Prisons: Staff Safety

Lord Beith Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulks]

I cannot, from the Dispatch Box, give the noble Lord a detailed account of why people left the Prison Service. Of course, he is right that that indicates that quite a number of them did leave, perhaps for reasons of retirement or simply a change in their job satisfaction. But I will endeavour to give him a more detailed analysis of those numbers.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

The Minister has recognised that the present numbers are a barrier to the Government achieving the rehabilitation objectives. However, will they not remain high if we continue to regard the length of a prison sentence as the only measure of the seriousness of an offence and until we put sufficient resources into alternative punishments?

[Lord Faulks]

With great respect to the noble Lord, that is a little unfair. The judges will of course determine the length of the sentence by reference to a whole host of factors: the seriousness of the offence, the history of the offender, and the best way both to protect society but also to rehabilitate. I know that judges always consider alternatives and that sentencing prisoners to prison will only be the last resort; very often judges will say, “I will sentence you to the least possible sentence that I am permitted”. Therefore the judges do not, as it were, oversentence.

Prison Reform

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Beith]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of the total number of prisoners on their plans for prison reform.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Faulks) (Con)]

My Lords, we do not need to reduce the prison population in order to reform our prisons. We will always provide sufficient prison capacity for those committed by the courts and aim to manage the prison population in a way that gives taxpayers value for money. Prisons must be places where offenders can transform their lives. We are therefore modernising the estate and will give prison staff greater freedom to innovate. Only through better rehabilitation will we reduce reoffending and cut crime.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, at least three recent reports by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons have demonstrated how difficult it is to achieve the Government’s worthy objectives of rehabilitation when there is a very large prison population and a much reduced staff managing it. Is it not time that, alongside the rehabilitation policy, Ministers began to look at why we imprison a larger proportion of our population than any other western European country, thus committing huge amounts of taxpayers’ money to a system which does not sufficiently reduce reoffending?

[Lord Faulks]

The Government are always anxious to find out why we imprison so many people. Of course, imprisoning is done by judges, not by government. We believe that the way to reduce the prison population is to tackle reoffending. Fifty per cent of adult prisoners are reconvicted within one year and 60% in less than 12 months. We aim to get to grips with that reoffending, and that will reduce the prison population.

Criminal Cases Review Commission (Information) Bill

Lord Beith Excerpts

Friday 26th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, what a privilege it is to follow the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and to see a change that the committee I chaired recommended only a year ago being implemented. We are grateful to have his authority in taking the Bill through this House. I record also my appreciation of Mr William Wragg MP for taking the Bill through all its stages in the House of Commons, and I thank Ministers for the support they have given the Bill. February has been rather a good month for the committee I used to chair, with the Supreme Court successfully addressing joint enterprise—another of the issues we brought forward—and redefining the law very helpfully.

The chairman of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, Richard Foster, said in evidence to the Justice Committee that,

“you can be confident that there are miscarriages of justice that have gone unremedied because of the lack of that power”;

namely, the power to compel the disclosure of material from private organisations. That was a pretty serious statement. The Criminal Cases Review Commission exists to remedy miscarriages of justice. We know they occur and we know how wrong it is that someone should serve a long term of imprisonment or have hanging over them a strong sentence for the rest of their lives for something they did not do.

Of course, the problem has become more acute, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, pointed out, because a number of services that used to be in the public sector are now provided by the private sector or the non-governmental sector, such as the forensic science service and significant numbers of probation and prison services. Interestingly, in evidence to us the CCRC cited the fact that there was a large charity, mainly publicly funded, from which it had proved extremely difficult to obtain material that the commission believed it needed to deal with a case. Then there is a wider range of private sector organisations—transport companies, commercial suppliers, CCTV operators—which may have material that is necessary to establish whether a case should go to the Court of Appeal. These bodies can all be and are approached on a voluntary basis and in most cases co-operation is secured on a voluntary basis, but without some ultimate sanction we will continue to have a very serious problem.

The kind of material that the commission seeks can be crucial in surmounting the “real possibility” test. One reason the Justice Committee reviewed the work of the CCRC was that there was a deal of frustration about cases which do not get past the CCRC—people who believe they are innocent—but the CCRC does not take to the Court of Appeal cases which it does not believe the Court of Appeal will consider justified to bring forward, such as cases in which there is no new evidence. The “real possibility” test is applied. The new evidence may be in the form of material which can be verified only if the kind of information referred to already is obtained from private organisations.

That being the case, and it being an anomaly, we may wonder why it has taken so long to put it right. The usual argument was about the lack of a legislative vehicle, which I found particularly unpersuasive when we have had about two criminal justice Bills every year for as long as I can remember. The chairman of the commission said of that phrase that it,

“is something that well-meaning officials have been telling us since 2006”.

I am glad to say that wiser counsels have now prevailed. The Government have given assistance to the Bill and support for it is widespread.

There are some questions on which I hope the Minister can help us when he contributes to this debate. One that has been put to me is: are there sufficient safeguards for information to be protected when there is another principle at stake, such as legal privilege, medical information which would be damaging to the patient without materially assisting the appeal case, or journalists’ sources? That issue was raised with my noble friend Lord Lester of Herne Hill, who cannot be here this morning. He passed on to me a letter from the News Media Association, which wrote to one of the Justice Ministers, Dominic Raab, on 16 February about this. At Third Reading in the Commons, Mr Raab said there are “safeguards”; I presume that he was relying on the fact that a Crown Court judge, upon whose authority the disclosure is to take place, would certainly have in mind proportionality, necessity and a long-established understanding of the importance of confidentiality in some of the spheres that I have mentioned.

A further point is that where disclosure to the CCRC is found to be necessary, we also rely on the commission’s care in the handling of documents. Its record in that respect is very good. In evidence, the commission told us that security and intelligence organisations, which have every reason to safeguard confidentiality, co-operated with the commission because they felt safe that its document-handling procedures were good enough.

