Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts(14 years ago)
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Lord McNally
Oh, you have all turned out—but we shall get later to what this Bill is really about and what you are really afraid of. It is about fairness. I did not hear any discussion of fairness when the Labour Government were elected by 36 per cent of the vote in 2005.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
The noble Lord most certainly did hear that in the course of this debate from these Benches. But it was also pointed out that, although there was unfairness, there was a possibility that this Bill might add to that unfairness because it is so ill considered.
Lord McNally
The Bill is being considered, and considered on the basis of fairness. I know that the noble Baroness is often a lone voice on those Benches. My point, which is central to the issue of first past the post, is whether we are to continue to have the kind of distortion that produces majorities of 66 on 36 per cent and then no majority at all on 36 per cent. With those kinds of distortions with first past the post, the rot sets into people’s respect for the electoral system.
Legal Aid and Civil Costs Reform
Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts(14 years ago)
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Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
My Lords, first, are the Government aware that the greatest advances in the development of law happen in legal aid cases? By diminishing legal aid, you end up undermining law as a whole. Secondly, family law has already suffered cuts, and we are seeing legal aid deserts in certain parts of the country. Women, for example, are not getting the kind of expert help that they need in cases of domestic violence. Thirdly, if the Ministry of Justice is concerned to look at spending on legal matters, has consideration been given to the money paid to lawyers by government, not as legal aid money but money paid by government departments to lawyers at the market rate, which is often excessive? Perhaps we should do something to drive those costs down instead of limiting access to the law by the poor.
Lord McNally
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Strathclyde is encouraging me to cheap populism by agreeing that we should drive down the cost of legal advice to government. Legal costs in general are certainly being looked at. I can reassure the noble Baroness that in the key areas of family law, which I referred to as domestic violence and child protection, legal aid will be retained.
On the breakdown of the savings, I have a slip of paper that says that the aim is roughly to try to find £100 million savings on criminal aid and £250 million on the civil side.
On the Statement’s intention, I can say to the noble Baroness only that, against the financial constraints that we face and a general agreement that legal aid needed recalibrating, we have tried to take some tough decisions in a way that protects the vulnerable and retains the core sense of our system: that all have a right to access to justice.
Prisoners: Voting
Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts(14 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord McNally
I agree with my noble friend that there are people who believe passionately that the removal of the vote is a proper sanction for someone who has committed a crime that justifies a prison sentence. There are also people—the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is one—who see the granting of the vote to a certain category of prisoner as being a useful way of rehabilitating them into society. Both views are perfectly respectable. The Government are considering both views and will make their decision in due course.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
It is a question. I remind the Minister of the view taken by David Howarth when he was the Liberal Democrat justice spokesman. He said:
“It is unacceptable for the government to pick and choose which human rights treaty obligations it fulfils just because it feels the issue is unpopular”.
Is this another fault line within the coalition and one of the areas where the Government want to remain silent? It is important that we hear clearly from the Government—and soon—what is intended with regard to an order that was made about the civic rights of prisoners. What does the Minister have to say about whether there is a fault line here?
Lord McNally
I can absolutely assure the noble Baroness that no such fault line exists. As I have explained already, over a period of five months we have been looking at the situation and listening to various points of view. There is a Council of Ministers meeting on 30 November and we will update that council meeting in due course. We have not been unduly laggard in looking at the issue and, as I have said, the work is continuing.
Criminal Justice System
Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, for initiating this debate. I had the great good fortune of being led by him in the Brighton bombing trial back in 1986, when he was the most glamorous of silks sweeping through the Old Bailey and I was a mere junior. I should emphasise immediately that age has not reduced his elegance or his glamour. I learnt much from him then. I learnt that the legal system has to remain stalwart and principled in the face of provocations, particularly terrorism but also other serious crime. I have continued to learn from him ever since, particularly through debates in this House.
The criminal justice system can never rest on its laurels. It must constantly review its workings to ensure that justice is done. What was right at one time is no longer right when society changes. Things that were once acceptable become recognised as unacceptable. Marital rape is a perfect example; the old law on homosexuality is another. Law must adjust to altered times and to different mores but, at the same time, it must not become susceptible to the whim of the day. Reform of the law has to be rooted in principles—the great principles that have made our legal system admired throughout the world.
