Offensive Weapons Bill

Debate between Earl of Listowel and Lord Deben

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 28th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I will hold the Committee for only one moment, but I very much agree with the arguments put forward by those who tabled this amendment. It seems that this is another example of saying, “We’ve got to do something, so let’s do this”. But “this” has failed. It does not work and is a disaster. There is no more stupid thing to do than to give young people short prison sentences. Countries throughout Europe have shown that it does not work and that other things do. I really am tired of people coming forward with the same answer to a problem, which does not work. Therefore, I very much hope that my noble friend will say that this Government will not go on with this kind of answer. It will take time, money and resources to make sure that we have something which works, and we should learn from other countries which have found a way through, instead of repeating a failed policy.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I would like to follow what the noble Lord has said. We have seen what works in this country. Indeed, a Conservative Government set up the intermediate treatment centres. I think the noble Lord, Lord Elton, very much led this work 30 years ago. I worked in one of those centres at that time. There was a male social worker and a female teacher, so the children and young people saw a model of a man and a woman in co-operation together, being courteous and respectful towards one another. There were six boys, ranging from eight to 15. The eldest was mad about motorbikes and was just about to get on a mechanics course. I saw these boys sitting down together sewing, with the teacher’s help. If you make the right kind of intervention, you can really turn these young people’s lives around. To put this in historical context, perhaps I may take my hat off to the coalition Government, as we have reduced the number of children and young people in prison in this country by 71% over the last seven or so years.

We have been through this process before. I remember that about 10 or 15 years ago, there was an outcry about mobile phone theft and various pushes to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, but really being tough on crime was putting more and more young people in custody. What did we see there? A boy who had just entered care, on his first or second day in a children’s home, was with a group of children and one of them stole a mobile phone. He ended up in court and there were no suitable places for him in custody, so he was placed in an insecure prison and ended up hanging himself within two days. His mother has been grieving for him ever since. As a trustee of a mental health service for adolescents, I know that adolescents become more and more interested in their peer group. So when you send a child off to one of our young offender institutions or secure training centres, you send them into a peer group where they will get the best information about how to join a gang or be destructive.

On some occasions it may be necessary to do that, if they are too dangerous. But leave it to the judges and magistrates to decide that; do not tie their hands. I know there will be exceptions, but I suggest to your Lordships that we do not want to tie the judiciary’s hands in this case, and having mandatory sentencing is not helpful.

I have been a trustee of the Michael Sieff Foundation, which was set up around the time of the Children Act 1989. I had the privilege of working for several years with Dr Eileen Vizard, a forensic child psychiatrist who worked with the NSPCC. She made the point that, once the criminal justice system gets children into the secure estate, they are likely to keep on coming back, and so we should try not to get them in there.

I share the conviction of all the noble Lords who have spoken in Committee today. I hope that the Minister can give us some comfort in his response.

Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Debate between Earl of Listowel and Lord Deben

Wednesday 22nd October 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham about delaying proceedings on this matter to give us more time to consider the detail before anything is put in place. I wish, as always, that I could support the Government because of their tremendous achievement, which must be repeated again and again, in taking 2,000 children out of custody in the past four or five years. Because of their humane achievement in bringing the number down from the all-time high of 3,000 children in custody—a number that was deplored by Members on all sides of your Lordships’ House—to, potentially, only 1,000 by this Christmas, I wish in my heart to support the Government as far as possible. I would also like to support them because the idea of basing an approach on education is, of course, immensely appealing.

There are, however, in these provisions shortcomings that have already been described. My concern is particularly about the risks that young people may experience in such a setting. On a recent visit to a young offender institution—I shall try not to repeat what I said in Committee, but I will repeat this point—I was given the example of 15 young people attacking two. When I first visited a YOI 15 years ago, there might have been three or four people attacking one or two, but with the gang culture now, it is normal—and a great source of worry and consideration to the governor and the prison officers—to have members of different gangs in prison, and to have to think about how to stop large numbers of boys beating up small numbers of boys. That is one aspect of risk.

Because the Government have been so successful in reducing the number of juveniles in the secure estate, we now have only the most troubled and challenging young people there. That may help to explain why it is difficult to reduce the reoffending rate further. It also means that those people are putting each other at greater risk than was the case in the past. Moreover, I learnt in an early experience of speaking to a prison officer that, contrary to expectation, people tend to be more challenging the younger they are, rather than it being the older ones who are most challenging. The older ones seem to have developed some sense of what one does and what one does not do, but the young ones just do not have that sense, so they can be very difficult to manage.