I should add that some recommendations which the Justice Committee made do not feature in the Bill. One was a provision for timely compliance in the public sector, where there is quite a lot of variation. Requests made to the courts have 92% compliance with the timetable but in local authorities it was only 67%, according to the evidence that they gave us. The Government wanted to see more evidence from the CCRC before they would be convinced that this provision was needed. The ball is therefore in the CCRC’s court to demonstrate whether it has been able to secure an improvement in that sector or whether, at some future point, we need to give attention to that.

Secondly, the Government agreed with our recommendation that the CCRC should develop a system of feedback so that all parts of the criminal justice system get a better understanding of how and why miscarriages of justice take place. The Government offered to assist and facilitate this process, which is obviously sensible. After every major miscarriage of justice case we all say, “This really mustn’t happen again—we must look at the kind of factors that led to it happening”. Indeed, the setting up of the CCRC followed just such a reaction. Does the Minister think that progress in getting feedback is happening? I hope that he will encourage it. It does not need to be in the Bill but it is important.

The third thing that the committee recommended was that the CCRC should have a significant addition to its resources. Of course, we made that recommendation when securing more resources for any public body was particularly difficult. The CCRC has had to live without any significant uplift to its resources but, in the context of the Bill, one has to ask: given that some more cases will probably be pursued because access is obtained to disclose material, will the commission have the resources to enable it to do that?

Although there were other recommendations, as I have mentioned, the recommendation which the committee believed was so urgent and overdue that no criminal justice Bill should pass through Parliament without its inclusion was the one which this Bill addresses. We now have the opportunity to put that matter right.

Criminal Legal Aid Services

Lord Beith Excerpts

Friday 29th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulks]

A Government should always say sorry when they make a mistake. This is a response to a difficult situation which confronted the Government. As I indicated, contractions were taking place within the market. There has also, fortunately, been a drop in the crime rate generally, and the need for consolidation was overtly acknowledged by the Law Society. So these changes were not, as was suggested by the noble Lord, going wholly against the grain, true though it was that many objected to those changes.

It is easy to say that this was a disaster for the department, but the noble Lord is not himself unfamiliar with changes in policy. In 2009, as he may well remember, the Labour Government altered their approach to criminal legal aid. Governments of all colours will, from time to time, in reviewing these difficult situations and in trying to balance the need for access to justice and the need to control public expenditure, adjust their plans.

What we have done has been welcomed by the profession. We have considerable regard and respect for the profession, particularly those criminal legal aid solicitors who go to the police station at highly inconvenient hours and provide valuable assistance to their clients. The profession has welcomed the abandonment of dual contracting, the suspension of the second fee cut and the Government’s intention to work with the professions, as we have indicated, to try to ensure that changes that will have to be made in due course are made with maximum co-operation from both solicitors and barristers.

Although we have not yet calculated the overall cost, this will certainly have been expensive, which is of course a matter of regret. However, if it results in stabilisation of the legal profession and continued maintenance of high standards, then that is not a matter of regret. We will of course have to accept the characterisation of this as a U-turn. I am not sure that U-turns are always quite the disasters they are depicted as in the newspapers. If a responsible government department thinks again, that may be characterised as a U-turn or it may be considered an appropriate response to changed circumstances.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, whether we regard this as a U-turn, a breath of fresh air from a new Secretary of State or simply a dose of realism in the department, it is welcome. But does the Minister recognise that a number of factors were reducing the number of solicitors doing criminal work in most towns and many rural areas, and that he will still have to address the danger that no one will be available, particularly if there is more than one defendant? While he is looking at that, will he also look at the fact that, since the scope changes, the number of claims on the exceptional cases fund has been surprisingly small, perhaps because people have never consulted a solicitor in the first place? Does that not need looking at as well?

[Lord Faulks]

The noble Lord is right that whatever the change in policy, it is important that we are satisfied that there are firms of solicitors that can represent people in whatever part of the country they are needed. When the replacement contracts come to be considered, that is clearly one of the factors that will be taken into account. The noble Lord also asked about the scope of legal aid generally and the exceptional funding provisions. They have been the subject of litigation and further clarification. One of the difficulties was that the forms that had to be filled in were perhaps not as clear as they might be. There has been considerable improvement in that regard, and the percentage of cases where exceptional funding has been obtained as a result of an application has increased considerably.

As a Back-Bencher looking at the LASPO Bill as it went through, I found the provisions on exceptional funding somewhat opaque, referring, as they did, to the Human Rights Act and Article 6. It was not always easy to know quite what the coalition Government were driving at. I think there is increased clarification of that. There has been a decision, although it is subject to appeal, but the noble Lord is right to draw our attention to exceptional funding.

Prison Reform

Lord Beith Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, I share the feeling, expressed around the House, of enthusiasm that this debate is happening, that it was so powerfully introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, and that it takes place at a time when the relatively new Lord Chancellor appears genuinely open to new thinking and radical reappraisal of some of the kinds of ideas that I pursued when I chaired the Justice Committee in the other House.

I want to try to analyse why the problem is as it is. We have to do something; we have far and away the largest proportion of our citizens in prison of any country in western Europe, at a time when there is enormous pressure on prison staff. Prison officers, instructional staff and others cannot really be expected to deliver very good results under that degree of pressure.

We all know that there are people who have to be in prison for public safety. However, we also know that the prison system is relatively weak in its record on rehabilitation. We know that it is of extremely limited deterrent value in relation to quite a few crimes and very many criminals, most of whom believe that they will not be caught and, if they are, that they will not receive a prison sentence anyway.

In the Justice Committee, I have had witnesses in front of me who said that they committed further offences in order to get back into prison; far from being deterred, they wanted to get back inside, in some cases because they could get access to drug treatment in prison that they could not get outside, and in others, frankly, because they did not really have anywhere else to go. At Christmas time or in the depths of winter, people were actually committing offences to get into prison. Another part of the problem is that the prison system pre-empts resources that cannot then be used to deal with the alcohol problems, drug addiction problems and failures in the care system and in the education system that put so many people into prison in the first place.

