Victims and Prisoners Bill

Debate between Lord Bellamy and Lord Hogan-Howe

Committee stage
Wednesday 31st January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

I shall not be attempting to answer the email that has not yet come through until it does, but my general answer to the noble Baroness is that the whole thrust of the Bill is that each criminal justice body must take reasonable steps to promote awareness of the victims’ code among users of those services and other members of the public, et cetera. I cannot conceive how you could discharge that duty of raising awareness without informing people how to access or go to whatever services they need, so it is implicit in the operation that that sort of information will have to be provided. The way in which it is provided and the detail of it is not for the Bill but for the code and the guidance.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I am sorry to delay things, but there is one thing I am not clear about. Restorative justice at the moment is available for the suspect as an alternate to going to court, with the agreement of the victim. If the right is to be given to the victim to insist on restorative justice, is that an addition to a potential court appearance or an alternate? If the Crown Prosecution Service has decided that there will be a prosecution but the victim insists on their right to restorative justice, does that change that decision? I am not quite clear from the amendments, nor the Minister’s response, how that dilemma is resolved. It may be that I have just misunderstood, in which case I apologise, but I do not quite understand how that gets resolved.

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, I may be as underinformed as anyone but my understanding is that the classic case of restorative justice is that once there has been a prosecution and a conviction, there is a process for some kind of reconciliatory interaction between the victim and the offender—for example, of the kind that my noble friend Lord Hodgson so eloquently described—in a way which enables both parties to process and come to terms with what has happened. It is not typically an alternative to having a prosecution in the first place, as I understand it, although that might arise.

Prison Capacity

Debate between Lord Bellamy and Lord Hogan-Howe

Tuesday 17th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure the evidence before and the conclusions of the committee will be borne well in mind.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, although I support the Government’s general bid, which is to reduce the prison population—it is too high, as the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, said, and we could probably be safer even if some people were let out of prison—I do not think that the Statement is entirely persuasive in a couple of areas. First, it did not give an impact assessment of the compound effect of the Government’s measures. What will the prison population be in 12 months if all these measures are implemented effectively? The second thing that worries me is about the group of people who will now have to serve the full term of their prison sentence, some of which we can entirely understand. If you extend that list, how do those in the Prison Service easily do their job? They have to have some hope that the people who they are trying to control could have a shorter sentence if they behave well. If that list grows, what happens is that people who are in prison have no incentive to behave well and the only people who can control them are the prison officers, which makes a difficult life even more difficult.

My final point is that I do not entirely agree with the Minister’s analysis of the growth in the prison population. Covid has certainly played a role, but the prison population was accelerating well before Covid. The two aggravating factors have been the sentencing guidelines—which are always inflated and never reduced, because there is no public clamour for less sentencing, even if it is not effective—and the parole conditions. Those are the two things that have caused the prison population to expand. I am afraid that, if we carry on at the rate we are, it can only get worse. Although the Sentencing Guidelines Council is not a government-backed issue, it is something that they can affect.

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, I will take the last point first. Clearly, sentencing guidelines ought to be kept under constant review. At some point, as I said earlier, the whole approach to prison and its alternatives needs to be rethought, and perhaps fairly fundamentally. The whole debate on how much we spend on building prison capacity and how much we spend on support in the community is one that we should have together; the Government do not disagree with that.

On the noble Lord’s question about what effect these measures will have, I cannot give him any immediate figures. The short-term measures should certainly manage the short-term problem; the longer-term measures will, over time, I hope, reduce the prison population. As to it making life more difficult for some because of an increase in the number of longer sentences, I think that is an operational matter that HMPPS will, I hope, be well-equipped to deal with.