Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Baroness Linklater of Butterstone
My Lords, this has been a fascinating and important debate and I am honoured to be part of it. This is an enormous Bill, not only in its size but also its scope and aspirations. Of particular interest to me are the relative roles of prison and community sentencing in the future and how this will be managed. I agree with everything that my noble friend Lord Dholakia has said on specific aspects of sentencing policy and so will not repeat those arguments. I shall concentrate on Part 3.
The Lord Chancellor came into office to find our criminal justice system in a mess. There are soaring costs. The NOMS resource budget alone for 2011-12 is £3.679 billion—I thought they might have got the “b”s and “m”s muddled up, but apparently not; prison numbers are soaring and are currently around 85,000; and reoffending rates are soaring. Of those serving short sentences of a year or less, nearly two thirds will reoffend. Where children are concerned, the figure for reoffending rises to more than 71 per cent. This is the headline indicator of the failure to deal effectively with offenders in ways which help them to stop committing crimes. The whole country's needs, particularly those of victims, are not being met. The challenge is to cut costs and to try to make the system work better.
The Lord Chancellor's initial response in the Green Paper, Breaking the Cycle, recognised that short custodial sentences do not work, and he proposed instead the development of effective, tougher, targeted community penalties, which are much more successful at reducing reoffending, thus making society a safer place. He proposed making prisons work better by reducing the impossible overcrowding created by those serving short terms and allowing them to do what they do best, which is to deal with the violent, dangerous, prolific offenders, who are serving long sentences, from whom we need to be protected. He talked about a rehabilitation revolution and presented a coherent programme of legislative reform, which was very welcome and made many of us cheer.
Since then, there has been a move back from the clear, constructive focus on prevention, rehabilitation and the reduction of reoffending to giving punishment a more central focus. Hence the change to the last part of the name of this Bill from “the Prevention of Reoffending” to “the Punishment of Offenders” after it was first published and the Bill had to be reissued. I regret this because it injected an unhelpful, retributive and negative tone. From my earliest days of working in prisons, I have been told that not only was imprisonment the sanction of very last resort and for as short a time as possible, but that those who were sent to prison went as a punishment, not for punishment.
Despite this, I believe that the Bill could usher in a shift of focus, or emphasis, so that much of what is being proposed is constructive and could succeed in the core aim of reducing the number of short-term prison sentences, and thus reoffending, save money and protect the public. However, that will depend crucially on the work that will have to be done with sentencers in both magistrates’ courts and Crown Courts to generate understanding and, more importantly, confidence in the proposed community sentences and the quality and availability of these new tough sentences in the community. The decision on whether to use these alternatives remains with the sentencers. However, there is nothing in the Bill about the nature, range or expectations of the community sentences, which are to be alternatives to short sentences and on which the reduction of reoffending is predicated.
At a meeting with the Minister, Crispin Blunt, he was emphatic that there is no government money for this provision, but rather an expectation that payment by results will provide the answer. My noble friend Lord McNally did indeed refer to that in his opening remarks, but I have yet to find any detail in the Bill. Perhaps this is because this is an approach which is still only being trialled at the moment and that the success or otherwise is as yet unknown and unproved. The result will take at least two years to demonstrate, so the country will have to wait several years. This means we are indeed putting on hold the kind of revolution we hope to see. There is one much-heralded project at Peterborough prison, run by the prison, the private sector and voluntary sector partners. However, it has yet to demonstrate any definite outcomes, and is also based in the prison and focuses on finding prisoners jobs. I understand that at least 14 other prisons have plans of some kind in place. Mostly, however, the work—if it is to work—must be done in the community, on release, where the capacity to keep a job and sustain it will be the critical result.
I have the honour to be the patron of an excellent medium-sized, voluntary sector organisation called SOVA, which is also attempting to make such a PBR scheme work. It is very well placed to do so in terms of its knowledge and experience of working with offenders in the community. The problem is that for the first two years at least there is no return on its investment, which, as an organisation, is extremely expensive, because the payment only comes after two years, based on the result of reduced reoffending; this is of course a major gamble. There are in fact only a few agencies in the voluntary sector able to afford such up-front commitment. The voluntary sector has been the bedrock of community-based work with offenders and consists mainly of SOVA-sized organisations which will struggle and have to take on huge risks to deliver results. The field is left mainly to the few large voluntary organisations or the private sector who can afford to become players if and when they choose. These are the ones who have come into the criminal justice world through providing STCs—our child prisons—YOIs, some adult prisons, and escort services such as Serco or G4S. Meanwhile, the Probation Service, which provides the basic, statutory work with offenders in the community, is itself facing cuts and is very limited in its ability to participate—although I understand that there is a project on which it is working with NOMs.
