Speeches by Farnsworth.

“Thank you, Mr Vickers. I thank all Members for their contributions today, as well as the Minister and the shadow Minister. I will return to the comments that the Minister kindly made about members of staff—”

“A ticket that has already been used? I am trying to remember; I think it goes back to the purpose of this change in the law and the desired effect of increased safety. If there is a valid ticket, there is a reserved seat, which is what I think the defence is getting at. The offence is being introduced to prevent overcr…”

“Indeed, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I am grateful for the fact that you did not; I am very conscious of my age myself. The community justice initiative brought the community into the justice process. It allowed community impact statements to be made for certain offences, such as antisocial behaviour, and took a holistic …”

“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?”