Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Baroness Stern Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stern]

My Lords, I am very glad indeed to follow the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, and wholeheartedly endorse his comments about free legal advice in police stations. However, I shall concentrate my remarks on the sentencing part of this Bill, Part 3, which contains many proposals that are broadly welcome.

The Lord Chancellor has said on more than one occasion:

“A sensible review of sentencing policy is much overdue”.

This followed his statement soon after his appointment that he was “amazed” that the prison population had doubled since he was Home Secretary in the early 1990s and now stood at more than 85,000, which he described as “an astonishing number”, which he would have,

“dismissed as an impossible and ridiculous prediction”

if it had been put to him as a forecast in 1992. He said:

“We need an enlightened and effective penal system that the public can both trust and afford to pay for … Too often prison has proved a costly and ineffectual approach”.

These are very sensible words that have proved a little difficult to put into policy.

It is perhaps worth noting, in support of the Lord Chancellor’s view, that it is a feature of England and Wales that our use of prison is high compared to similar countries, and our use of prison rises year by year, unlike similar countries. England and Wales have 154 prisoners per 100,000 of population; Germany, a similar, large, western country, has about 87. So we are about 70 per cent higher. Germany’s prison population has not been on a steady upward trend for the past 20 years; it has fluctuated around 90 per 100,000, and has gone down by 6 per cent since 2007. In England and Wales, the prison population has gone up steadily for the past 20 years and has increased by 6 per cent since 2007.

The Lord Chancellor is right to think that there are models of an “enlightened and effective” penal policy, and prison numbers can be reduced, especially since there is no evidence to connect imprisonment rates and crime rates; for example, in New York, the number in the city’s jail system has been going down steadily. In 2010 it fell below 100,000 for the first time since 1987, and at the same time there has been a big and much publicised reduction in New York City’s crime rate. Whether the legislation we are debating here this evening will take us in that direction remains to be seen, but it might be worth noting that features of the European countries with lower and stable prison populations are, to generalise, first, broad discretion for judges; secondly, strenuous efforts to keep young people out of the system and to divert lesser offenders; thirdly, strong, well resourced probation and social services; and finally, a recognised role in the system for victims of crime.

There is therefore much to welcome in Part 3 of this Bill. For example, there are provisions for greater use of compensation orders, which take victims into account. There is flexibility for the court in dealing with breaches—that is, more discretion for judges; greater discretion and flexibility in supervising community orders—and probation staff are likely to be more effective if they are given the opportunity to use their discretion and tailor what they do to the individual before them; more flexibility in imposing referral orders, trusting the court to do what is best for the juvenile before it; and reducing remands in custody, and, in particular, juvenile remands.

Obviously many of us who have spoken so often in this House about the injustice inherent in the IPP system will welcome the abolition of the IPP sentence, and also the proposal to reform the release test for prisoners serving IPP sentences. The Convenor of the Cross Benches, the noble Lord, Lord Laming, has received and passed to me a huge packet of letters from the families of current IPP prisoners—I believe that they have also written to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham—pointing out the injustice of their continued detention. Many of them are without access to the facilities that would enable them to progress towards release. Can the Minister also tell the House in his response what the Government plan to do to deal with those currently serving IPP sentences?

Not everything that has been put before us in Part 3 of the Bill is so welcome. Curfews of up to 16 hours, with the length of curfew periods up from six to 12 months, seem to me neither sensible nor enlightened, especially for children and young people. The provision for mandatory four-month detention and training orders—that is, prison sentences for 16 and 17 year-olds—for threatening with a knife could bring another 200 to 400 teenagers into prison every year. It is not clear to me that that is sensible either.

I must end with a word about the legal aid aspects of the Bill, although I can see that the Minister feels he might well have heard enough about them. It is my experience when dealing with improving observance of the rule of law in countries where it is grossly deficient that the one measure most likely to create a more lawful, fair and democratic society is to give poor people access to justice and access to means of redress of abuses by the powerful or by the state. In a democratic society, people—whatever their social position—should be able to get wrongs righted and injustices rectified. So I am in wholehearted agreement with the very powerful points that have been made all around the House, calling for the Government to think again about what it means when a rich person can go to court and fight for his or her rights and a poor person cannot do so.