Justice secretary to announce phasing out of short-term prison sentences – UK politics live

Labour says Alex Chalk’s U-turn reveals ‘epic’ crisis in Conservatives’ jails policy

Good morning. Governments that have been in power a long time often have to reverse decisions they have taken earlier, but under this administration this practice has become endemic. Two of the most important acts of public service reform under David Cameron were privatisation of the probation service and the Health and Social Care Act 2012, which put competitive tendering at the heart of the provision of NHS services. Both reforms were subsequently regarded as flawed (or disastrous in the case of probation), and reversed. On tax, the Tories spent the first half of their time in office reducing corporation tax, and putting the income tax allowance up. Now they’re doing the opposite. At the Tory conference Rishi Sunak announced a colossal U-turn on HS2, one of the biggest infrastructure schemes in British history. And today, on sentencing police, Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, is set to announce another U-turn.

Arguably, it’s a U-turn on a U-turn. When David Gauke was justice secretary in 2019, he announced plans to abolish short-term jail sentences. A few months later Boris Johnson became MP, Robert Buckland replaced Gauke as justice secretary, and the plans were ditched. Today, in a statement to MPs, Chalk will revive them.

We need to keep people safe – and that means moving away from short-term prison sentences that make hardened criminals rather than rehabilitated offenders. So we need to look again at low-level offenders. Because while the overall reoffending rate is 25%, the rate for people who spend fewer than 12 months in prison is over 50%.

A short stretch of a few months inside isn’t enough time to rehabilitate criminals, but is more than enough to dislocate them from the family, work and home connections that keep them from crime. Too often, offenders routinely turn back to crime as soon as they walk out of the prison gates.

What a waste of 4 years.

On 18 July 2019, @DavidGauke - then Justice Secretary - announced limits on the use of short prison sentences to cut reoffending & reduce costs.

But 5 days later Gauke resigned. Boris Johnson became PM & the plans were scrapped.

Now, they’re back…