British Bill of Rights
Lord McNally Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, they say that they never come back, and yet there is the noble Lord, Lord Bach, back on the Front Bench in fine, feisty form, taking on a kind of Dame Nellie Melba role in the number of questions that he asks. He has also tabled a Question for me to answer in a few days’ time. The rather emotional goodbyes that I bid him a few months ago were perhaps premature. Although some of his closing themes were familiar from our debates over the past two years, I shall not follow him down that path, because we will have other opportunities to do so.
I was grateful for the tribute that the noble Lord paid to the Cook-Maclennan reforms. Certainly, the success of that first Labour Government from 1997 to 2001 owed very much, as my noble friend Lord Lester said, to that blueprint setting out much of the constitutional reform during that period. I believe that when future historians come to review that period, they will agree that that burst of quite extraordinary reform started to peter out only when the Government departed from the Cook-Maclennan blueprint and began increasingly to rely on ideas usually prepared on the back of an envelope by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, and the noble Lord, Lord Prescott.
This has been an excellent debate. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith—the late Lord Goldsmith—posed the question, “Which human rights are you planning to repeal?”. It is a legitimate question to ask those who seek change. The debate was made all the healthier by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, who produced with characteristic clarity what I would call the case for the prosecution. He asked specifically whether membership of the EU and membership of the European Convention on Human Rights were compatible—whether we could withdraw from one without affecting our membership of the other—particularly given the ECHR case to which he referred. My officials advise me that this is a moot point. I find it to be an extraordinarily moot point, because I have always understood that one of the qualifications for membership of the EU was observance of the European Convention on Human Rights.
In recent years, I have had the opportunity to visit a number of countries that, in working towards membership of the European Union, have been set high hurdles by the EU in terms of human rights observance. One of the great triumphs of the EU is how, by insisting on those high hurdles, it has moved human rights eastwards across Europe. On 1 July, we celebrate the latest addition to the European Union, Croatia. After a terrible war, it has been the European Union and its insistence on high standards in the rule of law that have prepared Croatia for its rightful place in the European family, a family that is resting on the ECHR.
I understand the points about how human rights have suffered by appearing to delve into trivialities. However, as a number of speakers have pointed out, the media often attribute to human rights reasoning and causes that have nothing to do with the actual Human Rights Act. This is rather like health and safety and data protection legislation, which I also support. When the media talk about a pancake race that has been cancelled by health and safety rules, I like to count the number of deaths that have been prevented on building sites by those rules. That is when these rules bite. Similarly, we only have to open the newspaper every day to realise how important data protection rules are in a modern society.
I welcomed the spirited exposition of the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, which stimulated responses in others, and I will try to cover a number of the issues that were raised. I was extremely grateful for the intervention of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, because he counterpointed the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, in warning us of the complexities of trying to write a UK Bill of Rights. There is always a danger that, if you make a speech that is slightly out of step with your party, everybody else praises you, so I hope that it does not do the career of the noble Lord, Lord Gold, too much damage to say that I found his intervention extremely helpful with its warning of a backward step and reference to the problem of public understanding.
The noble Lord, Lord Bach, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, both seemed to imply that there was some secret about the origins of the Bill of Rights commission. This Government were formed as a coalition between two parties that have, in recent years, taken a different view about the Human Rights Act and the part that the European Court in Strasbourg, and the European Convention on Human Rights it interprets, should play in our national law. The response of the new coalition Government was twofold. We established the commission, of which the noble Lord, Lord Lester, was a distinguished member, as was the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, and the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, and we embarked on a programme of reform of the Strasbourg court that culminated in the Brighton declaration.
I have also said that I do not consider the Human Rights Act to be a precious vase, to be kept on a high shelf, never to be taken down or examined for fear of breaking it. I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, that well informed debate about human rights is extremely healthy. I welcome, particularly in this House, our periodic examination of human rights and their place in our society—the noble Lord, Lord Bach, referred to the one such review led by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, a couple of years ago.
I hope that the House will keep on returning to this subject, because, like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, I remain confident that such an examination invariably concludes with a reaffirmation of human rights as something deep in the political DNA of the British people and of our history. The noble Lord, Lord Lester, reminded us of the relevance of Magna Carta, the 800th anniversary of which we celebrate in 2015. That linkage between our history and the growth of the concept of human rights was underlined, as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, reminded us, when Eleanor Roosevelt launched the UN Declaration of Human Rights and called it a,
“Magna Carta for all mankind”.
The world needed no explanation of what she meant. She was part of that “never again” generation who had experienced the horrors of when state power goes unchecked and human rights are subjugated to the power of the state or some perverted political doctrine. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, is right: that generation, whether it be the noble Lord, Lord Healey, or Ted Heath, or others who came back from that war, had a “never again” determination that impacted on the legislation that they brought forward and the themes that they espoused.
Let us be clear that human rights and civil liberties are not some foreign invention. They are deeply rooted in the history of the people of this country. Upholding them should be a source of national pride. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and the noble Lord, Lord Gold, pointed out, too many people do not fully comprehend the impact of human rights on their daily lives, and myths and misreporting about human rights are often accepted as fact. If we look beyond the sometimes skewed perceptions, we see that the Act is a measured piece of legislation when understood and used properly. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, cited some very good examples of human rights in action and I could give others. As the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, said, human rights are not a matter of abstractions; they are about realities. It is not an airy-fairy notion reserved for philosophy seminars but the practical interaction between the state and its agencies and those they should serve.
The message from this debate is that it is your human rights, my human rights, our human rights. Perhaps that could be no better illustrated than by the fact that, when the Daily Mail felt that it was under attack by Lord Justice Leveson, the editor cited his human rights in protection. For me, it proved that there must be a God.
While reflecting on judgments, we should note our actual Strasbourg record. As the noble Lord, Lord Lester, reminded us, the number of applications involving the UK that resulted in a judgment by the European Court of Human Rights is small. In 2012, there were only 10 judgments finding violations against the United Kingdom out of over 3,300 applications. Our record on implementation of judgments is generally good: from March 2010 to May 2013, the United Kingdom completed the implementation of 82 judgments, with just 22 outstanding. One highlight of my ministerial career was when, in May 2012, I sat in front of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva being held to account for the UK’s human rights record.
The UPR mechanism offers the Government real opportunities to consult civil society organisations and our national human rights institutions. Through open discussion with them, we build an understanding of where we should focus our efforts on key human rights issues; this dialogue allows them to monitor our progress. We have also gone digital. On top of stakeholder events, everyone now can send us online submissions via our website. All this ensures that we remain connected to, and aware of, human rights issues as they affect real people. We aim to use the information gathered from our engagement with civil society and through online submissions to help to shape how we respond to the United Nations in our mid-term review next summer. This approach pays dividends in engaging people in human rights. It helps us to focus our efforts and enables civil society to monitor our progress. Generally, our approach to the review was one of openness, celebrating success where we can but being receptive to challenge. We have had very positive feedback from civil society organisations in the UK on our engagement strategy.
Also in May, the United Kingdom was examined against our obligations under the United Nations Convention Against Torture. We will consider the recommendations carefully before responding. That was a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks. It is not just a matter of the ECHR. In a world of interdependability, we are part of a whole range of conventions and commitments, by which we test Governments’ behaviour.
As I said, undergoing such scrutiny is necessary and proper to ensure that the United Kingdom is fulfilling its obligations under the Human Rights Act and that the Act itself is fit for purpose. It was with this in mind that the Government put forward plans for the Commission on a Bill of Rights. On behalf of the Government, I express thanks once again for the dedicated work of all those associated with the commission, culminating in the publication of its final report. Like others, I pay particular tribute to Sir Leigh Lewis, as chairman of that commission. My view is that the only job that he is otherwise qualified for is leading the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, because he has all the same attributes, as we have seen today—he had some fairly big personalities to keep in check.
I remind the House of some of the commission’s key conclusions. A majority of the commission concluded that there is a strong argument in favour of a UK Bill of Rights. However, that was on the basis that any such Bill would need to incorporate and build on all the UK’s existing obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and that it would provide no less protection than is currently contained both in the Human Rights Act and in the devolution settlements. Both the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, and my noble friend Lord Gold made powerful arguments about whether that was the right way forward. This finding was in line with the commission’s terms of reference. The majority saw the current lack of public ownership of the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights as the most compelling reason in favour of a new Bill of Rights. However, as my noble friend Lord Gold reminded us, even if it were to be carried through, it might not solve this problem of public understanding and acceptance.
Some of those in the majority who favoured a Bill of Rights felt that any new Bill could usefully define the scope of some rights more clearly and adjust their balance. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, has told us, she and Philippe Sands concluded that the commission’s consultations and its deliberations had failed to identify any real shortcomings either in the existing Human Rights Act or in the way in which it is applied to the domestic courts. They were concerned that any move towards a Bill of Rights would lessen the rights protection that is currently available and would potentially be a first step towards the United Kingdom withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights.
Although the commission was unable to reach agreement on all its conclusions, it identified and reported issues that would need careful consideration before any changes were made to the UK’s legal framework for human rights. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Bach, and some of the distinguished academics. I think that any political party looking forward and working on its policy on this issue, and any Parliament looking at it, will find the commission’s work an exercise in ground-clearing and testing of arguments that will stand us in good stead for the future.
My noble friend Lord Maclennan reminded us, as did the commission, of the background against which this discussion is taking place. Next year we will definitely have to make a very clear decision about the future of this United Kingdom. The evidence showed—and there was unanimity on this—that to discuss any changes to the Human Rights Act before we have made that fundamental decision about the union would not be very sensible or constructive.
It is interesting to note in passing that, although we think that perhaps the other place is more hostile and more populist, when a 10-minute rule Bill to repeal the Human Rights Act was put forward in the other place by Richard Bacon MP last December, it was defeated by 195 votes to 75. I just do not believe it is true that there is some great populist seething hostility to the Act. I think the more that people understand it and the more it is put to them in positive terms, the more support there is for it.
My noble friend Lord Maclennan and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, both mentioned the Brighton declaration. I am very proud of what we did at Brighton—I think that we addressed some very real problems. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, mentioned his own work in suggesting ways in which the effectiveness and efficiency of the court could be improved. I hope that there is good news for him. Better late than never, at the recent meeting in Strasbourg the court accepted a number of the recommendations in the noble and learned Lord’s report. I would not presume to suggest that the legal system sometimes moves very slowly, but it gets there in the end. On Monday, our ambassador in Strasbourg will, on behalf of the UK, sign Protocol 15 to the convention, which implements the amendments to the convention agreed in the Brighton declaration. We are continuing to press for reforms of the Strasbourg court in a way that we think will give it better credibility and lead to greater efficiency. However, I entirely share the opinion of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, that this is a matter where we can achieve change and improvement, although this is work in progress.
Looking forward, as I said, I do not believe that this Government or this country have anything to apologise for in their record on upholding human rights. Nor do I think that at heart there is fundamental disagreement on the need to uphold human rights and the rule of law. I tend to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Judd: I do not want to pin party labels on this matter. We have, as I said, concepts of human rights that are rooted deep in our history and deep in our national psyche. Let us not be afraid of debating human rights with vigour and candour. However, let us do so in a way that also takes account of the very real leadership role that we play in this area. The world does look and listen when we debate these issues, so let us be sure that we are sending it the right messages.