So why is the UK—this is true in Scotland as well as in England and Wales—set on a default course to the wrong place? Why is it that our system seems always to push up the prison population unless a real effort is made, as it is from time to time, to try to counteract it? These are the reasons I want to suggest to your Lordships.

First, it is institutionally dominant in the Ministry of Justice and the National Offender Management Service. Everything starts from the fact that we have this great big prison system and the effects of that within any management structure are quite powerful.

Secondly, prison is treated as a free good in the criminal justice system. It is commissioned nationally, whereas all the alternatives to prison are commissioned locally. When a court has an offender in front of it and is coming to a decision about what to do, at the back of the mind there will always be the simple fact that, if some kind of community sentence is required with several elements in it, it has to be established whether that is available—whether it is available locally and whether there is a place for someone to take it on. If the sentence is custody, a van will roll up outside and it will be somebody else’s job to find a particular prison to put the person in, but prison will be found, with the resulting overcrowding if necessary. The commissioning system does not work well, because things are commissioned in completely different places, which creates an imbalance in the system.

The third factor is that the prison system has been exempted from the value-for-money questions which have been applied to every public service, including defence, which of course shares with prisons this crucial importance to the security and safety of our citizens. I was very pleased to learn that the Lord Chancellor has been to Texas. The Justice Committee certainly went to Texas; that surprises most people you mention this to until you explain to them that what happened in Texas, particularly with regard to drug-related offences, is that right-wing Republicans and liberal-minded Democrats found that they agreed that they could not go on as they had been, putting more and more people into prison. The Republicans said, “This is the taxpayers’ dollar—it’s our duty as state senators to make sure that money isn’t wasted in this way”. Therefore, they reached an agreement that they should put more money into family-based programmes, nurse-family partnerships, problem-solving courts and keeping people out of prison, particularly when drug-related offences other than large-scale dealing had put them there. In our system, we now need to apply to the prison system some of the value-for-money tests which are applied to every other aspect of our system.

The final factor is that prison and the length of a prison sentence is the only yardstick by which society, and particularly the press, measures and asserts how seriously a crime is viewed. If you read a newspaper article it will ask, “Did he get more than somebody else got for a slightly less violent attack?”. We use it as a measure and a yardstick. That will not do, because it does not lead to the most effective disposition for that offender—the choice of sentence for that offender which might make them much less likely to reoffend. We have to find ways to insist and demonstrate that crimes are taken seriously when the courts impose a demanding community sentence or a community element as part of a sentence which involves custody. That has to change.

Legal Services Act 2007 (Claims Management Complaints) (Fees) (Amendment) Regulations 2016

Lord Beith Excerpts

Monday 18th January 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government are right to take action in this matter, and I certainly endorse the new arrangements that have been laid out, but it has a rather curious history. Looking at paragraph 4.2 of the Explanatory Note, I can see that it was some seven years after the passage of the 2007 Act before steps were taken to deal with this issue. The paragraph contains this rather curious sentence:

“This provision treats the designated Claims Management Regulator as an approved regulator to be levied in the same way as other approved regulators for the costs of the Legal Ombudsman”.

It goes on to say:

“However, there is currently no designated Claims Management Regulator and the function is fulfilled by the Secretary of State”.

One might have thought that he had more important things to do. Obviously, Mr Gove and his predecessor will not have been involved in this personally, but it is a curious situation that for some years there apparently was no functioning regulator in post.

The position appears to be, as the Minister has indicated, that a £500,000 shortfall has occurred in a very short period. I do not know whether he is able to indicate how many cases there were. He said that there were not many, but £500,000 is a reasonably large amount of money. It will be interesting to know how many cases there were and how many of those were from small companies, which appear to be leaving the market. But the very fact that after all these years there are clear deficiencies in how some of those providing this service are operating raises questions about the degree to which their activities are regulated in advance of the unfortunate outcome, which sometimes leads them to be subject to charges for maladministration or their conduct. Does the review to which the Minister referred encompass looking at the qualitative regulation of the industry? Should there not be a floor above which the resources of these companies should be fixed? If not, we will continue to have a situation in which, quite apart from the financial implications for the Government, people who have consulted these companies presumably are being short-changed. One wonders what has happened to valid claims that have gone astray as a result of maladministration. That side of it does not seem to be touched on at all in relation to this order, but it may be encompassed within the review. I certainly hope that that is the case, but if it is not, perhaps the Minister could undertake to look into the nature and quality of the supervision that ought to be exercised and, if necessary, what improvements should be made to what has gone on recently.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, about the rather curious nature of the regulatory arrangements for claims management companies. The Lord Chancellor left himself holding the baby when the original legislation was taken through. I never thought that this arrangement would last as long as it has. It is quite right that it should be subject to review. It is obviously right that the costs of dealing with what the noble Lord called the maladministration in the industry is visited upon the industry and not the taxpayer. Therefore, I support the order and the principle behind it.

The history of claims management companies has been one of things that go beyond individual complaints. There have been systemic changes to the way the legal system operates and attempts to turn it into an ambulance-chasing activity. We all have some worries about whether, in another area, the necessary referral fee bands have actually brought some of the claims management activities in-house, into some solicitors’ practices, where once they were precluded. This is a very difficult area and the regulatory problems that it generates are not just individual cases being badly dealt with but systemic weaknesses. I hope that when we dispatch this order successfully as an appropriate means of dealing with the costs arising from individual claims, we will not neglect some of the wider issues that this industry has generated.

[Lord Faulks]

My Lords, I am grateful for that short debate and for the contributions of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and the noble Lord, Lord Beith, who, I know, when he was chair of the Justice Select Committee had considerable concern, possibly in relation to the Compensation Act going back to 2006. At that time the question of claims regulations was certainly raised, with the emergence of claims management companies and the possibility that they were and would be engaging in unacceptable practices. That is a matter of concern generally to the Government.

