Immigration: Detention

Lord Hurd of Westwell Excerpts

Thursday 26th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hurd of Westwell (Con)]

My Lords, first, I make an appeal to my noble friend the Minister who will respond to this discussion. He has acquired a reputation for good sense and, perhaps I may dare say, for humanity, and I hope that he will listen to my short remarks with that reputation in mind. In the old days, although it may still be so, somewhere near the bottom of the Minister’s brief one would find the phrase, “if pressed”, in brackets. On special occasions, it might even say, “if hard pressed”. These phrases indicate the extent of a Minister’s discretion. I hope that today my noble friend will make full use of that discretion and perhaps tiptoe a little beyond it. In this case, he will be easily forgiven for that.

My noble friend could bring some assurance to these people whom we are discussing and who are discussed in this report. They have no certainty in their lives about when they might be removed from detention. That is a deeply unsatisfactory state of affairs, which my noble friend and his colleagues could put right. I hope that they will do so in the light of the report we are considering.

I also hope that my noble friend may find it possible to draw the attention of his right honourable friend to the exchanges which took place earlier today at Question Time when there was quite a brusque exchange between the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who I see in his place, and the Minister responding. I hope that that will be drawn to the attention of the Secretary of State because there is a lesson there. We do not want those kinds of remarks and exchanges spread to other parts of this House after the Parliament.

The noble and learned Lord has made his valedictory speech, which was, as one would expect, extremely good. He will be sadly missed. I congratulate him on a job well done. I declare an interest in that it is now 70 years since my life has been, to some extent, intertwined and run in parallel with the life of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd. During that period we have crossed swords from time to time, competed fiercely in earlier days and, in latter days I have learned to respect, admire and envy the care and keenness with which he has tackled every subject to which he has turned his attention. We had a list of those subjects in his valedictory today. He has not shown a soft or sentimental attitude to those who are convicted of crimes—on the contrary—but he has shown an overriding concern for justice, humanity and common sense.

We are greatly in his debt. He has done a great job as a Member of this House. On behalf of all your Lordships, I echo the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and congratulate him enthusiastically on a job well done.

Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Lord Hurd of Westwell Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Corston]

My Lords, I support Amendment 133A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. He suggested that my report had sunk without trace. Perhaps I may reassure him that I have not. Having waited over a year from the day when the noble Lord, Lord McNally, promised this House that we would have a strategy for women offenders which would be published “quite shortly”, found the statement released last week was acutely depressing. It was thin and took us back to the days of the women’s offending reduction programme. It is extraordinary that this can happen, particularly as I know that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, and his parliamentary colleague Helen Grant MP have been visiting women’s centres up and down the country and must have got the same message.

Why has nobody recognised the plight of women at risk of offending? It was reported in the papers that the women’s prison population had gone down by 400 since the previous Government started implementing my report. Given that the women’s prison population is, at any one time, just under 5,000, that is a proportionate reduction that the Minister might be quite proud of if it happened in the male estate. Why has it happened? It has happened because of the focus on women at risk. Magistrates’ courts up and down the country now do this work but there is no reference to it whatever. Will the Government please stop talking about payment by results? I have been in Parliament for 21 years and I have never known a Government who wanted payment without results.

Women’s centres, which work with women offenders who have been sent there by the court and women at risk, can have reoffending rates as low as 10%. There is no prison system in the world that can boast reoffending rates of 10% and yet these centres are now writing to me to say that their funding is being cut and they are finding it hard to cope. The £3.78 million, to which the noble Lord, Lord McNally, referred, is all well and good but probation trusts are, as I understand it from correspondence I have had with Helen Grant, being given the job of ensuring that that funding is spread. A smaller pot of money is being spread further so centres like Anawim in Birmingham—I challenge anyone visiting that centre not to be profoundly impressed with the work it does with very troubled women—are finding it difficult to cope. A lot of the women about whom constituents visit Members of Parliament in their advice surgeries are ones whose chaotic lifestyles lead to prison. Work done with them saves local authorities a lot of money.

I want to contrast what is happening with this advisory board with what happened before. We had a Minister, Maria Eagle, who regularly made Written Ministerial Statements on progress. That went alongside a very detailed strategy that was a thick document, not the two pages—it may have been three but it certainly was not more—that we had last week. This advisory board will work only if it has absolute overall strategic direction and a multidisciplinary team of civil servants working alongside it. I do not see that happening.

When I hear the Government say, “We are implementing Corston”, which I do not say out of arrogance but I gather that within the Ministry of Justice I am a noun and a verb, I feel my blood boil because it is not true. This Government do not understand the situation with regard to women generally, what gender-specific services are and what kind of priority should be given. If they did, it would not have taken one year and 10 days to publish what is a thin, mean document.

A huge opportunity has been missed because you cannot reinvent a broken wheel. Centres such as Anawim write to me saying, “You know what work we do and we are now finding that we are turning away women who lead chaotic lifestyles and are at risk of losing their children”. This is alongside a Bill under which we are speeding up the adoption process. What happens is that instead of helping these women who are at risk of offending to turn their lives around and keep their children, we do nothing for them and let someone else adopt their children.