I applaud the way in which the Foreign Secretary has used soft diplomacy and consistency of message to promote and support human rights around the world. Both my noble friend Lord Faulks and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, referred to the fact that we carry weight and influence in these matters. The Foreign Secretary can promote human rights because our own reputation for observing and promoting human rights still stands high. However, observing and upholding human rights is always work in progress.
In his closing remarks, my noble friend Lord Lester referred to the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta in 2015. Although she is not in her place at the moment, a few weeks ago the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, reminded me of something that was a surprise to me. Those gentlemen up there who look down on our deliberations are the Barons of Runnymede. They remind us of the 800-year journey that this country has taken in setting limits to the power of the state and the responsibility that we all bear to uphold what the late Lord Bingham referred to as the spirit of Magna Carta. I think that that is what we have been doing today and I thank my noble friend Lord Lester and all noble Lords who have taken part in what has been a debate of great quality in the best traditions of this House.
I am extremely proud to be the Human Rights Minister in this Government. I work very closely with my colleague Damian Green on this matter. This has been a healthy debate. I suspect that the next stage of it, as far as any legislation is concerned, will depend on the outcome of the next general election—it will be incumbent on all the political parties to take their views on the Human Rights Act and its future to the hustings. I think that I know where we will be and I look forward to this ongoing debate.
Alternative Business Structures
Lord McNally Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they propose to take action to prevent the re-emergence of the payment of referral fees through the use of alternative business structures.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, alternative business structures allow for increased competition and the provision of more cutting-edge services, helping to lower costs while maintaining high standards. However, they are required to comply with the rules of their licensing authority and the law in respect of the ban on referral fees.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that Answer. In doing so, I congratulate the Government on the progress made in banning referral fees, which has led to a 5% reduction in motor insurance costs with a planned reduction of as much as 15%—an achievement in no way to be sniffed at. Is the Minister aware of the extent of the current challenge to this new plan of the Government, which may undermine all the good work so far? For example, is he aware that Tesco, through its insurance company Fortis, has set up a new joint venture with a company called New Law, a personal injury claims specialist based in Cardiff? Will my noble friend accept that it is not doing this for its health? Will he have a word with the Legal Services Board and the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the body that authorises new firms, to see what their view is of new firms being established, apparently with the sole purpose of frustrating the will of Parliament?
Lord McNally
My Lords, if they are established with the sole purpose of frustrating the will of Parliament, they will break the law. I will certainly take up my noble friend’s suggestion and talk to the Legal Services Board and the Solicitors Regulation Authority. We have had experience before of putting a law in place and some clever person trying to get around it, but we will take a close look and if they are trying to get around it, we will stop it.
Baroness Deech
Does the Minister agree that referral fees are a bad thing in all areas of the law, not just personal injury? They mean that professionals buy in services that they would not otherwise have and the consumer is deprived of choice. Will the Minister lend his support to the regulators, who are trying hard to maintain a broad ban on referral fees? I declare an interest as a regulator of the Bar.
Lord McNally
My Lords, referral fees are viewed with a certain suspicion, particularly when, as in the case of motor insurance, they were rising to about £800 a pop. That obviously fed into the cost of the insurance. After the first look, it was decided that the greatest abuse took place in motor insurance, and so we concentrated on that area. However, we will consult the regulators and consumer groups to see whether our experience of the ban should be extended to other areas.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames
My Lords, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has approved licences for a number of alternative business structures, where claims management companies and even legal expenses insurers have joined forces with solicitors’ firms. In this way, solicitors effectively get personal injury cases in return for a commercial benefit—precisely what LASPO sought to avoid. Will the Minister make it clear to the SRA and the profession that if ABSs clearly undermine the referral fee ban, further legislation is an option?
Lord McNally
My Lords, more than that, LASPO already allows us to extend the powers, if necessary. We therefore want to see the evidence that is emerging. If these groupings of separate facilities and companies seem to be using means to bypass the ban on referral fees, we will revisit our powers under LASPO. I understand the concern of the House on this matter.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, is the Minister aware that a solicitor whose practice is a major participant in referral schemes has recently been reported as saying that if a fee is paid for indirect referrals, whereby the client is merely given the name of the solicitor but has not received the name from the referring organisation, it would be outside the scope of the scheme? Is that a correct view?
Lord McNally
I do not think so. However, a lot of examples have sensibly been raised in the House today, some of them hearsay and some from direct experience, which suggest that what we intended to do in LASPO may not exactly be hitting the target, or that, as a result of organisational devices used by companies, the target has been moved. I can tell the House that we will talk to the regulators and look at some of these examples. If necessary, we will look at the powers that we were given under LASPO to make sure that we do what the House intended, which was to stop the practice of referral fees, particularly in the area of motor insurance.
Lord Faulks
My Lords, is the Minister regularly invited, as I am, to commit fraud, by which I mean that telephone calls are made by companies inviting one to sue for accidents that did not occur? Do the Government have any plans to deal with this, and are they aware that this is a frequent problem?
Lord McNally
I have not had direct experience of that particular problem, but within my family I have had direct experience of just how casually the law is treated in this area and how that has had a direct impact on the cost of motor insurance. Parliament tried to address part of this problem through the ban on referral fees, but there are many murky practices around this area and the House is right to raise these issues. I will return to the MoJ with the clear message ringing in my ears that we should poke a little further into these murky businesses.
Offender Rehabilitation Bill [HL]
Lord McNally Excerpts(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames
My Lords, before my noble friend replies, having been asked direct questions, perhaps I may reply briefly. I envisage that there would be a wide range of special reasons. As the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, suggested, they would include a history of breach of previous supervision requirements. However they might also encompass areas of special risk to do with the particular offender. The shortcoming of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 at which this amendment is aimed is that under Section 152 only the seriousness of the offences is taken into account. There may well be reasons to do with the offender that could justify a custodial sentence, but the point of the amendment is to make it quite clear that in the absence of such special reasons, whether they are to do with history, special risk or other reasons, the presumption in favour of a community sentence should apply.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, I have found this to be an extremely helpful debate, and as the movers have indicated that it is a probing amendment, I will take it away to consider, but in my reply I will make it clear that we do not think the amendment is necessary at this moment.
I understand the points that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, has quoted, and that my noble friend Lord Dholakia mentioned, that the Bill might encourage judges to go for the best of both worlds by passing a short sentence that will immediately qualify for the 12 months of rehabilitation. I certainly share my noble friend Lord Dholakia’s view that short sentences are too short to rehabilitate, but just long enough to disrupt, the life of the person sent to prison and introduce them, perhaps for the first time, to all the bad influences that can be found in a prison. On the other hand, as the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, rightly recognised, we face media and—to a certain extent—public opinion that sees community sentences as somehow softer than prison sentences. Part of the aim of our reforms is to position community sentencing and the rehabilitation process that goes with it more positively in the eyes of the public, so that they have greater confidence in it.
I was grateful for the words of the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, in his intervention, because there are two things that become one. He put firmly on the record that in his experience, judges will not be tempted to go down the road that my noble friends fear. I think that he has said before—certainly other magistrates have—that sometimes for a repeat offender or somebody whose circumstances make setting them back into the community even more dangerous to themselves and the community, a short custodial sentence can be of benefit, so the idea of ruling them out entirely is not the way forward.
As my noble friend has explained, Amendment 24B would create a new clause in an attempt to bolster what is often referred to as the “custodial threshold”: that is, the test set out in Section 152(2) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, to which my noble friend referred, with which all courts must comply when imposing a custodial sentence.
It is perhaps worth noting again what Section 152 says:
“The court must not pass a custodial sentence unless it is of the opinion that the offence, or combination of the offence and one or more offences associated with it, was so serious that neither a fine alone nor a community sentence can be justified for the offence.”
It is an onerous test. It means that a court cannot impose a custodial sentence unless the offence was so serious that a fine or community sentence will not do; in fact, it cannot be justified. It is also worth noting that this test has to be read in conjunction with Section 153 of the 2003 Act. That requires a court when imposing a custodial sentence to ensure that the sentence is for the shortest term commensurate with the seriousness of the offence.
My noble friend’s amendment would add to the existing provisions a requirement, where a court intended to impose a custodial sentence of less than 12 months, that there be “special reasons” which justify the custodial sentence of less than 12 months. We have already heard in debate that magistrates and judges do not believe that they impose custodial sentences other than as a last resort. It is natural to ask what are these special reasons or circumstances that are not covered by the original test. Could the special reasons relate to a history of previous convictions? If so, the current custodial threshold test already applies because, under Section 143 of the 2003 Act, a court must consider relevant and recent convictions as an aggravating factor which makes the offence more serious. It is seriousness that is the key driver in determining the nature of the sentence and meeting the custodial threshold test.
I suggest to my noble friend that the special reasons he may have in mind must already be considered when the court decides on the sentence and whether a custodial sentence is merited under Section 152. So although of course I appreciate what my noble friend is attempting to achieve—that is, a statutory presumption against sentences of less than 12 months—I am not convinced that the amendment would actually do what is intended.
Let me make the point that the Government do not intend or expect that sentencers will change their current behaviour in any significant way in response to the provisions in the Bill. We do not expect to see an increase in the number of short custodial sentences. Offenders who do not meet the custodial threshold should receive community orders or fines. I hope that noble Lords and noble and learned Lords who have judicial experience will agree that it would be wrong for any judge, and contrary to the provisions of the existing law, if a sentencer decided to “up-tariff” an offender into custody so that they could receive 12 months of supervision.
I should also deal briefly with the second part of the amendment, which would require the court to give an explanation of the special reasons that merited a custodial sentence of less than 12 months. I point out to my noble friend that the current law already requires all courts imposing any sentence of any length to give reasons for the sentence passed. That is contained in Section 174 of the 2003 Act. Invariably, a sentencer will begin their explanation of a custodial sentence by setting out why the offence is so serious that it merits a custodial term. The further provision is, I suggest, unnecessary. I understand the good intentions behind the amendment. No one in this House wants to see short custodial sentences passed for offences that do not justify them, but that is why we have the current threshold test and a right of appeal against sentence.
We need to provide sentencers with a range of sentences in which they can have confidence. That is why we made the changes to community orders in the Crime and Courts Act 2013. We have to stop offenders reoffending to such a degree that they end up having to be considered for short custodial sentences in the first place. We also have to realise that some offenders will merit short custodial sentences. We need to focus on making those sentences more effective at rehabilitating offenders so that not only are they imposed as a last resort, they should be the last sentence that the offender receives.
I acknowledge the efforts of my noble friend on this amendment, but, although I recognise his intention, I ask him to withdraw it. Given the spirit in which it has been moved, I will discuss the matter further with the Lord Chancellor and others, but I suspect that our position as I have just set out will remain unchanged.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames
My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for that detailed and helpful response, and for the indication that he will consider the matter with us. The question really is whether the existing safeguards are sufficient in the light of the additional supervision requirement and whether there is ground for the concern expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, that there might be a temptation for sentencers to err. In that spirit, I withdraw the amendment at this stage.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, this amendment is the identical twin of Amendment 7A, which I moved last week in relation to Clause 2. As I said then, the effect would be to require the necessary supervision to be carried out either by a directly employed public service provider or by a person commissioned by such a public sector provider. I do not think it is necessary to rehearse the arguments again. I suppose that it is unlikely that the ministerial sinner will be in a repentant mood this afternoon, but I live in hope and I beg to move.
