Human Rights and Civil Liberties

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I put my name down for this debate, it was not because of the suggestion about changes to our legal framework but because of the reference to culture of civil liberties and human rights. As someone who has been concerned with disability, both inside and outside the education sector, for more years than I care to remember, I feel at the moment that that group’s hard-won rights are under threat.

We do not implement the rights that we have, and the big legal Acts are seen as great threats to get people to do the minimum. We are wasting huge amounts of time, effort and human resource running between those big rights at the front and their implementation on the ground. That is not a criticism just of this Government, but of probably every Government I have known since I came to this House—and I have been here for just over 29 years. All Governments pass a big Act and the politicians go, “That’s done, so now what is the next big Act?”, and we move on. We forget about implementation, and the “performance of duty” level is not considered. If we talk about taking away any strand of the overarching legal framework, even that which we have already got seems more and more vulnerable.

There is a great deal of implementation activity in education and special educational needs. We now have a good framework, which was slightly improved by the last Government through the Children and Families Act 2014—and I think that my own party made a real contribution to making sure that young people’s rights go on until they are 25 years old. We all know that the education system is something of a conveyor belt, so it is important to ensure that, if people have a problem, they are given a little more time to get themselves back on to that conveyor belt.

But if we have a culture where rights are taken away because they are inconvenient—people do not understand and say, “There is a little bit too much bureaucracy and it is getting in the way, and you just don’t understand the real world”, which is all part of the culture of interfering with regulation—you suddenly find that the people who are dependent on support in order to become full members of society begin to feel vulnerable. Add into the mix some talk of the “scrounger culture” when it comes to disability benefits, and we will be heading backwards. I saw the wheelchair protesters who upset Parliament a few days ago, something I have not seen since the early 1990s when that sort of action was required to get the first Disability Discrimination Act through. We are not giving the impression that we are taking care of people.

I turn to the other bits and bobs in this area. Education Ministers talk all the time about “catching up” and “maintaining standards”. Some 20% of the school-age population has some form of special educational need, so catching up is not on for many of them; it is about learning differently. Working hard in special lessons will not work because that just reinforces what has already failed. Indeed, the Labour Party tried very hard in this area by investing money in after-school literacy clubs and so on. They did not make that much of an impression for the simple reason that it is not about working harder but about working smarter. If we really wanted to do something, we would not be passing another law, we would do something radical like teaching our teachers how to deal with people who do not have mainstream learning patterns.

At this point I think I should restate my interest in this as a dyslexic, but doing so once in every three debates is probably sufficient now. We should be trying to encourage people to work more cleverly, and all the talk about red tape and needless intervention by the state will actually go against what we are doing. Why is dyslexia called the “middle-class disease”? It is because middle-class parents—or exam-passing parents—expect their children to succeed, and when they do not, they ask why. Those who come from a culture where people have not passed exams say, “Well, I didn’t, so why should they?”. It is that simple. We have discovered that dyslexia is passed down through families, so guess what we have got: a nice downward spiral. Unless we implement the Acts we already have and we intervene, we will not get there.

All areas of disability have this. We have had debates about bad implementation and, for example, how some police have not been aware of autism, and how they have interacted badly with someone and then been terrified to admit that they have got it wrong. Some hotel rooms simply are not accessible to someone in a wheelchair or even, perhaps, someone who just has bad knees and cannot get in. Hotels are supposed to have dealt with that issue for decades. Unless we address the implementation of law and stop saying that everything is bad if it comes in regulations, we will create more problems. We just shift the problems.

I now intend to get a bit of reflected glory from something with which I am associated only in name but not by deed. Microlink, of which I am chairman, has been working with Lloyds Bank. We have had a good, practical example in the business environment of how to help people. I should probably give the snappy title, which is the “Lloyds workplace adjustment case study”—I can see that tripping off everyone’s tongue. With Lloyds, we discovered that if management says, “This is important”, things happen. The management has to say to the line manager, “It is your problem, so deal with it—it comes out of your budget”. Things happen if you drive things from the top. The net result was that Lloyds got absenteeism down and saved money. If law is implemented across departments and you make sure that things happen quickly and easily, you will not always have to go back to the big beasts up there. After that, you might think about changing the law. Until you have done that and have a culture that comes down and drives forward, those big Acts are needed. Without them, nothing happens and there is no potential big stick and there is nothing to achieve results.