The claims management regulation unit in Burton-on-Trent has been doing a good job but the Government are by no means complacent about this activity. The review being conducted by Carol Brady is wide-ranging and I do not want in any way to pre-empt its conclusions, but the Government are not going to lose sight of the potential dangers that this claims management activity can present. I take the noble Lord’s point about referral fees and the possibility that they might have the unintended consequence of driving claims away from lawyers towards claims management companies.

On the plus side, I think that the increased powers to fine companies have been a positive step, together with the fact that a number of the less reputable companies have left the market. There is something like half the number of claims management companies in existence that there were. This is at least some indication that the better ones are still active rather than the less reputable ones.

The wider point that both noble Lords make about claims management is valid. I hope that the review will assist; the Government are very much aware of the field and whether it is desirable in the long term that these companies should exist, as well as the need for regulation.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vara]

I believe there has been a rise in litigants in person, but the Government have also made a huge amount of provision to cater for that. I also say to the hon. Lady and Opposition Front Benchers, who have never said that they are going to reverse the cuts that we have made, that we need a legal aid system that is sustainable, for the people who need it, for the legal providers and for the taxpayers who pay for it.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

Has the Minister noted the Justice Committee’s conclusion that although the Government had achieved the cost reduction, there was some transfer of cost to other budgets and far too little availability of the exceptional cases fund, and that mediation, far from increasing, had actually dropped?

[Mr Vara]

May I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his question? As far as exceptional funding is concerned, the giveaway is in the title. The fund is meant to be exceptional, but some people have seen it as a discretionary fund. Not surprisingly, therefore, the numbers involved in it have been few.

I understand that the right hon. Gentleman is retiring at the end of this Parliament. Let me say what a pleasure it has been to work with him. I may not always have agreed with him, but working with him has always been a pleasure, and I wish him well for the future.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

Will my right hon. Friend take a critical look at the proposal on its way to his desk that there should be a single local justice area stretching from Berwick to Sunderland, which could lead to cases being transferred for administrative convenience to courts 70 miles away at great cost to witnesses and families?

[Mike Penning]

I will, naturally, look at any submission that comes across my desk. I am sure the Minister responsible will look at that very carefully when it arrives.

Crime Reduction Policies

Lord Beith Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray, even if it is somewhat earlier than anticipated—such was the degree of consensus about the green deal in the preceding debate.

What are the most effective ways to keep our constituents safe from crime, and how can we spent taxpayers’ money cost-effectively to achieve that objective? The Justice Committee sought to answer those questions and keep them under review, while challenging the traditional media and political debate about who can sound toughest on crime, which tends to cast no light on the matter.

The Committee’s major initiative in the previous Parliament was a substantial report entitled “Cutting crime: the case for justice reinvestment”, published in January 2010. In this Parliament, we sought to follow up that work. I am pleased to have the opportunity to discuss the Committee’s inquiry on crime reduction, which led to the production of two reports.

The first report was an interim one addressing the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, which have been the subject of several debates here and in the main Chamber. Today, I want to focus predominantly on our broader inquiry, entitled “Crime reduction policies: a co-ordinated approach?” There is a question mark at the end because we wanted to assess the extent to which there is a truly co-ordinated approach to policies and programmes for reducing crime and reoffending.

In all those reports, including the report in the last Parliament, we have been greatly assisted by our staff, especially senior Committee specialist Gemma Buckland. Witnesses, including experts, the judiciary, social work professionals, victims and ex-offenders have also been invaluable. In all those categories, we have learned a great deal from those who have been willing to give evidence to us and to receive us in their institutions, prisons, courts and various other places.

We must assume that the objective of reducing crime is shared by politicians of all parties, as well as the general public. Overall, we are all pleased to find falling rates of crime across the criminal justice system. We are not convinced that that can, in practice, be attributed mainly to the success of any particular national crime reduction policy or local policy—indeed, it follows a pattern right across western Europe. All sorts of explanations have been put forward, ranging from better vehicle security to the removal of lead in petrol, and a whole variety of others in between. There is still considerable academic uncertainty and disagreement about some of the causes, but multiple factors are at play and there is a great deal more work to be done.

That welcome reduction does not alter the fact that in our courts, prisons and on community sentences, we see a lot of people who not only commit crimes, but go back to committing more crimes when they have completed their sentences. We want the fall in crime to continue and we want to deal with the persistently high rates of reoffending. We are still in need of a supportive framework that will get to the heart of the deep-seated challenges of reducing crime and levels of victimisation. We think the Government should seize the opportunity and address two key areas that are in need of reform or development: local partnership and preventive initiatives.

On local partnership, which I think has been one of the most significant developments in recent years in tackling crime, there have been significant changes in the landscape since 2010—since our previous report —including the introduction of police and crime commissioners and the transfer of public health responsibilities to local authorities, which reflects an ongoing broader and welcome shift of power from Whitehall to local communities. That has resulted in an assortment of local accountability structures, but our evidence highlighted the clear benefits of collective ownership, pooled funding and joint priorities, all of which have been facilitated by that approach. However, there remains a considerable way to go before health can be considered a fully integral part of the crime reduction picture.

The current situation, where all local agencies are accountable but there is no single statutory leader, risks confusion and abdication of responsibility. We were genuinely worried that the number of changes taking place and the climate of financial austerity would make local partnership working much more difficult, and that it would reduce. The picture we have so far shows that that has not happened, and that institutional change and severe financial pressures have been coped with remarkably well in many local partnerships.

We are watching the situation carefully, but thanks to the good will of all involved, we have not noticed people being taken away from the table, if I may put it that way, of joint and shared activity. We did not find evidence that funding cuts had resulted in any renunciation of the commitment to work together. Indeed, local government representatives regarded further joint working as more essential, given the ongoing financial restraint.