May I take your Lordships back to 1998, and the setting up of the first secure training centre at Medway? Some of your Lordships may remember Lord Williams of Mostyn coming to this House shamefacedly following the riot there, when in the space of just two hours eight or nine 12 to 14 year-olds caused hundreds of thousands of pounds-worth of damage and injured three of the staff. I think—perhaps the noble Lord will correct me if I am wrong—that the main issue was that the quality of staff was not appropriate to the needs of those young people. It had not been thought through beforehand what kind of staffing was necessary to meet their needs. So my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham has a very good point: we as parliamentarians should think extremely carefully about these vulnerable young people, who can be so damaged.

I am reminded of another example which, again, occurred under a previous Administration—namely, the setting up of Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre. It was established as a secure centre for children and their parents on the plan of a prison; indeed, it was identical to a prison. One could go into the reception area of Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre and have very much the same experience as going into a prison. A mother with an eight year-old child would have to walk through a barred gate. One has to ask oneself what the child thought of the experience of walking into a prison through a barred gate. Who gave any thought to what it would be like for children to be placed in that setting, run by a prison governor, if I remember correctly, and manned by prison officers? This caused outrage for 10 years.

The former Children’s Commissioner, Professor Aynsley-Green, repeatedly produced reports on this setting and very gradually the environment was ameliorated considerably over time. But how much better it would have been if consideration had been given well beforehand to what the needs of children and families kept in a secure setting would be—infants, eight year-olds, 16 year-olds with their mothers—and whether a prison would be suitable accommodation for them. This issue needs to be given the closest attention and most careful thought because we are talking about some of the most vulnerable young people in our society.

In conclusion, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, talked about the health and mental health needs of these young people. Many of them will have experienced the care system. In many cases, before they went into the care system, they experienced repeated trauma throughout their lives, had dysfunctional families and were betrayed by the people they most trusted. There was no help available from within their families and they were very damaged by the time they entered care. In those circumstances it is vital that the proposed setting has a very good team of mental health professionals to support young people and the staff who work with such vulnerable young people. I share others’ misgivings. I wish that I could be more generous towards the Government because I applaud them for what they have achieved elsewhere for these young people. I hope that the House will support my noble friend’s amendment to give us more thinking space.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, in my maiden speech I said that one of the things I wanted to concentrate on in this House was social justice. We are talking about what for me is one of the very central issues of social justice—that is, how you deal with those who are most troublesome to society. You can measure a society by how it deals with those who cause it most difficulty.

As a Member of Parliament, I found the visits to the young offender institution in my former constituency among the most troubling that I ever made because you met young men who had never had a chance of any kind whatever in their lives and you recognised that they could so easily have been your own sons. You also recognised how privileged your own children were, not in terms of money or any of the things which are foolishly trotted out by egalitarians, but just by the fact that they were loved.

That leads me to be very worried about any measures which are hurriedly introduced because I think this is a very difficult issue. It is very hard to get these things right. I come back to personal experience. If you bring up children in a loving and secure environment, it is still very hard to get these things right. It is very hard indeed and we all get it wrong. So often we say to ourselves, if we are honest, “If only I’d spent a bit more time thinking about that and taken a bit more advice about it, I might not have made such a blooming mess of it”.

Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Debate between Earl of Listowel and Lord Deben

Monday 8th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, he has made many important points but in his first point I think he was saying that there is no risk of confusion in the public mind and no need for this differentiation because it is all clear. However, is there not a risk in terms of raising children? There is a real question in the public mind about having children raised by, for instance, two men or two women and about children being raised without a father. I must not go on, of course, and this is a simple question. However, there is confusion, and is not the benefit of this amendment that there would be less confusion?

[Lord Deben]

I very much thank the noble Earl for that question. It would be germane if we were in France and debating the French changes, because France changed the law about adoption. The whole system was changed. We, of course, are not changing the law, as that provision is already there and is not altered at all. If that was where we were and what we were doing, there would be a different argument because I have to tell the House that I have a huge problem with the creation of babies in a world in which there are so many babies waiting for adoption. I have not yet come to believe that there is enough evidence to say that same-sex adoption is the same as or equal to opposite-sex adoption, but none of those issues is before us today. If they were, we would have a different argument. Because they are not, the proposed change is naked and unashamed. It is not about children or any of those things. It is about two different sorts of marriage and the difference will be upheld by those of ill will and by some of those of ignorant will, and we should not have it.