Changing law in response to public clamour, newspaper campaigns or police demands is a folly unworthy of good government. However, there is always a pressure on politicians to do precisely that. Governments become sorely tempted to legislate after every catastrophe, every shooting, every child’s death and every terrorist atrocity. The political instinct is to reach for yet more legislation when anything goes wrong in an endeavour to show that something is being done and, of course, to win popular support. However, criminal justice should not be the subject of a Dutch auction—as we have seen in a way that is new—where, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, described, parties compete to see who is being tougher on crime.
We are living through a period of high anxiety, with people fearful about their jobs, their pensions, their security and their future. When there is a high degree of fear, people often become more punitive and more demanding of law and order. They say that they want tougher responses to crime and more imprisonment. Government can very easily read this as a blank cheque for repressive action, which I am afraid we have seen in recent years. Yet when we have more reflective discussion with the public about crime, it has always been my experience that people recognise that there is very little purpose in simply jailing a person who has a drug problem, a mother who has young children or a young person who really just needs a job. When you have a proper discussion with the public about crime, you see that they recognise that alternatives to prison are often a better way.
It was a source of great regret to me that we saw such a considerable erosion of liberty under successive Home Secretaries, law officers and Lord Chancellors. I was deeply depressed at the ratcheting-up of prison sentences and the doubling of prison numbers in the past 20 years, so it is with relief that I hear that there is to be a restoration of many of the eroded liberties and a review of short prison sentences.
I have been fortunate over the years to have been involved in different penal reform organisations, from the Howard League to Nacro. I have led inquiries; I have written articles in books on criminal justice; and I have made television and radio programmes on the subject. I am the patron of a great charity, Make Justice Work, led by a wonderful woman, Roma Hooper, which looks closely at alternatives to prison. It has become clear to me that forever increasing the prison population makes impossible the rehabilitation of those who really are in need of serious work, because of overcrowding. Prison governors will tell you that they cannot conduct those rehab programmes effectively because they cannot move prisoners to workshops. In other cases, they cannot make available the programmes in the first place, because the numbers make it impossible.
We ought to be addressing crime at the lower end of the scale, or crime—sometimes it may even be violent crime—where the offender is new to the courts and can be diverted. The alternatives to short-term sentences are particularly important when we are dealing with young people. As we know, most crime is committed by people between the ages of 14 and 25. Once you have lost them to the prison system, it is very hard to retrieve them.
The second group is of those who seem hardened but who, when something happens in their life that takes them to the cusp of change, with the right kind of support can resist the old pressures to offend. I refer to people who, for example, suddenly meet someone whom they want to marry and live with—or perhaps they have a child, or a job comes on offer. What they need is real help to make something of those opportunities.
The third category is women. It is important to recognise that 68 per cent of women in prison are there for non-violent offences. Half the women in prison have suffered domestic violence; one-third have been sexually abused. Most women in prison have a dependency of some kind or a mental illness. Half of all self-harming that takes place in prison is done by the women, wretched about their circumstances, yet they represent only 5 per cent of the prison population. The majority of women in prison are mothers and one-third of them are lone parents. It is important for us to realise that very few of those women are ever supported on the outside by men; only 9 per cent of the children of imprisoned mothers are cared for by fathers. Men often do not stay the course in the way that women do when their partner ends up in jail. Eighty-five per cent of mothers in prison are separated for the first time from their children and the trauma to children is immeasurable. Sixty-five per cent of mothers in prison are receiving their first custodial sentence. Just think of the impact on those children—on their mental health, their behaviour and their chances in education, and the anger that it creates in them to lose their caring parent. Think of the cost to them and then the cost to society.
I shall mention three alternatives to prison. One is the intensive alternative to custody order, which has been piloted in seven places around the country and aims to reduce offending. It is about having close monitoring of an offender, which brings better outcomes. That means that the offender manager—we used to call them the probation officer—must have really close contact and that all offenders must be involved in meaningful activity, such as study, training, apprenticeships or work. Offenders must have support to run their lives, which so many have had little help in doing, getting rhythms of work established to help them into good habits of getting up in the morning. Sometimes it is just a matter of acquiring an alarm clock. It is important to work with families so that they support the person who is trying to change their ways; without that, they are likely to fall back into old practices. There is victim awareness and there are programmes and workshops to introduce people to what their wrongdoing does to others. That often produces interesting accountability letters from offenders as well as voluntary restitution—wanting to give something back. It is about taking responsibility for offences that have just been committed but also ones from the past.