How is it that on this very important and key element of policy, on which the reduction of the prison population is predicated, and which we all want to succeed, there so little explanation of how it will work, be managed, structured, co-ordinated, staffed, or delivered? I have searched the Bill without success. Perhaps the Minister can help me.
I welcome the Bill's aspirations in Part 3 as a positive first step in the approach to reforming our sentencing system and making it more fit for purpose, particularly in relation to community penalties including PBR, and the reduction of short-term prison sentences. Much will hinge on the nature and effectiveness of how these penalties are devised, how they command confidence—regarding sentences in particular—and show themselves to be truly effective. I sincerely hope that these aspirations will be realised.
Prisoners: Sanitation
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone Excerpts(13 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord McNally
No, my Lords. The figures I have given are accurate: less than 3 per cent of prisoners have facilities that do not comprise in-cell sanitation. The main alternative is electronic unlocking, which is not a perfect system but is certainly not degrading in the terms that the noble Lord suggested. As far as we are concerned, it is compliant with humanitarian and human rights legislation. The truth is that we have a prison estate in which it is extremely difficult to meet the full commitment to in-cell sanitation. Therefore, I cannot be enthusiastic at present about promising a rapid reduction in the numbers. As I say, as new build comes on stream, there will be more in-cell sanitation, but that will not happen quickly. We are down to almost an irreducible minimum whereby electronic unlocking is the alternative to in-cell sanitation.
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone
My Lords, given the Scottish experience, what provision is being made in England and Wales to prevent a similar situation developing here, where, in round numbers, 1,973 prison places are still affected by this disgusting situation?
Lord McNally
It is not helpful to suggest that it is disgusting to ring a bell to open the cell door in order to use the toilet. As my noble friend said, that applies to fewer than 2,000 prisoners in a prison estate of nearly 88,000. They have to do that because in certain prisons it is physically impossible to put in the facilities that would be desirable.
Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Linklater of Butterstone
My Lords, it gives me enormous pleasure to follow my hero, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, who never speaks anything but words of the deepest wisdom.
Since we last debated the future of the Youth Justice Board, the folly of the Government’s plan to dismantle it seems ever more misjudged, unnecessary and worrying. It is misjudged because the work of the YJB is highly specialist, dealing as it does with the most damaged, difficult and needy children in our community, who must be managed by people with specific experience and expertise, as they have. Children are not—as I said in Committee—small adults and should definitely not be managed by civil servants from NOMS in the MoJ who just do not have the expertise and whose work is with adults, not children.
It is unnecessary because, as we heard so eloquently in Committee from the noble Lord, Lord Elton, the ministerial powers of oversight, responsibility and accountability, which has been an area of central concern to the Minister, Crispin Blunt, are already in place in statute, giving him the power to make changes, decisions and appointments and other wide-ranging powers of overall control.
It is worrying because the desire to abolish the YJB betrays a determined failure by the Government to appreciate just how important, effective and significant this work is with children and young people who offend or are at risk of offending. This work by the YJB over the past few years has resulted, as we have heard, and as the most recent figures show, in a further drop in reoffending by young people. It is an extraordinary achievement.
This failure is exacerbated by a wish to make a decision which is driven by administrative concerns, convenience and cost-cutting—the input side of the balance sheet—rather than recognising and valuing the outcomes now being seen by the YJB, whose work has truly taken off in the past few years and is now achieving real results in terms of properly embedding and co-ordinating the youth offending teams, reducing reoffending and offending through prevention and diversion schemes, joint publications of inquiries, the oversight of the setting of maintenance of standards of professional practice, and much more.
This Bill has rightly concerned itself with rationalising those public bodies which have developed over the years with bureaucracies growing, mopping up precious government resources and duplicating effort which could be absorbed in existing government departments. The tests against which an organisation is validated therefore are that it performs a specific, necessary public service, independently establishes facts and is politically impartial. The YJB's success against these tests is beyond doubt, just as its value is clear to the many bodies with which it works, several of which were quoted in Committee. I will add the words of the Children's Commissioner, who represents the voice of children in this country. She says:
“It is imperative that responsibility for the custodial component of the youth justice system is held by an agency that understands and appreciates the distinct and special needs of children and young people, particularly those who are vulnerable”.