Of course, some major elements are not around the table and not part of the process—most obviously, courts and prisons. We believe that a prison system that effectively rehabilitates a smaller number of offenders, while other offenders are rehabilitated through robust community sentences, has the potential to bring about a bigger reduction in crime. The through-the-gate resettlement support envisaged under the Transforming Rehabilitation programme might go some way to achieving that, but it is not at all clear that there is capacity in the prison system sufficiently to facilitate it. Seeing courts as purely instrumental institutions misses an opportunity for encouraging greater innovation, and we believe that there is the potential to make broader systemic savings.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Does the Chair of the Justice Committee agree with me that integral to all that is the need for proper, extensive drug rehabilitation out in the community? That seems to be a missing link, bearing in mind that 65% of all acquisitive crime—theft, in particular—is carried out by people with drug problems.

[Sir Alan Beith]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right; I agree with him and will say a little more about the issue. It always strikes me very forcefully that if a judge or magistrate is presiding over a case and sentencing, and decides that an offender really needs a significant drug rehabilitation programme as part of a supervision programme, that judge or magistrate has to find out whether it is available. If custody is the answer, however, a van will come along, take the prisoner away and it will be somebody else’s problem to find somewhere to put them, but the sentence will be carried out. That is a mismatch within the system, and it also reflects the weakness of drug rehabilitation provision in the community at large. Had that been accessible, it might have prevented that person from getting involved in the drug-related crime in the first place.

When we were in the United States, both for the previous parliamentary inquiry and the present one, we saw instances of problem-solving courts playing a much more central part in the rehabilitation of offenders. They were adapting their procedures, particularly when dealing with drug offenders, to use the collective will, both of the professionals and of all those who were coming before the court, to motivate people to get over the drug problems that were causing their acquisitive crime. It was fascinating to watch a court in Texas, for example. Those who had successfully met the conditions of their sentence were coming up before the judge and the other ex-offenders were sitting in the court applauding the success of the person who had, as it were, qualified to stay outside prison, because of the way in which they had carried out the conditions of their sentence.

I referred earlier to preventive initiatives. We are concerned by the Government’s approach to preventive measures on such things as health and substance misuse. The abuse of alcohol and drugs, as the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) said, are significant in many crimes, but their manifestations often have other root causes. The Government’s approach, which is still focused largely on the activities of the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, may over-emphasise the extent to which measures taken within the criminal justice system can tackle those problems, when a much broader spread of measures is needed involving a wider range of institutions.

It is very striking—we have come across evidence of this—to see the extent to which the criminal justice system is used as a gateway to mental health, drug or alcohol treatment. We come across ex-offenders who have committed further offences because they know that they can get either, in the most basic sense, a bed for the night in prison, or treatment, which they are having difficulty getting outside the criminal justice system. The solutions to some of those problems lie beyond the criminal justice system and the direct responsibilities of even the Minister who will answer this debate. His response might be that he straddles two Departments, which is helpful in this context, but maybe he needs to take two or three more Government Departments under his wing to achieve the co-ordination that we think is necessary.

[The Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims (Mike Penning)]

I will not make a bid to take on more Departments; I have had five in the past four-and-a-half years, which is probably enough for anybody. However, on drug addiction and the effects on crime and the community, very often, as I am sure the Committee saw in the evidence, the issue is not just drugs, but drink and drugs. There are often mental health issues and conditions as well, and there may be learning difficulties.

It is absolutely right that I serve on several committees in Government, where this issue is discussed across Government. I know that it is difficult for the Select Committee to have seen that, but the work is going on in Government. To be fair, it started under the previous Administration; we have accelerated it and pushed it on. This cannot be taken in isolation, which I think is what the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) is saying.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I am delighted that the Minister is so clearly aware of the point that I am trying to make and is endeavouring to do something about it. I wish him well in continuing to move in that direction.

A lot can be done to support people in the system to address health problems associated with their offending, but the funding of mental health services generally is crucial to that. The inadequacy of those services costs the police, the courts, probation, prisons and victims of crime a very high price. That should be an urgent cross-departmental priority of the Government as part of their national crime action plan.

I welcome the priority that my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister has given to mental health and the way in which he has tried to lift it up the political agenda and the Government’s agenda. I also welcome the work on crisis intervention, including addressing the use of police cells as a place of safety—so clearly an inadequate response to that problem—and the ongoing work to improve liaison and diversion services within the criminal justice system. I welcome the presence of mental health nurses in many police stations now and encourage the development of that. Those are very welcome initiatives. We have waited quite a while for them and we really want a network of those services. At the moment, there are a limited number of pilots, with some more due to commence shortly.

However, we know from the implementation of the Transforming Rehabilitation programme that when the Government really want to, they can get on with something and make progress quite quickly. That programme of redesigning the probation service, whatever view we take of it—whether we are for or against it—has been carried forward very expeditiously. Governments can get things done when they are determined to do so, and we would like to see some of that determination in the area that I have just described.

Another good example of where what the Government have been trying to do is in line with what we have been asking them to do, although it needs to be built on, is the Troubled Families programme, in which the Government have invested heavily. Part of the motivation is that an estimated £9 billion a year is spent on the costs arising from families with those problems—an average of £75,000 per family each year.

Of the £9 billion, only £1 billion is spent on efforts to solve the problems that are getting the family members into all kinds of trouble and difficulty, so we very much welcome the Troubled Families programme. It is an illustration of preventive investment upstream, where the amounts of funding are, against the total picture, relatively small. For example, only £17.5 million has been dedicated to extending family-nurse partnerships, which we also saw working successfully in America; £10 million was given to enhance support to local authorities to tackle gang violence; and extending liaison and diversion services is costing £25 million.

With regard to the Transforming Rehabilitation programme, we were pleased to find that the purpose of achieving crime reduction was central to what the Government were trying to do. Achieving supervision for the less-than-12-months prisoners is an objective that has eluded previous Governments. This Government are determined to do it. They have chosen a route that is controversial even among members of the Select Committee, but we recognised what the Government were trying to do.