Let us look at the culture and make sure that it goes down through the legal framework. We must implement what we have and should not be terrified of making a regulation that says that something should happen quickly or saying to someone, “Another little regulation has come in—why haven’t you done it?”. People should not be allowed to say, “But you are interfering with a great structure and you do not understand the bigger picture”. When most people talk about the bigger picture, they are talking about their own very small one. They do not understand that it goes bigger than them.

If education changes are not implemented in a school because they are too expensive for the school budget, it is not the school which ultimately pays but the taxpayer because there are people on benefits for far longer than needed. That is what we are talking about. If we continue to attack the big pillars before we have something to replace them—and we may never be able to replace them—and fill in the gaps and make sure that things work, we will always have trouble. The cultural background is very hostile to taking positive action. Please can we make sure that we look at implementing what we have already said we will do? Unless we do that, we will have very little room for any form of manoeuvre.

Criminal Justice System: Autism

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, we have addressed things related to this subject fairly frequently. The fact of the matter is that those with autism get a rough deal out of society, for the simple reason that they have problems communicating and that we are an animal who communicates all the time. If you have a problem with communication, you are always going to find yourselves in positions that are potentially stressful and breeders of conflict. If we take that into account when looking at just how many rules and regulations we have, the fact that the criminal justice system will have problems with those who have autism at least occasionally is obvious to us. We should look at how we deal with that now.

The noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, gave information about a case on which the police were found not guilty at the trial but into which there is an ongoing internal inquiry. The fact that it was severe enough to get to court suggests that something had gone wrong at this point. Look at the selfish genes of society. Having to take an issue like this to court in the first place means that there has been a fundamental mistake. If we lose track of that, no matter what the outcome of this, we are losing track of the fundamental problem. Having looked through the information and attended some of the meetings that have already been referred to, I say that the police are always going to struggle with somebody who has these communication problems. However, they know this and there are schemes in various parts of the country that are better at making the police informed. What are the Government going to do, and encourage local police forces to do, to make sure that people understand or at least have an awareness of autism?

This is not easy, quite simply because most of the problem will be at the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum—those with Asperger’s or those who will not obviously have a problem, and where the first few lines of communication will probably not be enough to establish it. There is a desperate need for training but initial police training is a very slow way of getting this into the structure. I cannot help but feel that if a senior sergeant or inspector within the force had had a look at this case and said that an apology or some form of mediation were required, we might not have had to go through that wasteful process of taking an action in court. We might not have needed such a lengthy internal procedure. We are wasting time and money by not taking on some basic awareness training within this part of the service.

The same criticism could almost certainly be made of most bits of government. I will undoubtedly make similar points about other disabilities at other times, and already have. But unless you do this, you are building up the stress levels. If we are not to keep all our disabled people, and particularly autistics, locked away but to have them interacting with society, it is a basic requirement that we allow those in the public sector at least to be able to interact with them. I am calling not for everybody to be an expert but for them to have enough confidence and awareness so that, when they establish that something is not right, they call in the right support and help. That is not too much to ask: that you know that you do not have to soldier on here, and you call in the person who knows something. You are not wasting time or resources, or causing that individual such enormous stress.

We had a debate on mental health a week ago today, in which I spoke about the problems of those with disabilities and mental health. Autistics were a large part of that group. Some 70% of those with autism are reckoned to have some form of mental health problem, and the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, has already referred to the fact that those on the autistic spectrum are grossly overrepresented within our prison system. By the way, it is very widely accepted that virtually all hidden disabilities or special educational needs are grossly overrepresented within the prison system. Therefore that should not come as any surprise. To try and avoid that, we should invest a little in training and time throughout the system, so that there is a way in which you can interact, apologise, back down and correct what has gone wrong, as far as you can. All systems will go wrong, but unless we can instil enough knowledge within the system so that we can say, “Yes; something has gone wrong and we will intervene to do what we can to put it right”, you will have these problems. Would it not have been better if that had taken place?

