Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Baroness Linklater of Butterstone Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2012 Lords Chamber

The Minister knows that offenders are not an obedient workforce. They are characterised by periods in care. They have mental health problems, addictions and poor literacy. This is an opportunity for the Minister to address these problems and build on the good work that is done by the probation service, rather than undermining it through any reduction in funding.

[Baroness Linklater of Butterstone]

My Lords, there have been some very important contributions to this debate. I have agreed with pretty well every word. I therefore ask the House to forgive me if there is some repetition of what has been said.

We must be clear about what we want from the courts in terms of community sentencing and what we expect from those who deliver sentences. Above all, we must be clear about the values that inform the process. In introducing himself and the Government’s proposals, Chris Grayling announced that he is going to be a “tough Justice Secretary” because he believes that greater toughness and more punishment is what the people of this country need and want. I wonder. A lot depends on interpretation and what is meant by and expected from this new emphasis on punishment as an additional element in all community sentences. I question whether what he is proposing will indeed be a positive way forward.

The greatest proportion of all those coming before the courts receive community sentences, which have already proved to be significantly more effective than prison in reducing reoffending by more than 8.4%. Of course, they could and indeed should be still more effective, focused and robust, particularly if better resourced, and I hope that the Government will do just that. Like others, I pay tribute to the probation service in particular for its role in providing an infrastructure and effective programmes with experience and skill all around the country.

The purposes of sentencing as set out in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and revised in 2007 remain, I assume, the agreed framework. Very importantly, the five elements are interdependent and must be applied in equal measure. They are: reparation, rehabilitation, punishment, crime reduction and public protection. However, the Government want to alter this balance and prioritise punishment, assuming that the sanctions currently available are in some way too soft. This also begs the question of why some people break the law, whether those involved in low-level reoffending are thinking of potential sanctions they might face if they are caught, and whether punishment per se will have a significant effect anyway.

The Government say that they want more punishment in every order and that this would generally mean,

“restrictions of liberty that represent to the public a recognisable sanction”.

As has been said, these are curfews, exclusion or community payback. The Government also say that,

“what is punitive for one offender … will not necessarily be punitive for another”,

recognising that all disposals must be relevant to the individual offender. Clearly, community sentences should challenge in ways that will effect change, especially in reoffending, and the public need to be confident that this is happening. However, typically the needs of such offenders are significant, particularly in terms of mental health, lack of education and school exclusion, low IQ, domestic violence, unemployment, homelessness et cetera. Unless the sanctions of community sentences take these into account and support needs are met, they are bound to fail.

It is unhelpful and misleading to attempt to separate the punitive and non-punitive elements of an order. This is because they are interconnected, and the chances of breach and reoffending are high if this is ignored. It also risks—as we have heard it so eloquently put by my noble hero—constraining judges and magistrates, who must take into account the individual offender’s circumstances as well as the offence. I suggest that successfully preventing reoffending matters more than being punitive for its own sake and should remain the ultimate goal of sentencing.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research has done some very interesting work for the MoJ on punitive sanctions and found that unpaid work alone—that is, a “punitive requirement”—had no impact at all. It found that a lot depends on the needs of the offender, and the best chances of punishment having some effect are when it is added to supervision and a programme. This indicates more clearly than ever that punishment has an effective place in the sentencing armoury only in combination with other interventions relevant to the individual. I urge the Government and my noble friend, when he is in his place, to look closely at their own good research on the place of punishment in what they hope to achieve in reducing reoffending.

The Government are quite rightly concerned about public confidence and the confidence of the courts in the effectiveness of community-based sentencing. This hinges on a combination of knowledge, understanding and experience and, where community sentencing is concerned, a great deal more is required. Community justice is an area where public confidence is not high because so little is generally known of the reality of sentences and community sanctions. This is hardly surprising because they do not take place in a public arena and you cannot see or hear what a curfew or an exclusion order or tagging entails. Even community payback is rarely publicly visible either, let alone the reality of specific programmes for drug or alcohol abuse, mental illness et cetera.