It is because these tests are clearly being met and because of its track record of success and the considerable savings that are being made to the Exchequer through the success of diversion and prevention work, as well as because of the judgment of specialists in the field, that I believe that the YJB clearly should not be abolished.
Furthermore, the YJB itself is quite prepared to look at how to accommodate itself to the administrative thrust of government thinking. It is quite able to see a modus vivendi within the MoJ as an executive agency, with its specialist focus maintained, its separate identity from NOMS and its ability to work at arm’s length from government, just as NOMS and other organisations already do. It is a mystery to me why this option has been resisted so far by the ministry and why it appears that my dear noble friend the Minister and, particularly, his colleagues in the Commons are hell-bent on reinventing the wheel in the name of some perceived convenience. The idea that the work of the YJB could be taken over wholesale by Ministers and senior officials is totally unrealistic, particularly when it has taken the YJB years to reach its current levels of expertise. We have already heard from the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, about the marvellous Keppel unit at Wetherby YOI. It demonstrates the extent to which specialisms within the specialist provision of the children's estate are so necessary. It is probably saving lives in the process. I just hope and pray that we are not being served notice that other groups in the criminal justice system not currently at issue but seriously important, including women and the mentally ill, can expect no future special attention, and that the reports of the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, on women and of the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, on mental health, whose recommendations have had wide support, are now to be shelved.
We should acknowledge around this House and in the country at large our overriding duty of care for the youngest in our society who need us most and should remember our responsibilities to our most vulnerable children by ensuring that their needs can continue to be met by the very organisation which has the knowledge and skills. To do otherwise would be a serious dereliction of our collective duty. I wholeheartedly support the amendment.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, I start by tendering an apology to the Youth Justice Board and to your Lordships' House for a figure I gave in an earlier debate concerning the number of deaths of young offenders in custody. Those figures had improved substantially in recent years, but I was not aware of that fact. That improvement was in good part, of course, due to the efforts of the Youth Justice Board.
One might have thought that a Bill that deals with part of the justice system would rest upon a sound evidential base. Where is evidence to support the proposal contained in this Bill for the abolition of the Youth Justice Board? Such evidence as there is appears to point entirely the other way. As my noble friend Lord Warner and others have said, the reduction of about one-third in the number of young offenders in custody, in those who reoffend and in those who do not come before the courts at all because of policies of prevention and diversion, is testament to the successful approach of the board. That has been supported by a number of reports. The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, referred to the work of the Youth Justice Board in conjunction with local authority services, which was acknowledged as far back as 2004 when the Audit Commission reported.
Of course, the Audit Commission is also under sentence at the moment, although we have yet to see legislation about that. Even at that stage, the Audit Commission reported:
“The new structures work well. The YJB sets a clear national framework … and takes a lead role in monitoring progress”.
It also emphasised the role of the young offender teams. It stated that they,
“are critically placed between criminal justice, health and local government services to co-ordinate and deliver services to young offenders and the courts”.
A report commissioned by the previous Government concluded:
“Overall, the YJB earns its place as a crucial part of a system which aims to tackle one of the most serious social policy issues in this country”.
Most recently, there have been reports from the National Audit Office and, as my noble friend Lord Warner, mentioned, the Public Accounts Committee in terms of the recent statistics on the reduction of offending by young people. In a report published only three months ago, the National Audit Office declared:
“The Board … has been an effective leader of efforts to create and maintain a national youth justice system with a risk based approach, and in recent years key youth crime indicators have been falling substantially”.
The Public Accounts Committee report, which was published only six weeks ago, concluded:
“The youth justice system has been successful in reducing the number of criminal offences … an achievement in which the Youth Justice Board has played a central role”.
It continued:
“The planned abolition of the Youth Justice Board has arisen from a policy decision and not as a result of any assessment of the Board’s performance”.