Lord McNally
My Lords, I am like St Augustine; I want to give up sin, but not yet. I will deal briefly with Amendment 24C. It would mean that the responsible officer for the supervision of offenders subject to community orders and suspended sentence orders would have to be a public sector probation provider. As the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said, this is essentially the same amendment applied to community orders as the noble Lord tabled on the first day of Committee for supervision of custodial sentences. As I said then, the Government are committed to providing new supervision for those released from short custodial sentences. To achieve this aim, we, as a responsible Government, have to be able to afford this additional supervision. To do that, we need to reduce the current costs of dealing with offenders.
We also want to encourage innovation among providers of probation services dealing with this group of offenders serving community sentences and suspended sentences. It is important to ensure that we continue to improve the reoffending rates of this group of offenders, as well as of those serving custodial terms. Paying providers in full only where they are successful at reducing reoffending will not only make savings; it will drive down our reoffending rates. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, will withdraw his amendment now that I have clarified what the Government’s intentions are.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for the repetition of the stance that he took the other night. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
Not having come with a long speech, I want to register my support and that of my noble friends on these Benches for these amendments and, as the noble Lord, Lord Beecham said, the growing support for the concept of restorative justice. The more I hear about that, the more it seems a very important part of rehabilitation. It has many aspects and one of those fits neatly within the thrust of this Bill and in the new Section 200A. Among the things it can achieve is redirecting offenders who can be described, as many noble Lords have done at previous stages, as having chaotic lives. Being able to put the chaos of one’s life into the perspective that this kind of activity can help achieve is an important objective of rehabilitation.
Lord McNally
My Lords, first, I pay tribute to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, for the very long campaign he has fought to put restorative justice on a statutory footing. Although I am sure he is right to pay tribute to and thank the Opposition for their support, it is also worth pointing out that it was this Government who actually did that. In the battle to do so, I pay tribute to the former Prisons Minister, Crispin Blunt, who joined battle with me within the department to make sure that we got the first foothold as far as restorative justice is concerned.
I am glad that we have the eagle eye of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. Of course, reparative and restorative justice are not the same thing. I fully associate myself with the points that the noble Lord made about the value of reparative justice. It can be very significant, in not only what it does but also getting the confidence of the community—the point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. The community sees a derelict site cleaned up or some piece of community work restored as part of reparative justice and has confidence that it is worth while.
I also fully agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, about what we are trying to do in this Bill. We are doing a little smoke and mirrors with the money we have available—I freely confess that—but even if we had all the money we wanted, it would still require that change in culture to which the noble and learned Lord referred.
I hope that we can make this work and carry it through. I am not sure whether we will ever carry the great British press with us. My office always gets very perturbed when I attack the British press. I merely observe that the regular comments on this area of policy always leave me in despair, not about humanity but about journalists.
Lord McNally
My Lords, this has been an extremely useful debate, fully living up to the reputation of this House for taking an ongoing interest in this matter. I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, in particular, for bringing it forward. We have had a very useful debate, with a number of interesting points being raised. We already realise that if the problems of women within our criminal justice system could be solved by reports, or even clauses in a Bill, they would have been solved a long time ago.
Perhaps part of the problem, going back to what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, mentioned earlier, is that we also need a change in culture and general approach. We have made painfully slow progress in this area. Too many women are in our prisons. It is palpably obvious that women have different problems and needs and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, has reminded us, the collateral damage from the imprisonment of women is substantial. Nothing divides us on this.
I was pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, made her contribution. I regret that her assessment is that we are going back 10 years. I do not think that we are. That is not the direction of travel. However, we face difficulties. She knows that her report was not implemented in full by her Government because of some of the financial constraints that face this Government. I have never moved away from the fact that her report is a template for action and we will re-examine it in the light of what we are trying to do with these reforms.
Of course, one of the key factors of these reforms is that we are picking up the challenge of dealing with sentences of under 12 months. As has been pointed out on a number of occasions, it is that cohort, if that is the new in-word to use, that has the greatest preponderance of women offenders. So, in that respect, this legislation gives us the opportunity to deal with and respond to the challenges posed by women offenders in a positive way.
A number of points were raised during the debate. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, mentioned the review that is under way of the women’s estate. The Justice Secretary is conscious that female offenders have particular needs and that the custodial female estate should be organised as effectively as possible to meet gender-specific requirements while delivering best value to the public. That review is expected to report by the end of the summer. I do not know what that means. I was told today that summer has not yet started but it will report by the end of the summer.
Of course, although the implementation of the Corston review has not been complete, the National Offender Management Service accepted 40 of the 43 recommendations. Progress has been impressive, including ending the mandatory full searching of women in reception and moving to a risk-based approach; embedding gender-specific standards for women in all areas of prison regimes; encouraging greater use of specialist accommodation in the community for offenders who pose a high risk of harm; and introducing the women awareness staff programme for those in the criminal justice system and the community who work with female offenders. So, as I say, I do not believe that it is entirely negative.
The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, made a valid point on resettlement accommodation for women. We will look at it and think about it. I agree that the issue poses real problems.
Interestingly—I lift the veil on the workings of the MoJ—we had an interesting discussion this morning when my noble friend Lord Ahmad made exactly the point that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, made about whether there is a lacuna in terms of black and ethnic minorities. If we had had the common sense to listen to my noble friend this morning, I would have had a full answer this afternoon. However, it is a point that should be looked at.
The approach of the Bill, which has given rise to some of the issues in the debate today, is, basically, let a thousand flowers bloom. Let us see what comes back in offers, ideas and approaches and consider how we can reshape the service to it. Again lifting the veil on the MoJ, I have argued at times whether the contracts should be women-specific—and, who knows, that might happen—but the reason that that is not there at the beginning is to encourage the widest possible contributions to the debate.
I am sure that no one in the House disagrees with the principle underlying the amendment. As the noble and learned Lord knows, the Government fully share his belief that service providers should take a different approach where there is a need to differentiate provision for female offenders. Where the challenges are different, our response should likewise be different. The Government’s commitment to ensuring the provision of services that recognise and address the specific needs of female offenders where they are different from those of male offenders is set out clearly in our recent Strategic Objectives for Female Offenders strategy. I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, thinks that it is rather sparse, but it does point the way forward.
All probation trusts are required to make appropriate provisions for women in the community to address factors associated with their reoffending. One of the Ministry of Justice equality objectives for the period 2012-16 is the,
“provision of gender-specific community services to improve support for vulnerable women in the criminal justice system”.
Let me make it absolutely clear that this objective will continue to apply as we move to a new framework for supporting offenders in the community.
Our plan is to open up provision to a diverse market of large and small providers. This will provide the opportunity for groups delivering women’s services, which are often small, community-based organisations. Helen Grant, the Minister for Victims and the Courts, and I have visited a number of these women’s centres, as the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, mentioned, and I have been greatly encouraged by the work that we have seen being done with female offenders to help them turn their lives around. I pay tribute to the work of Helen Grant. She has made a significant impact since she came into her role. I know of her commitment to this issue and that she will particularly appreciate the tribute from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf.
I am equally clear that our new framework must encourage providers to work in partnership with other public services to ensure that the broader life-management issues associated with women offending, such as drug misuse, domestic violence and sexual abuse, are addressed. As we design the new commissioning process, the need to ensure the delivery of services that take account of women’s needs and their often troubled backgrounds will be embedded into the new approach.
Service specifications for the commissioning process will include gender-specific outputs, where appropriate, which providers must meet. In order to win contracts, service providers will be required to demonstrate that they understand and will respond to the particular needs of female offenders where these differ from those of men. This will include, for example, taking account of women’s family and caring responsibilities. Many female offenders have children, and any activity requirement clearly must take account of their needs too. There will be a robust approach to evaluating bids to ensure that potential providers are offering innovative and effective services to female offenders.
The payment-by-results approach will in itself be an incentive to providers to take a gender-specific approach where appropriate. Put simply, they will not rehabilitate female offenders unless they take account of and address women’s needs and the factors that lead them to offend. I also reassure noble Lords that those safeguards for female offenders will not end with the commissioning process. Once contracts have been awarded, contract managers within the Ministry of Justice will monitor service delivery to ensure that key outputs for female offenders are being delivered. Service providers will be supported by guidance on working with female offenders and the sorts of provision that are known to be effective.
Lord McNally
Deary, deary me. If the best we can do is some anecdote about paint not turning up on time, that must be a sign of some pretty thin paint. Of course, we are at the very start of the Bill’s progress; it is the second day of Committee in its first House. I am perfectly happy to acknowledge that noble Lords can ask all kinds of questions about what is done—“Give me firm answers now”. However, the truth is that we are doing something extremely radical, which the previous Government tried and backed off from. Let nobody doubt that payment by results in this area is exciting.
By the way, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, should take full responsibility for that paint story. I cannot imagine that the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, who is a gentle soul, would attempt such a malicious intervention. It has Beecham fingerprints all over it. Let us be clear on that.
Lord McNally
Yes. I have never suggested that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is trying to throw a spanner in the works. I know that he wants this to work as much as I do. One of the values of the parliamentary process is that legitimate questions are asked about how this or that will be done. As the process unfolds, I will do my best to make sure that the House is informed.
We are working at this moment, not in advance of legislation but within the department, on how contracts and competition will work. We are not entirely flying blind on this because, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has said, payment by results has been tried in other parts of Whitehall. Of course we are taking advice and learning from both the successes and the failures of other departments. That is being built into our process. The noble Lord referred to gaming in the NHS experience. That will certainly be looked at. He mentioned transition costs being built in, and verification. We are working and consulting with other departments on these matters. It is very interesting. I can remember the first prospects for privatisation of prisons and a lot of the debates that went on. Even the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, would acknowledge that with the privatisations of prisons lessons and efficiencies have been shown and standards set which have been to the benefit of the prison system as a whole. We anticipate that a similar process will take place in this case.
The Government are very clear that we are trying to carry through quickly a very radical programme, addressing a problem which defeated the previous Government. As earlier debates today have shown, our attempts to address it have widespread support across the House.
We will need to have a good understanding of the support that probation providers give to short-sentenced offenders during licence and supervision. We will need to keep a very close eye on the proportion of offenders breaching supervision, and on how magistrates decide to respond. We will also need to watch very carefully for any changes in sentencing practice.
As I have made clear, it is not the Government’s intention that this Bill will result in changes in sentencing practice, and nothing in the Bill alters the existing custody threshold. However, let me reassure noble Lords that we will be monitoring this and other issues extremely closely. Again, the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is quite right that there are a lot of other initiatives. This Government are exciting and radical, and are doing things across the piece. Of course, progress we are making in other areas will impact on the criminal justice system, just as our successes will impact on other parts. That is what happens when you have a radical Government.