One problem is that alternatives to prison sometimes do not operate at weekends. The offices close on a Friday afternoon, but you need outreach officers available to contact at weekends, too, when people are most tempted. There should be a coming together of the multiple skills of the probation service with the police and people who can work on therapy for some of these offenders. In Greater Manchester, only four orders have been revoked out of 70 in the past two years. The subject of one of them, a man called John Hankey, has even written about how gaining the qualification and licence to become a fork-lift driver has changed his life. However, it is not always so easy, so we must really address some of those problems. I could mention other programmes, but all of them deserve our examination.
I want to deal with what has been said about the importance of looking at the views of victims. It is wrong to turn the system into an adversarial contest between offenders and victims. Rebalancing should not be an excuse for more inappropriate punishment. We should have the effects of crime on victims clearly within our sights, of course, but victims are better served by our seeking methods for turning people away from their offending behaviour.
I shall make three quick, radical proposals. First, we should look at the abolition of imprisonment for all minor offences. It is difficult to find a definition, but we could do that. We should make it clear to the courts that minor offences should not involve imprisonment. Secondly, we should have women’s courts. It has been recognised that most women coming before the courts have multiple social problems. If we could have a one-stop shop in major conurbations for women offending at the lower level so that their offending and social issues were addressed, we would divert many of them from crime. Thirdly, I suggest that we re-examine, and have a serious debate about, the issue of drugs. Much reoffending is due to people having addiction problems, which we should address as health rather than penal issues. These may be radical suggestions, but I hope that noble Lords consider them sensible.
I applaud any government effort to reduce prison populations. I therefore hope that any suggestions coming from the Government will have the support of my Benches, too.
House of Lords: Working Practices
Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Rooker
No, no. There was almost a competition between us. My noble friend Lady Amos would say, “I once got 36 supplementary questions through. How many did you get today?”. I usually managed 24 or 25 supplementaries in half an hour, which is pretty good going when you think about what happened during the Statement today. I want to repeat a point I made last October in the debate on the Queen’s Speech. There is a serious problem in that with the expertise in this House and the range of Questions that can come up on a daily basis—we are not constrained like the other place—I think that there are hundreds of Members of this House who are reluctant to try to ask a supplementary question. That is because the method of doing so is to enter a bear pit.
I have no experience of it. In fact, last week I stood up for the first time ever and asked a supplementary question at Question Time. I had never done it before, and it was an easy one because no one else stood up. However, it can be a bear pit and many people just will not do it. But if you were to ask them whether they had something to say, they would reply, “Yes. I had a good point to make but I wasn’t prepared to join in. If I could have been called, I would take my luck with everyone else”. I know that this is a tricky one because, in a way, it would give the chair the authority of the Leader. It is important because I do not think there is another legislature anywhere in the world where the Executive decides who is asking the questions that scrutinise the Ministers. That is intrinsically wrong for a start. It has got to be a bad principle in terms of democracy. The Government decide which Member can ask the Government a question. I know it is done fairly because for two years I supervised it myself, but it looks wrong. The Lord Speaker could do it in terms of the blocks as people stand. My noble friend Lady Jones is not here, although I am pleased to see my noble friend Lord Grocott in his place.
When I referred to this last October, I said that I had not done any research on it, but I did say that we keep hearing from the same noble Lords at Question Time. After that, someone did some work on the figures, and we had them today. Over a whole Session, half of the supplementary questions—over 1,500 of them—were asked by 8 per cent of Peers, which is 57 Peers. The same people asked all those questions because they are prepared to bully and shout and intimidate others into sitting down. That cannot be conducive to proper scrutiny at Question Time. A few people dominate, and we know who they are because we see them all the while—the same 57 people ask half the supplementaries. So I appreciate the fact that that research was carried out.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
I would be interested to ask how many of them are women. I think that women are particularly intimidated by the way in which Question Time is conducted.
Defamation Bill [HL]
Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Hayter for her fine maiden speech. I do so with great affection, as I have known her for many years. We often forget in this House how daunting it is to stand for the first time to address your Lordships, but my noble friend has done so with charm and confidence and has given us the benefit of her good sense and experience.
