s article yesterday saying that he would be bringing Texas-style justice to the UK. Given that the best known fact about the Texas justice system is that it has by far the highest execution rate for any US state, this made it sound as if Chalk was embracing a policy about which even Suella Braverman might have second thoughts. But the headline was just based on a line in the Chalk article in which he said even US states like Texas were using tagging more for some offenders.

Danny Shaw, the BBC’s former home affairs correspondent, has a good take on X.

What a waste of 4 years.

On 18 July 2019, @DavidGauke – then Justice Secretary – announced limits on the use of short prison sentences to cut reoffending & reduce costs.

But 5 days later Gauke resigned. Boris Johnson became PM & the plans were scrapped.

Now, they’re back …

An acute shortage of prison places has forced the current Justice Secretary’s hand…

So @AlexChalkChelt is adopting Gauke’s 2019 plan – to get courts to use tough community sentences rather than 6 or 12 month jail terms.

Worth a try – but it must be evaluated properly…

There’ll also be other emergency measures from @AlexChalkChelt to free up space…

…like extending early release schemes…

… and trying (yet again) to persuade other countries to take back foreign offenders locked up here – there are 10,500 in jails in England/Wales …

To sweeten the early release pill @AlexChalkChelt will outline some tougher sentences…

…but this shouldn’t deflect from the big story here:

A grotesque failure by @MoJGovUK to plan for the rise in the prison population which its own statisticians had forecast.

In a statement issued yesterday, Shabana Mahmood, the shadow justice secretary, said the government was to blame for a “crisis of epic proportions” in prisons. She said:

The only thing Texan about this government is that they are running the country like cowboys.

13 years of reckless mismanagement of the criminal justice system has led to a crisis of epic proportions where they are now coming up with policy on the hoof, which does nothing to deal with the immediate overcrowding crisis …

With thousands of offences – including sexual offences – committed by people on bail every year, the government is seeking to distract from the issue at hand, instead of giving answers on how they plan to keep our streets safe now.

Labour would uphold law and order in this country by building the prison places we need and by putting criminals behind bars.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Rishi Sunak makes a visit to show support for the Jewish community.

10.30am: The SNP conference resumes with a session on priorities for Scotland, debates on resolutions including one on wind turbines and a speech from Rhun ap Iowerth, the Plaid Cymru leader.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2pm: Keith Brown, the SNP’s deputy leader, addresses the SNP conference.

2.30pm: Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 3.30pm: Sunak makes a statement about the Israel-Hamas war.

After 4.30pm: Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, makes a statement about prisons.

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