Speeches by Farnsworth.

“I recognise that prison places were created, but we are talking in net terms, and net, there were 500 extra places. [Interruption.] We are certainly not happy with only 500 places, net, over 14 years. That is why this Government are taking action to increase prison places in real terms. We must sort out the cycle of re…”

“Thank you. We are looking at expanding the use of it, as you say, as technology improves. I am sure we will be doing more and more with electronic monitoring. I know that the review considered the Government’s pilot on electronic monitoring for perpetrators of domestic violence. What evidence did you find of its effect…”

“Good afternoon. I am Linsey Farnsworth, Member of Parliament for Amber Valley. I was a Crown prosecutor for the best part of two decades before coming to Parliament, and my interests are as in the register.”

“Yes, thank you. I would like to talk to you about community sentences. The review proposes an expansion to the use of community sentences. Having been in the criminal justice system before coming into Parliament, I am interested to hear what your view is on what implications diverting more people into the community wou…”

“That will presumably need more resource. You cannot just move monetary resources from the prisons into probation because we are still going to need the prison places because of the trajectory that we are going in.”

“You have mentioned the third sector and opportunities there for bringing the third sector in more. I was interested in what you were saying earlier about the person, when they come out of prison, having a job, having a home, having strong familial ties. I think that goes for people serving a community penalty as well. …”

“If we can turn now to community sentence treatment requirements, the review highlights significant concerns about the lack of availability of those requirements. What assessment did the review make of the geographical availability currently for those and the funding across England and Wales for those programmes?”

“Last week we heard from healthcare providers about the opportunity to increase community sentence treatment requirements. I was just wondering to what extent the review adopts a public health approach to reducing reoffending.”

“I do not know whether you would agree with me, but I think that in the circumstances where a sentence requires somebody to tackle the core reason for their offending and what is behind it, that is quite a tough sentence in my view. It is quite onerous on somebody, so it is not the easy option for them, is my view. I do…”

“That is helpful, thank you. Last week we also heard about community sentence treatment requirements, orders that were dual, so alcohol, mental health, and drugs, that they are quite popular in prisons because often prisoners will have a dual diagnosis. Does the review recognise that assertion that they are quite popula…”

“Shall I move on to the electronic tagging?”

“I think we have votes soon but—”

“I am behind the times, I do apologise. We will move on to electronic monitoring tags, then. The suggestion of expanding the use of electric monitoring tags is clearly something that has been talked about quite a lot. Do you think it is realistic to expand the use given Serco’s history of poor performance in recent year…”

“How will the data be collected from electronic tagging in real time?”

“There have been some concerns raised about using tagging for domestic violence cases, particularly in circumstances where we hear about tags running out of power and offenders failing to maintain contact with the tagging side of things. With a domestic violence case, that gives a little bit of concern about safety for …”

“One last question from me, but moving away from tagging and on to women’s centres. What engagement did you have with the Women’s Justice Board when developing the recommendation to expand women’s centres?”

“Did the review identify any challenges regarding the competitive tendering process for specialist services for women?”

“Given that the Justice Committee sits on Tuesday afternoons, we would request that consideration be given to Wednesday 25 June for the Estimates debate. There are serious challenges facing the criminal justice system. The backlog in the Crown Court is in excess of 70,000 cases, and the remand and prison populations are…”

“Brilliant. That sounds really interesting. The evaluation from the MOJ and our written evidence identified some limitations on community sentence treatments when they are not person-centred, or are not used consistently, or there are delays in starting the treatment. What is NHS England doing to mitigate those challeng…”

“I would like to move away from prisons a little and talk about community sentence treatment requirements as an alternative, whether that be drug rehabilitation requirements, alcohol treatment requirements, or mental health treatment requirements. As a former prosecutor seeing the same defendants back in court time and …”