We will also make sure that we are open and transparent about sharing data and information wherever we can. There are already well established mechanisms for making available many of the types of information that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has highlighted in his amendment. On changes in sentencing trends, for example, we publish every quarter a Criminal Justice Statistics bulletin that includes detailed information on sentencing outcomes and trends. This is a national statistics publication, so it is subject to the appropriate checks and safeguards. Any changes in sentencing practice will be clear from this report. In addition, the Sentencing Council has a duty under Section 130 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 to publish a report every year on the impact of changes in sentencing practice on prison and probation costs. Any changes to sentencing practice as a result of this Bill will fall under that duty. The independent council, with all its expertise on sentencing, is best placed to carry out that analysis.
Similarly, on breach we already publish licence recall statistics every quarter in the Offender Management Statistics Quarterly Bulletin. Again, that is a national statistics publication. We want to make sure that, in the future, that includes recalls of prisoners released from sentences of less than 12 months, and includes committals to custody for those proven to have breached a supervision requirement. Likewise, we publish proven reoffending rates every quarter, broken down by type and length of sentence. That is also a national statistics publication.
I hope this makes it clear that we are not starting from scratch. I also take pride in the fact that this has been one of the most proactive Governments in putting out their statistics and information, allowing various parts of the Government to be checked on performance. The Government have worked hard over the past three years to improve the transparency of the criminal justice system, and we would look to make available much of the information that Amendment 34 details through the existing mechanisms we have.
The Secretary of State is already subject to a duty to publish information of this sort. As I suspect the noble Lord is aware, given that his amendment follows some of its language very closely, Section 95 of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 requires the Secretary of State every year to publish such information as he considers expedient on a range of topics, including information that allows those working in the justice system to become aware of the financial implications of their decisions and information that allows those working in the justice system to understand the effectiveness of different sentences in preventing reoffending.
We already consider it expedient to publish not just annually, but quarterly, much of the information that Amendment 34 mentions. That will continue to happen if the provisions of the Bill receive the agreement of both Houses. Therefore, while I understand, welcome, and agree with the intentions of the noble Lord in tabling this amendment, I hope that what I have said reassures him that the Government are committed to understanding and sharing the impacts of this Bill and to being as transparent as possible in delivering it forward.
In doing so, I remind noble Lords that costs for extending supervision will ultimately be dependent on the outcome of competing offender services in the community. If we were to give figures at this stage, it would put at risk our ability to agree value-for-money contracts with providers. However, I hope that my commitment last week to take away the impact assessment for the Bill and to consider how we could expand it will provide some additional assurance. Work is under way to revise the impact assessment as I speak, and I hope to be able to bring back a revised version soon. I know what has been said about the value of that on Report. In the light of these assurances I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Hylton
My Lords, will the Minister confirm that the Treasury has set a fixed sum for the transition to the rehabilitation of short-term offenders and for the changes to the probation service? If so, how big is that sum, and over what period?
Lord McNally
One of the things I have learnt in three years is that when a noble Lord asks me a question like that, I promise to get advice and write to him for the benefit of the Committee. I am quite sure that on almost every aspect of life the Treasury has fixed sums in mind, but I will check on that and report back to him.
Lord McNally
The noble Lord beat me. I have been racking my brains for a suitable Shakespearean quote to come back at him. I suppose we could say that this is a “Government of wonders”. I am reminded of the late Lord George Brown, who, when he was Economics Minister, stood up at the Dispatch Box, banged it and said “This Government are running the economy in a way that it has never been run before”, and was then surprised when the Opposition cheered him to the echo.
In this last group of amendments, we turn to the provisions on consequential and transitional arrangements. The provisions in Clauses 18 and 19 are mainly technical, and are also fairly standard constructions, which can be seen, for example, in the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, seems to be saying that these amendments are designed to ensure that Parliament has a say before order-making changes are made.
Clause 18 allows the Secretary of State to make provision that is consequential, supplementary or incidental to the provisions of the Act by an order that is subject to the negative procedure. This clause mainly amends other statutory schemes, some of which are complicated and technical in nature. It is therefore eminently sensible for there to be a power to make the consequential or other changes needed to ensure those provisions work well with the provisions of this Act.
Those changes should be subject to the negative procedure where possible. Clause 18(6) makes it clear that where an order under Clause 18 is made that amends another Act, it is subject to the affirmative procedure. Amendment 35 would remove Clause 18(2), which makes it clear what the power can be used for. The power itself is conferred by subsection (1), so the amendment makes it unclear what the power may be used for: it would not remove the power. There will be an opportunity to scrutinise the technical changes made by any order made under Clause 18. I do not believe that these have to be affirmative orders, and where the order is not subject to the affirmative procedure it will be subject to the negative procedure.
Amendment 36 is more specific in that it would make any order made under Clause 19 subject to the affirmative procedure. Clause 19 makes arrangements for transitional provisions and introduces Schedule 7, which sets out in what circumstances the changes made by the Bill apply. For example, it sets out how the new supervision changes apply to different sentences in different circumstances. The power to make transitional, transitory or saving provisions can be used only if those provisions are related to a commencement order. Under this Act, commencement orders are, as is usual, not subject to a parliamentary procedure. It would therefore be odd for the power to include transitional, transitory or saving provisions on commencement to be subject to the affirmative procedure.
Clauses 18 and 19 are needed to implement primary legislation flexibly, and they are often technically complicated. I do not think that noble Lords would particularly welcome a detailed debate on affirmative orders. I do not know: I could think of one noble Baroness who would relish a detailed debate on affirmative orders. Oh, she has gone. We teased the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, earlier. I am not convinced that such a debate is a good use of your Lordships’ time, or is what this amendment actually intends.
In asking the noble Lord to consider withdrawing these amendments, I take the opportunity to say that this has been very useful and productive Committee consideration of this Bill. We will return to detailed points on Report and we have already had a few Mafia-like warnings—you know where we live—that there will be consequences if we do not respond. However, I have appreciated the general support on all sides of the House for what we are trying to do in tackling the problem of reoffending, which has proved very difficult for successive Administrations. We claim no genius in our solutions, but we are genuinely trying to find both the resources and the flexibility to tackle this problem. The contribution of this House to getting it right is enormously appreciated.
Lord Beecham
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his reply and his essentially good-humoured approach for most of the time we have been discussing the Bill. I made it clear at the outset that these were probing amendments only, so he perhaps went a little further than he needed to in responding. Nevertheless, I am grateful. I echo his words about the proceedings having been useful. How productive they have been will very much depend on the Government’s response on Report. I hope it will be a little more positive than he has indicated, or has been allowed to indicate, so far. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Offender Rehabilitation Bill [HL]
Lord McNally Excerpts(10 years, 11 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now resolve itself into Committee on the Bill.
Amendment to the Motion
Lord Beecham
My Lords, I strongly sympathise with the noble Lord’s observations and share his strictures on the substance of the proposals that we are to debate. I must, however, thank the Minister for arranging a meeting yesterday, and I thank the Secretary of State and the Under-Secretary of State in the House of Commons for attending that meeting. However, in the nature of things, it lasted only an hour and we were able to get through only three clauses of the Bill. That underlines the difficulties that your Lordships will face in debating adequately the complex proposals before us.
The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, referred to the inadequacies of the impact analysis, which, I have to say, was exceptionally flimsy, even by the standards of this Government. A huge area of public policy, the future of the probation service, on which much of the Bill depends, is not actually included in the Bill. Amendments in my name and in the names of other noble Lords will raise that issue, but it is not in the Bill at all.
It is only two weeks since Second Reading and your Lordships’ House has been in session for only six days since then. Given the recess, it has been difficult enough for Members of the House to consider and draft amendments without the benefit of the kind of information to which the noble Lord referred. He has itemised many of the relevant questions. I, too, raised questions, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, and the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia. I do not expect the Minister to occupy his Whitsun Recess by replying personally to all these matters but the department should surely have taken steps to respond to those questions and allow the debates that will take place today and next week to be better informed. It is unfortunate that that has not been the case and I hope that the Minister will feel able to assure the noble Lord that answers will be given. It is not good enough for them merely to arise in the context of today’s Committee debate. We ought to have the answers laid in the Library in a consolidated form and available for consideration before we reach Report in some three weeks’ time. I hope that the Minister can build on the good work he did yesterday, rather than the omissions of the department, in dealing with these requests.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, a lot of what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said was very familiar, because of course it was also his Second Reading speech. I make no complaint, but I say to the Opposition that they may be on this side of the Box one day. If using this kind of amendment to prevent a Committee stage proceeding were to become too much of a habit, it would be very easy to gum up government business.
I associate myself with the noble Lord’s words about Sir Patrick Nairne, because I was also a Whitehall warrior for quite a long time. I worked with Sir Patrick in the 1970s. My experience of both Whitehall and Westminster makes me less than apologetic about our approach. Governments are always faced with attacks for having no policy and being too slow, or for having too many ideas and rushing Parliament. I would rather we had too many ideas.
The truth is that successive Governments have tried to tackle the challenge of rehabilitating offenders. We have put forward our proposals for scrutiny and I am old fashioned enough to believe that that is exactly what the Committee stage of a Bill is for. I look forward to the next eight hours or so today and to the next Committee day for the House to do its proper job of scrutiny and questioning, and I will do my best to give answers.
On the specifics of the impact assessment, I agree to take another look at it and see where we can update it for the benefit of the House. I will bring that impact assessment back before the Bill completes its stages in this House. I hope that will be in time for Report. However, as noble Lords on the other Benches who went through similar exercises will know, we have to hold back certain things for commercial reasons. We are about to enter negotiations to get the best deal for the taxpayer and therefore do not wish to reveal our entire hand in advance. I will update the impact assessment as much as I can but I suggest that we now get on with the work of the day and the work of this House, which is the detailed scrutiny of the Bill.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister and to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, for what they have said. I am particularly grateful for the Minister’s reassurance that he will look at the impact assessment. That is hugely important not only for us but for the officials and members of the services who will carry out the work. Can the Minister say anything about the unanswered questions which I and the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, mentioned?
Lord McNally
My Lords, that is what a Committee stage is for. I will try to answer as many of those questions as I can, but after the noble Lord’s experiences in the military, in Whitehall, in Parliament and in the various services, he will know that not all the questions he poses have an instant answer available. I have never hidden the fact that we are being innovative in what we are doing, and because of that, there is no track record to refer to. However, that does not resile from the fact that these are worthwhile proposals to be considered, and I am very willing, during the course of the examination of the Bill, to try to be as full in my answers as I can.
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede
My Lords, in moving Amendment 1, I shall also address Amendments 3, 5 and, in passing, Amendment 3A. Amendments 1 and 3 are designed to give greater flexibility to a sentencing court. As the Bill stands, everyone sentenced to a period of custody of one year or less will be given a period of 12 months’ supervision from their day of release. This, of course, is something that we welcome as a useful addition to the armoury of the probation service. However, there will be cases where this period of supervision is excessive, disproportionate and unnecessary. A court imposing a short custodial sentence of, say, 29 days or fewer will be well aware of the alternatives available—namely, a community order, which could itself have been more punitive and more rehabilitative. If, nevertheless, the court decides on a short custodial sentence, I would argue that it can be safely assumed that no rehabilitative action was required and therefore it should not be unnecessarily imposed on the offender.