It is equally damning in this case because this same individual had been involved in a case three years earlier, and Bedfordshire Police had agreed to undertake some of this. If it did, clearly it did not get through to the right person at the right time. We need to make sure that we get this done, and quickly. If not, we will waste the time and resources that could very usefully be spent somewhere else. The selfish gene of society means that we deal with this and move on, otherwise we waste time and resources and make people’s lives unpleasant. That is more or less an open-and-shut case.

Rehabilitation of Offenders (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Friday 21st January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, this is not the first time that I have spoken on this subject, but our basic problem is the fact that a well intentioned Act has simply become out of date. It needs to be brought up to date for the world in which we live.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, has done us all a service by doing some of the hard pounding on the background to this issue. My connection with the world of offenders and ex-offenders is probably a little out of date, but I am assured by everyone that things have not changed much. Those who are involved are predominantly young males, who offend and reoffend repeatedly. As the noble Baroness said, they may not be the most promising candidates for employment, because they tend to have quit school at 14—that is about the average age at which they leave. They do not achieve after the transition to secondary school. When they suddenly find themselves in difficulties, they ask, “Why should I be here?”, if they come from an environment where educational attainment is not regarded as the norm. The situation is accelerated.

I have discovered from my work and various interests in the field of dyslexia that a high percentage of such young people are dyslexic, but they may also have every other type of educational problem. Often, they and the social services sector work in a downward spiral together. This group of young people will be difficult to employ anyway. If someone who has got involved in comparatively petty, low-order crime when they were very young discovers that they have to disclose that and that people can just say no to them, they have virtually no incentive to try to get out.

The proposals in my noble friend’s Bill to change the rate at which disclosure of previous convictions is required are a huge step forward. I hope that the Government will have some positive words to say to my noble friend about why his Bill is unnecessary because real attempts will be made to deal with this issue in the immediate future. We will probably find a huge degree of consensus around this House—although I am sure that at least one person will disagree—that the way forward is, if not this Bill, something very like it. If the Government picked it up—like many Private Members’ Bills, it has been polished by time and effort to get into good shape—the world would be a slightly better place as a result. The Bill is no magic bullet, but it will make it slightly easier for, and give a slightly better incentive to, young people to get out of the cycle of reoffending. The Bill reflects the modern world and the group that it is dealing with in a way that the current legislation does not, although that legislation set a good precedent when it was introduced.

I suggest that, by accepting the Bill or being assured that something like it is on the way, we would be taking a step towards dealing with the problems of offending and reoffending.

Human Rights: Spending Cuts

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

I am sure that the police have studied the text of the documentary by Peter Oborne but, as with other breaches of the law—or alleged breaches of the law—I suggest that anyone who has evidence should send it to the police.

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, would my noble friend give some consideration to the fact that we might be able better to protect human rights if we actually had a written constitution, which would make it a little bit more difficult to duck the issue if you wanted to?

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, I know that there are supporters on all Benches of this House for the idea of a written constitution. However, I remember when my old friend Lord Peart occupied these Benches and got questions like that. He used to say, “Not next week”.

Criminal Justice System

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, it is my very pleasant duty to welcome my noble friend to the House as a full Member, now that she has made her maiden speech. She has told us about her background. This is one case where not only has immigration enriched society but it has also enriched our Chamber in a very direct way. She has had a very distinguished local government career and having been in touch with issues outside the House, that will have an effect on this Parliament and beyond. She knows what she is talking about. I am not sure whether those on the Front Bench will always be grateful for that knowledge and detail, but that should be cherished by the House. Very few of us would disagree with what she said in her speech as it was based on fact and the experience of those who have had something to do with the system. It is a good beginning and I look forward to hanging on to her coat tails in many a debate to come.