My noble friend Lady Hayter is a Welsh girl who embraced the Labour Party when she was still very young. She has been at the heart of the Labour Party all her life. She was for many years general secretary of the Fabian Society; she was the chief executive of the European Parliamentary Labour Party; she sat on the national executive of the party; and from 2007 to 2008 she was the party’s chair. The Labour Party became my noble friend’s family, although I have to say that in her private life she now has the joy of grandchildren, who she adores. I just wish that her parents could have been alive to celebrate her entry into this House and to have heard her address today.
One of the pamphlets which she was involved in writing—she has written a number of important policy documents—was Men who made Labour. All that I can say to her is that when they come to write “Women who made Labour”, you, Lady Hayter, will most certainly be among them.
I now turn to the Bill, add my tributes to those of others and say to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, who is a great champion of freedom and rights, a thank you for initiating this Bill. It is wrong that scientists, NGOs, authors and journalists should be prevented from publishing information in the public interest due to their concerns about being ruined by libel threats. We have all known those cases where rich individuals, such as the press baron Robert Maxwell, used libel injunctions to freeze articles exposing his dishonest conduct. The fear of litigation by the rich and powerful often casts a shadow over independent journalism, chilling the sort of investigative reporting which is essential to our political well-being and vital to a culture which is free of corruption. Large corporations have brought actions against NGOs and newspapers without even having to prove financial loss, as we have heard. We have also recently seen courts allowing super-injunctions to create total silence where events scream for public awareness, such as in the horrifying Trafigura case.
However, I have concerns, like others, about elements of the Bill. I should declare an interest as a member of the board of the Media Standards Trust and I sat for 12 years on the board of a newspaper, the Independent, so I am very aware of some of these issues. I am concerned that some elements of the Bill remove helpful correctives on the excesses of the press. I am not convinced that the capping of damages at £10,000 could be sufficient to stop the press from going to print with a story that it thought would attract a great deal of public attention. Nor do I think that the burden of proof should be reversed. The well established principle that claimants carry the burden of proof should not be abandoned too readily. I agree and I am delighted that the multiple publication rule should be reformed. I also of course heartily endorse the idea that we should strengthen the public interest defence.
However, some things are missing here. One of them, of course, is that whole issue of cost, mentioned by others. For a long time, libel actions were out of the reach of the ordinary litigant and, indeed, remain so, but recently we have seen the introduction of the no-win no-fee conditional arrangement, which has had the unintended consequence whereby, instead of just allowing access for many who might not have had access to the courts before, it has involved the ramping up of costs in libel actions yet further. It has also allowed claimants to pursue claims where there has been no substantial harm. This is one of the issues that we are not addressing adequately here.
My other concern is regarding balance. In order to reform the law, it is also necessary to look at the whole issue of press self-regulation. These are two sides of the same coin and, when we are addressing defamation, it is important that we look at that issue. Libel reform must be coupled with reform of press self-regulation. I know that this Bill recognises the importance of self-regulation in its reference to codes of conduct, but it does not mention reform. One of the main reasons that people resort to libel action is because the current system of self-regulation offers insufficient remedies. It was the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport in its recent report on press standards which made an explicit link between libel law and self-regulation. At paragraph 558, the report recommended,
“that the Government consider whether proposals to reduce the cost burden in defamation cases should only be made available to those publications”,
including newspapers,
“which provide the public with an alternative route of redress through their membership of the PCC”—
the Press Complaints Commission. However, the committee also added that that would not work unless press self-regulation became more effective and more credible. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, will speak—she of course chairs that body—and I know that she has been anxious to make it run a more effective regime. Reform there is vital.
My concern with the libel reform debate to date is that it has not engaged sufficiently with the general public; it has very much been dominated by the press. This has meant that not only has there been insufficient scrutiny of some of the claims that are made, but the views of the public, particularly with regard to their protection from scurrilous journalism, have not been heard. Failure to take the public into account when you are reforming law does not usually make for law that has public confidence.
This is an issue of getting the balance right, and I know that that is difficult. The question that I leave this House and the noble Lord, Lord Lester, with is: how can we change the law to protect journalists who do have a regard for accuracy, truth and fairness and who know what a genuine public interest is? How do we protect them, but distinguish them from those whose standards are not as high? So I applaud the strengthening of the public interest defence and the general purpose of the Bill, but I urge the noble Lord to consider strengthening it with a greater balance towards those who are traduced by libellous journalism.