Prisons Strategy

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Tuesday 7th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

The hon. Gentleman is mischaracterising the success of the X-ray scanners. I have seen how they work at Lincoln, and they discover objects concealed within a person that would not otherwise be found. It shows the terrible ingenuity of organised crime gangs in getting these substances, mobile phones and so on into prisons. It is precisely because we want to break down these empires that we have such enhanced security measures across our prison estate.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for mentioning the good practice at Downview and High Down. Most importantly, she has the joy of being a Prisons Minister with money, and I congratulate my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Robert Buckland) on securing it. It will all go to waste if we do not address the inflation in the number of prisoners due to the addiction of this House to ever longer sentences. There are better ways of punishing people and protecting the public than prison. Her and her colleagues’ rhetoric will affect sentences and the Parole Board, which needs a lead and confidence from those charged with these responsibilities.

Ten-Year Drugs Strategy

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

As I say, I think there is a big difference with this plan, which is that on the supply side we are very much coming at this from an economic point of view. We have done an enormous amount of work to examine the nature of the business. We are not necessarily looking at the individuals involved, who very often are replaced if they are arrested—sometimes within hours—but fundamentally at the structure of the business, and interfering with it in a way that means it does not reoccur, using the method of distribution and communication against the business to make sure that we stamp it out. We are showing success across the country, particularly on county lines.

On drug consumption rooms, as I say, we remain open to evidence. We are looking at the evidence that has been presented by the Scottish Government, and we will respond to the Minister there shortly. However, as I say, even if that evidence was compelling—I am not convinced that it is at the moment—there are legislative obstacles that mean that we have no option for the moment but to focus on health investment and making sure that we ramp up treatment and rehabilitation, which we have seen have effect across the world.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I welcome the commitment in the strategy to building a world-leading evidence base, and the funding of it, with a cross-Government innovation fund to test and learn. Given our desire to become world leaders in this space, will the Minister confirm that that evidence will include international examples and evidence?

[Kit Malthouse]

I am more than happy to confirm that we will look anywhere in the world where there are good ideas that are having impact and effect, but the evidence has to be properly evaluated, properly peer reviewed and scientifically proven, because we are dealing with people’s lives here. Across the world, we have seen unintended consequences from measures taken on narcotics, which we do not want to repeat. I know that my hon. Friend has done a lot of work in this area and that he is very well informed. I hope that, over the months and years to come, we can communicate regularly on this issue.

Point of Order

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. On Monday, in answer to my supplementary question during Home Office questions, I believe—I have obtained guidance on the law from a senior lawyer—that the Minister for Crime and Policing most inadvertently misled the House, and I humbly invite him to take this early opportunity to correct the record. The Minister stated that the process for the rescheduling of compounds is that approval is given for a medicine by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, and advice is then taken from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs about the rescheduling, as happened with Epidyolex. Nothing in the legislation requires MHRA authorisation for a compound drug to be moved to schedule 2 to 5 under the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001.

The effect of the Minister’s statement means that in practice, compounds will largely not be researched to become medicines. That would require market authorisation as, under the apparent new policy, which has so far never been presented to the House, compounds can never escape the rigours and expense of schedule 1. For British scientists that is a particular barrier to the exciting science around the psychedelic class of drugs that is now more easily developed and researched in North America than it is in the UK, where the science began. For those British scientists denied the opportunity to do that research, due to the costs imposed by the scheduling, it is a constant frustration that there is no recent scientific basis to support the scheduling in the first place.

The Minister’s statement was contradictory not only in logic, but also given recent precedent because—ironically, on the basis of the example given by the Minister—market authorisation for Epidyolex was granted two years after cannabis-based medicines and medicinal products as a whole were placed in schedule 2, precisely to facilitate the prescription of non-MHRA approved special medicines.

[Kit Malthouse]

rose—

LGBTQ+ Afghan Refugees

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Tuesday 21st September 2021 Westminster Hall

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I join the congratulations to the hon. Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) on securing the debate. I follow an extremely moving account from the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (John Nicolson) about the personal circumstances of the people we are trying to assist. I have a couple of points to make, briefly and hopefully well within the time allocated.

