Victims and Witnesses Strategy

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Anna Soubry

Monday 30th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

The right hon. Gentleman first touched on the arguments that we have been having on a wide range of other justice and sentencing issues, and on one or two subjects on which I was not aware that we had any differences on policy. The fact that he started on that basis rather led me to believe that he was not really very opposed to a great deal of what we have put forward in our consultation document.

I shall deal with the right hon. Gentleman’s specific questions. We are able to go ahead with terrorism compensation. I quite accept that it has taken some time since it was announced, and supported by us, during the time of the previous Government. We are putting it on exactly the same basis as the domestic CICS, and the time has been taken up getting the details of that scheme right. The domestic compensation scheme was left to us with an enormous financial deficit, and we are striving to make it sustainable and financeable, I hope without significant further change, in a way that it has never really been since it was first introduced back in the 1960s.

The right hon. Gentleman asked whether I could guarantee that there would be no further reductions in criminal injuries compensation. As I have just said, I very much hope there will not be. The scheme was set up in 1964 and ran into financial difficulties almost straight away. It was altered in 1996, and the last Government kept consulting on it but not doing very much. By one measure, when I took over from my predecessor there was an unfunded deficit of £750 million. We have had to find a lot of extra money from the Treasury to deal with unfunded pre-tariff liabilities, and we are trying to put the matter on a set footing for the future.

The victims surcharge will be raised in a fairer way, and I do not think there is any question of any cuts being made. At the moment the surcharge is levied only on those who pay fines. It is fair that it should be levied also on those who go to prison or serve community sentences, and that is how we are changing it. We hope to get a substantially bigger contribution from those who commit a crime, to compensate the people who have suffered from it.

As we move the detail of the current services to local responsibility and to the new police and crime commissioners, we will still provide specialist services for bereaved families nationally. We have put extra money into that, and into specialist groups, on Louise Casey’s recommendation, but we will not reduce the support for Victim Support. Support will be provided more locally and sensitively by the commissioners, who will have to build up partnerships with a lot of local agencies. We have of course done such things as putting extra money into rape support centres to open some new ones and give the current ones long-term funding security for the first time.

I concede that the last Government made considerable improvements on victims and witnesses during their term of office. Awareness of the inadequacies of how the criminal justice system dealt with victims and witnesses began to grow in the ’80s and ’90s, and it has been a fairly continuous process from the early 1990s onwards. However, we are making a significant step forward. As I said when I began my reply, I believe that the right hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends will find it quite difficult to find very much with which they disagree.

[Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

I agree with and support today’s announcement of these reforms, but does the Lord Chancellor agree that nothing in them will stop the victims of crime receiving compensation directly from the offender when sentence is passed? Some would say that that is at the very heart of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, which is currently going through the other place.

[Mr Clarke]

We are seeking to make it more of an obligation on the court to consider making a compensation order for the victim when they appear for a crime. We are also trying to address ways in which we can improve the collection of that compensation so it can be paid over. My hon. Friend touches on what ought to be a key feature of the justice system, and one that needs to be improved.

Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Anna Soubry

Wednesday 29th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I will address the extent to which we retain discretion, as determined under the bail Acts, according to which bail is granted or refused. In 2010, more than 16,000 people were in custody but were released when they appeared for trial and either pleaded guilty or were convicted. Continuing a system whereby people are refused bail when everyone knows that they will not be imprisoned if convicted is a very wasteful use of a very expensive place in our prison system.

[Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

Someone who breaches bail commits a criminal offence and can therefore, and usually does, receive a custodial sentence, especially if they did not attend court when they should have.

[Mr Clarke]

I am grateful. My hon. Friend has been in practice much more recently than the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) or I have. We will doubtless continue to study this after the debate.

The sentencing reforms are balanced. Again, I shall quote the words of my shadow, the right hon. Member for Tooting, who when I first published them in the Green Paper described them as

“a perfectly sensible vision for a sentencing policy”,

and they will in my view achieve a very significant transformation.

That brings me to the rest of the Bill covering legal aid and provision on litigation and funding. No Government look to tackle legal aid lightly, but the system as it stands is obviously unaffordable. Labour had 30 goes at fixing it between 2006 and the end of their period in office and we have sought to go back and think about what the taxpayer should pay for by way of litigation from first principles. Our priority is cases where people’s life or liberty is at stake, where they are at risk of serious physical harm or immediate loss of their home or where their children may be taken into care. After our reforms, legal aid will routinely be available in 25 areas, including for criminal cases, for most judicial review proceedings, for private family law cases involving domestic violence, child abuse and child abduction, for community care, for debt where the home is at immediate risk, for mental health cases and for cases concerning special educational needs. We modified our original proposals in response to consultation, listening carefully to the thousands of responses that we received.

Legal aid will no longer be routinely available in 13 areas, including most private family law cases, clinical negligence cases, non-discrimination employment cases, immigration cases, some debt and housing issues, some education cases and welfare benefits cases.

Sentencing Reform/Legal Aid

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Anna Soubry

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

Does the Lord Chancellor agree that it was the last Labour Government who, having introduced IPPs, then changed the law for no other reason than to reduce the prison population? As for the thoroughly good idea that we now scrap IPPs, would we not thereby ensure that the public—the victims and, indeed, the offenders—were better protected and had greater justice?

[Mr Clarke]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I think that the reason the last Government introduced IPPs was that they were reducing the time of a sentence automatically served from three quarters to a half. They introduced what sounded like a tough measure, with these new indeterminate sentences. However, it immediately went wrong, and they introduced more legislation after two years to try to reduce the numbers. I regret to say that my first effort was to go in the same direction and reduce them even more. I hope that I have my hon. Friend’s support in saying that the best thing is to get rid of them and return to a sensible system of long, determinate sentencing.

Rehabilitation and Sentencing

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Anna Soubry

Tuesday 7th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I am grateful that the right hon. Gentleman does not differ in principle. I do not think that Opposition Front Benchers do either; they certainly do not have an alternative to put forward. Knife crime is a very serious matter. We are clear that the use of a knife in crime is serious. Anybody who stabs somebody else will go to prison—they usually do and they always should. Anybody who uses a knife in a threatening way in the course of a crime should go to prison. Anybody who carries a knife in circumstances in which its imminent use is likely should go to prison.

However, we have to avoid absolute tariffs that set in statute what the punishment should be for every particular offence. That was a mistake made by the previous Government. To fill up more than 20 criminal justice Acts, they produced ever more complicated and prescriptive rules, which judges sometimes find incomprehensible and which sometimes are in danger of flying in the face of the obvious justice of an individual case or the long-term interests of society.

[Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

The majority of the people I represented who were burglars were addicted to drugs or alcohol. Does the Secretary of State agree that residential rehabilitation is usually far more effective at stopping such people reoffending than long custodial sentences?

[Mr Clarke]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. She has long experience, and much more recent experience than I have, of dealing with such problems in the courts. What we must do through, among other things, the payment-by-results approach and bringing in more private, independent and not-for-profit providers, working in co-operation and partnership with statutory providers, is find better ways of achieving better results in drug rehabilitation, the ending of alcohol abuse and the treatment of mental illness.