00:00We all want people who come out of prison to be reformed. We want them to take their
00:04place in the community, to get a job, to get a home, to get a life.
00:09Of course. And, you know, I think in order to address this, we obviously have the new
00:14Labour government carrying over the previous government's plan of reducing the limit to 40%
00:20per year term, so that can be released or be considered to be.
00:24Yes, it's a temporary measure, just for three months. It will need to be followed by a much
00:28more substantial long-term reform. Just to give you two examples, because I spoke about
00:34them at the end of July in a very brief intervention, because we were only given five minutes each
00:39to speak. So many people wanted to contribute. This is staggering. There are 17,000 people
00:47on remand in prison, on remand, who have not yet been tried or not been sentenced.
00:54Last year, there were 27,800 recalls. That are people who are recalled, most of them,
01:01under a provision which recalls them for 28 days, and then there has to be a review,
01:05and most of them are let out. It's a crazy system, absolutely crazy. All of those have to be found
01:12a place, they have to appear in a cell. And what you're doing is you're jamming it up,
01:16you're dislocating it when you need those cells for people who have been
01:20sentenced to serious times in jail. Do you think for the inmates that are going to be released,
01:31or have been released this month and will be released again next month, as part of this
01:34process, we talked about the probation service a little bit already, but how prepared do you
01:38think they are for that? Are they going to struggle? I think they're going to struggle
01:42for three reasons. One was that Christopher Grayling, when he was the Justice Secretary,
01:47absolutely messed up. And everybody's accepted, the previous government accepted in the end
01:52that it was a total mess and he tried to privatise it. They've just about put it together, but a lot
01:58of the probation officers are new. And that doesn't mean they're no good, it just means
02:03they're inexperienced. And that makes it much more difficult for them to handle a sudden surge
02:10in the caseload, and therefore they're bound to be risk-averse, understandably, but they're also
02:17bound to be in a situation where they can't foresee what will happen. So I fear that we will
02:24get some incidents where people repeat offend. It happens anyway with people released, there's a
02:31very high level of re-offending, something like 50%. So you're going to get that whatever happens.
02:37And the question is, can we hold our nerve? And can we say, look, we've got to do it? I mean,
02:42everybody in the system acknowledges this, so nobody's actually saying there's another way at
02:48the moment. There's going to have to be another way within 18 months, two years. If you were still
02:53the Home Secretary, what would be your kind of priorities in helping to sort this? I would say
02:59instead of building even more large prisons, which are difficult to get planning consent, difficult
03:06to go through all the building processes, difficult to recruit once you've built them
03:10within a specific radius, difficult in terms of where prisoners are coming from and whether they
03:16can keep with their family, why not build a large number of small remand centres right across Britain
03:24and there'd be much less objection from the locality because these people have not been
03:28found guilty, they're not sentenced, and you could do the job very quickly. I'm hoping to persuade
03:35ministers to do that because there is money in the forward budget and I don't think there's a
03:40chance of Rachel Reeves cutting that on the 30th of October when she has her first
03:46major announcement. So the money's there, so why not use it more smartly, more effectively,
03:53more quickly than trying to build bigger prisons, which take ages to build, and then you fill them
04:00up way away from people's homes and including those on remand. So that's the first thing I'd do
04:06and then the second thing I'd do is cancel this ridiculous 28-day recall and I would also
04:14take a very strong look at the recall for the IPP, the imprisonment for public protection,
04:20and say only when someone has really committed another offence as opposed to breaching their
04:27licence should they be pulled back in and instead we have a joined-up approach at local level. I've
04:32been talking to Oliver Coppard about this as the elected mayor of South Yorkshire. How can we pull
04:38in the police for whom he's responsible with the probation service, with the court service,
04:47with other community actions, local government is one, voluntary sector are others, so that we
04:54try and get a joined-up system here locally and that's taking place in Greater Manchester under
05:00Andy Burnham and I think we can do a better job.
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