The hon. Member for Jarrow made clear a number of issues about finding and establishing people’s credentials and the difficulty associated with that for LGBT people in societies such as Afghanistan. I welcome the statement on Afghanistan last week by my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), then a Minister at the Home Office, when she undertook to give us a point of entry, in order to get advice from officials in the Home Office who have to make these difficult decisions. It is incredibly important that there is a dialogue between people who are supporting LGBT people trying to make these asylum claims, so that they can be assisted to assist the Border Force to make the judgments necessary, in order to ensure that our country is kept safe while these individuals are enabled to be safe.

I welcome that undertaking; it is incredibly important. We failed to achieve it during the conduct of Operation Pitting. I am interested to know how many Afghan citizens got out, courtesy of the United Kingdom evacuation operation. I can understand to a degree why it may be the case that there were no LGBT people who were evacuated under that third group of people at risk, not least because we had not identified them as a cohort. They have now been so identified by the Prime Minister in his statement, which was a point reiterated by my hon. Friend, whom I congratulate on her appointment as Minister for Prisons and Probation. There are some old boys kicking around who have had that title before and would be happy to give advice, if sought.

I am also very pleased that she appears, from the list of Government responsibilities, to have kept responsibility for Afghan resettlement. It is a credit to her that, having held that responsibility for only a month, she is in a new role and different Department, but is being invited to continue because she has got across her brief so well. There are enormous hopes invested in my hon. Friend that this issue will be dealt with sensitively and effectively.

Probation Services

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I am going to try to get everybody in. However, I need to finish the statement at 12.50 pm. That will require short answers and short questions.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I will do my level best, but I was the probation Minister between 2010 and 2012. One of the proudest moments of my time was attending a dinner where the Princess Royal presented the British Quality Foundation’s gold award to the National Probation Service. The reforms that subsequently were done to probation service would not have been done by me. They were visited upon the Department to a degree by some whizz kids—bright people—some of whom are now very senior in the Government.

There were two faults. The first was that the companies were too large and did not equate with the geographical area of the police force. I would have given them, had I done it, to the police and crime commissioners, saying that they were responsible for the input and the output. A very good point was made by the shadow Lord Chancellor about engaging local authorities in all the services we have to bring to an offender for there to be a decent chance of getting them rehabilitated.

Secondly, I say to my right hon. and learned Friend that, attractive as going back to the position of 2012 might seem to me, we were trying to find the opportunities to make sure that we can get the charities, the private sector and everyone else engaged in the great work of rehabilitation of offenders. We are in many ways back to square one, but there is a huge opportunity to be grasped.

[Robert Buckland]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend. I pay tribute to the work he did as a Minister in the Department. I can reassure him that this is not a return—a “back to the future”—but a new departure. He is right that I will focus relentlessly on the need to harness the smaller organisations; we are going to do that. At force level, we will do it by working with PCCs. I have already engaged with them on several occasions about the need for co-commissioning. Where we have PCCs working together in reducing reoffending boards, I see that as another vehicle for the commissioning of truly localised services. I hear my hon. Friend, and we are going to act on it.

Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 9th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that issue. I can give her the strongest reassurance that, though at times it might appear, from some of the coverage of how terrorism is monitored in prison, that our system is failing, it is not. There are many aspects of the counter-terrorism regimen in our prisons that are world leading and which other countries are learning from and coming to us for help and advice on. I can say this about our recent announcement: the doubling of the number of specialist probation officers, and imams with specialist training, will further improve the way we deal with terrorism both inside prisons and in the community.

I can reassure the hon. Lady that, after 2017, when the Home Office and my Department came together with the joint extremism unit that deals with terrorism, a visitor to a prison with a particular specialism—Belmarsh, for example—would have seen embedded in the command and control structure police officers, probation officers, all parts of the system working jointly around a particular offender: not just monitoring but anticipating and understanding the trends, themes and information emerging. A lot of this is of a sensitive nature and it would be wrong of me to dwell too heavily upon the detail, but I can say that we have created separation centres. Those are challenging, as one should not use them on a whim and there needs to be a clear basis on which to separate individuals of known extremism from the rest of the prison population. Otherwise, there is a danger of creating an even more worrying unit or cadre of individuals who feed off each other and whose agenda of hate and terror is only entrenched by their being separated from the rest of the prison community.

