Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Lord Blair of Boughton Excerpts

Monday 30th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blair of Boughton (CB)]

My Lords, I rather imagine that not many of your Lordships know that, as a young man, I wanted to be an actor. I must therefore start by acknowledging my gratitude to the Whips’ Office for putting my name in lights on the annunciator for many hours. I also apologise to those of your Lordships who have come to listen to the Statement on Europe, because I have one or two things to say. The first is that I agree with many provisions of the Bill, but the main parts of my speech will deal with two clauses that I do not think should be in it and one matter that I believe should be.

However, I must begin with an apology to the House. On 12 March this year, I asked an Oral Question of the Minister about the ban on jury research contained in Section 8 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981. The Minister and I agreed to discuss the issue and, indeed, have done so. I apologise because there is no ban on jury research for academics—there never has been and it was never intended for there to be. There is just a ban on asking individual jurors what happened in the jury room. Anonymised research on the type of case, type of court, ethnicity, gender and much more is not banned. The trouble—and my excuse for misleading the House, as it were—is that although there may not, de jure, be a ban, de facto, almost everyone thinks there is; including not only me but many Members of this House including, perhaps rather quietly, even some noble and learned Lords with whom I have spoken, before and since my Question.

I have since spoken at length with Professor Cheryl Thomas of University College London, who has conducted research in this area and on how juries work, and had it published by the MoJ. The Minister even mentioned her in his reply to my Question. However, the problem is that she seems to be almost the only person in the country who does this sort of research because most people, including most academics, appear to think it is impossible. I apologise for asking a Question that was inaccurate but I do not apologise for raising an important subject. When he replies, can the Minister agree to require the MoJ to issue, as soon as possible, new comprehensive and clear guidance on what is and is not possible in jury research and to put it on the MoJ website? This is important because, as we have seen in the past week, juries in criminal trials, and how they work, are a central and vital part of how most people view and judge the whole judicial system in the UK.

Turning now to what should not be in the Bill, I raise for the consideration of the House Clauses 23 and 24, which deal, respectively, with the corrupt or other improper exercise of police powers and privileges, and the term of imprisonment for the murder of a police or prison officer in the course of their duties. This House complains occasionally about unnecessary legislation. These clauses seem to be not only unnecessary but entirely populist and should be struck out.

I begin with the murder of a police officer or prison officer. The Government propose that such a murder, rather than being in the category of cases where the starting point on conviction is a minimum sentence of 30 years, should instead be considered in the rare category where a whole-life sentence should be the starting point. Particularly having had the experience of someone trying to kill me with a machete, I yield to no one in my view that the murder of a police officer on duty is an outrage. However, the MoJ has forgotten its history, in two ways. There is simply no evidence—no evidence at all—of the judiciary failing to accord a conviction for the murder of a police officer or prison officer on duty the utmost seriousness. In the 1980s, I served in Shepherd’s Bush police station, in whose front hall is a plaque commemorating the murder, which I am sure a number of noble Lords will recall, of three Metropolitan Police officers—Geoffrey Fox, Christopher Head and David Wombwell—in August 1966 in Shepherd’s Bush, by Harry Roberts and his associates. Harry Roberts is still in prison, 48 years after the murder. His associates are dead. What need is there, in the face of this, for a change in the law?

Secondly, the MoJ seems to have forgotten that, following the abolition of capital punishment for murder in 1965, there were continuous attempts in the years that followed to reinstate capital punishment for the murder of a prison officer or a police officer on duty. These attempts were always resisted not only by the precursor of Liberty, the National Council for Civil Liberties, but also by the police service. It was believed that a prisoner on the run after such a killing would reason that if he was to hang, he would have no compunction in killing other people, including other police officers, to escape. I disagree with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, that some prisoners do not know what the sentence is; you know what the sentence is if it is hanging. The whole-life term is the contemporary version of hanging. This clause is not only unnecessary but capable of risking lives. It is wrong.

I turn now to Clause 23 about police corruption. This legislation is not only loosely drawn but entirely unnecessary. I am sorry to hear that the Opposition will support it. I have led investigations that have led to the conviction of police officers for corruption. Police corruption is an evil; it is a permanent and corroding threat. However, neither I nor the CPS, in my experience, has ever had any difficulty in framing charges under what was then the Prevention of Corruption Act, which would now be the Bribery Act 2010, or the common-law offence of misconduct in public office. The difficulty was not the charge but finding the evidence in a crime where all the participants do not want to tell anyone about it.

That this is unnecessary legislation is shown in subsection (11), which the Minister mentioned, which states:

“Nothing in this section affects what constitutes the offence of misconduct in public office”.

Where is the evidence that existing legislation is inadequate?

When the Milly Dowler case broke in 2011, a leader in the Times—a News International newspaper—declared that what had been revealed was “police corruption on an industrial scale”. I do not think so. Since that time, the phone hacking investigation has led to the conviction of an editor, two subeditors and three journalists or specialist hackers on a News International newspaper, and 101 journalists, some very senior, have been arrested, as opposed to 26 police employees, all very junior. Twelve more trials beckon.

The oddity of the clause is: what if you substituted some other professions for this legislation about police officers? What if we put journalists or parliamentarians instead of police officers in the clause, or even NHS dentists, because they can be convicted of corruption? Would the House support that? The police are far from being without fault and police corruption is an evil thing, but this legislation has no rationale at all and has the feel of a populist reaction to the wrong target.

Lastly, I turn to a different matter. Is the Minister aware that there are roughly 200,000 children in the United Kingdom with one parent currently in prison? That is three times the number of looked-after children, who, in old money, are children in care. During their lifetime, boys who have had a parent imprisoned—I wonder whether the Minister knows this—are three times more likely to be convicted of a crime than their peer group, as well as having many more poor life outcomes. Are the Minister and the House aware that no state agency has a duty to inform those responsible for education or social work that a child’s parent has been imprisoned? There is therefore no reason for a head teacher or any other teacher to know that a child’s parent has been imprisoned and, because the other parent will probably be ashamed to explain it, that position will not change officially. However, the likelihood is that the child’s playmates will find out that the child’s father or mother is in prison, and the effect on that child and the bullying that will follow will be awful.

Is the Minister aware of the campaign entitled “Families Left Behind”, which is backed by Barnardo’s, the Prison Reform Trust and the NSPCC, among many others? The campaign is to introduce a statutory duty on courts to ask whether an individual facing a custodial sentence or being remanded in custody—after, I should emphasise, not before that decision is taken so as not to influence the decision—has a dependant, to ensure that the child’s welfare is considered by statutory agencies. Whether or not he is aware, I would ask for a conversation with the Minister about whether the Bill would be a suitable vehicle for such a statutory duty to be included in Committee. I do not believe that such a proposal has significant resource implications downstream—and downstream it may massively reduce reoffending. I hope he will agree.