The board has brought together a whole range of organisations and institutions working in youth justice. It has developed a substantial programme of secure estate commissioning. Indeed, it has been so successful that it decommissioned 900 places recently. Value for money is certainly very much part of its agenda. A range of other initiatives has been taken. Those initiatives range from the piloting of YOTs, as we have heard, to the delivery of the persistent young offenders’ pledge to halve the time from arrest to sentence, working with the parents of young offenders and much else besides.
Against that background, it is disconcerting that the Government still are unclear about how the functions of the board will be discharged in the future. In particular, there is widespread concern in your Lordships’ House and beyond about the potential transfer to the National Offender Management Service, which deals with adult offenders. NOMS, to put it mildly, has a chequered record. I would invite the Minister in his reply to assure the House that, if the amendment fails—I certainly hope that it will not—it would not be the Government’s intention to transfer the Youth Justice Board’s functions to the National Offender Management Service.
As my noble friend Lord Warner indicated, should the amendment fail, as a backstop, an agency would be a better solution. But given the pressures on the department, its ministerial members and the officials working within it, it is inconceivable that the Young Justice Board’s functions would be adequately discharged if they are simply transferred into the department. The independence, to a degree, that even an agency status would confer and, in particular, the separation of youth justice from adult justice and NOMS must be a precondition of any organisation of our services for young offenders.
Young People: Custody
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone Excerpts(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord McNally
The Government’s policy is as in the Bill. An amendment on it is to be debated on Monday. This is far off the question before the House. Two old experienced campaigners such as the noble Lord, Lord Bach, and the noble Baroness know full well when they are wandering wide of the mark. I will see them on Monday.
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone
My Lords, this report by the Children’s Commissioner is most powerful in its first-hand descriptions of how restraint techniques in secure settings are actually experienced by children themselves. It makes quite distressing reading. It is followed by the commissioner’s unambiguous recommendation that the use of pain to enforce control and order should be prohibited and that internationally agreed standards, as set out by the UN and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, should be used as a benchmark. Will the Minister please undertake to ensure that there is rigorous, thorough and better training of all staff in the children’s secure estate who deal with these most damaged and difficult children, so that the use of pain during restraint ceases? Will he undertake, with the help and advice of the YJB, to ensure that greater consistency is established across the estate and that more effective and rigorous monitoring is in place throughout?
Lord McNally
I fully appreciate and have benefited from my noble friend’s deep knowledge of these affairs. However, as I said earlier, I also have a duty of care to staff and other inmates and the people she refers to as “children” are often 16 or 17 years of age, six foot in height and 14 stone in weight. In such circumstances, keeping a safe and secure estate becomes a real problem. That is the problem that we are wrestling with in the study that we are undertaking.
Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone Excerpts(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Viscount Eccles
My Lords, I cannot resist following the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, as he used the word “bureaucracy”. We are faced with a point of principle comprising the difference between administration and management. Ministers manage and civil servants administer. To bureaucracy—regrettably, perhaps—the process is more important than the outcome, which does not make the bureaucrat a good manager. Ministers are short of time. They would do all the good things to which expert noble Lords around the House have referred if they could and if they had the time and energy to do them. However, if they cannot, to ensure that they get done they need to delegate their management to somebody else.
I am very sympathetic in principle to the idea of being able to collapse functions back into departments but in this case the Government should think very carefully about whether that is an appropriate thing to do. It seems to me from what has been said that the management challenge is considerable and that the possibility of Ministers having sufficient time to guide their administrative colleagues in the department to do the things in the right way is pretty remote. Therefore, we should think carefully before we take the delegated responsibility to manage away from the Youth Justice Board. It is not so much a matter of independence—we tend to use that word rather loosely as regards non-departmental public bodies—but of giving a group of people the responsibility and space to manage complicated matters which, arguably, are better managed outside the department rather than inside it.
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone
My Lords, as is clear, there is widespread concern around this House about the Government's plan for the abolition of the YJB, and indeed more widely among those organisations which work with children in trouble. I add my voice most wholeheartedly to theirs. This concern arises for a variety of reasons. Despite the consultations which have taken place with civil servants, the detail of the practicalities of how any change will actually work once it has been subsumed into the MoJ is a cause for concern, particularly if the quality and scope of what the YJB is doing and achieving are to be sustained. It has developed an extremely important role and expertise in this very specialised field.