We had a number of concerns and we are still watching to see how those are addressed and how successfully. Some have been successfully addressed. We feared that there might be areas without bidders, but that has not proved to be the case. There was confusion about what would happen if a bidder dropped out or failed to meet its contracted requirements. It is now clear that the national probation service has to step in if that happens.

We had concerns about whether perverse incentives would be created in the way payment by results was structured, but it is too soon to know for certain whether that has been sufficiently mitigated. We had too little financial information to know for certain whether the goal of under-12-months supervision could be achieved within the total budget. That was central to what the Government were doing.

Partnership crime reduction activity must continue to build in strength as resources are diminished. As a Committee, we stress that new providers of probation need to be incentivised to reinvest part of any cost savings into further reoffending reduction initiatives, and to consolidate the partnership commitment to reducing crime more broadly. It is important that the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms do not frustrate partnership approaches. The new providers must get involved in the partnership structure, and the national probation service, being now a national service, must also be structured in a way that enables it to participate at local level. We do not want it to become a distant bureaucracy.

The most important conclusion that we draw is that the Government should focus their efforts in seeking to address the wider question of how they prioritise their activity as a whole on the reduction of crime. In our predecessor Committee’s report, we said that a rigorous assessment was required of where taxpayers’ money could most effectively be spent in cutting crime. We did not feel that that exercise had ever been done. That ought to be a serious question for the Treasury. It is supposed to be the Treasury’s job to look at whether Departments are providing value for money. That is the question that it should be asking of the criminal justice system.

If we compare the investment in drug and alcohol treatment, mental health schemes and early intervention activity with some of the annual costs of inaction, it is pretty difficult to justify. Annually, violent crime, 44% of which is alcohol-related, costs almost £30 billion. Nearly one tenth of that is costs to the national health service. Crime perpetrated by people who had conduct problems in childhood costs about £60 billion; drug-related crime costs £14 billion; and the annual budget for the whole of prisons and probation is £4 billion.

We believe that what is required is a longer-term strategic approach that recognises more explicitly that the criminal justice system is only one limited part of the system through which taxpayers’ money is spent to keep our constituents safe from crime. That safety question is important, too. We are in a position in which prison is the default option for society expressing its disapproval of criminal behaviour. That is not a very good way of deciding how to spend the money efficiently; it is a way for people to look as though they have taken something seriously, without having had proper regard to whether it will prevent the person from reoffending.

Many of my colleagues in the House were puzzled that we went to Texas, which they thought of as a place where right-wing Republicans merely executed any prisoner who came into their sight. What we actually found was that right-wing Republicans and centre-left Democrats had agreed that they were wasting the taxpayers’ dollar, because they were spending more and more money creating more and more prison places to deal ineffectively with people whom they could deal with better through the kinds of initiative that I have described. So they changed the policy and we are seeing good results. That seemed to me a good example of a society looking at how it is spending its money to keep people safe and working out whether it is really achieving that objective.

In this country, we want to get away from a mere “predict and provide” approach to the criminal justice system. It is time that politicians and the media stopped using the length of prison sentences as the sole measure of the seriousness with which we treat crime, because that traps us into using expensive custody to lock up not only those who have to be locked up for a considerable time for public safety, but those who would be much less likely to reoffend if they received effective treatment, which could be provided less expensively outside the hotel envelope, if I may call it that, of the prison system.

The Justice Committee has members from four political parties and with a wide range of political outlooks, but we share a determination to make our criminal justice system more effective in protecting our constituents and breaking the intergenerational cycle of crime. What enables us to produce what are usually unanimous reports—in fact, invariably unanimous reports—is the fact that we look objectively at the evidence of what works, and develop our ideas from that starting point.

We are in an election year—the election is getting closer—and however many things we disagree about, it is important that we come through the period without engaging in a sterile contest over who can sound toughest on crime; rather, we need a realistic debate about how we can best protect our constituents. I hope that those on both Front Benches will indicate their willingness to maintain that level of debate about how we can make our criminal justice system effective in keeping our constituents safe, at reasonable cost.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I normally start Thursday afternoon debates by saying that we make up in quality for what we lack in quantity. At one stage, it looked as though it was going to be me and the Minister, which would have tested that view to destruction, but fortunately we were joined by the Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), and the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd), so we can be assured of a forensic and testing debate, but also, I hope, a well-informed one. I commend both of them on their speeches, made on the back of their report.

We welcome the aims of the report, which are to

“to examine the nature and effectiveness of crime reduction policies”

under this Government. It is an authoritative report, and the Opposition are studying it carefully with a view to implementing parts of it if we have the opportunity later this year. Although I welcome the hard work put into the report by the Committee, after reading the Government’s response, I fear that a lot of it might be falling on deaf ears at the moment.

We know that the current Lord Chancellor has a way with words, but yesterday he excelled himself when he suggested that his lack of legal training enables him to “take a dispassionate view” of matters. That undermines the legal profession and writes off genuine concerns about the effect of his legislation as mere self-interest. That is not helpful. Probation workers, lawyers, prison officers and magistrates are all let down when this Government take that sort of attitude, and particularly by the Lord Chancellor’s approach.

Ministry of Justice policies over the past four years have not been well evidenced and are guilty of a distinctly short-termist approach. The Government were warned repeatedly that their probation reforms were rushed and concerned more with structure than with outcomes. If probation is in a state of chaos, our prisons are in a state of crisis, as we have heard. The quality of prison provision has deteriorated rapidly under the current Justice Secretary.

I note that page 14 of the Committee report points out that reoffending was falling in 2010 but has flatlined under the current Government. Page 6 of the report says that we are still lacking a

“lack of rigorous assessment of where taxpayers’ money can be most effectively spent in cutting crime”.

That is quite an indictment: after almost five years of coalition Government, the Government still cannot define where they are spending public money. They could not even tell MPs how much the Transforming Rehabilitation plans would cost when they asked Members to vote it through the House.