The hon. Lady is right to say there is a challenging balance to be reached between separation and the danger of the proselytization of these views among other more susceptible members of the prison community, but we have the resources and are ploughing them in. The Bill is only part of the step-up approach I announced earlier this year. She can be reassured that not only is the work being done in prisons but—to deal with her point about the community—the specialist probation officers will have a community role as well. Furthermore, as I will refer to shortly, the statutory review of Prevent will give us all an opportunity to hone, improve and refine our approach to terrorism within the community.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

When I was Prisons Minister between 2010 and 2012, we abolished control orders, to which we are returning, because of the inflexibilities they created. I will speak on that in my main remarks. Will not the inflexibilities and the mandatory elements in the Bill make significantly more difficult the job of those most brilliant people in the Prison Service engaged in the rehabilitation of this most difficult class of offenders?

[Robert Buckland]

I pay tribute to the work my hon. Friend did in my Department at the beginning of the coalition Government. He is right that in many instances the removal of flexibility in sentencing can pose huge challenges, but we are dealing with an exceptional cohort—a small group of people whose type of offending is very different in my view from the mainstream of other types of offender. As he knows, I have worked in the system for many years, and I have seen individuals capable of the most astonishing rehabilitation, who have turned away from crime and gone on to lead blameless lives, but I am afraid that within this cadre of people there is a stubborn minority who are not capable of rehabilitation, who might show superficial signs of co-operation but whose agenda remains unchanged and undeterred and whose chosen path remains the same, even many years later. That is the sad reality of terrorism and I make no apology for taking an exceptional course to deal with an exceptionally difficult, troublesome, and dangerous group of people.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Robert Neill]

I take on board what the right hon. Gentleman says, and I know that the Secretary of State will as well. We all want to get this right for the sake of the national good. Flexibility and agility are perfectly legitimate considerations, but it is not unreasonable for us to have some sense of whence they come if we are going to make the case for doing something that would go against the run of our normal approach to the rule of law and safeguards. That is sometimes necessary for the greater national good, but we ought to have a pretty clear basis for doing it.

[Crispin Blunt]

Does my hon. Friend share my anxiety that the resource issue—the difficulty of setting TPIMs up in the first place—combined with the roll-over factor in the Bill means that the default position on a reduced balance of proof will simply be that the two-year TPIM will be replaced constantly? That will become the default position based on the difficulty of producing resources to effect a proper prosecution, which is the standard we want to achieve.

[Sir Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend, who has much experience in these matters, makes a very good point.

Ultimately, most of us who believe in the rule of law will always prefer to see prosecution and conviction as the best possible means of dealing with this issue. It is not always possible, but we still need to have important safeguards in whatever regime there is. I am sure the Government recognise that, but we really do need to get it right, for everybody’s sake. I hope that the Lord Chancellor will reflect on how best to make the case for this and to justify what is, on the face of it, a change that may well have much merit—one wants to give the benefit of the doubt—but that could perhaps do with a little more amplification as the Bill progresses.

The other matter that I hope that the Lord Chancellor might bear in mind as the Bill goes forward is the need for some form or other of proper judicial scrutiny of these matters. I recognise that there are plenty of safeguards in the regime that is proposed in the Bill. However, Mr Hall makes another interesting point in one of his notes: that there has been a rather troubling development of the opting out of judicial review by some suspects subject to TPIM orders. That provision was intended to ensure that there was some oversight. It is up to them whether they do that. They may not do it necessarily for the very best of motives, given the rather warped ideological nature of what drives them, but it does ironically remove a means by which best practice can be brought in hand.

That is why Mr Hall suggests that a solution would be for the Secretary of State to seek the High Court’s permission for any extension beyond a two-year length of the TPIM, in the same way that he currently does when the TPIM is first made. It would be perfectly proper to make that longer TPIM, and I can quite conceive of many circumstances when it is, but perhaps the modest requirement of an application to the Court would not be onerous in the circumstances but would put in a sensible safeguard for all such cases.

If we go beyond the two-year length of a TPIM, perhaps we should also be looking at thinking again, at some point, about what is the burden of proof. The greater the level of restriction, as the Law Society has observed in one of its briefings, perhaps the greater the burden of proof that should be required. For example, if there is a set of conditions that includes relocation, is it perhaps reasonable to expect a greater degree of care to be taken on the burden of proof in a matter of that kind, as with other matters?

Those are matters of important detail. I am sure that they need not detain the progress of this Bill on Second Reading, but they are not, I submit, something that we should lose sight of.

