Mr. David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con): Is it acceptable that yet another weekend has gone by when prisoners from courts on Friday were locked out of their full local prisons to be transported across the country to police and court cells, and then back to court on Monday? Rather than spending the equivalent of a night not just in a four-star hotel, but at the Ritz, on housing prisoners, surely it would be a better use of taxpayers’ money to spend more than £35 million on providing more than 400 new prison places.

Mr. Straw: We have provided additional prison places at twice the rate of the previous Administration—2,000 a year on average, compared with 1,000. None of us believes that the use of police or court cells is acceptable. We want to get prisoners out of them as quickly as possible. However, while the hon. Gentleman’s memory might be short, mine is a little longer. On average, we used 181 police cells a night last year, but the rate was running at 1,100 a night in 1991-92; indeed, back in November 1980, the use of police cells peaked at an astonishing 3,540. I will take lectures from a lot of people, but not from those on the Opposition Front Bench.