As the report notes, the Secretary of State published no modelling or projections to support his claim that Transforming Rehabilitation would save money. That raises obvious concerns that savings will not be made and the Government will therefore not be able to afford to fund probation for offenders serving under 12 months. Those changes—that is, the creation of the community rehabilitation companies—were not driven by cost-effectiveness but by what the Secretary of State called his gut instinct to privatise the service and see what happened next.

We agree with the Select Committee that crime reduction needs to be a cross-departmental priority, but by the time someone reaches the criminal justice system, it is already too late, in many ways: somebody has already been a victim of crime. Our approach, through a victims taskforce, will be to recast the criminal justice system as a criminal justice service fit for victims. A lot of good work is going on; I pay tribute to the work done by my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) and Sir Keir Starmer, alongside the shadow Lord Chancellor and Baroness Lawrence.

The previous Labour Government were building strong cross-departmental practice in work on female offending prior to 2010. That included working with women at risk of offending, to prevent crime before it happened. Unfortunately, as the Committee noted in its previous report on Corston, the current Government disbanded the cross-departmental structures working in this area, which I am afraid is evidence of more short-termism.

We have pledged to appoint a Minister with responsibility for mental health in the Ministry of Justice, to join up the health and criminal justice agendas. We agree with the Committee that it is important for probation to be represented on health and wellbeing boards, and we look forward to the Minister’s response to the Committee’s recommendation that that representation should be statutory.

[Mr Graham Brady in the Chair]

Labour welcomes the work being done on liaison and diversion. The intention to divert offenders with mental health or substance misuse problems into treatment, or to ensure correct support through the criminal justice system, is laudable, and it is supported by Members from all parties. I hope that the Minister can give us an update on the roll-out of liaison and diversion services.

I will move on, briefly, to Transforming Rehabilitation. The Transforming Rehabilitation plans were rushed through and they were based on no evidence of what works to reduce crime. The Government did not test them to check if they worked at all before rolling them out; I think one of the first acts of the Justice Secretary was to cancel the piloting. Now probation services are firefighting and having to deal with additional strains on the system caused by the rushed fragmentation of the service, rather than focusing on reducing crime. As one witness, who is quoted on page 36 of the report, said of every time that providers change:

“We have…to take a few steps back and start again.”

Furthermore, despite the Justice Secretary arguing that the point of all this activity was to allow for supervision of offenders serving less than 12 months, the sell-off has been rushed through and there is still no certainty about how the increased supervision will work.

Later, I will refer to the views of the Magistrates’ Association, but one thing that I picked up from yesterday’s meeting of the all-party group on the magistracy is that there is a lack of clarity as to exactly when the new proposals will start. I do not know whether the Minister can confirm the start date today. What we were told yesterday was that offenders sentenced from February onwards will be subject to the new regime when they come out of custody. If we are talking about very short sentences, that could be in February itself, although it seems unlikely that we will see the results of this policy before the general election.

The successful bidders for the community rehabilitation companies are due to take over on 1 February and contracts are about to start. Labour has expressed numerous concerns about the various “sweetheart deals” and “poison pill” aspects of the contracts. Frankly, it is ludicrous that Ministers have tied the hands of future Governments to multibillion-pound contracts for a decade or more. There was no testing or piloting to see if this system would work. It means that every IT problem and failure in communication is now being dealt with on a national scale.

What is even more concerning is that the fragmentation of the service has built new problems into the system, as the Justice Secretary was warned it would. The chief inspector of probation found that processes are slower and more complicated than they were before. Staff are worried that the service is now less readily responsive to risk, and less able to protect the public from repeat offenders. However, the concerns of experts and probation staff have been ignored.

The situation is no better in our prisons. Despite the Justice Secretary’s protestations, prisons have been badly managed by this Government and are undeniably in crisis. Let me give an example. Last autumn, there was a report into the prison in my own constituency, Wormwood Scrubs. The outgoing chief inspector’s report revealed that Wormwood Scrubs is not a safe place to be and does little to rehabilitate prisoners. That is bad not only for the inmates themselves but for the whole of society, because eventually the inmates are put back on the streets without the means or attitude to reform or improve their lives. Those are some of the headlines from that report, but I am afraid reports of that kind are now published almost weekly or monthly.

The report showed that Wormwood Scrubs had declined significantly in almost every aspect. It was not safe enough, with 22% of prisoners saying they felt unsafe at the time of the inspection; over a third of prisoners reported victimisation by staff; there were five suicides in 2013 alone; almost half the prisoners surveyed said they had felt unsafe at some point during their time in the prison; only one in 10 prisoners said that they had been helped to prepare for release; during the previous three months, more than a fifth of prisoners had been released without a suitable address; many prisoners were allowed out of their cells for only two hours each day; more than 40% of prisoners were locked up during the working day, with nothing to do; there were too few activity places, sufficient for only half the population; and administrative failures meant that many prisoners attending learning and skills activities were not paid for long periods. And yet, during the same short period the population of the prison increased by 8%, from 1,170 to 1,258. Earlier this month, I received a petition from prisoners in Wormwood Scrubs, protesting about the fact that the excellent art and design department is to be closed.

The “rehabilitation revolution” that the Government promised is proving as illusory as their being the greenest Government or building the big society, or, in the case of the Liberal Democrats, abolishing tuition fees.

Page 45 of the Committee’s report shows how the chief inspector found that the overall prison system was under “strain” and that

“activity outcomes were poor and falling; too many prisoners spent too long locked in their cells, and evening association was increasingly curtailed”

and

“there were too few activity places”.

Tragically, since that report was published, things have got much worse. Page 21 refers to “prison population projections” that suggested the population was going to fall. In fact, in the week that the report was published the Government had to instruct already overcrowded prisons to take in even more prisoners, because they had closed prisons—17, I think—and were taken by surprise by the rise in the prison population.

The Justice Secretary’s prisons are not doing enough to challenge criminal behaviour; in fact, prisons themselves are increasingly violent places. Also, rehabilitative work is being cancelled because there are not enough staff to safely unlock prisoners and escort them to rehabilitation programmes.

