Diolch, Llywydd, and thanks to Plaid Cymru for bringing today's debate. This isn't, I would have to add, a debate that is particularly welcomed by us here on the UKIP side of the Chamber, since our view is that criminal justice is rightly a matter for the UK Government. We don't really go along with the aspirations of Plaid Cymru that criminal justice should be a devolved issue. It seems that the Welsh Labour Government are creeping by inches towards Plaid Cymru's position, so we find that we in UKIP are increasingly in opposition to Labour over many criminal justice issues as well. 

Perhaps I should start on areas where we do agree. UKIP doesn't see any role for private contractors working in the criminal justice sector. We think that this is necessarily a role for the state, and we would like good terms and conditions for people working in the prison system to ensure that high standards are maintained. High rates of suicide, violence and self-harm among the prison population clearly are no good thing, and we also have to take account of the increasing rates of assaults by prisoners against the prison officers.

There can be a problem with short custodial sentences. To be fair, we had evidence to this effect on the communities committee last year, when we did our homelessness inquiry. Some prisoners on short sentences go into homelessness almost by default once they are released because the housing authorities haven't had any time to put any tenancy in place for them, so the released prisoner can fall into a cycle of prison and homelessness and possibly end up back in jail for reoffending after only a short time. So, there are issues over the use of short sentences.

The problem with this is that serial offenders are not really appropriate for community sentences, since their track record suggests that they will in all probability reoffend, meaning that we will then have more victims of crime. And there is a problem that only two thirds of community sentences in England and Wales are actually completed. We have a problem with having enough probation officers to run the community sentences properly, so you can't just have a blanket assertion that we have to rule out short sentences. Sometimes, offenders have to be given a short sentence because there is no viable alternative.

There is an issue of overcrowding in jails as the prison population has risen substantially in recent years. Plaid Cymru and Labour don't seem to want more prisons to be built; this seems to be their position, although they say that it is superprisons that they are specifically against and not prisons per se. I think that, in truth, neither Labour nor Plaid like the idea of us having prisons at all. One of the causes of overcrowding in jails is the rising population in England and Wales generally—