An extremely effective programme run by the Magistrates’ Association in conjunction with the probation service, Local Crime Community Sentence, aims precisely to close this gap in awareness and knowledge of how the whole process works by taking audiences through real cases and making them act as sentencers. The resulting growth in understanding and confidence in the process on the part of participants is palpable and measurable. We need much more of this kind of initiative and much more information.

Another piece of important work recently carried out by Victim Support and Make Justice Work—mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee—has demonstrated how much the public, especially the victims of crime, want to have more information at every stage of the criminal justice process. They want to be involved by having their views heard and then being kept in the loop with the outcomes of sentencing. Crucially, the overriding response from victims, as we have already heard, is the need to be reassured that what they have experienced never happens again to anyone. This is a far stronger feeling than any retributive response, which the Government should heed. Victims want to know, too, what community penalties consist of, and so they should. I believe that, if they did, they would be encouraged by much of what they found and thus be more confident. Their voice must be heard and the Government must have ears to hear. The Government should develop more programmes and information dissemination to make these realities more visible and available to victims in particular.

This need extends to sentencers, too. As chair of Rethinking Crime and Punishment, I saw the effect of visits that we arranged for judges and magistrates to programmes available to them in their area to see work being done by the probation service and local voluntary agencies. It was like an epiphany to many, because judges do not normally get out and about that much to make such visits. Sentencers must know more about the disposals available to them. Magistrates, too, no longer have basic travel expenses paid for such visits and have difficulty in many areas staying in touch with local provision. There is no substitute for first-hand visits and discussion. “I never knew it was like that”, was often the refrain after these visits. I hope that the Government, with their enthusiasm for community penalties, will look again and restore this very modest but potentially transformative practical support.

Finally, I shall say a quick word on restorative justice. The proposal that it should be readily available to the courts, victims and offenders is an enormously important move. It represents the embodiment of the same principles of effective justice that I have already discussed—namely awareness, knowledge, understanding and meaningful engagement with the participants, particularly victims. I have supported these principles and the work of the Restorative Justice Council for years. I welcome these proposals as having the best possible potential for enabling positive outcomes following the damage of crime.

My caveat is that it will take a great deal of time and large investment to provide adequate numbers of suitably trained and accredited facilitators, who are key to the process. Sentencers who would be initiating the process currently have no established tradition in the use of RJ. They would need training as well as convincing. The whole process will be extremely complex and expensive, and it will be vital to ensure that the quality of delivery is of the best and not rolled out in a piecemeal fashion. It would be a disaster if expectations were raised without adequate quality delivery. That would destroy confidence and set the programme back for a long time. The Government must clarify not only how much they are planning to invest in training, promoting and delivery but the estimated timescale for the rollout of RJ. I cannot imagine that it will become widely let alone generally available for some considerable time, even with the expert advice and support of the Restorative Justice Council and other agencies. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply.

Positive change does not happen through negative strategies. Punishment will fail unless it is married to positive strategies geared to the needs of each individual —victim and offender alike. The research confirms this. I urge that that should be our goal.

[Lord Lloyd of Berwick]

I support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. I had not intended to speak so will do so briefly.

I particularly wanted to say how much I agreed with the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser. What we are engaged on here is taking another step down what has become, recently and most unfortunately, a well-trodden path: you create a new offence carrying a mandatory sentence; you then allow the court not to impose the sentence if there are exceptional circumstances that would make it unjust to do so. My first observation on that, of course, is that it is a complete misuse of the word mandatory. The word mandatory should be confined to cases that are really mandatory, like the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. However, there is a worse objection. It seems to me that it creates confusion. Of course, it has every advantage from the Government’s point of view, because it enables them to say that they are being tough on crime. At the same time, however, they can say that they are not leaning on the judges—oh no, no—to impose a sentence that they would not otherwise impose since courts never impose a sentence that they do not regard as just. That point was made very eloquently by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf.

The Minister must say in reply which of the two ways he intends to have it. What do the Government really mean? What do they really want? In legislation, especially in criminal matters, clarity is of the first importance. Absence of clarity, such as I think one will find in the working of Part 1 of the schedule, has bedevilled criminal legislation, especially in the area of sentencing, in recent years.