Transport Infrastructure (Northumberland)

Debate between Lord Beith and Guy Opperman

Wednesday 3rd September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Guy Opperman]

I seem to be straying quite a way from Northumberland, and I have not made it past page 1 of my speech, but my hon. Friend makes a fair point. Having driven through that village, I recognise that it needs a bypass.

The dependence on public transport in the rural north is strong, and the importance of proper transport links cannot be overstated, whether it is for the children who are struggling to get to school, the patients who need to travel to urban-based hospitals or the many thousands of tourists who visit Northumberland national park, Hadrian’s wall and our county’s many attractions.

On heritage, transport infrastructure is going full circle. Northumberland is the birthplace of the father of the railways, George Stephenson. He was born in June 1781 next to the Tyne in my constituency, and built the first public steam railway between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. The industrial revolution and advances in transport emanated from the north east, yet our transport legacy is showing its age. I am pleased to say that one of the finest examples of Victorian engineering, Ovingham bridge, which was opened in 1883, is being fully refurbished thanks to £3 million of pinch point funding from the Department. In addition, Wark bridge is being rebuilt thanks to the campaign that I started with Councillor Edward Heslop and many of the enterprising locals from Wark back in 2009.

I come now to the specifics and the issue of roads. All of us welcome the widening of the A1 western bypass, especially between Lobley Hill and the A184 junction, which will tackle congestion and speed up journey times. It is a key consequence of the Government’s Newcastle city deal. I for one will continue to push the Chancellor, as part of the long-term economic plan, to commit final funds for the Dual the A1 campaign, led by, among others, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), the local communities and the north-east chamber of commerce. This last stretch of dualling north of Morpeth will transform the north Northumberland economy and improve connectivity to Scotland, and, let us be blunt, save lives.

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

Would it not be a good idea, just weeks before the referendum, to make it clear that we care about the link between the north-east and Scotland? An announcement on dualling the A1 would be very helpful.

[Guy Opperman]

We could not make the case more clearly that we care that the Scots stay as part of the Union and that we hope they say “No thanks” on 18 September.

The A69 is the chief arterial route that connects east and west across the rural north. It is dualled between Newcastle and Hexham, but thereafter it is a notorious stretch of single-track road, with occasional dual passing points. It has seen too many accidents, and its limitations are holding back the growth of the economy in west Northumberland and Cumbria.

As I said, I met the Secretary of State for Transport in the summer, I continue to make representations to the Department for Transport and the Highways Agency, and I very much hope that the three key Members of Parliament who are concerned with this road will be taking forward their commitment to trying to improve in many shapes and forms the A69 west of Hexham, leading on into Carlisle. We accept—I will help the Minister on this point—that the present spending round is committed up to 2016, but I want to make the case today that the upgrading of this crucial road should be in the frame for the investment programme post-2016, leading up to 2020.

Finally, I come to the A696 as it heads to Otterburn, which only last month saw another fatality. Clearly, that is not part of the DFT strategic road network, but I welcome the recent increase in the DFT integrated transport block funding, paid by the Department to Northumberland county council for transport capital improvement schemes. The allocations to Northumberland during the last four years have increased, and last year’s £1.9 million has now risen to £2.7 million. I will be liaising with my Ponteland and other Northumberland county councillors to pitch for improvements for this road from capital funding.

No speech on roads and infrastructure in Northumberland and the rural north could go ahead without a mention of the chronic potholes that we suffer. However, I must thank the DFT for the £5.6 million to alleviate some of our many potholes, and also payments for elsewhere in the north, such that the situation has massively improved, although there are some in various parts of my constituency that, amazingly, have not been addressed.

The Minister has particular responsibility for railways, so I turn my attention to the Tyne Valley line between Newcastle and Carlisle. This is an essential link. It leaves Newcastle, which again has just had an £8.6 million upgrade, paid for by the DFT, and carries significant freight and more than 1 million passengers a year through urban, commuter and rural areas. It connects thousands to their jobs, hospitals and schools, and provides connections for the long-distance services that emanate from Newcastle and Carlisle. I am in regular contact with members of the excellent Tyne Valley rail users group, and I thank them and all the constituents who have written to me and made representations on my blog or in any other way for their help both in keeping me informed and in preparing for this speech.

Looking to the future, the potential for the line is vast. This northerly cross-country route needs greater attention. There are significant issues surrounding the timetable of the line, ticket retailing and the line’s integration with other modes of transport. The present service features very out-of-date rolling stock. The Sprinter and the infamous 1985 British Leyland Pacer trains desperately need improvement. The Pacers in particular are uncomfortable, expensive in terms of lease and repair costs, are hot in the summer and cold in the winter, lack wi-fi and offer limited luggage space, and my constituents and our tourist visitors deserve better.