Amendment 5 addresses the same point and is also designed to reduce the burden on the probation service. It provides that a court can direct, on advice from the probation service, that there need be no period of supervision. I should say that this would be in exceptional cases. The sort of cases that I am thinking about relate to the one-off nature of an offence where the offender is of previous good character, there were physical or mental health issues, or the offender is extremely old. Another factor might be the length of time that has elapsed between the date of the offence and the date of conviction where there had been no offending during the interim period.
The purpose of the amendments is to give the courts greater flexibility and prevent disproportionate and unnecessary supervision. As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, in the previous debate, yesterday we were fortunate enough to meet the Justice Secretary. The argument he advanced in response to these amendments was that there needs to be a stable cohort of offenders who are to be managed by the private probation providers. He went on to say that the new group of offenders who are to receive this new supervision need to be a stable group so that a proper assessment of reoffending among this group can be done on a year-on-year basis. The purpose is to make an accurate calculation of the payment by results of the private contractors and, most importantly, to assess the success or otherwise of the additional supervision to be provided.
I completely understand that argument. In my professional life I have done many similar calculations and I know it is very useful to have a stable cohort when making those calculations. But I would argue through these amendments that that simplicity and clarity of calculation should not be set above the interests of justice of the offenders themselves and, however low the level of supervision which will be imposed on these people, there will still be an additional cost. In the interests of justice for the offenders and a reduction in costs, I have tabled these amendments.
I turn briefly to Amendment 3A in the name of my noble friend Lord Beecham. A number of amendments address the transition of offenders from under 18 to over 18. The object of all these amendments is to try to maximise the input of the YOT service and to work flexibly with the probation service. This issue may be addressed in Clause 6(4), which will introduce new Section 106B(4)(b), and may well cover the points raised in this amendment. Nevertheless, I hope the noble Lord will address this point about maximising flexibility for the YOT service and enhancing its ability to work constructively with the private probation providers. I beg to move.
Lord McNally
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, for the way in which he moved that amendment. During Second Reading, the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, told us about his experiences as a sitting magistrate and the frustration that magistrates often feel when they see offenders with long histories of offending coming before the court time and again. The noble Lord told us how magistrates genuinely feel that they use custody as a last resort. In all the discussions that I have had with anybody who has had an experience of the magistracy, that emphasis has been made. The Government share the frustration of the magistracy. They seem to be almost forced into successive custodial terms because of the cycle of repeat offending. That is exactly why we have brought forward the Bill. It is why Clause 1 extends release on licence and why Clause 2 tops up that licence with additional supervision.
The Government believe that the only way we can break the high level of reoffending among this group of offenders is to end the current position whereby they walk out of prison after half of their sentence with no support and no incentives to seek support to change. That is why Clause 1 applies licensing conditions to all custodial sentences of more than one day. I will explain why in Clause 1 licences apply to a sentence of more than one day, before I turn to the Amendment 1 of the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby. First, there is a practical consideration. The headline sentence imposed by the court is, as the House knows, halved. It is not possible, nor practical, to halve a half day of custody. It is also the case, as the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, will be aware, that there are some minor cases in which the court decides that an offender could serve their sentence by spending a day sitting in the court. So, for practical purposes and to retain the power of the court to sentence to a day in court, we applied the licence and the new top-ups of this supervision to sentences of more than one day.
Amendment 1 would raise that minimum period to sentences of 29 days or more. In other words, a sentence of 28 days or less would result in unconditional release with no licence conditions, no top-up supervision, no power to recall the offender and no way to rehabilitate the offender other than the hope that they volunteer for support. A significant number of offenders who the noble Lord and his fellow magistrates sentence to custody receive a sentence of 28 days or less. The latest statistics from 2012 suggest that around 13,300 adult offenders received such a sentence. The reason why many of those offenders receive sentences of 28 days or less is that their history of offending makes the offence more serious, therefore justifying a custodial sentence. It is exactly because these offenders have failed to break their cycle of offending that they received the short custodial sentence in the first place, and it is because they have been released from short sentences with no support that they continue to offend and receive yet more short prison sentences. This is exactly the group that we should be targeting for supervision. It is a group of offenders for whom we should do everything possible to help them face up to the issues that have caused them to offend. Some of them will reoffend when under supervision and some will not comply with the licensed conditions, but that has to be better than the current position, where they are simply imprisoned and released, only to reoffend and be imprisoned again.
I understand why the noble Lord tabled this amendment but, given that it will not provide the courts with more discretion and will leave a significant number of offenders without support, I hope that he will consider withdrawing it. As the Secretary of State explained at our meeting last night, the intention is to have flexibility and common sense in terms of the treatment that is applied during that period of supervision. By the way, that was not a secret meeting—all noble Lords were invited and I was very grateful to those who did come along to hear him. At the very beginning of this debate, I would also make the point that we must not think of the period of supervision as punishment; it is a period of help and support, which we hope will help people to avoid reoffending.
I now turn to Amendments 3 and 5, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby. These relate to the top-up supervision covered by Clause 2, which will introduce a new Section 256AA, applying supervision to all offenders with a sentence of,
“more than 1 day but less than 2 years”.
That means that the period of licence will be topped up with additional supervision so that the two, taken together, amount to 12 months. Amendment 3 essentially follows from Amendment 1. If Amendment 1 was adopted, those serving 28 days or fewer would have no licence, and Amendment 3 would mean they would have no top-up supervision either. I have already said why the Government disagree with Amendment 1, and it follows that we would not support Amendment 3 for the same reason. It is a small point, and I do not want to labour it, but I assume that the noble Lord, in Amendment 3, meant to refer to more than 28 rather than 27 days, since his Amendment 1 related to sentences of less than 29 days—that is, 28 days or fewer. In other words, a sentence of 28 days would fall between the two.
Amendment 3A, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, seeks to amend the categories of offenders who receive top-up supervision under Clause 2. Amendment 3A would exempt offenders sentenced in the youth court when they were under 18 from receiving top-up supervision, even if they were 18 when released from custody. I note that the amendment does not seek to extend this exemption to those sentenced when under 18 in the Crown Court. I understand the concerns, which my noble friend Lady Linklater has also raised, and we will return in later amendments to the question of supervision for those released from custody who have reached 18. However, I would say now that the Government believe that our commitment to provide 12-month supervision should apply to all those aged 18 and over, when they reach the point when they would be released from custody. We of course recognise that young offenders who have just turned 18 can have different needs from older, adult offenders, and we will expect providers also to recognise this difference and to tailor their supervision to the particular needs of this group.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, I join the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, in supporting the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater. She has a strong point in Amendment 2 on the need to avoid rigidity in the system, to look at particular individuals’ needs and to ensure that supervision is proportionate and flexible according to the circumstances of the case. There is some danger, under the Bill’s present formulation, that that will be rather more difficult than it should be.
I am also particularly enthusiastic about Amendment 4. It seems that continuity is critical here, particularly as the people we are looking at are themselves in a state of transition. It does not seem helpful that those who supervise and assist such people should change in the course of that transition. Of course, there has to be some cut-off point, and the age of 21 is reasonable. I hope that the Minister will look sympathetically at that. It also strikes me that it may be a more cost-effective way of dealing with offenders in that category, because you do not have the process of handing over and entering into separate contractual arrangements with a different organisation and all the rest of it when you have already got a provider with a budget and contract which should be capable of being extended if required under the circumstances of the case.
I hope that the noble Lord will undertake to have a look at this and come back on Report. It seems sensible and quite consistent with the approach that the Government seek to pursue.
Lord McNally
My Lords, I am grateful for the debate that my noble friend has stimulated. She is absolutely right that this group of people is the most challenging in terms of the prolific number of offences for which they are responsible. In many ways, this can be a key period in their lives and can determine whether they live a life of crime or become constructive members of society. I also take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe. For me, there is a sense of shame that so many who have been in our care end up in our criminal justice system. We must go into that more deeply and we shall try to do so, in part, through the Children and Families Bill and other legislation.
What gives me some optimism that we shall be able to make this new legislation work is that there are good examples: the Manchester scheme that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, referred to and the mentoring in Peterborough. This was raised in our discussion yesterday and I want to explore further the mentoring by those who have committed earlier misdemeanours but now play a positive role in life. I remember going to Stafford and meeting a mentor who had been heavily drug dependent, but he had cleaned himself up and was now having a really good effect on young people through the advice that he was giving them.
The noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, expressed the dilemma at Second Reading that persistent offenders end up being given short sentences that send them into a prison environment. I fully accept the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, that that puts them into a completely ill-suited environment in terms of rehabilitation. That is one reason why part of what we are trying to develop is to start rehabilitation in prison, so that they get used to the world of work and address various failings such as literacy or drug or alcohol dependency. One of the first things I was told when I started visiting prisons and youth offending centres was, “We just start to have some effect and then we lose them”. I repeat that the period of 12 months’ supervision is not punishment but the continuation of help.
My noble friend said that this amendment is designed to provide a power for the Secretary of State to contract the rehabilitation services when an offender volunteers for such programmes. I have already said why we think that both licence and top-up supervision should be applied to all offenders. I understand the point that often the most effective rehabilitation occurs when the offender decides that they want to change. However, the simple fact is that many offenders will not volunteer for rehabilitation programmes. Those who initially volunteer may change their mind when more challenging questions are asked of them, or when they simply become bored of what they may decide is undue hassle. Offenders who fail to comply with the programmes will simply withdraw their consent to avoid any consequences of failing to undertake the programme they initially signed up for.
In the Bill we are ensuring that all offenders have the opportunity to receive help and assistance on release from custody. We are saying to offenders, “Here is your chance to rehabilitate yourself and turn your life around, but you cannot walk away from this and expect no consequence if you do”. That is why the licence and top-up supervision is mandatory, but also flexible, so that providers can tailor the type of support and intensity that is needed for each offender.
I have taken time to explain that we think licence and supervision should be mandatory, but let me deal very quickly with the powers of the Secretary of State to contract for voluntary-based rehabilitation services. The fact is that the Secretary of State already has the power, and nothing in the Bill restricts that power, even though our intention, in the vast majority of cases, is to make licences and top-up supervision mandatory. In short, therefore, the Secretary of State does not need this power, and I ask my noble friend to withdraw her amendment.
Amendment 4, on the top-up to 21 year-olds, also takes my noble friend’s application of top-up supervision. I understand that the intention of Amendment 2 is to ensure that offenders aged under 21 on release from custody will serve a period on licence but not be subject to top-up supervision. I understand my noble friend’s argument, but I disagree with it. The Government believe that all those aged 18 when released from custody should get the same level of supervision and support. The amendment would mean that an offender sentenced to two months’ imprisonment when aged 20 would serve only half their sentence in custody and have only a month of licensed supervision. Yet, as I said at the beginning, these young offenders have some of the highest reoffending rate of any group.
