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Mr. Dawson: Perhaps the right hon. Lady can clarify her remarks. She seems to be denying that well-prepared planned releases involving all the technological surveillance that can be brought in and all the support that is necessary can help to protect the public and rehabilitate a person more effectively than simply remaining in prison until the end of the sentence.

Miss Widdecombe: No, quite the contrary. Planned release has an essential role to play. Provisions for post-release supervision are extremely poor and have been for a long time. The link between the work done by the prison and that which the ex-offender will receive in the community thereafter is often extremely weak. That is why I pay tribute to the drugs rehabilitation scheme at Lancaster prison, whose main strength is that it carries on that work after the prisoners have walked out of the gates.

Not only have I nothing whatever against proper plans for release, but I strongly support them as an integral part of preventing reoffending. However, there is a difference between planned release with proper arrangements for supervision and early release on a scheme that is producing reoffending. That is my problem. Whatever else my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) might or might not have supported when he was a member of the Select Committee, he would not have supported a scheme that released those categories of person to reoffend while still on tagging.

Mr. Straw: I am afraid that I do not follow the right hon. Lady. There is no difference in principle between release on HDC and release on licence before a determinate sentence is due to end, except that under HDC, as the figure shows, there is a much lower risk of the person reoffending. Is she seriously telling the House that she would remove any idea of an offender being released on licence before the automatic release date?

Miss Widdecombe: The automatic release dates and entitlement to parole occur at set and statutory points of a sentence. Judges know that when they pass sentence. Indeed, when we introduced "Honesty in Sentencing", we took into account the fact that, when judges pass sentence, they in turn take into account how much is likely to be served. My point is that, going against that judicial decision, releasing before that point people who have committed such a range of offences and who then reoffend, and brushing that aside as inconsequential is not how any of us who might have supported the scheme-- I did not--would have envisaged its operating. Most people would have expected a very different application.

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If the Home Secretary is honest, and I am sure that he is, his answer to a rising prison population is 18,000 early releases.

Mr. Straw: May I press the right hon. Lady because, uncharacteristically, she has not answered the question? As an experienced prisons Minister, she well knows that under the Criminal Justice Act 1991, which was passed by a Conservative Administration, prisoners are routinely released early on licence--before their automatic release date--on the basis of a risk assessment. Some will reoffend. Such prisoners are not released automatically. Is she saying that, in government, she would abandon any early release of prisoners on licence?

Miss Widdecombe: I am obviously not making myself clear to the right hon. Gentleman. There is an earliest point at which somebody becomes eligible for parole. If parole is refused, there comes a point at which he is allowed automatic release, subject only to the requirement for good behaviour. As an experienced prisons Minister, I well know that I was always being told when that earliest point was. A judge passing sentence knows how long a person would serve as a minimum because that earliest point is worked out, but my point is that the Home Secretary has introduced another set of considerations that are not taken into account by the judge. That means that people can be released early and let out into the community on tagging.

I have explained the matter as simply as I can. If the Home Secretary still does not understand, I will ask some of my hon. Friends to try to reduce the language even more, so that he will perhaps be able to understand in Committee.

The Government have squandered the legacy of falling crime that they inherited. [Interruption.] They inherited three years of continual falls and they now have a rise in crime. They cannot deny that. They have failed the police, of whom there are 2,300 fewer than at the general election. The Government cannot deny that. They have created victims of crime by letting people out before the minimum point of the sentence that the judge expected them to serve is reached. They are not, apparently, apologetic towards those victims, even when the crimes are as serious as rape and assault.

The Government's record shows that there are serious flaws in the Home Secretary's approach, whatever soundbites or fiddled figures he tries to use to hoodwink the voters, who remain resolutely unhoodwinked because they can see what is going on around them. The Bill will not make up for any of that. It will not change the fact that the Government have squandered the legacy of crime reduction.

Mr. Dawson: Will the right hon. Lady give way?

Miss Widdecombe: No. I am going to finish my speech.

The Bill will not change the fact that thousands of drug dealers, burglars and convicted killers are being let out early. It will not change the fact that our response to a rising prison population was to supply more places, not to let 18,000 out early. We will not oppose the Bill, but the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister should be under no illusion that the effects of their policies--which

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see crime rising, after the repeated and substantial falls that the Government inherited--will be felt throughout the country in the coming months and years.

I hope that, when we examine the Bill at further stages, it will not suffer the fate of previous Bills. We have stood here and said that we would not oppose the Bills in principle and would give them a fair wind, only to find that all the things that we considered merited at least some amendment and fair consideration had been brushed aside as inconsequential because the Government had such an enormous majority. I hope that there will be a responsible attitude towards this Bill--disqualification orders, getting the amendment about serious sex offenders into the Bill, extending the measure from class A to class B drugs and the other issues that I have raised--and that a serious approach will be taken. The Government's seriousness in tackling crime will be judged by the seriousness of their approach to this and similar Bills.

5.2 pm

Mr. Robin Corbett (Birmingham, Erdington): The right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) will forgive me if I do not respond in detail to her main point, but the public outside must be bemused when they look into these debates and listen to our accusations about whether crime has gone up or down. Like all hon. Members, they have a great interest in seeing crime reductions--no Member wants more crime.

It is true that Bills brought before the House, whether under the right hon. Lady's regime or by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, do not always work out as intended, but, as my right hon. Friend said, that is not a reason for not introducing it, trying it and working harder to restore the peace and security that too many of our local communities have had stolen from them.

It does the right hon. Lady's case no service to get into a stupid Dutch auction about which party will promise to put more feet on the beat in terms of police officers. It was her Government--it is no good rewriting history--who gave responsibility--properly, in my view--for spending resources to chief constables. [Interruption.] It is no good her moaning about it--soundbite Sue, I have news for you! Her Government did that. In my judgment, they were right to give chief constables responsibility for allocating resources. Those chief constables can have a row with the Home Secretary of the day about the size of those resources, but, when they have them, they must, in proper partnership with police authorities--whose role, I say in passing, is grossly undervalued--work out how to spend those resources.

Let us see if the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald and I can agree on this point. Although police numbers--the number of officers--are of course important, chief constables will have told her, as they have told my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and other Labour Members, that success in combating crime hinges increasingly on much better and deeper responses to and co-operation with the public and on the increasing use of modern technology. This is not the day of Dick Barton; we have to use modern technology, just as criminals do.

Miss Widdecombe: In imposing one particular set of new technology on police--the public safety radio

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communications system, which may have great merit in its own right--but in not funding it, the Home Secretary has made it more, not less, likely that police will have to cut recruiting.

Mr. Corbett: The right hon. Lady does not even help her own case. An assiduous reader of Hansard will see, both in the statements that my right hon. Friend has made in the House and in his answers to parliamentary questions, his references to the great sums--he referred to them again today--that have been allocated to police for the long changeover period for the new communications system. I hope that the right hon. Lady will not say that that is not something that she would have done.

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