From my recent contact with the YJB and the many other agencies that work with children who offend, or are at risk of offending, I know how good and important the YJB’s work has become, particularly in the past few years. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, for his vision in setting it up in the first place. However, there is considerable anxiety and distrust about what is likely to emerge beyond the immediate future if the YJB is abolished. There is particular concern, which has also been echoed around the Chamber, that elements of the YJB’s work will be taken over by NOMS, which is specifically an adults’, not a children’s, service. Indeed, it is not really a service at all, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, rightly said. NOMS inevitably lacks the expertise required for children and is therefore quite inappropriate. I hope that when my noble friend the Minister replies, he can assure us that NOMS will not take over YJB functions.
This is because children who offend are not small adults to be taken over like a series of parcels. Indeed, they are the most vulnerable, disadvantaged, complicated and challenging individuals in our society. They are children who have experienced a “disproportionate experience of loss”—indeed, one in eight has actually experienced the death of a parent or sibling—while 76 per cent have had an absent father and 33 per cent an absent mother. Thirty-nine per cent are on the child protection register, 75 per cent have lived with someone other than a parent at some time, and 40 per cent—I repeat, 40 per cent—have been homeless. The rate of children with special educational needs or who are underachieving is 46 per cent, while 90 per cent of boys who offend have been excluded from school. Finally, around 85 per cent of those in custody have mental health problems.
This is a tragic picture. Those alarming children who we see on street corners, possibly collecting ASBOs, are quite likely to have no real loving home to go to that any of us might recognise. The gang members who carry knives may be doing so because they themselves are in a state of fear from what others may do to them, and the gang is their only family. This is why a specialist body for children in trouble should be maintained, just as in medicine and teaching there is a distinction in provision between children and adults. We have a duty of care to all our children, which is or should be a priority of government and all its agencies and sectors. This should never be more true than when things are going wrong.
In my experience, while troubled children command considerable care and concern in the public mind, children who are in trouble do not. These children tend to have not our sympathy but our censure. I am not arguing for sympathy, but I am arguing for the knowledge, skill and understanding that are vital to how we manage and treat such needy children so that they do not offend or reoffend. Our society should be safer as a result. To do this, we need on the ground not only the multiplicity of agencies that are the bedrock of provision but a body that has the experience, knowledge and understanding to stand at the interface between all the elements of the justice system and give leadership and coherence to the very complex whole. The YJB does exactly that. It works with the complexity of the youth justice system that spreads across three government departments—the MoJ, the Home Office and the DfE—as well as the DH and DCLG, and the range of local agencies, to bring some coherence and leadership to a complex framework for youth justice services.
Prisons: In-cell Sanitation
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone Excerpts(14 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord McNally
He did; to err is human. I have read the independent monitoring board’s report, which prompted the noble Lord’s question, and it does not make easy reading, but I put it to him that, as he must have experienced during his time as inspector of prisons, this problem is in a small number of prisons—nine—that do not have these facilities and which, with just under 2,000 places, make up about 3 per cent of the total prison estate. We are looking at the situation and consulting about guidelines to governors to see how it can be improved, but in the present state of the prison estate we do not see the opportunity in the near future to supply in-cell toilets in these places and therefore the electronic system will continue.
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone
My Lords, is my noble friend aware that Grendon prison, our only therapeutic prison, which deals with prisoners with particularly challenging psychiatric issues, is one of the 10—I think that it is 10, but I may be mistaken—prisons without integral sanitation? Does he not agree that, given the particular challenges in that prison, it is unacceptable to be queueing or, most of the time, stuck in your cell with a pot?
Lord McNally
It is true, as my noble friend said, that Grendon has a particular and very challenging regime—it is a therapeutic prison. It is perhaps surprising that it should be a prison that does not have in-cell facilities. However, the question is whether we keep the real benefits, which I think my noble friend would acknowledge, of what goes on there in the therapeutic approach to prison for some very difficult prisoners. The toiletry situation is a problem, but it is managed by the electronic locking system. On balance, I would prefer to keep the success of Grendon as a therapeutic prison, even with the downside of the lack of in-cell facilities.
Prisons: Young Offenders
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord McNally
My Lords, since the document was published in 2005, the Government have had a thorough review of it and are in the process of producing new guidelines on restraint and behaviour management designed to replace the existing document. The new system will be assessed by medical and other experts on the new restraint accreditation board. In the mean time, as I said, a new version of the manual is being drawn up and will take account of the changes that have taken place since 2005.
