Conservative Party: David Cameron monthly press conference

Conservative Party: David Cameron monthly press conference; Question SOT - Prime Minister, why did you get the sentencing policy so wrong in the first place, or is it all Ken Clarke’s fault? David Cameron press conference SOT - The whole government produced a Green Paper, and a Green Paper with ideas in it for trying to reform a broken system. I think you do have to sort of stand back and say: what are we dealing with here? We are dealing here with a prison system where each place costs £45,000, half of all prisoners reoffend within a year, half of them are on drugs, 10% are foreigners, and a court system that doesn’t work very well, where you do have 10,000 cases getting to court where at the last minute the offender pleads guilty. So, there’s all sort of inefficiencies and bad arrangements in the system that we need to change. The Green Paper was about trying to address some of those. The idea of a greater sentence discount – it was right to put that forward, to see whether that might bring forward more early guilty pleas. I think the proof during the process of consultation was that actually the 50% reduction was far too much about cutting the level of sentencing rather than speeding up the court process. As an idea, it failed, and it rightly failed. It wasn’t just condemned by a number of victims, but also a number of people involved in sentencing, including judges, who didn’t think it was the right approach. The right thing for the government to do is say: right, okay, we are not going to go ahead with that. We will actually save the money in a different way. We will press ahead with trying to make sure the court processes work better and we will also produce a range of measures that will actually mean we get a tougher response to crime. I think that’s the right thing to do. There would be no point in having – why would you have Green Papers or White Papers if you never listened to anything anybody said after you had publishe...