Sentencing Act 2020 (Special Procedures for Community and Suspended Sentence Orders) Regulations 2023 Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Jackson of Peterborough
Main Page: Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Jackson of Peterborough's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(1 year, 2 months ago)
Grand CommitteeMy Lords, these regulations introduce pilots of an intensive oversight system for certain less serious offenders. The Explanatory Memorandum states that,
“this legislation is expected to: improve judicial confidence in the sentencing system, increase offender compliance, reduce reoffending and reduce the use of custody”.
The regulations will come into force on Monday 26 June.
In July 2022 three sites were selected with the approval of the senior presiding judge and the Secretary of State. Substance misuse ISC pilots will be established in Teesside Crown Court and Liverpool Crown Court, and the women’s ISC will be piloted in Birmingham magistrates’ court. It needs to be remembered that, in the sentencing White Paper 2020, the Government committed to pilot a problem-solving approach, which is essentially what this is, in up to five courts in England and Wales. It is regrettable that they are now committing to only three.
The Ministry of Justice describes ISCs as a “problem-solving approach” to offender management, in which those receiving some community and suspended sentences have regular contact with a multidisciplinary team including the judiciary, health professionals, police and probation officers and specialist support in relation to housing, education and skills. Local authorities will reportedly be a key part of the team in ISCs.
ISCs will seek to address an offender’s induvial needs, such as substance misuse, housing and education, with the ultimate aims including reducing reoffending and the use of custody. Judges and magistrates will oversee the process and be able to incentivise good progress, such as by relaxing conditions, while sanctioning behaviour that fails to meet agreed standards by increasing drug testing, court reviews and periods in prison, for example.
It is worth putting this in an international context. According to the Centre for Social Justice, there are more than 3,000 problem-solving courts in the United States of America and Canada, and the model has spread across the world, notably to Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway and Belgium. The US was an early adopter, with examples including the Miami drug court, which was established in 1989, the New York Midtown Community Court, established in 1993, and the Red Hook Community Justice Center, established in 2000.
International evaluations have variously highlighted improvements in offender compliance with court sanctions, greater levels of offender accountability and improved collaboration with external agencies. Despite its international appeal, problem-solving justice has had limited uptake in England and Wales. Although a handful of problem-solving community courts were established as pilots during the mid-2000s, their evaluations, while important, cannot be generalised, and successive Governments have been unwilling to invest further in an approach that is lacking “credible data”.
Although advocates continue to argue that problem solving should be better mainstreamed in the criminal justice system of England and Wales, their arguments are sometimes based on the fact that the model has great potential rather than a proven track record in reducing reoffending rates.
I will list some of the challenges I see with this model, the first of which is administration. To achieve consistency of the Bench, which is a core requirement of the ISC model, the current system for court listings and rotas would need to be amended to enable the same person—or group of people, if they are magistrates—to sit on the same case. The current system allows for drug courts, so there is no reason why this method could not be utilised more widely, but it would require HMCTS to change its systems.
The second challenge is effectiveness. To date, no evaluation has been published of the Manchester women’s problem-solving court, and the evaluation of the Aberdeen court was also limited. This is a big issue, and something the ISC pilots will need to address. Previous evaluations, such as those of the Liverpool community court and the Salford problem-solving court, found that there was no difference in rates of reoffending between those who went through the problem-solving stream and those who did not.
My experience of the drug court at Hammersmith magistrates’ court was that the magistrates—which I was at the time—had to sit on a separate rota. That rota was discontinued after a number of years because the Ministry of Justice, as I understood it, was unable to demonstrate that there was a reduction in reoffending by offenders through this separate rota approach. At the time, this was a disappointment and frustration to me and my colleagues because the data had not been gathered to make an informed assessment of the approach. Since it could not be proven that it worked, it was discontinued. However, that was not assessment of data which had been gathered; the data simply had not been gathered.