Our proposals in the Bill will ensure that offenders who are 18 when released from custody get 12 months of supervision in the community. I stress again that the type and level of supervision can be tailored to the young person’s needs. I expect that providers will develop specific programmes for this age group, offering a real chance to make a difference to the needs of young offenders. The Government see this as an opportunity for real support for young offenders, not as something that they should be excluded from.
I will clarify the point that my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham made about the crossover from YOT supervision to probation supervision. The Bill makes it clear that this will be a matter of judgment at that time, and of consultation to make sure that what is done is most effective. If the most effective course is to retain the YOT supervision, that supervision will continue. It fits in with what I keep on emphasising: this is not, to take the criticism of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, an exercise in rigidity. It is quite the opposite. It builds in the most flexible of approaches to try to tailor to the needs of the individual the kind of help and support they are going to get. However, I disagree with my noble friend, although, goodness knows, I am in awe of his experience and expertise in this area. If saying to offenders in this age group, “For the next 12 months you are going to try to mend your ways” is somehow an unfair burden on them by society, I am willing to take that risk.
I suspect that if we can put this into place, we will start having an impact on this age group. As I have said, one of the lessons that we have to learn from the experience of this age group is that without this help, they get out of our control, become repeat offenders, going into the adult criminal justice system and the prison system with disastrous results for both themselves and their society. Therefore, I do not think that this long period of 12 months’ supervision ahead of them is somehow a terrible burden on these young people. For a significant number of them, it may be the best thing that ever happens in their lives.
I hope that my noble friend will consider withdrawing her amendment. However, I will carefully read Hansard and look at our proposals for this age group. I agree with much of what noble Lords have said about offenders in this age group; if we get it right for them, there will be enormous benefits in terms of the impact on future criminal behaviour.
As I said, I am willing to look at the arguments and think about this further, but I think we have got the balance right. I hope that the noble Baroness will consider the arguments that I have deployed. In the mean time, I hope that she will be willing to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Beecham
Accepting for a moment, for the purposes of argument, the noble Lord’s assurance—and of course I do accept his assurance—that there is the option of transition not being automatic, who decides in the end what should happen? Does this have to be agreed between the YOT and the probation service, or does it go back to the court? Where would a decision be made if there is a disagreement between the existing provider and the future providers?
Lord McNally
That is one of the things that I want to think about. I hope that the two bodies concerned would make a practical decision about the needs of the individual, but as the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said, if that was not available, who would be the judge? Would that have to go back to court? I will think about that, and if there is a gap we will fill it.
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone
I thank my noble friend the Minister for his very thoughtful and detailed response. I am particularly grateful to hear him say, as I understand it, that there will be real flexibility based on the needs of the young people and on whether they can actually continue with the YJB, YOTs and others while they serve out their time, as it were. That is a very welcome thing to have heard.
However, I must also say that while the Minister talks about flexibility within it, the year’s supervision is a fixed time. I have heard him say it. To have the long arm of the law wound around you for a year is a very long time for a minor offence. I was arguing essentially for flexibility there, not rigidity.
I also thank the other noble Lords who contributed. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, for asking my question again, which is a very important question to hear the answer to, and the noble Lords, Lord Ponsonby and Lord Ramsbotham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, for their very helpful remarks.
I will, of course, now think about everything that I have heard and everything that has been said before we come to Report. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, this amendment seeks to amend subsection (2) of Clause 2, which, in turn, seeks to insert new Section 256AA into the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The amendment seeks to amend new subsection (8) of the new section in relation to the definition of a supervisor of persons subject to the supervision which will, when the Bill is passed, take effect for prisoners serving less than two years.
The purpose of the amendment is to be clear that the provider of the supervision should be a public sector organisation. At the moment, presumably it would normally be a probation trust or an organisation commissioned by such an organisation. It seems to me and to my noble friend important that there should be a clear public line of accountability for the provision of this service, which does not necessarily seem to be the case according to the wording of the proposed subsection as it now appears. It is a fairly basic point. Given that we are looking at a significant responsibility, some of which at the moment is not exercised at all by the probation service—that is to say, supervision of people serving less than 12 months—an important line of public accountability should be established. That in no way precludes, of course, the engagement of the third sector in relation to supervision of offenders, as long as they have been contracted by a public authority.
Of course, there are many examples of probation trusts working with voluntary organisations at the moment. I know that in my own area, Northumbria, a probation trust has very good working relationships and in Newcastle there is a successful scheme that has been commissioned in that way. There is no intention at all to ensure that all the supervision is actually carried out by the probation service but, if that is not the case, there should at least be that line of public accountability. I beg to move.
Lord McNally
My Lords, the noble Lord will be quick to tell me if I am wrong but, as I read it, Amendment 7A has a very clear effect. It is to ensure that all top supervision of offenders should be carried out by the public sector providers or those bodies commissioned by the public sector. I have never hidden from this House that we believe, particularly in the present economic conditions, that we will be able to find the resources to carry through our rehabilitation revolution only by employing payment by results and involving the skills and initiatives of the private and voluntary sectors.
We are breaking new ground in our approach. We are committed to providing, for the first time in decades, supervision for those released from short custodial sentences. One of our key objectives is finally to tackle the unacceptably high level of reoffending among this group. That prize is worth striving for. However, to achieve that aim we have to be able to afford this additional supervision. To do that, we need to reduce our current costs of dealing with offenders. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, does not think that we can do this. I say to him that we cannot do so by only going down old ways and old costs. Competing the majority of probation services will improve value and efficiency throughout the system, making taxpayers’ money go further. For example, competing the community payback contracts in London saw a £25 million saving over four years. We will also look at efficiencies within the public sector by consolidating back-office functions and creating one national public sector probation service. That is another real plus for the Bill. I remember the debates nearly a decade ago, and I was never happy that the probation service was a kind of junior partner to the Prison Service. One of the effects of the Bill will be to create a national probation service with real status and a real voice in these matters. We also want to encourage innovation among providers of probation services to ensure that we make a real change in reoffending rates. By paying providers in full only when they are successful at reducing reoffending we will not only make savings but will drive down reoffending rates.
We want to avoid what the last Government did. We do not want to create a sentencing regime that is overly prescriptive, complex and unaffordable. In other words, we do not want to create another custody plus sentence, the flagship policy of the 2003 Act, which ended up never being implemented. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, will be reassured that we have learnt those lessons from the past, and that in the light of my explanation he will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Beecham
If I do, it will not be because of the noble Lord’s explanation. However, of course I will not press this matter to a vote.
We will come later to the question of payment by results and the considerable doubts that many of us on these Benches and in other parts of your Lordships’ House have about that as an appropriate way of dealing with the sensitive area of supervision. I stress again, as my noble friend Lord Ponsonby made clear earlier, that we strongly support the drive for reducing reoffending and that we are engaged with a question of the practicalities.
I come back to the position that in our view that line of accountability at the level of the provision of service should ultimately rest with a public sector body and not simply be hived off completely, even if the work is subcontracted—and there is no particular reason why that should not be the case. I mention specifically third sector organisations because they have a particularly valuable role to play. My amendment would not exclude contracting with private sector organisations, for that matter. However, they would be contracted by the public sector body with the legitimate experience. However, as I indicated, I will not press this tonight, and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, it is common ground between all Members of your Lordships’ House, and reflected in some of the amendments that we have already debated, that the problems suffered by and indeed occasioned by offenders are complex and often multiple, and that in dealing with them no single agency is likely to be able to resolve all those problems or help people entirely overcome the difficult issues that they face. On the contrary, it is quite clear that in a number of areas, collaboration between various agencies will be required if we are to achieve the shared objective of reducing reoffending, from the perspective both of the advantage to society and of the individuals concerned. Therefore, looking at what is most likely to avoid reoffending, we know—and it has been rehearsed many times in your Lordships’ House—that the principal steps that can be taken to diminish reoffending relate to employment and in particular to housing, but also to issues such as health.
A number of different agencies could and should be involved in all these aspects, both in the direct provision of services and in the case of commissioning services, so that, for example, local authorities clearly have a role. I suggest that in shire county areas that is at both levels—of adult services which are county level responsibility, and housing, which is a district level responsibility. However, of course, in unitary authorities they are located within the same authority. Obviously the police have a role, but also in terms of employment one has to look at the Department for Work and Pensions. In terms of health, in the new organisation of the health service, I suggest that one has to look at two levels: the clinical commissioning groups and the national Commissioning Board, because they have responsibility over areas of mental health.
All these need to be involved, and many of them are already involved, in local arrangements, such as community safety partnerships and crime and disorder reduction partnerships. Some of them are involved in the health and well-being boards, which prepare strategic needs assessments. I would hope that the needs of offenders are reflected in those bodies. However, the purpose of this amendment is to ensure that all providers of the services which the Bill seeks to introduce, or at any rate ensure are available, come together with the other relevant agencies so that a genuine cross-sectoral partnership is dealing with these issues. Of course, that puts a responsibility on the other partners, as well as on the direct providers of probation services or supervisory services.
I hope that the noble Lord will accept that, at least on this occasion, this is meant to be a friendly amendment, designed to achieve some progress on a commonly shared objective, and I look forward to hearing his response.
Lord McNally
My Lords, I always assume that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, is working in the most constructive manner. I was a little brusque with him in my previous reply. I thought that perhaps buried away in his innocent amendment was an effect that might have undermined the purpose of our Bill. However, in respect of Amendment 7B, I would not even entertain such an unworthy thought. I understand where he is coming from; let me try to explain our approach.
This amendment would provide that all future providers of probation services would be responsible authorities for the purposes of formulating and implementing crime reduction strategies. It would also mean that all responsible authorities, not just probation providers, would be obliged to attend community safety partnership meetings and co-operate with crime and disorder reduction partnerships.
The Government fully share the sentiment in this amendment but nothing that we do will work unless it is rooted in local partnerships. The Transforming Rehabilitation strategy made clear that the Government expect new providers to engage with statutory and non-statutory local strategic and delivery partnerships. These will, of course, include community safety partnerships, but also others such as integrated offender management, safeguarding boards and youth offending teams. It will be in providers’ interests to work with other partners to achieve the best results, and our payment mechanism, which will reward reductions in reoffending, will incentivise them to do so.
However, we also set out in the strategy our clear expectation that providers will need to demonstrate how they will work in and strengthen local partnerships to deliver the results that they are incentivised to achieve. As part of the formal evaluation of this, we will include a requirement that providers’ evidence how they will sustain and develop networks and partnerships. Once the system is up and running, we will monitor local partnership working as part of obtaining assurances of the delivery of services. We will liaise with police and crime commissioners, local authorities and other relevant partners as appropriate.
I have set out our commitment and the steps that we are taking to ensure that our reforms are rooted in local partnerships so that offenders can access the broad package of support that they need to get their lives back on track. Incentivising providers to focus relentlessly on reducing reoffending means that it is in their interests to work with other partners and in local partnerships. However, we must ensure that providers have the flexibility to do what works. Integration at local level works best when it is not mandated centrally.
