Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coussins]

My Lords, the other amendments in the group are clearly consequential, in the case of Amendments 22, 23 and 26, and directly consequential, in the case of Amendment 27. These amendments are designed to preserve the status quo in our justice system for victims of international corporate human rights abuse. I am very grateful to the Minister for the further meetings he has had with me and with others since Report, and for the correspondence we have had. I readily knowledge that he wants to achieve the same things as do I and my co-signatories to these amendments, who are from all sides of the House. Indeed, I had very much been hoping that at this stage we would be announcing an agreement of some sort, and I am very disappointed that this has not turned out to be the case. I am afraid that I have not even been able to persuade the Minister to see it as acceptable to put corporate human rights abuses on the same footing as clinical negligence, as Amendment 27 would do.

I do not believe that the Government have adequately understood the impact of the Rome II regulations, which are binding on the UK as an EU member state, let alone the additional restraint and restrictions that this Bill would provide. Figures to illustrate this are very hard to come by, because of the small number of cases of this sort that have been settled over the past decade, so many have included a confidentiality agreement as part of the settlement.

However, I will illustrate the impact of the Rome II regulations with one brief example that is in the public domain: the Trafigura case, which is probably also the most well-known case, where toxic waste was dumped on a large community in the Côte d’Ivoire. There were 30,000 claimants in this case, who shared £30 million in damages—£1,000 per head. It is estimated that under the Rome II regulations, the damages would have shrunk to £6 million, making it £200 a head. Yet the “after the event” insurance premium would still have cost over £9 million. If £200 a head seems a very small amount of compensation for loss and damage to life, homes, health and community, how much less compensation would there be under the provisions of this Bill? It makes it far too costly and risky to bring the cases in the first place.

It is a question of straightforward arithmetic, added to which there is no cost to the taxpayer whatever as a result of these amendments. We have a very good system in place already, which is the envy of many other countries in the world that are looking to us to build their own system to deal with international corporate human rights cases. I appeal to the Minister even now to accept my amendments, but if he cannot then I hope that the House will support me in trying to prevent the clock being turned back for poor and vulnerable victims of human rights injustices at the hands of UK companies, which should remain accountable in practice as well as in theory. I beg to move.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, if the Government think it appropriate that the private disputes of Russian oligarchs should be settled in our courts, how much more appropriate is it that poor people in countries such as the Côte d’Ivoire, who have been treated utterly disgracefully by a large international corporation, should also be able to seek remedy in the British courts? Should we not be proud to make that a possibility?

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, the noble Baroness is to be congratulated on having persevered so well and firmly with this cause, right up to Third Reading. I remember in my early days as director of Oxfam that I was in north-west Brazil where, having travelled overnight in a rickety bus, I arrived in this very poor town. Around the tower of the church, there was a banner in Portuguese which said, “Prison bars will not prevent the truth escaping”. When I, together with the field director, probed to try to find out what had happened and what was wrong, evidently a greedy land grabber had been bribing the judge with cattle and the judge had repeatedly ordered these people off their land. They had no social insurance—nothing. They had no means of surviving but to go on farming the land they traditionally farmed. In the end, because they resisted, he threw them and the local secretary of the peasants’ association into prison for good measure.

I had gone with my colleague to discuss agriculture—wells, tools, seed and irrigation—but what became very clear was that these people were preoccupied totally with justice. They wanted to have some resources to be able to go to the regional court and put their case before it. I can remember us sitting over some beer and doing some rough calculations, and reckoning that we could find a bit of money to help support them to go off to the regional court. One of my best moments in those formative years as director of Oxfam was when I heard at headquarters in Oxford that having taken their case before the regional court, the local judge was in prison and they were back on their land.

I tell this story because I have repeatedly found in my work with the Third World that what holds people back is a lack of justice and fairness, and what they are wanting is a fair crack of the whip. If this is true within the context of their own societies, when we move into a globalised society—with the vast power of the biggest international companies and the almost limitless resources that they have at their disposal for legal undertakings, cases and the rest—the case becomes even more obvious. I am very unhappy with this whole Bill, and have been from the beginning, because it is about limiting access to justice when surely a cause in a civilised society is to increase access to justice. If we have a serious commitment to the people of the Third World, as the Government keep demonstrating that they want to have, nothing is more important than ensuring that they can get access to justice. I really will be very despairing if the Government, even at this 11th hour, cannot respond to what the noble Baroness has argued.