The next challenge is the importance of a collaborative approach. As the Minister will know, there is currently a postcode lottery of specialist services, which is an obstacle to the ISC vision. There were hours of oral evidence at the recent Lords’ Select Committee on this very topic, and the Chief Inspector of Probation raised it with the Select Committee a few weeks ago. Without the necessary agencies to create the holistic, multiagency scaffolding required to support people in the community, a specialist order is very difficult to put in place in practice. The backlogs from the pandemic mean that offenders are still unable to access specialist support services in some areas of the country. The lack of specialist services, including proper buy-in from the Probation Service, will have an impact on sentencer confidence.
A further challenge is appropriate training. Any expansion of the problem-solving model would certainly require investment in training opportunities, which is of particular concern to magistrates who have seen their Judicial College and HMCTS training budgets slashed. Budget issues notwithstanding, I am sure that many magistrates and judges would like to sit on these types of courts and use the additional skill of building an appropriate relationship over a period of time to try to discourage reoffending.
Although, as I understand it, this issue was not raised by magistrates or judges, most practitioners—probation officers, as well as keyworkers or other support services—have expressed concern that the model should not be used as a route to up-tariffing in the name of helping people, whereby people would be given a longer sentence than they might have otherwise got because of the help available. Their professional experience was that many people struggle to juggle the many elements of their orders with different appointments and things like that. The concern expressed by these professionals, such as those in the Probation Service, is that, given the chaotic and complex nature of their lives, you could, potentially, set people up to fail. The problem-solving model should not be touted as the universal answer for all people serving community orders, and suitable holistic support should continue to be provided for those who would not respond positively to additional court reviews.
To be clear, I support and welcome this model, but I have raised my concerns to make sure that we go into these pilots with our eyes open about the potential pitfalls. It is disappointing that no new money is being committed to these pilots and that the scope of the pilot schemes has been reduced. Nevertheless, intuitively, it sounds like a good model. I support it, but it needs to be underscored and supported with sufficiently robust data collection so that a realistic assessment can be made for its potential future extension. I beg to move.
My Lords, I shall speak briefly on this statutory instrument. I have always taken an interest in the criminal justice system and have taken the view that, if you are to impose relatively draconian sentences on some prisoners, you should at least also give them an opportunity for redemption and to improve and turn around their lives for the benefit of their families, not least, and the wider community. In the other place, I strongly supported the coalition Government’s rehabilitation of offenders Act 2012, which I thought was a brilliant piece of legislation, in that, hitherto, “low-level” prisoners were discharged from prison and forgotten, and they very quickly got into the clutches of drug dealers and others. It goes without saying and is axiomatic that drugs have a huge negative impact on our communities.
I shall elucidate some of the points that the noble Lord made. I was slightly disappointed that the Explanatory Memorandum that accompanies this instrument is not more detailed. I find it quite odd that the analysis of the work of the Liverpool community court should come up with the statistics referenced by the noble Lord. It is very important to interrogate why that was and why there was no demonstrable difference between recidivism in that court’s area, compared with more traditional courts.
Obviously, another issue is money. If you are going to establish a pathfinder scheme in order to keep people out of the prison estate and give them a chance to turn their lives around, and have a multidisciplinary approach with adult social care, children’s services, the police, et cetera, you need to spend the money. I am not someone who always calls for tax rises but, for the long run, you need to spend the money on this bespoke project, and you probably need more than three projects. It is disappointing that only three projects were allocated under the auspices of these regulations, because the excellent White Paper published in 2020 alluded to the possibility of five or more projects.
The Government may have missed a trick in not allowing a wider degree of public consultation in the design and review of these pilot schemes. I understand that they have to be expedited and that the Government have to move rapidly in order to put processes in place, but there is an awful lot of experience, knowledge and skills in the third sector and civil society, which could have been brought to bear in assisting the Government in developing these schemes. The Opposition spokesman mentioned Manchester and Salford. Lots of people have been involved and will have real-world experience.
My final point is on analysis and evaluation. It is frankly scandalous if we are really looking at a comprehensive evaluation taking another four years. I understand that you have to look at reoffending rates at the end of a period, but we already have a small cohort in this study; to wait another four years, which would be half way through the next Parliament and Government, for us to make a value judgment on its success or otherwise would let down taxpayers. On that basis, Ministers would perhaps be wise to look again at the efficacy of such a long-running period.
