Shabana Mahmood MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  I have no truck with anyone else’s prejudices and they certainly do not decide what I do in office. I believe in prison. This Government are going to build more prison places, and we will fill them. I believe in prison for the reasons of punishment, primarily; I agree with the right hon. Gentleman on that. I will not let this country run out of prison places, because I know what will happen if we do. I am not willing to put anyone through the breakdown of law and order in our country—I am not willing to take that risk. It means that harder choices are in front of me and this House as we get ourselves out of this crisis, and I am making those choices today. I will work at pace to bring forward legislation at the earliest opportunity, so that the House can consider the proposals in full. Those on extended determinate sentences —the most dangerous offenders, as judged by a judge in a court—will be excluded from these measures. For all other offenders, earlier release will have to be earned, and there will be intensive supervision afterwards. That is the earned progression model, and I am sure we will debate it at length in the weeks and months ahead.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We are deporting at a faster rate than the previous Government. We have accepted the review’s recommendation to drop the threshold for early removal from this country from 50% of the custodial sentence to 30%. We will urgently work up a plan, with the Home Office, for those who are sentenced to less than three years to be deported as quickly as possible after sentencing.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  Restorative justice has an important role to play in our justice system, so where it is appropriate and where it can make a difference, we will ensure that it is available. But I want to ensure that victims of crime have other confidence-inducing measures at their disposal, which is why I want to look at exclusion zones in particular, and it is why we want to do the domestic abuse identifier, so that we can track systems, learn from the cases that are going through and make better policy for victims.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  I pay tribute to the hon. Lady for her work in this area, and I will pass on her remarks to the Victims Minister. I also pay tribute to her constituent. It is very difficult to raise these issues and talk about them openly, and her constituent has shown real bravery in coming forward and explaining why the scheme would have made a difference to her own recovery. I am very pleased to extend the pilot scheme. We will learn the lessons about how the first pilot scheme worked in the first year, and if we need to do more on publicising what the scheme can do and its availability, we will do so. The hon. Lady will know that I want to make further progress on using AI technology to make transcripts more widely available, because I believe in a transparent justice system. I do not believe that we are very far away from having tech that is accurate enough to be a matter of court record, but we are not quite there yet. It is something we continue to work on.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend raises a really important point. This is why the Government have already rolled out employment work councils, where prisons link up with employers in their region and try to make sure that there are jobs and training available for offenders on leaving prison. We know that the ability to work is a really important part of driving down reoffending. That is a priority for this Government. Of course, unpaid work is a very visible way for offenders to make reparations to the communities they have harmed. In our eyes, that is the primary focus of it, but the discipline of doing that work can help offenders who are far away from the world of work to get closer to it.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for his question. Let me tell him that we have already learned the lessons of the Tory party’s failure, and I am very sorry to hear about the situation he describes in Scotland. The Conservatives’ failure on prison building stemmed from two things: they could not get it past their own Back Benchers, so the planning delays added billions to the cost of prison place expansion; and they did not make certain and available the amount needed to stimulate funding at the rate required. We have reversed both those things: we have made £4.7 billion available and we have made it very clear that planning will not get in the way of prison building.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  Studies show a 60% reduction in offending. My hon. Friend is right to say that, for one subset of offenders, offending relates to power. For another subset of offenders, we believe that a combination of chemical suppressants and psychological interventions can have a big and positive impact. A pilot has been trundling along for many years, and nobody has shown much interest in it, including any of my predecessors—Tory Justice Secretaries just let it carry on. I am not willing to do that, and I am not squeamish about taking further measures. We are going to have a national roll-out of this programme, and I will ensure that is what happens. I am expanding it to two further regions, including for prisoners in 20 further prisons, so that we can build the evidence base and make sure that we are using every tool at our disposal to cut reoffending.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  I am happy to ensure that the evidence is available. I would say to the hon. Lady that the very small-scale pilot that I inherited had been running for some time without anybody paying a huge amount of attention to it, and the evidence from other jurisdictions where it has been rolled out a bit more widely is stronger. Our roll-out—I want to get to a national roll-out—will start with two extra regions and 20 more prisons, and we will build the evidence base there. We want measures that work, and I do believe that the combination of chemical suppressants and psychological interventions can help with a cohort of particularly difficult sex offenders.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  All dangerous offenders—those who receive an extended determinate sentence, including some of the serious offenders to which my hon. Friend has referred—will be excluded from this scheme. All other offenders receiving a standard determinate sentence will be within the earned progression model, but they will have to earn an early release. That is why we are ensuring that there is an uplift in probation funding, to ensure that all those individuals are intensively supervised in the middle stage of their sentence. The worst thing that could happen for every type of victim in this country, and in fact for every citizen, would be for us to run out of prison places altogether. We are in this position because of the mess that the previous Government left behind, and it falls to us to fix it.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for raising issues relating to the Probation Service. We have already expanded the number of staff. Last year, we recruited 1,000 extra, and this year we are on track to hit our target of 1,300 extra staff. Increasing resource—first and foremost with more staff—is a clear priority for us. We are investing in technology to help the Probation Service to be more productive. We have already funded programmes and pilots on AI tech designed to decrease the amount of file work that probation officers have to do to allow them to have more time to do the things that only a human can do: to spend time with the offender in front of them, to come up with a proper plan to reduce their reoffending and therefore to keep the public safe.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  Let me thank the right hon. Gentleman for his remarks of personal respect, which are shared across this House. I thank him for that and for the important issue he raises. I hope to move to a position where the combined impact of the changes in the review and the work we are doing with the Women’s Justice Board mean that we see a huge drop in the number of female prisoners. I am particularly keen to ensure that pregnant women and mothers of young children are not anywhere near our female prison estate in future. Of course, for serious offenders we will always need to make sure that prison is an option, but the vast majority of women go to prison on short sentences for much less serious offences and we need to turn that around.