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone
My Lords, although the manual is going to be revised, it is currently in use, including, theoretically, on children as young as 12 who are the most damaged and difficult in our society. Is my noble friend aware that the advice given is that, in extremis, a member of staff can drive his fingers straight into the young person’s face and then quickly drive the straightened fingers of the same hand downwards into the young person’s groin area? A great deal is wrong and I hope that the Minister will agree that what is needed is proper, adequate, suitable and relevant training and not this kind of restraint.
Lord McNally
I can assure my noble friend that suitable, adequate and proper training is exactly what is under way. It has been suggested, particularly in the media, that some of these techniques were in general use. The techniques are for when an unarmed officer is under attack. I have looked at the manual and at some of the techniques highlighted by the media. On almost every occasion, the last line is: “The member of staff exits”. These are not techniques to inflict pain on young people; they are techniques to enable unarmed, unprotected members of staff who under attack, often by large and quite violent young people—we use the word “children” very casually—to escape from those situations.
Crime: Youth Crime and Antisocial Behaviour Commission
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord McNally
The use of ASBOs is about steady but we are looking at whether they are effective. There is evidence that in certain cases they are useful. Certainly, ASBOs can be used to help where disturbances by youths cause great distress to a wide group in the community.
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale
The Minister will be aware that the commission describes the current levels of remand in custody as,
“unacceptable, unjust and unnecessarily damaging to the children and young people concerned”.
What steps will the Government take to reduce the use of secure remands to the absolute minimum for the protection of the person concerned and the public?
Lord McNally
One of the things that we are looking at very much is the use of restorative justice as an alternative. The pilot projects that have been used indicate that this could have a good impact on the need to send young people to prison. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Bach, emphasised, there are times when young people need to be in custody. But, as the report indicates, and as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, indicated, it should be a last resort. We are trying to make sure that we get the balance right in restorative justice and in taking young people who are a danger to their community off the streets.
Lord McNally
Certainly that is so. In fact, the whole thrust of the present Government’s policy is localism involving voluntary organisations so that the community itself is involved in the fight against youth crime.
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone
My Lords, the commission has recommended the disbanding of youth offender panels. Do the Government believe that the better way is actually for the community to become engaged in the decisions affecting young people who offend, particularly in the use of community penalties as alternatives to custody?
Lord McNally
My Lords, I regret to say that that is still under review as far as the responses are concerned, but I hope that my replies have indicated that the whole thrust of the policy is one of localism and local community involvement, and a real attempt to avoid sending young people into custody.
Criminal Justice System
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Linklater of Butterstone
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for introducing this important subject. I declare an interest of a lifetime of working with prisons and prisoners’ families. Many of us were astonished and delighted by the Secretary of State for Justice’s speech when he called for the reduction of the prison population, particularly the use of short prison sentences for low-level crime. Some of us have been asking for this for years as we watched the prison population rising exponentially, by 66 per cent over the past 10 years, while crime actually dropped and the numbers found guilty by the courts fell from roughly 1.5 million in 1991 to 1.3 million in 2008.
These levels of imprisonment are simply unaffordable in financial, social or human terms. Financially, it has cost us approximately £44.4 billion in 2009-10, and an average of £45,000 per prison place per annum. It has cost us socially, because an average of about half— 49 per cent—reoffend, while in the case of short sentences it is 61 per cent and, most terribly, where children are concerned, it soars to just under three-quarters.
If the purpose of imprisonment—apart from punishment and protecting us properly from dangerous, violent and prolific offenders—includes, inter alia, preventing reoffending, which means public protection, the figures that I have mentioned demonstrate expensive failure. The human cost and damage continue through to the next generation since the children of offenders are more likely to become the next generation of offenders themselves; 160,000 of them lose a parent to prison each year, which is often experienced as a bereavement.
Ken Clarke’s clarion call for recognition of this unacceptable situation is greatly welcome, as is his support for the development of alternatives to custody with far better outcomes for those low-level offenders for whom alternatives are more appropriate and successful. Rehabilitation and reparation are key in sentencing if we are serious about reducing reoffending and making society safer. As Churchill exhorted, the,
“constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment”,
should be coupled with,
“a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate”.
That is what short sentences do not do but alternatives can.
