MAJOR PLANS to cut prison numbers in England and Wales which were pushed strongly for months by prime minister David Cameron have been abandoned, though the need to find new savings elsewhere means that free legal aid services will be hit even harder.
Under yesterday’s retreat plans to offer people a 50 per cent cut in a jail sentence for an early guilty plea have been dropped – a proposal which had been supported by just 3 per cent of voters and which had provoked deep fears amongst Conservative MPs.
In a bid to reject charges of U-Turns and humiliating climbdowns, Mr Cameron said mandatory life sentences would be imposed on serious repeat offenders – though judges have in the past hated taking such instructions from politicians.
Meanwhile, violent and sex-crime offenders will have to serve a minimum of two-thirds of their sentence, while those found guilty of using a knife to threaten others will face automatic jail sentences, he said in No 10 Downing Street.
Defending the changes, Mr Cameron said that the original proposal to cut sentences in half in return for an early guilty plea would have been “too lenient” and would have sent “the wrong message” to criminals.
However, the changes mean that justice secretary Kenneth Clarke will now have to find the £130 million savings expected from cutting jail terms elsewhere – an outcome that means that free legal aid services will be hit even more severely than had been feared. The prison population as of last Friday stood at 85,000.
In a further effort to deflect attention away from the retreat on 50 per cent remission, Mr Cameron announced a consultation on plans to make squatting in England and Wales a criminal offence, along with proposals to give greater protections to home-owners who use force to defend their homes.
From his first days in office, Mr Clarke has insisted that the UK could not go on jailing more and more people after he discovered that the prison population had doubled since the early 1990s when he served as home secretary in a previous Tory administration.
However, his effort to cut numbers is now in shreds, since yesterday’s actions will mean that prison numbers will be higher by the end of this parliament than they are now, according to ministry of justice documents seen by the BBC.
Promising further efforts to discipline offenders with community service orders, Mr Cameron said: “We have got to cut the growing cost of prison. We have got to stop this massive acceleration in prison sentences.”
Defending his own reputation, Mr Clarke said: “I have done many U-turns in my time and they should be done with purpose and panache when you have to do them, but I actually don’t think this is a U-turn at all.”
In the House of Commons later, Mr Clarke announced that the English and Welsh £2 billion legal aid budget would be cut by £350 million – a decision that led the Law Society to warn of a disaster for the public that will now not be able to win legal redress.
Each prison place in the UK costs about £45,000 a year, with almost one in two offenders reoffending within one year.