[Sir Alan Beith]

If we are to deal with the kind of problems that the hon. Gentleman described, which exist in many of our prisons, does he accept the Committee’s general contention that we ought to use prison only for those whom it is essential to lock up for significant periods, and that we should make more use of robust community sentences rather than continuing to increase the prison population?

[Mr Slaughter]

Sentencing has to be appropriate. I entirely agree with the right hon. Gentleman that there is a need to ensure the safety of the public. That is what indeterminate sentences for public protection were designed to do. In some respects they worked, but unfortunately in others they did not work. It is a continuing problem for all Governments, and it is the No.1 priority; that has to be where we start.

As for less serious offences, it is the job of the Government to set sentencing policy, but it is the job of the courts to ensure that in each individual case sentencing is appropriate. Regarding prison numbers, the problem that we have had over the last four years is not so much the number of people in prison as the fact that prison closures, including the closures of successful prisons that were achieving rehabilitation, have been driven by a financial agenda.

That was done by a Government of whom the right hon. Gentleman is a supporter, so none of us can entirely wash our hands of responsibility. However, the objective—I think it will be shared by all of us—must be to bring down offending rates and to increase rehabilitation. That is achieved through a combination of what happens in prisons and what happens outside, but the lesson from the Select Committee’s report is that neither is working at the moment, because of the short-term solutions and, particularly in the last year, the cuts in the number of prison staff, some of whom are now being re-recruited.

Whatever the Government’s genuine intention, and I am sure that Ministers share our genuine intention to increase rehabilitation and decrease reoffending, they must have known that, after the cuts they made in October 2013 to prison resources, that was simply impossible to achieve.

Finally, I will say a few words about courts. There is a section in the report on the Courts Service, and there has been an interesting response from the Magistrates’ Association. The Minister was unable to attend a meeting of the all-party group on the magistracy yesterday due to other commitments, but we had an interesting discussion, although he would have been no more cheered by it than by what he has heard today about the Prison Service and the probation service.

Increasingly, the Courts Service is not functioning, and that is partly due to a lack of staff, ranging from ushers, who ensure the smooth running of the courts day to day, to justices’ clerks, who supervise the entire court system. Furthermore, up to one in five defendants in magistrates courts are not represented, because of cuts in legal aid, and more such cuts are planned.

However, the issue that concerned the magistrates most was what they regarded as the Government’s lack of respect. We have seen that in the cuts in training, in the attempts to cut remuneration and, most of all, in the issue of increasing responsibility, with magistrates having to take on serious amounts of work without, effectively, being allowed to run their own courts.

I was very interested in the section in the report on problem-solving courts. In terms of the ability of magistrates—not just district judges, but lay magistrates—to be involved in, and take charge of, that process, one observation the magistrates make is that there is not even a magistrates representative on HM Courts and Tribunals Service, despite the fact that they are its largest customer.

Leaving aside the financial constraints, there is a need to ensure that we use the skills that are there in the court system, and particularly those of magistrates, who give their time for nothing, who have a huge reservoir of expertise and who are hugely committed to all the principles the report deals with in terms of improving the criminal justice system. Increasingly, however, they are simply used as a convenient tool to get through the substantive work load.

We take the report seriously, and we applaud the Committee’s work in scrutinising the court, probation and prison reforms. On page 39 of the report the Committee expresses the concern—we have heard it again today—that, when choosing their language, Ministers should bear in mind the

“gulf between hard line rhetoric and the practical policies”.

I cannot imagine who the Committee had in mind—not the Minister here today, who is always very emollient. Notwithstanding the fact that we are approaching a general election, if those involved took a slightly less bombastic, heated approach and had a slightly more measured discussion of the key issues, as evidenced in the Report—I use the word “evidenced” advisedly—that would not only improve the level of debate, but increase the extent to which we achieve the aims we all share.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Alan Beith]

I thank the Minister and hon. Members for taking part in the debate. I particularly appreciate the fact, Mr Brady, that you allowed the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) to join the proceedings, because although he has been a Committee member for only a short time, he has proved an extremely valuable one. It is striking that people with quite different views on some fundamental political questions can get together in the Justice Committee and find a great deal to agree on, including a great many valuable changes and reforms that could be made. We are not agreeing because we think that everything can be kept as it is; we are agreeing because we can see ways forward that will make a real difference.

The Minister is open to much of that, but as he was describing his excitement at the possibility of a testing system for drugs, I was thinking, “Yes, but how much better it would be if we had services in place that meant that those people had never got tied up with drugs in the first place?” That is the message I want to leave with the House: there are so many things that we could do to make our society safer if we spent more money right at the beginning of people’s lives and their career towards crime, rather than waiting until later and spending it on locking them up and feeding and housing them in prison.

Question put and agreed to.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 16th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hughes]

The rules about lobbying do not fall into the same category. They are dealt with by legislation, and the hon. Gentleman has been present for debates on it. We have legislated in relation to lobbying companies; the question relates to contracts for the provision of public services, and the need—about which I hope the hon. Gentleman and I agree—to ensure that the public know exactly what is going on. As a Liberal Democrat, I hope that we can extend the rules to other public companies and to private companies that are effectively public sector monopolies, such as the water companies, which are not currently covered by freedom of information.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

The Government have never dissented from the principle advanced by the Justice Committee that information that would be available under freedom of information in the public sector should remain so when a service is outsourced to the private sector. While I welcome my right hon. Friend’s efforts in this direction, is he looking back at some of the older contracts to see whether that principle has been applied?

[Simon Hughes]

The answer is yes. My right hon. Friend and his Committee have been very clear as to the right way forward. We agree with them. There has been good practice and bad practice. The intention of the new guidance and the new code of practice is that we should monitor the situation carefully, and where bad practice follows, that should be made public so that we can name and shame those who do not deliver at least the standard that freedom of information legislation requires.