[Lord Hurd of Westwell]

My Lords, I must add a word of praise for the two speeches that we have just listened to and a word of exhortation to the Minister to pursue more effectively the lines that he set out. We can welcome the steps that he outlined, so far as we understand them on first reading. Whether those steps will be taken or in some way accelerated by the fact that we are having this debate and passed an amendment at an earlier stage, I do not know. However, in attempting to make his case, I thought that the Minister’s heart was not in it. He did not really explain why my noble and learned friend’s amendment would be unhelpful. He took some pride in saying that life has moved on—meaning that the Government have moved a step or two—and that the amendment was therefore out of date. However, the Minister has not been too chary in the early part of our proceedings today in moving government amendments that updated the Bill. It would not be beyond the wit of his department to commission an amendment that would have filled any gap and brought us up to date on the Government’s latest actions, which, I understand, came to a head last Friday.

This is a black hole in our criminal justice system. In my time as Home Secretary, I visited a good many prisons, and I have visited several in the past year or so through my involvement with the Prison Reform Trust. Nothing is more desponding, gloomy or soul-destroying than a visit to a women’s prison. I do not know quite why, and I have not sorted out the logic of it in my mind, but there is something particularly disagreeable and unnatural—awful, really—about a woman in prison. When you consider the kind of offences in which women are characteristically involved, particularly those concerned with drugs, you are filled with a feeling of pity and anger that this defect in our criminal justice system should yawn so widely and take so long to deal with.

The noble Baroness, Lady Corston, is of course to be congratulated on her report, which has helped to move things on, as has the tireless work of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. They have illustrated clearly in their powerful speeches the defect. What is lacking is accountability and a person or persons whose responsibility it is to put this wrong right. Short of that, I fear that we are just being subjected to an amiable, and certainly sincere, smokescreen. They have proved beyond doubt that that is not sufficient. This has drifted on year after year, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, and now we are offered not a statute, or a promise of legislation, but an advisory board. There is an advisory board sitting in this Chamber, but unfortunately its advice is not being taken.

I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, intends to press his amendment to a vote. I am sure that the Minister does not need to be told this, but I would ask him to take away and report to his Secretary of State and to all concerned in the Ministry of Justice the strong feeling in this House that there is a black hole in our arrangements and that we look to this Government to put it right.

Police: Strike Action

Lord Hurd of Westwell Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

My answer to that is yes.

[Lord Hurd of Westwell]

My Lords, in view of the line unfortunately taken by the Front Bench opposite, would it not be a good idea if all parts of this House sent out a clear message that the inability of the police to strike, far from being an oddity compared with others, is an essential part of the relationship between the police of this country and the public? Is that not the essence of this matter, whatever the purpose of the ballot might be?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I thank my noble friend for a positive contribution which takes the debate forward. As I think I have expressed, the Government are anxious to make sure that the relationship is a good one. We are not alone in our relationship with special groups of people. The Prison Service and the armed services also have prohibitions on striking. We recognise the importance of our relationship with the police service.

Justice: Evidence

Lord Hurd of Westwell Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, it is not for me to decide when the Privy Council group should make its decisions. That must be a matter for the group itself. As I stressed at the beginning, there have been changes to the membership of that group, which has complicated matters and slowed things down somewhat. As I said, I am sure that the group will take account of the implications of the judgment in the European Court of Human Rights and of the views expressed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine.

[Lord Hurd of Westwell]

As a former member of the group that we are talking about, could I press my noble friend a little further on this point? My recollection is that some time ago we were within spitting distance, we were within reach, we were edging fast towards a settlement or compromise that would satisfy both the main parties and points of view in this complicated matter. What has gone wrong since then?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, it is not for me to pronounce on the problems that the group is having. As my noble friend knows from his distinguished service on this group, the membership has changed not once but twice over the last year or so. There are difficult issues to be addressed. I know that it came forward with one model, and there were problems with that, but I think my noble friend will accept that trying to get the right balance, to which I referred in my first Answer, between advantage, costs and risks is a very great challenge and one that we want that group to get right.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Hurd of Westwell Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My noble friend, for whom I have real affection, as he knows, has been a champion of this policy, very honourably. He knows that I take a different view. We respect each other and will continue to do so.

In this case, the situations are different. An operational chief—after all, we are so keen on operational independence that it is written into the Bill—with a series of assistants and deputies under him, with this as his sole and absolute duty and having done it all his life, because a chief constable by definition is someone who has risen through the police service, is in a far better position to know this professionally. I cast no aspersions on those who would aspire to stand as a commissioner, of course, but for the most part they would be party politicians with party priorities, to a degree.

[Lord Hurd of Westwell]

My noble friend constantly reverts to the point that they would almost certainly be party nominees. Might it not turn out otherwise, as it quite often has in the elections for directly elected mayors? Does he not conceive it possible that in fact independents have a certain appeal, particularly in that position, and that they might put themselves forward quite successfully and that people might vote for them on an individual basis, as has been happening to some extent in the elections for directly elected mayors?

[Lord Cormack]

My noble friend moderated his own comment by saying “to some extent”, having said “very often” at the beginning of his intervention. The fact is that it does not happen very often that independents are elected. If there were a clause in the Bill to say that only those who were not affiliated to a political party were eligible to stand, many of my objections would be answered. However, I am concerned.

Because I know about Staffordshire, I would like to relate my remarks to my own county. In future, with Stoke included, it will be what is called a swing county; it will go Labour, then Conservative and then Labour again. This could have a very odd effect on the relationship between the commissioner and the chief constable. For four years you could have a Conservative commissioner. He appoints a chief constable. He begins an entirely proper but very constructive relationship for four years, and then he is out, replaced by someone from the other side who will not necessarily readily and immediately be able to establish a similar relationship.