My Lords, I agree with much of what the noble Lord has said. I fully accept that he was in this position 20 years ago. I was checking up on some of the issues this morning, and one that was drawn to my attention was the possibility of executive action under a piece of legislation from 1982. Lo and behold, when I looked to see who the then Home Secretary was, I discovered that the Minister of State was today's questioner.

There is a serious issue. We can make predictions of the prison population, but the fact is that the figure is 2,000 to 3,000 higher than was predicted in October/November last year. There has been a substantial increase in the past few months. There is no single factor, but some factors have been highlighted and raised in the House. There is a large increase in the female prison population, especially in the past 12 months. There are two reasons for that: one is a large increase in the amount of fraud committed by women and the other is the substantial number of foreign nationals involved in the import or export of drugs. So there are some serious issues.

Nevertheless, as I said in my Answer, giving people very short sentences for non-violent offences does not make sense. It clogs up the system, does not help with rehabilitation and gets in the way of the rehabilitation of persistent offenders when we are trying to reduce the number of such offenders who go back to prison. There is a serious problem, and we are taking steps to reduce it. Later in the year we will make proposals for sentencing policy, following last year's report from John Halliday.