Sections 5 and 6 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 already specify that where contractual arrangements so provide, providers of probation services will be responsible to authorities for the purpose of crime reduction strategies. We have no plans to change the legislation in this respect. We are doing further detailed work on the contractual requirements on providers, and will look at how we address issues such as lack of engagement with partners locally. However, as I have already touched on, it will be in the provider’s interest to work with other partners to achieve the best result under our system, and we will incentivise them to do so. We will monitor local partnership working as part of obtaining assurance of the delivery service. As I have said, we will liaise with the police and crime commissioners, local authorities and others in this task. We are doing further detailed work on the contractual requirements on providers and will look at how we address issues such as lack of engagement.
However, it will be in the provider’s interest to do this work. For this reason, although I think it is an important issue, I hope that my reply convinces the noble Lord that it is one that we are keeping in mind as we draw up the contracts. We will try to get the balance right between flexibility in operation, which we have continually emphasised, and an important emphasis on local engagement, commitment and monitoring, which the noble Lord has rightly raised in this amendment. Having given such a warm and constructive reply, I hope that he will agree to withdraw it.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Haskel)
I have to inform your Lordships that if this amendment is agreed, I cannot call Amendments 9 to 12 because of pre-emption.
Lord McNally
My Lords, I hope I am answering the amendment that the noble Lord has moved, because I am just wondering what Amendment 8 would actually do. It would remove paragraph 1 of Schedule 1 to the Bill, which amends the 2003 Act and sets out the conditions under which the Secretary of State may top up supervision. I have already said that top-up supervision is a useful device to ensure that there is a reasonable period of supervision to enable a change to be made to the offending behaviour. Therefore, the amendment has the unusual and perhaps unintended effect of not removing the provision for top-up supervision that is contained in Clause 2.
Lord Beecham
It is purely a probing amendment. There is no intention to remove the provision.
Lord McNally
Instead, it would simply remove any statutory controls on the conditions that can be imposed during the supervision period. When sentencing offenders to custody, courts will be unaware of the limits to the conditions that may be imposed by the Secretary of State. This could affect their sentencing behaviour if they decide that they need to compensate for the risk of punitive supervision conditions being imposed. It also, strangely, retains the detail of drug testing and drug appointments under the top-up supervision, which are in paragraph 2 of the schedule, along with the process for dealing with the breach of supervision. However, it removes the reference to them as conditions of the supervision.
The noble Lord said that this was a probing amendment. I will look again and reflect on what exactly he was probing. If I need to clarify this, I will. On his question about a resident who for unforeseen circumstances was in breach, again, I hope that what we are doing is not setting up circumstances for individuals to fail; these are meant to be supportive, sensible, intelligent ways of dealing with individuals whom we know—as has been emphasised—often have very complex problems. The noble Lord has probed, I have responded, and if the matter requires further clarification, I will certainly provide it.
Lord Beecham
I am grateful for the second—unscripted—part of the noble Lord’s speech. In the circumstances, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, I join the noble and learned Lord and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, in supporting the amendments spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Marks, which would help considerably. The noble Baroness’s amendment would remove the capacity to order a person in breach to be committed to prison. She said that there was no provision in the Bill for this measure to be used as a last resort. That is the substance of my amendments in the next group. It may be convenient for me to speak to those amendments now as I am advised that that is possible. It makes sense to do so, as my Amendments 15 and 18 would qualify the provision in new Section 256AC(4)(a) within Clause 3 by providing that a sentence for breach not exceeding 14 days is to be treated as a last resort. I hope that meets the point raised by the noble Baroness. Concerns were expressed about this provision in the consultation document, which the Government acknowledged in their response. However, as yet, their response has not been reflected in the Bill. In my submission, it would make sense to add that qualification, so that, in addition to the provisions in the amendments spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Marks, the right of the court to impose a custodial sentence of up to 14 days would be preserved but it would be stated explicitly in the Bill that it is to be used only as a last resort. That is the sort of declaratory statement to which the noble Lord has referred in earlier debates.
Is the Minister in a position to indicate the anticipated number as regards the recall provision? I could not find it in the impact assessment. He may not be in a position to do that. However, the noble Baroness rightly referred to the very large increase in this regard—the 55-fold increase—in the past 20 years, most of which, as she rightly says, occurred over the past 14 years. Many of the custodial sentences for breach are imposed on young offenders. Indeed, the Prison Reform Trust has reported substantially on that problem.
I suspect that there is no great distance between the Minister’s position and that set out in the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Marks, and in my Amendments 15 and 18. I would welcome the Minister indicating tonight or on Report that those measures will be included in the Bill, with the appropriate wording. The noble Baroness rightly referred to concerns about there being an increased readiness to impose custodial sentences for breach and the cost of this in material terms and, potentially, for offenders and the rehabilitative process. This is not a clear-cut issue and there are clearly arguments on both sides but I have heard concerns expressed by a senior member of the Magistrates’ Association as well as by the noble Baroness and other organisations. Accepting these amendments would go a long way to relieve those concerns while still leaving the court with the ultimate power to impose a custodial sanction as a last resort.
Lord McNally
I thank noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. Perhaps I could cover numbers and costs in the revised impact assessment that I will bring back to the House.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, that I certainly do not want to see any benefits gained from a successful rehabilitation programme being dribbled away in the costs incurred through dealing with breach. That would be very self-defeating indeed and we must look carefully at that. However, although this is a wonderful Chamber in which to discuss these problems, I sometimes think that we try too hard to be understanding on these issues. In trying to understand all these terribly complex problems with which these people are faced, we do not face up to the fact that they have a choice. As I have said in previous debates, I remember from my childhood young people who experienced in their upbringing many of the problems we talk about in this House but who nevertheless grew up to be honest, decent, honourable members of society. It is a choice.
In our efforts to understand, I sometimes think that we leave some of these offenders with the belief that the gun is never loaded and that they will never have to face the consequences. As the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, has said in earlier debates, some offenders who have been given every chance, shown every understanding and been offered every opportunity still appear before the courts and the magistrates have no alternative. I am as willing to be as woolly a liberal as the next man, but we must also send a very clear message that as a society we do not intend to tolerate anti-social and criminal behaviour without a firm response. If we do not do that, some of the characters we are trying to deal with will never apply themselves to the offers we are making them that we hope will help them put their lives together again.
Offender Rehabilitation Bill [HL]
Lord McNally Excerpts(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Beecham
My Lords, we now come to the black hole in this legislation. Astonishingly, given the scale of the changes proposed for a major national public service, the Bill does not deal with the proposed restructuring of probation. It is quite remarkable that this should be the case.
I have complained from time to time about the Government’s habit of engaging in pre-legislative implementation. What they are doing to probation is, in fact, worse: they appear to be about to implement their proposals without any legislation at all. What we see in the Bill is a series of consequences of their proposals rather than a proposal. This is in connection with a service which has met and exceeded all its targets, which won the British Quality Foundation gold medal for excellence for its achievements over many years and which has very high ratings from those with whom it has to deal: 98% of victims approve of the work of the probation service in the feedback that they have supplied and 82% of supervisions were completed satisfactorily. The record on the timeliness of reports to courts was as high as 99%. Only just under 50%—49%—of what is by any standards a difficult client group were placed in employment after serving their probation order.
Yet the Government now propose a massive change which will effectively exclude around half the work of the probation service from its future deployment. Some 70,000 cases will be effectively privatised. The probation service will be unable, in its present form, to bid to carry out the work which the Government have determined will be subjected to competitive tendering.
The service has done well in reducing reoffending. The Secretary of State has drawn attention to the reoffending rates. He has noted that, for those serving sentences of less than 12 months, reoffending rates have been rising. We have heard today about the scale of the problem of that group. Of course, that is a group for which the probation service has no responsibility. Where it has responsibility, for those with longer sentences, it has done extremely well in reducing reoffending. The Government propose effectively first to nationalise and then virtually to privatise most of the probation service. They will centralise control. Probation trusts will disappear. There will be 21 areas in which the work will now be carried out by tendering. This will mean that much of the work currently carried out by the probation service, and all the work on short-sentence offenders which has not been carried out by the probation service but which the Bill seeks to address—I repeat that we welcome that—will now be carried out on a contractual basis.
There are many concerns about that. Certainly, one of the effects is likely to be a reduction in the degree to which justice is local along with greater difficulties for voluntary organisations wanting to be involved in the work. There would effectively be a binary system of risk, with categories of low and medium risk to be dealt with by organisations other than the probation service, but with the probation service being responsible for high-risk cases. Of course, this appears to ignore the fact that there is movement between the categories. Around 25% of offenders will change from one category to another, many of them becoming higher-risk.
The proposals will clearly lead to confusion. There is a risk, to which I shall return in greater detail when we discuss an amendment specifically dealing with the issue of risk, of the public lacking the protection that a properly administered probation service can afford in the 15,000 or so cases a year that move into the higher risk category. As we shall explore later, it is very difficult to see how those cases will be effectively managed.
We need a proper legislative framework for this exercise of transferring responsibility into the private sector. The Government display, as usual, a touching faith in the competence of the private sector but their record in this area of justice is not very convincing. There have been the huge profits made in relation to an inefficient and inadequate system of tagging, with many failures of the system and a great cost to the public purse. The Minister will no doubt say that that has been changed, that there will be new equipment, and so on. Be that as it may, the original providers certainly did very well for themselves but not very well in relation to the purposes for which they were contracted. Just yesterday we heard the appalling news about the young offender institution run by Serco, one of those massive organisations that purport to be able to do everything anywhere. It was a terrible report on the mistreatment of offenders in a young offender institution.
The unwavering determination of the Government to move from public provision to private provision potentially poses a risk to the interests of the community in matters of safety. We need a proper legislative framework if there is to be any change in the probation service. We need reassurances about a whole range of issues and we need parliamentary approval for a scheme which may bring changes to the probation service, a service that is highly successful.
The purpose of Amendment 20 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and myself is to seek to ensure that any change in the probation service will take place only after the full details have been discussed and approved by Parliament, rather than by executive order or, as it may be, by statutory instrument. This is so important that it deserves to be dealt with by primary legislation. That would certainly be my preference. At the moment we do not have the details and I do not think that the Government have worked them out. They are rushing to implement this programme. Mr Grayling wants things in place in time for the general election. This is too important an issue to be rushed in this way, especially when they are doing so behind the curtain.
We have seen many changes to major public services under the present Government. The health service is in turmoil, despite all the warnings and a very long legislative process. There is a grave risk that we shall see something similar in terms of the impact on the service if the Government press ahead with untested, undebated and unapproved legislation to change what has been a very successful service. I hope that the Government will think again about this. I hope they will see the force of having their proposals properly scrutinised, debated and approved, if that is what Parliament wishes. At the moment, it does not look as though Parliament will have that opportunity, and that simply is not good enough. I beg to move.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, I need the guidance of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, on the correct pronunciation of the word “chutzpah”.
Lord McNally
Glottal or not, that is an extraordinary piece of chutzpah. He knows full well that the powers that we are taking to reorganise the probation service were embedded in his Government’s 2007 Act. It is interesting to recall that during the passage of that Bill through the House of Lords, the issue of parliamentary scrutiny of orders creating, abolishing or amending probation trusts was highly controversial. Originally the Bill did not include any parliamentary scrutiny but the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee identified it as an issue for further investigation. My noble friend Lady Anelay of St Johns tabled an amendment successfully introducing the affirmative resolution procedure to this clause in the Lords. The then Government overturned the amendment during ping-pong by tabling their own concessionary amendment providing for the negative resolution procedure on the basis that that would provide sufficient scrutiny without unduly taking up parliamentary time.