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right: it is a day of shame for the Conservative party. I am sorry to see that the attitude of Conservative Members today is shameless. He makes a very important point on policing. I have had a good conversation with police leaders. I am determined to use the national Criminal Justice Board to ensure that every part of the criminal justice system is aligned and that we take into account all the interactions—based on this review, and on the upcoming criminal courts review—and think about the impact they have not just on the bit of the justice system I am directly responsible for, but on the wider criminal justice system, including policing as a whole.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  Let me be clear: we will be adding prison places to the estate, and we will be filling them up. The prison population will rise year on year by the end of this Parliament, but my hon. Friend is right that the measures we have announced today stabilise the prison population. As a whole country, we will have to do better at ensuring that our prisons are churning out better citizens, rather than better criminals. When we know that 80% of offenders are reoffenders, there is clearly much work to be done in this area.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  After some months in this job facing the shadow Ministers, I am afraid that nothing about their behaviour surprises me any more. I will take notice—as, I think, will the country—when the Conservatives finally offer an apology for the absolute abject mess they left behind.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend puts it very well, and he is absolutely right. We have made more progress on the deportation of foreign national offenders than the previous Government and we will go further. We accept the review’s recommendations on reducing the threshold for early removal from 50% to 30%. For offenders who get less than three years in prison, we will work with the Home Office on proposals to move to immediate deportation.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  This Government will make sure we are running a prison system that is sustainable and not on the point of collapse, so that we can ensure that dangerous offenders in this country are still locked up. We will make progress on our broader mission to halve the level of violence against women and girls over 10 years.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes an incredibly powerful point and she is absolutely right. When we have a prison system on the point of collapse, it is not as if the criminals do not know that that is happening. That is why it is imperative that we get our system under control and ensure there is always a prison place available for those who have to be locked up to keep the public safe. Her point about winning votes shows the approach taken by the previous Government: they put themselves first, not the country first.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  I very much hope that the position for Welsh women will be the same as for women in England, which is that we see a huge reduction in the number of women in Wales and England entering the female prison estate. That is because the combination of the measures David Gauke recommends, in particular on short sentences, will mean that fewer women go to prison. I will, of course, work with colleagues across Wales to look at what more we can do on accommodation provision. I know that there is no specific centre in Wales—the right hon. Lady and I have discussed that previously. It was a promise made by the previous Government without any funding attached to it, so I was not able to make decisions when I first came into office that could reverse that, but we will work with the Women’s Justice Board and others to ensure that the offer for women who are now no longer going to prison is still strong and helps them on their rehabilitation journey.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  I pay tribute to the organisations in my hon. Friend’s constituency; such voluntary organisations play a hugely important role in helping the justice system to succeed in rehabilitating offenders. We will continue to work closely and build on the review’s recommendations in this area.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady makes a good point. I pay tribute to the work that is going on in her constituency. As I have said before, 80% of offenders in this country are reoffenders. That tells us how broken our system is, and how imperative it is that we sort it out.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  I shall take my hon. Friend’s early bid for further building in her constituency under advisement immediately.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady raises an important point. The combination of the measures that we are accepting from the review will mean that we will see a huge reduction in the number of women going to prison. Approximately two thirds go in for sentences of less than one year and, as the hon. Lady knows, many of those women are themselves victims of domestic abuse. In future, we expect the numbers to drop very significantly, and I know we will make progress in that regard. I have set out an ambition to see fewer women prisoners and, ultimately, to have fewer women’s prisons. Turning to residential alternatives to custody, the hon. Lady will know that I have set up the Women’s Justice Board. It is well represented, including by those who have personal experience of Hope Street, and we will work with the Women’s Justice Board as we roll out further changes to the female estate.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This Government are determined to clean up the mess left by the previous Conservative Government and to put victims first, cut crime and make our communities safer.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right to remind the House that 80% of offenders in our country are reoffenders, which tells us that our system is broken. It tells us that our prisons are creating better criminals, not better citizens, and this is something we absolutely have to turn around if we are to protect victims and cut crime.

• 22 May 2025 · Independent Sentencing Review · Hansard source

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  Mr Speaker, if I were waiting for respect from Opposition Members, I would be waiting for a long time, so it is a good job that I do not need it. The shadow Secretary of State talks about “iron bars”, but he was part of a Government that did not build the prison places that this country needs. Unlike him, I take responsibility, and it has fallen to me to clean up the mess that he and his party left behind. In case there is any confusion, let me spell out what happens when he and his party leave our prison system on the brink of collapse, which is exactly what they did, and set out the prospect that faced me on day one, when I walked into the Justice Department. When prisons are on the verge of collapse, we basically have only two choices left at our disposal: either we shut the front door, or we have to open the back door. The right hon. Gentleman’s party knew that that was the situation it was confronted with, but did it make any decisions? No, it just decided to call an election instead and did a runner. The public put the Conservatives in their current position. If they ever want to get out of that position, I suggest that they start by reckoning with the reality of their own track record in office. In any other reality, they should have started already with an apology. Conservative Members have had many chances to apologise to the country for leaving our prisons on the point of absolute collapse, but they have never taken them. Frankly, that tells us everything that anyone needs to know about the modern Conservative party.