Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Lord Judd Excerpts

Monday 28th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, in one sense, the message of the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, is very powerful: modern organised crime knows no national frontiers; the dividing line between what is crime and what is so-called orthodox business becomes increasingly fudged; we have all the issues of cyberspace, and the rest. The challenges are formidable, and it is necessary to make sure that the police are organised to meet those challenges.

What I would counsel to the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, is that we live in something rather precious. What is it that we want to live in? We want to live in a free democracy. We want to live in the kind of society in which the relationships between institutions is very complex, in which there are checks and balances, but one in which we are not building up great independent authoritarian bodies in our midst that are not a living part of that complexity. We also want a society, surely, in which citizens are citizens, not merely consumers of a type of democracy, and, as citizens, are playing their part in ensuring a stable and secure society. Local involvement in the responsibilities of policing is therefore a crucial part of democracy.

I have never talked to a serious policeman with real professional experience anywhere—and I have talked to quite a number in my life—who has not sooner or later said, “We can do our job effectively only if we are working with society and if people are working with us and see us as part of the society which is theirs. Then we can get on with the job. If we have a suspicious, hostile, questioning society out there, which is simply delegating responsibility to us, our effectiveness will be limited”. In the cause of the kind of society in which we want to live—one which we recognise is threatened by the most sinister kinds of development in crime, as the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, was spelling out, but nevertheless one in which society remains in the driving seat—and the things that make our society worth living in, we have to take these issues of balance and, perhaps, the dispersal of power rather seriously. There have to be checks and balances, not just formally and structurally but in the very dynamic of society itself.

I have a certain amount of sympathy with my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey. I have always felt, having been around in politics quite a long time now, that one of the mistakes that Governments make, whatever their political persuasion, is so often they come rushing along to the Dispatch Box with a superb solution to society’s problems without first having built up a public understanding and consensus of what problem the legislation is supposed to be tackling. I do not believe that that mistake has been avoided by the Government in this context and, in another way, I think my noble friend would agree that that was very much the point that he was making.

It is also a matter of culture, not just of organisation. That is related to how far the police are integrated with society as a whole. Most people out there—and, I imagine, within Parliament itself—are really quite exercised and worried at the moment about the amount of police corruption. That is not just an organisational issue but a cultural issue. If one goes down the road of independent agencies which are not integrated in society, does that become easier or more difficult to tackle effectively in the long run? It is not a one-way argument because some will claim that the more you are involved in society, the more the temptations arise. On the other hand, it seems to me that if we take these issues seriously we will have to look at the details and implications for society in what is being proposed very carefully as the Bill goes forward.

That takes me on to the issue of law, in so far as this Bill deals with it. I am sure I am not alone in being disturbed by the parallel systems of justice that we are beginning to develop in this country. There are too many discrepancies. If we are talking about law and justice, we must recognise that they are not necessarily the same thing but that we want law which is advancing justice. If we are talking about justice, we are talking about habeas corpus and equality before the law—of course we are. We are talking about law being not only done but seen and felt to be done. In some aspects of our new approach to administrative law—I do not for a moment minimise the challenges and agonising problems which are there—we are beginning to diminish those qualities. We know that we have people interned who are not told why they are interned. We know that we have advocates working in our courts who are not able to discuss with their clients what they are defending them against. How do we reconcile that with what we have always understood to be fundamental to the system of justice in our society? We cannot reconcile it. There may be an exception which we come to say is unavoidable, because of the pressures that are there. However, we had better be pretty careful that we are not beginning to let this become a rather convenient habit of organising our administrative law and thinking that we can make exceptions here, there and in the other place.

This brings us quickly into the realm of immigration, because any of us who has had anything to do with immigration knows that its administration is a disgrace in this country. That is not a partisan point; it has become so over successive Administrations. One has only to look at the number of immigration cases which, on appeal, have been proved to be absolutely up the creek and wrong. Now we hear Ministers cheerfully telling us, “Well, it would be much more sensible and rational not to have appeals against these things. If it is not working in a particular case, then it would be better to start again”—rather like snakes and ladders—“and we’ll get much more speedily to the conclusion”. That is not quite the point, is it? In law and justice, you want to know what is wrong and why. You want to pursue those matters, and not just say, “Oh well, that didn’t work. That was unacceptable—try again”. It is actually about finding out the lessons that are there to be found out. I am really rather uneasy about some of the arguments that have been slung around by government in this context.

It also seems that we have some strange contradictions about our culture in this area, because the Government keep telling us of the importance of family as the basis for a stable society. Family and family relationships are crucial to the well-being of people and of society as a whole—unless of course it comes to the realm of immigrants. Then families can be treated completely differently. If we are doing a bit of joined-up thinking about the issues that face us, we also have the challenges of security and stability in the age in which we live. Immigration is central to security and stability. Extremists operate where there is a climate of disenchantment and where there is not a sense of positive good will towards the authorities, the police and society as a whole but a sense of frustration. There are too many bad examples and heartrending experiences. If we are to have security and stability, we had better be looking to that. Every immigration officer doing a job anywhere is fighting the battle for security by asking not simply, “Is this person a terrorist?”, but, “Are we giving this person a good, reasonable experience in a terrible situation?”. We all understand that so often their situations are terrible, but are we giving them another bad experience which is likely to lead to alienation and the rest?

I would like to conclude with a brief word about alternative sentences. We have to stop prevaricating and playing it both ways. Do we want to protect the British people or not? If we want to protect the British people, do we really believe that one of the best ways of doing that is to achieve rehabilitation? In that way, one gets to the roots of the problem with the offender and to the issue of how that person ceases to be culturally an offender and becomes a positive member of society. If we really believe, as I do, that rehabilitation is therefore the overriding priority—for the individual, for society, and economically, because it makes economic nonsense not to have rehabilitation there at the top—why do we always slip into legislation, proposed legislation and the discussion about legislation the need to bring the public on board and to understand the anxieties of the public, and so on? If we believe that the public are being misled by a stupid press, or too much of a stupid press, then it is no good trying to appease the attitudes that result from that. It is a matter of giving the public an alternative around which they can coalesce. It means speaking out very strongly for the alternative concepts that we see as relevant, effective and right.

We all know that if we were starting again from scratch we would not have the prison system as it is. We would have lots of different types of specialist institutions for different types of people; we would be much more person-orientated, getting the person right. Of course the person must be punished for behaving badly, for breaking the law, for doing damage to society, but rehabilitation remains the issue—winning that person back into a positive role in society.

I hope that in our approach to alternative sentences we do not make the same mistakes that we have made in the prison system of having to say “No, we’ve got to demonstrate that we’re ruthless and tough with prisoners and offenders”. We have got to say, “No, we’re getting it right with offenders. We’re doing what is really going to make a difference to these offenders”. That is the issue and we have got to fight for it. We had better not think that it will be a cheap option, because it is not. If we are to do this work well, we have got to have the people in place with the right skills, the right backgrounds, the right understanding, in order to be able to do that constructive work.

We made mistakes with lunatic asylums. We said, “They’re dreadful places and we ought to get rid of, them”, and we turned a lot of people out of asylums without the provision in society to care for them. We saw families broken because of people coming home with whom they could not cope. This is not a cheap alternative. It will need a lot of resources, a lot of attention and a lot of care. There is a hell of a lot to do on this Bill, and I am sure that we will do it constructively.