My Lords, I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate in such a constructive and thoughtful way. I am particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, whose Motion gave rise to it.
First, I will briefly address the concerns raised, notably by the noble Lord, Lord Beith, about the Explanatory Memorandum. I am happy to acknowledge that, in this case, the Explanatory Memorandum was somewhat thin and did not meet the required standard. My officials have, I think, been able to provide answers to the committee’s satisfaction. We are working to ensure that future memoranda do not encounter a similar problem. Internal training is being undertaken and we will shortly have a meeting with the clerk of the relevant committee to understand what its requirements are. I hope that these various measures will deal with the problem, but I apologise for the fact that the committee felt it necessary to draw the House’s attention to this statutory instrument.
Let me explain briefly some of the background to this instrument; I hope also to deal with the points that have been raised. We are piloting three ISCs: two are focused on offenders with substance misuse and one is focused on female offenders. I place particular importance on the female offender court, which is at magistrates’ level in Birmingham. To take one particular point, in the earlier sentencing White Paper of 2020, the Government committed to piloting up to five schemes; we did not commit to five or more, I think. It is partly a question of resource, but the view has been taken that we should try to do three properly now rather than risk spreading resource too thinly; of course, that leaves open the possibility of the programme being expanded later if it is successful, but I hope that this is a solid and important start. I am glad to hear that, in general, noble Lords welcome this step forward.
I mention, I hope relevantly, four particular features of the programme. The first is close judicial monitoring by the same judge. The noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, my noble friend Lord Jackson and, I think, the noble Lord, Lord Beith, raised the importance of continuity from a judicial point of view; it is crucial. I am sure that the MoJ will take away that point—it was made very forcefully by your Lordships, who collectively represent a wealth of experience in this area—and ensure that it happens. That is indeed a mainstay of the proposal.
The second feature is a particular emphasis on continuity and personal probation supervision so that there is always that particular continuity. As has been explained to me—to my personal satisfaction, I must say—it is in this respect something of a return to the old system of probation, whereby you had one probation officer who looked after you, took you all the way through the court process and was in direct touch with the judge, rather than there being, as I understand has happened to some extent in recent times, a sort of split within the Probation Service between the court team that prepares the reports and the supervisors who are out in the community, with a certain lack of communication in that process. It is very important that there should be the continuity of a single probation officer. Of course, at the same time—this is one of the reasons why the experiment is perhaps not as expansive as it might be—you do need to fully involve local authorities, other support services and so forth. We need to be sure that agencies have, as it were, signed up to and bought into the whole process for it to work.
For the substance misuse course, we have a requirement for regular drug testing so that, if there is a risk of someone falling back into such misuse, it will be picked up early.
Fourthly, as the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, said, there is not exactly a mixture of carrot and stick but the possibility of imposing sanctions on offenders if they are clearly not observing the rules in a way that merits a sanction.
Your Lordships know the sequence of events. There was a sentencing White Paper in 2020, then there was the 2022 Act and now there are the pilots. The ministry did not exactly invite bids but sought to explore which areas of the country would be interested in undertaking this work. I have to say, the response was not exactly overwhelming because, at the time, the courts were preoccupied with the backlog and after-effects of Covid and all those issues. So we do not, from that point of view, start from a particularly propitious situation. None the less, on each site, a local level, multiagency team has worked together, including the judiciary, probation, the police, the police and crime commissioner, the local authority, third-sector organisations and, of course, MoJ officials.
Will my noble and learned friend the Minister put on record the continuing support and importance of chaplaincy—both potentially in these schemes and in the wider prison estate—which, to my mind, is an integral part of supporting prisoners as they move away from crime and take their place in society?
I am very happy to give my noble friend Lord Jackson that assurance. The Ministry of Justice and the Government share his view that effective chaplaincy is very important and part of the wider holistic approach to dealing with offenders.