Yet despite these limitations, our story locally is a positive one, because these last few years have seen improvements. Frequency on the line has increased, passenger usage at stations west of Hexham has increased markedly, and the service to smaller stations has also improved. In that context, we have the Northern rail franchise. We are all conscious that that is coming, and I want the Minister to allay concerns about the franchise. I hope she agrees that it is essential that the new franchise on the Tyne Valley line offers a timetable that gets passengers to where they want to be, at the times they want to travel, with improved carriages that run on time, and changes that make the railway competitive and more attractive to locals and tourists alike, with integrated ticketing with other transport providers. In short, we want an improvement, not a contraction, of the capacity and the services.

Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Beith and Guy Opperman

Monday 24th February 2014 Commons Chamber

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

I am very pleased to follow my fellow Select Committee Chairman, whose wise and thoughtful comments have, I think, raised the level of the debate to where the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) wanted it to be. I am not sure that the mental arithmetic of the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) is quite up to scratch, but I am sure that he can improve on it with a little practice.

The Bill contains many provisions, covering matters ranging from misconduct by jurors to automatic release, and I have no intention of commenting on all of them. However, I will make one passing comment on the issue of trial “on the papers”, which strikes me as a perfectly sensible way of dealing with summary offences of a minor character involving guilty pleas when the defendant was not going to be present anyway. It is important for the public record to be clear and immediately accessible, and I hope that we can find a way of ensuring that that happens. There should be no secret justice; it should be readily apparent what sentences have been handed out by the courts, and to whom.

I want to concentrate on three issues. The first is the issue of the simple police caution, along with the wider issue of out-of-court disposals of which it is part. The Government’s consultation on out-of-court disposals ended in January, and I should be interested to know when they will respond to it. I think that the magistrates were right to be concerned about the dangers of inconsistency around the country, and about the fact that people did not really know what was happening. However, I also think that there is real value in police officers’ ability to exercise discretion in many circumstances, and that out-of-court disposals, as a broad group, open up numerous possibilities, including possibilities for simple restorative justice.

Restorative justice exists in many forms. Obviously it exists in post-sentence form, but there are simple kinds of restorative justice which I have experienced in my constituency. In the past, a police sergeant would say to an offender “The best thing that you can do is go to the person whose property you have damaged, give that person money to pay for the damage that you have caused, apologise, and ask whether there is any way in which you can help to make good what you have done.” Such measures are worth developing as part of neighbourhood justice.

I do not want the necessary codifying of the system of cautions to be seen as in any way discouraging the use of alternatives to traditional court procedures. As was suggested earlier, magistrates can be involved in the process. The Justice Committee visited Stockport recently, and observed that magistrates had been involved in a number of developments in the Greater Manchester probation area. When I asked why they were not hostile to those developments, the answer was that they had been involved from the start. I do not want us in any way to undermine the scope for out-of-traditional-court disposals in matters of this kind, because they may offer the best opportunity to enable young people, in particular, to move away from crime rather than becoming institutionalised into it.

The Union flag that flies outside my constituency office on the Queen’s birthday and other state occasions was once torn down by some people who then rather unwisely boasted about having done so, and were therefore quickly picked up by the police. The friendly sergeant instructed them to put together the money necessary to replace the flag and to write a letter of apology, which they all did. At least one of them was planning to go into the Army, and the sergeant pointed out that that person would not want to start off with a criminal record. It was a very sensible way of dealing with the matter.

The second issue that I want to raise is that of secure colleges. I do not think that there is any disagreement with the Government’s objective in that regard. A clear indicator of the likelihood of reoffending is a lack of basic education and skills. The evidence for that is overwhelming, and I think that the Government are right to focus attention—and, indeed, resources—on the provision of basic education for young people who have been caught up in the criminal justice system.

[Guy Opperman]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Alan Beith]

I will, although I want to raise a number of points that the hon. Gentleman may wish to follow.

[Guy Opperman]

May I compliment the right hon. Gentleman on what he has said so far? Does he agree that there is potential for secure colleges to be run not just by the state, but by individual institutions, churches or charities? Academies have transformed education, and there is surely no reason why academy-style secure colleges could not be established in the longer term.

[Sir Alan Beith]

That sounds like an attractive idea. However, there are some problems to which I do not yet see a solution, although I agree with my neighbour from Hexham that plenty of people in both the charity sector and the private sector have something to contribute to the process.

