Labour is right to enlist David Gauke – cross-party intervention is needed when it comes to our prisons

According to Westminster folklore, whenever the then chancellor George Osborne found himself in a bit of a pickle, he’d send his most reliable and demonstrably reasonable junior Treasury minister to tour the broadcast media studios and make the coalition government’s case.

When a crisis hit, therefore, the cry in the Treasury went out; “Uncork the Gauke!” – and David Gauke was dispatched to calm everything down. Later, as justice secretary, Mr Gauke, a solicitor by profession, became a highly respected member of the cabinet, as a pragmatic, moderate Conservative of an older tradition.

It was no surprise that he found himself expelled from the party by Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson because of his typically sensible views on Brexit.

Now, Mr Gauke is being uncorked again, to deal with the prisons crisis. He rejoined the Tories – a triumph of hope over experience – but his talents are being deployed in the national interest by the Labour government. He is to examine the vexed world of prison sentencing and whether (for relatively minor crimes) short custodial sentences (of the kind the electorate, populists and the more reactionary parts of the media love to see) actually do more public harm than good.

Mr Gauke, in other words, must revisit the validity of the old adage “prison works”; and suggest ways in which the new technologies can also work, rather better, in preventing reoffending and making the public safer in the longer run.

In 2019, when he was justice secretary, Mr Gauke remarked that there was a “very strong case” for abolishing jail terms of six months or less, with exceptions made for violent and sexual crimes. He was right then and even more correct today, given the worsening context.

Recruiting Mr Gauke is a smart move: it capitalises on his high reputation, his extensive experience in government, and introduces an element, albeit slender, of bipartisanship into the debate on crime and punishment. Even the Tory front bench find it hard to defend their own record, which is a good start for those seeking to deal with public concerns about law and order, rather than exploit them.

Something certainly needs to be done in a country where the population is generally keen on harsh retribution and long prison sentences; yet extremely reluctant to pay the taxes required to build more prisons and house the inmates in even the most spartan of conditions – no less than £50,000 per prisoner, per year.

There is clearly a severe mismatch between what political rhetoric and popular pressure demand from the criminal justice system, and the funds the Treasury wishes to make available. That led to the crisis in the system that “shocked” Sir Keir Starmer when he became prime minister in July; and there are disturbing signs that it may not be resolved quickly.

The rumours, not denied, are that the present justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, not one of life’s revolutionaries, has found herself driven to protest of her colleague Rachel Reeves about more real-terms cuts to court and prison budgets.

If we do not want thousands of criminals being released early, then supply and demand in Britain’s prisons have to be brought into balance – and behaviour in overcrowded jails brought back under control. Special attention should be paid to ways to decrease the number of female inmates, generally less violent.

Mr Gauke deserves thanks for taking on this politically hazardous task, but it is deeply regrettable that he will not be considering the morally repugnant and hopelessly neglected position of those serving time on indefinite jail terms – surely an easy hit for getting prison numbers down.

The practice of handing down sentences of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) was ended in 2012, rightly on human rights grounds. But some 2,734 IPP prisoners sentenced before then are still left inside. Of these, more than 700 have served over 10 years longer than their minimum term. At least 90 IPP prisoners have taken their own lives.

Quite aside from unnecessarily adding to the overcrowding crisis, some of these cases are absurd in their cruelty; they are patently unjust. For example, James Lawrence was handed an IPP jail sentence with an eight-month minimum term in 2006 for threatening someone with a starting pistol. He is still in jail, with no release date.

Yet many on longer custodial sentences for more serious offences are now being released early, because of the crisis. At the very least, Mr Gauke should pay some attention to the impact IPP inmates are having on the system; and if the whole subject is too much of a diversion from Mr Gauke’s remit, then Ms Mahmood should act, on the grounds that such injustices should not be tolerated a moment longer.

Ms Mahmood is showing herself to be a conscientious, competent minister and lord chancellor, with an elevated sense of her prime duty – to the law-abiding public. She wants the criminal justice system to work, knows what an extreme challenge that is, and is willing to take it on.

After inexplicable delays under the Conservatives, Ms Mahmood has apparently speeded up the deportation of foreign offenders, because, as she says, that can be a greater and more effective punishment than jail. She will, if Ms Reeves assists her, build new prisons, but, as Ms Mahmood freely acknowledges, no realistic expansion of the prison estate can keep up with the demand.

Something has to change. Non-custodial “home arrest”, including sobriety tags to detect drug and alcohol abuse, are clearly new options worth exploring. Rehabilitation should be restored as a primary goal in custodial sentencing.

If prison did work, then El Salvador – with the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world – would be the safest place on Earth; and the United States, not far behind the international league table thanks to its unquenchable appetite for politicised judicial revenge, would scarcely have a problem with crime at all.

In any case, as Mr Gauke, like Ms Mahmood and the impressive prisons minister, James Timpson, already well know; the question whether “prison works” becomes pretty much irrelevant if the places simply are not there – and never will be.

There will have to be “Change”, as Labour’s slogan promised, in prisons – as in the rest of society.