Victims and Witnesses Strategy

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and David Nuttall

Monday 30th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

We must ensure that the approach is proportionate and the circumstances appropriate. The hon. Gentleman, who raises a perfectly serious point, will see his question canvassed in the consultation document. It is not for me to suggest circumstances in which difficulties might arise. However, if someone was convicted for shoplifting and then, a year or two later, was the victim of an extremely serious assault in unrelated circumstances, that might be an exceptional case. If someone with a previous conviction has got themselves injured intervening to protect another victim from another crime, that, too, might be an exceptional case. I do not want to sketch out all the exceptional cases, however, because there would not be many of them. Nevertheless, I think that we can protect ourselves against challenge as long as it is possible to consider those cases. However, the bulk of criminals should not be entitled to payment from the taxpayer when they are victims of crime themselves.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

The current maximum award available under the criminal injuries compensation scheme to the most seriously injured victims of crime is much less than they would receive from a civil law claim for damages. Do the plans contain any proposals to remedy this problem?

[Mr Clarke]

That was the problem when the scheme was first set up—I remember wrestling with it 20 years ago. At that point, we had slipped into a situation in which a compensation claim was assessed as though it was a personal injuries claim in a civil court, which meant that every case took ages to litigate, lots of lawyers would turn up to make representations on the basis of large numbers of medical reports, and the costs soared. Everybody accepted that this was completely unsustainable. The compensation scheme for criminal injuries is not meant to be full compensation; it is meant to be a contribution towards covering the financial consequences of the injury. As I said earlier, it would be nice if the taxpayer could pay everybody full compensation as if it were a civil award, but frankly that was never practicable from the moment it started, and it certainly is not affordable now.

Sentencing Reform/Legal Aid

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and David Nuttall

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I agree with all that the hon. Lady has said and we will try to produce programmes that deliver what she obviously hopes we will do. First, we have all the work experience in prison that we are going to provide. We will try to organise serious work as much as possible with the collaboration of outside businesses which, for social responsibility reasons, are often very attracted to getting involved in this area. The work inside prison should be more meaningful and more like the ordinary disciplines of working life outside. It should, with luck, add to the training and employability of those inside. Then we have to tie in with the Department for Work and Pensions’ Work programme and what it is doing to try to get people skills and employment outside. Having a job to go to greatly increases the chances that an offender might not offend again and have more victims—that they might start to go straight—so this is a very important area and we are proposing to make very significant changes in tackling that side of the problem.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

Last year’s Conservative party manifesto stated:

“Many people feel that sentencing in Britain is dishonest and misleading.”

In order to start to restore the public’s trust and confidence in our justice system, if it is a good idea to introduce minimum prison sentences for certain knife crimes, why cannot we have such minimum sentences for other classes of crime?

[Mr Clarke]

The honesty in sentencing issue concerns the fact that it is not currently explained to people that sentences are likely to involve so much time in prison and a further amount outside on licence but subject to recall. We will see whether we can address that and make people understand more clearly what sentences actually imply. It was the previous Government, not us, who moved the amount of sentences being served from two thirds to half—a move that we intend to reverse in the cases of the most serious sexual offenders and violent criminals when we move away from imprisonment for public protection sentences to a more sensible system of determinate sentences.

Prisons Competition

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and David Nuttall

Thursday 31st March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I think I can. A cohort will be allocated rather than some carefully selected group, so a positive result will reflect some move in reoffending rates, with the consequent reduction in the number of further crimes and victims. I give credit to Serco, because when I went to Doncaster I broached the subject slightly tentatively there, because we were already in a competition process and Serco could just have proceeded perfectly ordinarily on the basis it had already agreed for the tenders with the previous Government. Yet Serco was positively enthusiastic, and I think it sees the pilot as a way of finding out whether it can enter into more such arrangements elsewhere in the criminal justice system.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

I too welcome the statement from my right hon. and learned Friend. Further to the previous question, in view of the fact that prisoners move around the prison estate, what proportion of a prisoner’s sentence must have been served at HMP Doncaster for that prisoner’s record to be taken into account in the statistics?

[Mr Clarke]

I will consult those who negotiated the details of the contracts and write to my hon. Friend with an answer to that extremely pertinent question.

Rehabilitation and Sentencing

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and David Nuttall

Tuesday 7th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

We are not just going to let IPP prisoners out—any of them. Release will be by the Parole Board. The Parole Board is currently experiencing considerable difficulty in evaluating whether prisoners can prove that they are a minimal risk when they are released, because it is very difficult to demonstrate that when the prisoner is in prison. We are going to readdress IPPs, to try to make them work as they were originally intended, for a comparatively small number of very dangerous offenders who pose a continuing risk, and look at the test that the Parole Board can apply. However, no one will be released until someone has assessed whether the level of risk is acceptable. It is impossible to guarantee no risk: there is nobody in prison about whom anybody could ever say, “This person is never going to be at risk of offending again.” I am afraid that, in the real world, there is nothing we can do about human nature. Quite a number of the people in prison will inevitably commit crimes when they come out, but the number who reoffend has to be reduced, the IPP ones have to handled very carefully, and the Parole Board has to be given a proper test to apply.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

Further to the reply that the Secretary of State gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey), does he agree that if we are to restore the public’s trust in the criminal justice system, there must be honesty in sentencing and that convicted criminals should serve the full length of any sentence of imprisonment handed down by the court?

[Mr Clarke]

I agree with honesty in sentencing—I have always supported that idea—and we will certainly be addressing the way in which it is explained by a judge in court, so that it is clear and comprehensible to the public. That includes explaining the term of imprisonment and the term of licence that follows—what is currently called “serving half the sentence”. The first half is in prison; the second half is subject to recall to prison, but it is served on licence out in the community. To turn the full term into imprisonment, which no one has ever done, would merely involve doubling the sentence for every prisoner. The financial objections to that are only the first ones that I would raise.

Legal Aid and Civil Cost Reform

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and David Nuttall

Monday 15th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

Serious issues arise for parents in educational cases, and, obviously, the interests of the children should be paramount, as they are in most other cases. The difficulty is that the problem to be resolved usually relies more on educational expertise than on the law, and too often we are financing people who argue about the process that has been followed to resolve problems, instead of finding the best way of resolving the merits of how best to teach the child, where the child should be taught, or what support the child should have. We believe it is simply not right for the taxpayer to help inject an element of what is really legalism into problems that should in the end be resolved taking into account the best interests of the child from an educational point of view. Some of these cases can be turned into enormous legal battles, which seem to me to be very far removed from the object of ensuring that a child is best educated in school.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

One group of people my constituents in Bury North would like to see excluded from the scope of criminal legal aid are Members of Parliament. Will the Lord Chancellor ensure that, in future, legal aid is not granted to any Member of Parliament accused of wrongdoing?

[Mr Clarke]

Considerable adverse comment was made about the unfortunate case of our recent colleagues who succeeded in obtaining legal aid for their defence because, I think, their case was listed in a Crown court that had not yet introduced means-testing. I can assure my hon. Friend that all Crown court cases that might involve legal aid will be subject to means-testing in future, and although MPs are not paid a king’s ransom, all are likely to have resources that will put them beyond the reach of full legal aid, which some of our colleagues recently obtained.