As with anything to do with our criminal justice system, one is confronted by the fact that the system mops up what the rest of society fails to deal with. Ultimately, the criminal justice system and the health service deal with most of the failures in our society and that is where you find things that have gone wrong. Invariably, the criminal justice system gets the first bite at this: it tends to deal with people who have failed educationally and thus in employment. It is not surprising that one discovers very low levels of literacy and numeracy in the prison system and it is not surprising that one finds an incredibly high number of people with educational problems within that group.

When I speak of dyslexics in the prison system, for once, I am not talking about a minority. Approximately 50 per cent—some estimates are higher than that—of the prison population are in the dyslexia spectrum. That means that one in two prisoners has a problem, which means that they cannot process written material and the educational process easily, and one wonders why they are at higher risk of offending. They do not have access to jobs because of interview processes and qualifications. One has to take into account the fact that they come from what used to be called a working-class background. We are now discovering that often there are entire generations of dyslexics in families: families where the idea of reading a book or passing an exam is anathema to their entire social structure. You wonder why the problem is so entrenched.

What can we do about it? There are no dyslexic deniers here today—they are usually quite a free hit. If people with such problems are coming through the system, what can we do to lessen the impact? First, we must try to identify them early. The age of 14 seems to be when young men, who end up in the prison system, have stopped their education, having refused to attend or having been excluded from school. Often they have not been identified within the school system and I am sure that, when my noble friend returns, he will acknowledge that the Government intend to implement a programme of better identification. However, even if it were implemented tomorrow, we would still have 10 to 15 years of pupils in the school system who will not receive the benefit of being identified as dyslexic or as having other special educational needs, to say nothing of the entire population outside the school system. I hate to say it but I doubt whether any system devised by man will catch everyone. We need a process of identification to give people the right kind of help throughout the criminal justice system.

Young dyslexic men may resent any kind of authority, usually because of a bad school experience, and we have found that they tend to do badly under cross-examination in court. They may have short-term memory problems which means that they cannot identify things like numbers, dates and sequences. Eloquence was displayed by the first two speakers in the debate. However, if dyslexics find themselves in court, they are more likely to be convicted more regularly than others. For different reasons, those with Asperger's syndrome also handle that process badly.

What can we do to make the entire system aware of these problems and that probably the majority of their client base has them? How will we start to address this? Will we take this on board and work it in? If we do not, we will have a slow process of a series of assessments. Prisons are very good at assessing people who present themselves. People who move around the prison system are often assessed eight or nine times for being dyslexic; they do not actually get much help beyond that. I suggest to my noble friend and to our colleagues in Government that we look at a process of identification and explanation for those who are found to be dyslexic.

A while ago, I found an excellent scheme in Chelmsford prison for those who never go to the education unit. If you have had a bad experience when being taught literacy and spelling at school, and someone says, “Go to the education unit; they’ll teach you to spell”, unsurprisingly you will avoid it. How many noble Lords who hated games at school force themselves to go jogging three times a week? Take that example and spice it up a bit. Will we have programmes in the system for identifying people with literacy problems early on? The majority with literacy problems will already have taken that on board. Can we identify them and tell them why they cannot spell or write, which is still seen by society as a way of judging someone’s intelligence? A dialogue could then be opened. When I visited the prison in Chelmsford, the warders said to me, “Do you know what has happened where the scheme works? We have cut down on the number of assaults”. The level of tension has been removed and a lot of money has been saved in reducing the number of man hours required to process assaults. Can we therefore have a recognition that this area has to be examined not because it is a special, concentrated group but because it is part of the mainstream?

If we start to address the problem properly, we may be able to make considerable savings and make it far easier for those in the justice system to access the help on offer. I suggest that this really is one of those no-brainers in theory—in practice it will require thought and a degree of prejudice-kicking measures. I look forward to hearing about them.