Ministers To Answer Directly For Prisons
The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, has said he wants to make the Government more accountable for conditions in Britain's prisons.
As a first step, he is taking direct responsibility for answering questions about prisons in the Commons.
Mr Straw said he was ending the practice of the past government whereby responsibility for answering MPs questions was delegated to the director-general of the Prison Service.
"One of the things which drove MPs on both sides mad in the previous Parliament was this continuing argument by ministers to evade their responsibility as to whether there is an operational issue which had come before Parliament for which the director-general should be blamed, or whether there was a policy issue for which the minister should take responsibility," Mr Straw told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"In practice the only test of a policy is how it operates and that is why I am announcing today that in future Parliamentary Questions about the Prison Service will be answered by ministers," he said.
"I will certainly take responsibility. If I were to resign every time there was an escape I think you would get through all 417 (Labour) MPs within about a year," he added.
Prison ship
The former Director General of the Prison Service, Derek Lewis, welcomed the change. He described it as a symbolic change which would improve moral in the prison service.
As for the number of people in prison, Mr Straw made it clear there would be no big or instant drop in the figures which rose to record levels under his predecessor.
"The prison population is rising faster than previous published estimates suggested so of course I'm looking at a series of options but above all I'm taking account of the need to protect the public and to maintain public confidence," he said.
The Home Secretary said community sentences could be used if they were better at punishing or deterring, but not if the public thought they were a soft option.
Although he wants to reduce jail numbers, he confirmed that more prisons will be built and that he's prepared to use what he called the unpalatable option of the prison ship - a sign that the crisis in the service is far from over.
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