The first problem, which was identified by my Committee, is that the average length of custody is 79 days. That is not a period in which a programme of education can be developed, and greatly extending periods of custody is not part of the Government’s policy. Secondly, people going into custody do not do so neatly at the beginning of a term or an academic year; they go when the courts have sentenced them. It is difficult to provide a range of basic educational courses for people who go into custody for relatively short periods and at different times, and it involves paying a price. Some of those people will be much further away from their local communities than they would have been if they had been dealt with under the previous system, especially if the college has been created at the expense of, for example, secure children’s homes. I should be very concerned if those ceased to be available because a college was being opened in a much more distant place.

I think that the Government have quite a bit more thinking to do about how they can realise their very desirable objective of providing basic education by means of some kind of secure college framework. It would be wrong to assume that it is possible simply to set up a large institution in one part of the country, and that people who are in custody for relatively short periods in a constant turnover will fit neatly into a programme of education. The objective is right, but the means have yet to be fully explained.

The “reasonable force” argument was mentioned earlier. I had a word with the Minister about that. I think that there may be some confusion about it. It needs to be made clear that there will be no breach of article 3 of the European convention on human rights in secure colleges, and that reasonable force is used for the purpose for which it is provided—that is, for the safety of those in custody or of those around them, including those who are superintending the education for the purpose of which they have been placed in a secure college. There needs to be a safe environment.

By way of offering the Government a warning of the difficulties involved, I shall quote what the chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick, said in his oral evidence to the Select Committee. He pointed out that the youth custody population is not what it was two or three years ago, for the obvious reason that it is much smaller. That means that we now have the more intractable and difficult cases in youth custody, to which we are trying to apply this new system. He said that

“the nature of the juvenile population you now have in custody is different from what it was a year or two ago. The Government need to take that into account…What you now have is a higher concentration of the most troubled, most at-risk and most risky young people, concentrated in a very small number of establishments…You have to make sure that your future accommodation arrangements can guarantee the safety”

of those young people. He went on:

“It is not simply about the number of teachers you have; it is about whether you have the staff to get young people safely from their unit to the classroom, without trouble occurring en route, and to make sure that the teaching environment is safe and secure.”

Those are big challenges for the programme that the Government have set out.

My third topic is judicial review. The Public Bill Committee will need to look closely at the proposed change in the threshold for exclusion of judicial review from it being “inevitable” to being “highly likely” that the successful challenge would not change the outcome. There could be a risk of the argument becoming about the substance of the case, rather than about process. Judicial review is supposed to be about process. It is not an appeal mechanism in which the decision is considered by an alternative decision maker; it is a review of the process that has been carried out. However, if an argument had to take place about just how likely it was that the success of the review would make no difference, that would involve going quite deeply into the substance of the matter. The wording of that proposal will therefore have to be looked at carefully.

More generally, judicial review is inconvenient for the Executive. It is a nuisance, and the initials “JR” strike fear into the hearts of Ministers and, even more, of the civil servants who are always reminding Ministers about judicial review. However, it is a discipline by which we ensure that proper process is followed. It would be unsatisfactory to strip away that discipline completely and to say, “It doesn’t matter if you get the process wrong, as long as you make sure it’s not likely to affect the outcome.” The wording of this proposal also needs to be looked at, as do some of the cost attribution issues that have been raised today.

There is a problem when judicial review is used to try to delay a case sufficiently for the window of opportunity for something to happen to be closed, but such cases are few and far between. If we leave aside immigration cases, the increased use of judicial review is nothing like as big a problem as it was thought to be. The increase was identified as being primarily a result of immigration cases. I hope that the Bill Committee will look carefully at the wording of those measures. We must recognise that we need to maintain the discipline and that, if the law requires us to go through certain processes, we must go through them. If we do not, we run the risk of bringing trouble into court. I am referring not only to the Government in this context; this applies also to a wide range of local authorities and major infrastructure industries.

It would be wrong for me to conclude without referring to a point that has been underlying much of the debate—namely, that these are aspects of the criminal justice system whose primary purposes will be addressed only if we achieve further long-term reform. I see that reform as involving primarily what my Committee has called justice reinvestment—that is, taking resources away from the damaged end of the system and putting them into the beginning, so that victims do not become victims in the first place because crimes do not happen. We must ensure that we direct the resources to the appropriate areas, just as the Government have sought to do in the transforming families programme, so that they prevent crimes from happening in the first place. We need to create a virtuous circle in which we do not need so many prison places because fewer crimes are happening. We had an opportunity to do that, and crime levels have been falling, but that opportunity has unfortunately been compromised by the difficult financial situation in which the Government have found themselves. That means that it has been much harder to prime the pump, or to put in extra resources.