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using language to which we have become accustomed over the years—“such other persons as” are considered “appropriate”. The term consultation here really does mean consultation. It does not mean just a period of grace or formality, because the consultees proposed in Amendment 41 are those who know the position on the ground. They know about the availability of conventional housing. To come back to the point from which I started, this is about housing supply and homelessness.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, it is unfortunate that the amendments tabled on this important subject by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, should have been reached so late at each successive phase of our consideration—in Committee, on Report and now at Third Reading. It is unfortunate because the House is less full than it might have been, and it is much more difficult at this stage of the evening to win a vote on an amendment opposed by the Government. If it is unfortunate for her, though, how much more unfortunate is it for homeless and vulnerable people all across the country? They will be deeply grateful to her for the passion, determination and eloquence with which she has pursued this subject, and we ought also to thank her.

We face a housing crisis in this country, and that crisis is deepening. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for the letter that she wrote to a number of us following a debate on Report on squatting. She herself has acknowledged that while the nature of the case means that it is difficult to know precisely how many people may be squatting in this country, the best estimate by academics, homelessness organisations and people who provide advice services to squatters is that there are no fewer than 10,000 people squatting and possibly as many as 50,000. Those are large numbers and those statistics, uncertain as they are, underline the gravity of the issue all the same.

What are the Government doing to respond to this problem? It so happens that today the Government have published the national planning policy framework. It is an important document with an extended two-page section in which the Government offer their thoughts on:

“Delivering a wide choice of high quality homes”—

words that may sound a little hollow to those who are homeless and those who are squatting. However, there are good intentions in the document. It is a vigorous exhortation to all concerned to act to increase the supply of housing in this country. There is a section at paragraph 51 that is very relevant to the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness:

“Local planning authorities should identify and bring back into residential use empty housing and buildings in line with local housing and empty homes strategies and, where appropriate, acquire properties under compulsory purchase powers”.

If local authorities were to act on that exhortation, that would be helpful. I would be grateful if the Minister would say how much more the Government intend to do to translate that aspiration and exhortation into an effective and practical reality. I am concerned that even where local planning and housing authorities will wish, as I am sure they will, to increase the supply of housing available for people in desperate need and to follow the particular advice that I have just quoted, it may not be easy for them because their resources have been much reduced and we are now just entering a phase in which local authorities are having to face the first and biggest part of a reduction of some 30 per cent in available resources. If they decide that they would like to use compulsory purchase powers, it is not clear to me how they are going to be able to afford to do so.

The Government’s broader economic strategy has, unfortunately, squeezed both growth and confidence, as the Chancellor was driven to recognise last week. The upshot is that the housing market is pretty well dead in the water. People do not have the confidence to apply for mortgages and bankers do not have the confidence to offer them, so house builders cannot find a market. While the private sector of housing development is stagnant, the Government have seen it as appropriate drastically to reduce funding for social housing construction. In the face of a rising population and rising demand, particularly at the lower end of the market, we are seeing reduced supply. The consequence is that rents are rising, and in the face of rising rents the Government have also judged it right to cut housing benefit severely.

The Government have also introduced their new policy for council tax benefit—a fixed budget for each local authority to limit the total that it can spend on the benefit. Our late friend and colleague, Lord Newton of Braintree, whom we all miss so much, spoke on that very topic in our debates on the Welfare Reform Bill. He asked what the position would be if there was a fixed budget for council tax benefit in a local authority area but a factory closure meant that it had to be spread across a larger number of people. He said that it was mad—that was the word that he used—and I think it is.

The noble Baroness, Lady Miller, is absolutely right to pull us up on this and to insist that, in the face of these circumstances and against the background of these other policies, now is not the time to criminalise people who may be driven by circumstances to fairly desperate actions, and to squatting in particular. It is not the time to criminalise them if they squat in a residential premise that has been unoccupied for 12 months and for which there is no planning application. She is also right to ask the Government, at the very least, to postpone implementation of this clause until they have conducted a thorough consultation with people across the country and on the ground who understand these issues. It is of course late. However, if the noble Baroness decides to test the opinion of the House, I will enthusiastically support her.

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, I shall add only a few sentences to what the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, said about the undesirability of creating new criminal offences unless there is a substantial reason to do so. Surely that argument is doubly important when the offence carries a term of imprisonment, in this case of up to 51 weeks. We all know—I thought that there was general agreement on this—that short sentences are harmful, leading to greater recidivism on the part of those so imprisoned.

If we are to create these new offences, there have to be extremely powerful arguments in their favour, whereas here the exact opposite is true. I will not rehearse all the reasons that have already been given by noble Lords as to why these provisions are unnecessary and harmful. However, keeping houses empty for more than a year is to be discouraged. People whose homes are occupied by squatters already have effective remedies. In the consultation, not only were 96 per cent of respondents against the clause, but that included the substantial opinions of such organisations as the Law Society, ACPO, the Criminal Bar Association, Liberty, Shelter and Crisis. There is also the fact that homelessness is increasing rapidly. For all these reasons, I hope that the Government will see reason and accept my noble friend’s amendment.