In an interview for The Star's 'The Sheffield Scoop' podcast, former Home Secretary Lord David Blunkett told Harry Harrison deeper reforms were needed in the criminal justice systems within "18 months to two years" to avoid repeats of the prison capacity crisis.
He said recalled offenders and people on remand take up too many vital spaces in prisons and told of what his first steps would be if he were still leading the Home Office.
Lord Blunkett sat down with The Star's Harry Harrison for The Sheffield Scoop podcast, and you can find the full interview wherever you get your podcasts from September 20.
He said recalled offenders and people on remand take up too many vital spaces in prisons and told of what his first steps would be if he were still leading the Home Office.
Lord Blunkett sat down with The Star's Harry Harrison for The Sheffield Scoop podcast, and you can find the full interview wherever you get your podcasts from September 20.
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NewsTranscript
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 it 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
00:38minutes each to speak. So many people wanted to contribute. This is staggering. There are
00:4417,000 people on 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 they asked 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 be found 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. And well, I think, do you think for the
01:29the inmates that are going to be released, or have been released this month, and will be released
01:33again next month, as part of this process, we talked about probation service a little bit
01:36already, but how prepared do you think they are for that? Are they going to struggle?
01:40I think they're going to struggle for three reasons. One was that Christopher Grayling,
01:45when he was the Justice Secretary, absolutely messed up, and everybody's accepted,
01:50the previous government accepted in the end, that it was a total mess, and he tried to privatise it.
01:56They've just about put it together, but a lot of the probation officers are new,
02:00and that doesn't mean they're no good, it just means they're inexperienced.
02:05That makes it much more difficult for them to handle a sudden surge in the caseload,
02:12and therefore they're bound to be risk-averse, understandably, but they're also bound to be in
02:18a situation where they can't foresee what will happen. So I fear that we will get some incidents
02:25where people repeat offend. It happens anyway with people released, there's a very high level
02:32of re-offending, something like 50%, so you're going to get that whatever happens, and the
02:37question is, can we hold our nerve, and can we say, look, we've got to do it? I mean, everybody
02:42in the system acknowledges this, so nobody's actually saying there's another way at the moment,
02:48there's going to have to be another way within 18 months, two years.
02:52If you were still the Home Secretary, what would be your priorities in helping to sort this?
02:58I would say instead of building even more large prisons, which, difficult to get planning consent,
03:04difficult to go through all the building processes, difficult to recruit once you've
03:10built them within a specific radius, difficult in terms of where prisoners are coming from and
03:16whether they can keep with their family, why not build a large number of small remand centres
03:23right across Britain, and there'd be much less objection from the locality, because these people
03:28have not been found guilty, they're not sentenced, and you could do the job very quickly. I'm hoping
03:34to persuade ministers to do that, because there is money in the forward budget, and I don't think
03:40there's a chance 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
04:01way away from people's homes, 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 take a
04:14very strong look at the recall for the IPP, the imprisonment for public protection, and say only
04:21when someone has really committed another offence, as opposed to breaching their licence, should they
04:28be pulled back in, and instead we have a joined-up approach at local level. I've been talking to
04:33Oliver Coppard about this as the elected mayor of South Yorkshire. How can we pull in the police
04:41for whom he's responsible, with the probation service, with the court service, with other
04:47community actions, local government is one, voluntary sector are others, so that we try and
04:54get 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.