I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

I want to reiterate the Government's conviction that this particular Bill is an essential piece of legislation, drafted well now, with the amendment that we have accepted, and that it will bring to the prison system a useful deterrent against those people who might think it possible to have some form of disruption leading to the kind of destruction of our prisons that we have seen in recent years.

This is unacceptable. We wish to have the climate in our prisons in which the reforms that we plan to introduce as the result of our White Paper in response to Lord Justice Woolf's wise report will be possible, without the kind of disruption that we have seen in the past.

It is for that reason that I commend the Bill, as amended, to the House.

We have argued this Bill on Second Reading, in Committee and now on Third Reading in a positive manner. We have improved the Bill; with the Government's acceptance of a major amendment, we have seen the Bill considerably changed, and we will not be voting against it on Third Reading. We said on Second Reading that, if major amendments were made, we would not vote against the Bill, and we keep that pledge, but I must say, in the brief time allowed me, that the Bill is still disappointing.

Britain's penal system is falling about the Government's ears. When any system is under stress, there are symptoms. Anyone who looks at the prison system, as Lord Justice Harry Woolf did when he considered the Strangeways and other related riots, to which this Bill is a response, will see several symptoms. One is the sort of riot and mayhem that we saw at Strangeways. Another is the tragic suicides increasingly occurring in young offenders' institutions and in prisons—suicides not only of inmates but also of prison officers. Bad industrial relations are also a symptom of a system under stress.

We also see the ghastly symptom of governors and prison officers unable to keep the security of our prisons intact. It is a sad day when we discover that, for seven weeks, the Home Secretary has failed to tell the House that a major criminal, with a record not only of drug trafficking but also of trying to defraud British Aerospace of £40 million, has walked out of one of Her Majesty's prisons. There has been no statement to the House, no reference to it in this place by the Government. It follows on the heels of the apparently simple and easy escape of the two suspected IRA terrorists from Brixton prison.

I mention the symptoms of stress in order to point out that our penal system is in grave disorder. Lord Justice Woolf framed his recommendations to make sure that there was a serious legislative input in the House to reform the prison system. We have consistently argued that this legislation, which we will not oppose in its modified form, dwells on the surface of things and fails to get to the heart of what is wrong with our penal system. It will need an incoming Labour Government to put it right and to put law and order at the top of the agenda.