Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Hope of Craighead and Earl Attlee

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Wednesday 17th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I have some sympathy for the noble Earl’s amendment because of two experiences of mine. First, I had to undergo 10 weeks of basic compliance training when I did my National Service. It had many of the elements listed here. Hope for the future was there. Certainly, a lot of attention was paid to dress and bearing, teamwork, first aid training, conduct and anger management, fieldcraft and so on. I underwent that for 10 weeks as a recruit. Later in my national service, having become a commissioned officer, I was responsible for training recruits, and I noticed a remarkable difference in their behaviour and appearance between the beginning and the end of the 10 weeks. That impressed on me the value of the training that the Army was then able to provide.

At a later stage in my life, when I was prosecuting criminals, usually in Glasgow High Court, a lot of those who were being prosecuted I could see in my mind’s eye as people who might have been among my platoons of people undergoing training. My great regret was that we had not been able to get hold of them before the gang fights took place that led them to being prosecuted and ultimately going to prison. There is a lot of force in what the noble Earl has suggested. In those days—I am talking about my national service days—there was an enormous force available within the Army to conduct all these procedures. This is not easily managed. You are required to train the trainers and you must have the facilities. However, the philosophy and thinking behind the noble Earl’s amendment has a great deal to recommend it. He is talking about people who have already been convicted, but it would be lovely if one could intercept them before they got into the criminal system in the beginning. We cannot do that but, at least if they have been convicted, we can do something to prevent reoffending, which is what I think his amendment is driving at.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I may respond to what noble Lords have said. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, mentioned young offender institutions. When I was getting educated by Frances Crook, I asked her, “How often do inmates at a YOI get taken out on camp?” She said to me, “John, you should ask how often they are taken out of their cells.”

In response to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, I am not proposing conscription or a national service-type solution. However, the points that he makes are absolutely what is informing my thinking. He made a valid point about the need for instructors and I am not proposing the use of the military to provide that function. Prison officers ought to be taking up that role and I envisage, among other things, youngsters who trained as Outward Bound instructors who cannot necessarily get particularly well-paid employment then training as prison officers and being double-hatted. There are a lot of things that we could do if we wanted to do them.

Scotland: Independence Referendum

Debate between Lord Hope of Craighead and Earl Attlee

Thursday 30th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Lang, for initiating this debate. He has done a valuable service to the House by raising the profile of this issue at a critical time in our national affairs.

I would like to say just a few words about our legal systems and what the Treaty of Union, to which the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, referred, had to say about them. In 1606, King James I and VI said of the English system, perhaps rather to the surprise of the Scots, of which he was one, that it was the best law in all the world. His vision was for the English law system to be the system throughout Great Britain. One hundred years later, that was not how the commissioners saw matters when the Treaty of Union was formulated. What was provided there, with great care, was that Scotland would be able to keep its own legal system, which by then had developed, in all time coming. In Article XIX, it was provided that no causes in Scotland were to be heard in any of the English courts sitting in Westminster Hall. At first sight, the idea was that the two systems would be kept entirely separate, standing on their own two feet. The two would never meet: one country, two systems.

However, that is not how the union worked in practice, and it is typical of what happened in so many aspects of the way in which the union has worked. It did not take very long for canny Scots lawyers to spot that the House of Lords did not sit in Westminster Hall, and that led them to bringing appeals before this House. In 1709, the House held that it had jurisdiction to hear appeals from Scotland. That gave rise to an increasingly close association between the English and Scottish legal systems which has lasted for more than 300 years—woven into the fabric, as the noble Lord, Lord Lang, put it. That is reflected today by the fact that the United Kingdom Supreme Court hears appeals from all parts of the United Kingdom, as this House did in this very Chamber for so many years before the Supreme Court was created, and by the fact that the court now has justices from Scotland and Northern Ireland among its membership.

There is a very important question as to what is to happen in Scotland if the referendum were to result in a vote for separation. Typically, the White Paper does not say a word about that, but I am not going to say a word about it either, because our concentration today is on the United Kingdom, not what is to happen in Scotland alone. For that purpose, I want to say just a little more about how that has developed since 1707.

It took a little time before the Scots judges began to sit in this House—the first was in 1867, as it happened—but a few years later, the Appellate Jurisdiction Act was passed, which provided for permanent Lords of Appeal in Ordinary and, more or less, since then there have always been two Scots Law Lords, and now two Scots Justices of the Supreme Court. The total has reached 21 over that period, but merely to mention the figure is only part of the story. It has always been understood that the Scots Law Lords could sit on appeals from other parts of the United Kingdom—as, indeed, those from England and Northern Ireland could on Scots appeals—and this has been greatly to the advantage of all three jurisdictions.

It could perhaps be said that the Scots have pulled somewhat above their weight in contributing to the development of law elsewhere in the United Kingdom. One has only to mention the name of Lord Reid, who sat as a Law Lord in this House for 26 years, from 1948 to 1975, the longest serving Law Lord of them all, to make the point. It is not only his long service that marks him out as one of the outstanding lawyers of his generation: the quality of his judgments, the perception of the issues that they raised and their clarity were all outstanding, and are cited every day in the courts up and down this country. There is no time to go over the contribution that others have made. My part is perhaps enshrined in the fact that I am shown in a portrait in Committee Room 1 delivering the House of Lords’ last judgment in an English appeal. Earlier this month, I was referred to in a case which came from Northern Ireland and, just yesterday evening, a decision by Lord Reid in an English case was referred to in the Supreme Court. The fact is that our contributions have been built into the entire system as part of its fabric.

This brings me to the consequences for the United Kingdom if that tradition is broken. The process of cross-fertilisation of ideas across the border will cease. The tendency to prefer principle to precedent, which is one of the characteristics of the Scottish approach, is also at risk of being lost. So, too, will be the breadth of experience which has always marked Scots judges out in comparison with the specialists from England. Of course, the loss of the two Scots justices, if and when this has to happen, can be made good, but the breadth of vision which comes from having what is at present a court for the entire United Kingdom that draws its ideas from a broad canvas, cannot.

As I said at the start, it was not anticipated at the outset of the union that these two legal systems should grow together as they have, but that is what has happened, as it has been appreciated on both sides of the border that their systems draw strength from working together with each other while respecting their differences, rather than working separately. Both sides have a lot to lose if that relationship is broken—jettisoned, as the noble Lord, Lord Steel, said earlier—as it is bound to be if the right of appeal is to be ended and Scottish justices are no longer present. I, for one, would very much regret that development.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, your Lordships are doing extraordinarily well at keeping to time, but timings are quite tight. If noble Lords speak when the indicator shows seven, they are in the eighth minute. If too many noble Lords do that, we will run out of time.