That brings us right back to the ultimate purpose of justice reinvestment, which is to move resources. In order to do that properly, we need to address a matter that the hon. Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) mentioned earlier—that is, something that the Select Committee calls local commissioning. In such a system, the decisions about the resources needed to deal with crime are made by all the agencies that have to handle crime at local level. Many of those decisions are now made locally, which is a good thing, but one crucial one is not: the decision on how much money is spent on prisons and where that money is put. That is still very much a national decision and it will remain so under the Government’s present policy.

I believe that we will achieve more in crime prevention when we have a rational allocation of resources at local level by all the organisations involved. They include the police, the courts, the magistracy and the judiciary, as well as the youth offending teams and all those in the voluntary sector who are becoming involved in these processes. Quite a lot of good practice has developed—in youth offending teams, for example—and the lessons from that need to be learned throughout the criminal justice system as a whole.

Skills (North-East)

Debate between Lord Beith and Guy Opperman

Wednesday 27th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[Guy Opperman]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution; it is a perfectly fair point, which the Adonis report deals with. The north-east skills pilot is an attempt to achieve that. Some are shorter apprenticeships—no one would deny that—but the majority are exactly what he and I, who are of venerable years, would understand to be a traditional apprenticeship. [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman is looking at me as though I am ageing him too much. I am sure he is still a stripling.

Yesterday I spoke to Bob Paton, another of my constituents from the Hexham shire, who took time out to come and talk to me on exactly that issue. He described the apprenticeships offered by Accenture, a big multinational of which he is a director. Accenture’s IT apprentices spend three years in the business and complete coursework and college work on a repeated basis, at the end of which they can achieve a university degree. The apprentices are working and learning, and they achieve both an apprenticeship and a degree.

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

In this context, is it not vital that we ensure that further education linked with apprenticeships is spread more readily around the rural parts of Northumberland? Access to further education is essential to making good apprenticeships work.

[Guy Opperman]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that point. He was not quite in his place when I said that my key desire arising out of this debate was for a technical college for Northumberland, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. At the moment, there is the potential for a college linked to Hitachi in Durham, but we need something in the northern part of the north-east to address the skills gap between school and a job, which is central to fulfilling the manufacturing and engineering demands of our businesses.

Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Debate between Lord Beith and Guy Opperman

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith]

I think the right hon. Gentleman has made his point and I have given my response. The Ministry of Justice has not provided an indication of how much it would additionally need to save to afford the cost of implementing the proposals, or said how quickly those savings would be realised. That puts my Committee in a difficult position when assessing the viability of the proposals.

There are also difficulties of risk management. The public probation service will have to assure itself about the risk management of up to 200,000 offenders for whom it has no direct responsibility, and we will need to ask many questions about how information will be passed between the public probation service, the police, and private sector providers. At the moment, transfer of information is relatively easy, but under the proposed arrangements it will become more complex and difficult. I hope the Minister will say something about that. That also affects other areas. I had a discussion with a victim liaison officer who is concerned about how far information of the kind she is able to get now will flow when reassuring victims about restrictions being placed on an offender, and whether that information will come so readily through the system the Government propose.

There are key confidence issues about how the proposals can be made to work. There is a confidence issue for the police on sharing intelligence. If police officers feel inhibited about sharing intelligence with the provider of these vital services, the effectiveness of the whole process will be impaired. There is a confidence issue for magistrates when considering how they can rely on a community sentence—a significant part of the Bill is on community sentences. We want magistrates to be able to pass community sentences confident in the knowledge that they will be carried out effectively. There is a confidence issue for those who deal with victims and, currently, for probation office staff, who are uncertain as to where they will end up. If they take no definite action to locate themselves in the new system, will they finish up in the public probation service or the private sector? Which way should they go if they want the opportunity to exercise their skills?

[Guy Opperman]

I echo the concerns the Chairman of the Justice Committee outlines and accept their validity, but the idea that there is no example of partnership between charitable organisations and the police is surely negated by the St Giles Trust—the Committee has looked at the trust in great detail. The trust is a charitable sector organisation that works throughout people’s time in prison and outside in partnership with the prison, probation and all other services. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the St Giles Trust is a good example of how things can be done?

[Sir Alan Beith]

There are plenty of good examples—my Committee has looked at a number of them—but no one should start from the presumption that the existing system is the only way of managing prolific and frequent offenders. On the contrary, the reoffending figures should tell us that we must do something differently. We must harness the talents that exist in the charity and voluntary sectors, which may also exist in the private sector.