Finally, on polygraphs, I accept that they have been used in relation to the release of sexual offenders, but the science on them is still very uncertain. There remain concerns among lawyers and other practitioners as to their dependability in all circumstances, which is why, after all, they are not used as evidence in criminal cases for understandable reasons. I would be worried if we became over-reliant on polygraphs without some sort of proper check and balance. When they were brought in, certainly in England and Wales, in relation to sexual offenders, they had been piloted first. It will not be possible to pilot them in this case, so is there not a strong case for post-legislative scrutiny? That is the view of the independent reviewer in his note, and it seems to fit with good practice in terms of legislation as well.

Those are my points, which I hope will be taken in a constructive spirit by the Government. As someone who supports the Bill, I want to get it right. We probably do not want to have to revisit burdens of proof and mechanisms any more than we need to in future. It must be in everybody’s interests to get it right this time and make it stick for as long as this awful threat persists. I will certainly support the Bill on Second Reading, but I hope that we can have constructive engagement on the detail as we go forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

It has been a real pleasure to sit through the debate and listen to the quality of the speeches. I cannot help but reflect that both the Lord Chancellor and his shadow, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy)—both good men and good lawyers, and a fine reflection on our profession—probably, if left to their own devices, would not have wanted to deliver quite the speeches they gave. The shadow Lord Chancellor’s speech flew when he talked about the duty to try to rehabilitate and to deradicalise, and quoted Jack Merritt and considered what he would have wanted. Then, when he got into the detail, he was pulling his punches on some of the issues in the Bill that are singularly problematic. My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), the Chairman of the Justice Committee, gave a very good and wise summary of the challenges in the Bill.

My hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Robbie Moore) gave, in a sense, the speech designed to give the public reassurance that we are going to be tough on terrorists and unyielding in our approach. I say to him that it is so much more complex than that. There are so many balances that have to be struck. We need to understand what we as a society now are competing with as far as the apparent terrorist threat is concerned. The hon. Member for North Down (Stephen Farry) pointed out that our overreaction in Northern Ireland—internment, Bloody Sunday and the injustice seen in what carried huge popular support to tackle the murderous wickedness of the then Provisional IRA—meant that the terrorists were able to enjoy significant support from their own community. There is a real battle to be won against those who want to engage in murder and mayhem, perhaps for reasons that are wholly unrelated their ideology. As a society, we have to detach them from their support base, so that the community is on our side. In the end, we are engaged in a battle to protect our society’s liberal values, so we must not take measures that are plainly unjust.

On imposing mandatory 14-year sentences, the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) made the point that it is our job to impose a sentence. No, it is not. It is our job to decide what the maximum sentences ought to be, and the Sentencing Council then gives recommendations to the judiciary about the appropriate tariff. There should always be room for judges to be able to come to their own judgment about the appropriate sentence in the circumstances of the individual case that is presented to them. I have the gravest reservations about apparently securing public support by having ever longer mandatory sentences. We will do an injustice and find that we have given the opportunity for that injustice to be exploited by these people. They will then get a level of support from the communities they come from. We are working so hard with such communities, with the Prevent programme and all the other aspects of policy, to convince them that they will not be the continuing victims of injustice, and that, as a society, we are trying to address the issues that lead them in a direction where they might be minded to give some support to people who are turning on our society.

Of course, it is even more complicated than that: there is religious faith. The perversion of Islamic faith sits behind some of the violence and the motivation of some of these people, so that they think they are acting with some perverted form of God’s truth on their side. I urge my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and others to turn the board around—understand why people are coming from the place they are and why they have these attitudes. Then we will get to a better place where we are able to understand the injustice that they perceive, and we will have a chance of beginning to address it. We must address it by not betraying our own values. If we betray our values by the justice measures that we take, we might find ourselves on the wrong end of the European Court of Human Rights because we have taken measures that are manifestly unjust and unable to be reversed by our own court system, and those measures will then be reversed by the convention to which we must remain attached—we will create a further set of problems for ourselves.

I urge Ministers to consider some of the wise words of the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, the shadow Lord Chancellor and the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry). There is a degree of unanimity about the very careful set of balances we have to find here, and we need to make some changes to the Bill in Committee to get those balances right. We have to carry public confidence; I understand that. If we cannot carry public confidence, we will set up problems for ourselves. But we continue to swing back and forth on this—we abolished control orders in 2011, and here we are putting them back again nine years later—and this pendulum is not doing any of us any favours.