For seven years I chaired an initiative called Rethinking Crime and Punishment, where we looked at the uses of custody and its alternatives and funded a range of 60 projects and organisations in the field, developing some of the best practice, including that by Roma Hooper. We set up a commission of inquiry chaired by Lord Coulsfield, whose report, Crime, Courts and Confidence, concluded that the sentencing framework should restrict the imposition of custody and,
“review the need for short custodial sentences because these have little or no deterrent or rehabilitative value”.
It is a model of analysis and wise recommendation that I hope that Ministers will consult.
Crucially, we worked with sentencers and members of the public in developing more knowledge and understanding of the reality of the alternatives currently available to them, thus developing greater confidence in their use. Sentencers, after all, are the people who make the decisions and will choose either prison or an alternative. Knowledge of and confidence in what is available to them on their patch is essential. One judge said about his local visits that,
“there really is no better way to find out what someone is doing than to see them at work and to talk to them and ask questions. No amount of reading of reports can convey the same amount of information so efficiently”.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Phillips, who was then Lord Chief Justice, commented on his visits, which we arranged:
“I am convinced of their value”.
He also did a day’s unpaid work.
This is hardly rocket science but the opportunities available to judges to get out and do this regularly are rare. Given the constantly changing landscape of provision, it would deepen their understanding of their options if they could do more. Despite very busy lives, it was not difficult for us to arrange, as we did in the Thames Valley, Cheshire and London, and the rewards were immense. Another judge said to me, with some astonishment after visiting his local drug programme and a domestic violence programme: “I had no idea it was like that”. His sentencing decisions will now be better informed in the future. If this was regular, rather than an occasional practice, it would do a great deal for the confidence of sentencers in alternative provision. Confidence is essential in the field of criminal justice. I will be interested in the Minister’s comments.
The same applies to public knowledge and attitudes. That offenders should pay back something to the community against which they have offended is part of natural justice, but it should be visible and better understood. However, there is little public confidence in our criminal justice system today, despite this country’s vigorous use of custody. The Government’s community payback initiative is not known about enough, but there are myriad projects across the country where local people can have a say in how offenders do unpaid work and this, too, is important in developing confidence in alternatives. Rethinking Crime and Punishment funded the publication of a booklet which describes outstanding examples of community programmes all over the country. It is important reading for those interested in understanding more. I give just one example, though all show a reduction of reoffending rates and some are significant. Circles of Support, based in Hampshire and originally funded by the MoJ, works with particularly difficult high-risk sex offenders. It uses local groups, or circles, which work with professionals, and in the past five years there had been no reoffending.
However, there are worries about the implementation of the new plans. While we are told by Crispin Blunt that there is no new money, not only will all those offenders who will now—increasingly, under the new policy—serve their sentence in the community have to be provided for, but that provision must be part of some new strategic framework. A significant growth of new localism does not just happen. It has to be choreographed with all the local agencies and providers. The social investors by whom the Minister sets such store are one part of the picture of providers at the point of need as the courts deliver them, but only one part. Some are very impressive, such as National Grid. There is a real challenge here for all those agencies that are expected to be involved to develop their partnership roles effectively.
This is where the probation boards could have a pivotal role; where the spread of people, experience and knowledge of local partnership working is already there on the ground; and where links with the range of providers from the statutory, voluntary and private sectors are already established. Probation trusts are now responsible authorities, tied to their local authorities more closely. Crucially, they work with individuals, which is the great strength of the service, creating those human connections which are pivotal in the reduction of reoffending. Localism is indeed what they offer, and there is now a need to rethink their position under NOMS, which is perceived to be inhibiting, centralising and overbureaucratic. Ministers would do well to look at the Scottish experience, where a centralising NOMS-type option was examined and rejected in favour of the local option. Now the country is divided into eight criminal justice authorities with which we in Scotland are very happy.
The real fear is that if sentencers find that the provision of alternatives is not available at the point of need, or not up to scratch, they will not use them. That loss of confidence, so necessary to ensure that the Government’s new approach is a success, would be tragic and hard to restore. Poor alternatives are worse than none at all. Since the savings from reduced imprisonment will not be directly available for this kind of core provision, will the Minister clarify the Government’s thinking on how the gap is to be filled?
I had intended to speak on the problems of children and young people in custody, but time is against me. Therefore, I end by reminding noble Lords of the famous lines from Julius Caesar:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries”.
Now, I think, is such a moment; we need no more shallows and miseries.