That is the background. Nothing was done behind the curtain or anywhere else. No one has ever heard me, from this Dispatch Box or anywhere else, attack the record of the probation service. The probation service does an excellent job, and I hope it has a very clear future ahead of it with a national role. However, we have to ask whether these things could be done better and more efficiently. As well as the successes of the probation service, we have had as a background to this debate the very disturbing levels of reoffending. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Beecham; the private sector will be very much on trial during this period. We in government who have been preparing the contracts and guidelines for this new partnership will have to work very hard to make sure that they are watertight in terms of delivering value for the taxpayer.
Lord McNally
My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, bandied statistics around from authoritative organisations, I should add that the National Audit Office estimated that reoffending by ex-prisoners cost the economy between £9.5 billion and £13 billion in 2007-08, and I doubt that the figure has gone down since then.
It is all very well to talk about pilots and taking the time to conduct them. However, as I said, we are dealing with a section of reoffending which the previous Government thought they would deal with, tried to do so and then backed off. A lot of what we are dealing with here is a long-standing problem that is still costing the economy a great deal of money. Therefore, I think we are entitled to look at what works best in the present system and then bring forward positive ideas to tackle this very difficult problem.
As I approached my third year in my present office, I began to get slightly embarrassed about pilot schemes because all we seemed to do was go round and round in circles conducting pilots. Pilot schemes can be valuable but I suspect that we abandoned certain pilots because there was nothing significant to be gained from continuing with them, and we already had the feedback from the pilots started by the previous Government in Doncaster and Peterborough. I hear what the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, is saying about our following a high-risk policy. It is certainly a radical policy and delivering it will, no doubt, demand significant effort by my department. What we have learnt from the pilot schemes that have taken place, from the experience of payment by results in other parts of Whitehall and from the existing involvement of the voluntary sector in rehabilitation gives us confidence that if we apply ourselves, taking some of the warnings that he has rightly made, our solutions to the matters before us will work.
Our experience with initial payment-by-results pilots has increased our confidence about designing robust contracts that drive the required behaviour and help generate improved value for money. We have drawn lessons from pilots about establishing performance targets that will allow us to measure, with confidence, the impact of providers on reoffending rates; of designing payment mechanisms that reward providers only for achieving genuine success. We have looked at the benefits of co-design with the market; early provision of data, where possible; the importance of engaging with a wide range of voluntary sector providers in building diverse supply chains; the new complexities in managing PBR contracts and how we can best meet them within the department.
We have not been static on this: we are working on the kind of contracts. The consultation response set out our phased approach to implementation over the summer. We can complete the final details of our design and test robustly some of the details of our plan. The Secretary of State has committed to transparency in this process and we are publishing information on our website as soon as it is ready. We recently published information on our proposed payment mechanisms for the market to consider.
It is all right. I must not cause tensions between departments but when the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, quoted somebody from the Treasury saying that he did not think the Ministry of Justice had a handle on the numbers, the terms “kettle” and “black” came to mind. I had better not go further down that road but before that Bench starts nodding too much about having a grasp of the numbers I would remind them of recent history. I am, nevertheless, pretty confident. I see the teams at work who are going to deal with this in a very businesslike way.
I do not resile from what I am saying. We are doing something extremely exciting, challenging and radical which is opening up the real opportunity—which escaped the Opposition during 13 years in Government—of dealing with this particularly difficult, complex area of reoffending. I will therefore resist Amendment 21 which would require the details of any system of payment by results to be laid before and approved by resolution of both Houses before being implemented. It would also require the piloting of payment by results for a three-year period, subject to independent evaluation and based on existing probation trust areas.
As noble Lords will, no doubt, be aware, we are currently piloting a number of different approaches to payment by results across government and have gained valuable learning data. The lessons we have drawn from implementing our pilots and from the experience of other departments give us confidence that we can design and commission robust contracts that drive the right behaviours and generate value for money. It is, of course, extremely easy to get quotes from various organisations about this but we are moving this forward. The Government have consulted carefully on the principle behind our intended payment mechanisms. In the recent response to our consultation, we explained how we had taken on board comments that the payment mechanism must incentivise providers to work with all offenders, not cherry pick them, including the most prolific, and how we had developed the payment mechanisms accordingly. We have now published a draft payment mechanism for discussion and will continue to engage closely with potential providers to make sure that we get this right.
As I have explained, given the current financial constraints and the importance of delivering effective rehabilitation services to all those who need them, maintaining the current trust structure and piloting payment by results within the existing area are not options open to us. In the light of these arguments, I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord McNally
My Lords, I am not sure how this has come about—I have been advised not to gloat because it might be our fault rather than that of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham—but the risk amendment is Amendment 23; he has just moved Amendment 22. To save him having to speak to Amendment 22 later, it may help if I say that we understand the need to bring a wide range of providers in. We are helping a number of staff within probation trusts who have already expressed an interest in being part of a mutual. On 20 May, the Government announced a package of measures to support the voluntary sector and public service mutuals, in particular through the Cabinet Office mutual support programme, which is providing intensive one-to-one support to prepare the first cohort of seven fledging probation mutuals for the competition. Although we do not believe that a probation trust should itself be able to compete, we will be bringing forward this solution—of mutuals—and of course we can explore that later.
I turn to Amendment 23, to which the noble Lord has just spoken. The amendment will require the definition of risk of harm to be prescribed by statutory instrument and subject to the affirmative resolution procedure. While I do not agree that there is a need to prescribe the definition of risk of harm by statutory instrument, I welcome the opportunity to explain how risk of harm is assessed and to reassure noble Lords that the assessment of risk is not simply a tick-box exercise.
The Offender Assessment System provides a structure for National Offender Management Service staff to assess an offender’s static and dynamic risk factors and risk of serious harm. It is a nationally recognised and understood tool that is supported by national guidance for probation and prison staff. The OASys combines actuarial factors, such as age at first conviction and gender, and dynamic factors such as substance misuse or anti-social attitudes, as well as clinical judgment. Following a structured assessment process, offenders are allocated to a risk of serious harm category that ranges from high to medium to low. A range of potential future harms are considered, including harm to self, to staff, to known victims and to members of the public. Within the current assessment process, there are already agreed definitions for what constitutes high to low risk of serious harm. “Serious harm” is defined as an event which is life threatening and/or traumatic, and from which recovery, whether physical or psychological, can be expected to be difficult or impossible. The risk of serious harm is the likelihood of this event happening.
It should be recognised that the risk of serious harm that an offender poses is dynamic and should be kept under regular review. There are numerous behavioural changes that could indicate an increase in the level of risk of serious harm. It would be difficult to enshrine that range of behavioural change in law which could apply meaningfully to individual cases. The current assessment process enables a practitioner to use all the available information to assess whether an offender is at risk of causing serious harm and give differential weight to the information as it relates to that individual. Under the rehabilitation programme, the National Probation Service will decide on allocation, in each case using a set of clear rules. They will retain management of every offender who poses a high risk of serious harm and every young offender who falls under multi-agency public protection arrangements—MAPPA. This includes offenders who are convicted of serious sexual and violent offences. We are consistently updating and improving the validity of the tools that are used to assess an offender’s likelihood of offending and risk of serious harm.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, this is a very straightforward matter. The amendment simply seeks the collation of information from providers, whether of probation services or otherwise, so that it can be collated in an annual report and received in Parliament. I think that is certainly necessary in the early years, although maybe when the system settles down, in whatever form it ultimately takes, it will be a different matter. However, given the sensitivity around the proposals and, as the Minister himself puts it, the “radical” nature of the proposals—and bearing in mind our shared objective here, which is to reduce reoffending and to afford as much support as we can to people who have offended but need to reintegrate into society—it seems to me that the request that the information should be available to us is a fairly basic one. I hope the Minister can accept the spirit, if not necessarily the precise wording, of the amendment. I beg to move.
Lord McNally
My Lords, the noble Lord is always reasonable in his requests, but the implications are less reasonable. The impact of the amendment would be that all providers, regardless of size or place within the supply chain, would be required by law to produce an annual report for Parliament, as it does not distinguish between prime providers and smaller providers within the providers’ supply chain. This would provide a disproportionate level of scrutiny on a single aspect of service delivery.
I assure noble Lords that there will be a defined data set within the providers’ contract. This will detail what performance information providers have to produce and who is responsible for producing it. We envisage that this would include information such as the number of offenders supervised under top-up supervision and breach rates. We will ensure that reporting requirements strike a balance between providing enough information effectively to hold providers to account for their service delivery and minimising the bureaucracy required to collect and report the data. The Government will publish data and statistics relating to probation service delivery in line with our current practices. I hope the noble Lord, in the light of this, will agree to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Beecham
I take the Minister’s point and beg leave to withdraw the amendment. I indicated that the wording might possibly be capable of being refined. If we can achieve that one way or the other, that would be satisfactory.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, this is simply a probing debate, to explore the rationale behind Clause 8, in particular the length of the extension period contained in it. The extension period is one year, and I would just like the Minister to elucidate the thinking behind that and why that particular period has been chosen in respect of these matters.
Lord McNally
An extended determinate sentence or EDS is the sentence that is given to dangerous offenders. This is the sentence that replaced the IPP sentence in December 2012 as a result of the changes made in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act. An EDS is made up of a custodial term whereby offenders serve at least two-thirds of the sentence, after which the most serious offenders are considered for release by the parole board. After release, offenders are subject to extended-licence supervision. Clause 8 essentially closes a loophole whereby offenders serving an EDS could, although only in wholly exceptional circumstances, spend less than 12 months under supervision on release. Clause 8, by requiring the extension period of licence for these sentences to be at least a year, ensures that in every case offenders released from custody will serve 12 months under supervision. It is highly unlikely that an extended sentence would be imposed that resulted in less than 12 months of supervision. For this to happen, the sentence imposed by the court would have to relate to a dangerous offender who had received a surprisingly short custodial period where the court had chosen not to extend the licence period. I should stress that this is extremely unlikely to occur and there is no example of it having happened but we are taking the opportunity of this Bill to ensure that it does not happen in the future.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, this is yet another proposal from the Government that is not included in the Bill and about which there again seems to be no real opportunity for parliamentary oversight. The notion of resettlement prisons is attractive, but there are a number of questions to be asked about it, in particular, about how the system is going to work and the potential costs. There are also questions in relation to women prisoners especially because at the moment there are only 13 prisons for women and there is concern that, since they are not evenly geographically distributed, women may be housed in one place and then moved to what is, effectively, an all-male institution close to their home because there is no women’s prison in that area. There is concern that that would be potentially very difficult. I do not know whether the Government have in mind locations for the resettlement prisons. The figure was about 70, if I remember correctly. Have they given any thought to the position of women in that context, given the relatively small number of women’s prisons dedicated for that purpose?
By sheer coincidence, the Minister has kindly replied to a Written Question today giving me information about the home locations—he is looking puzzled; I assure him he has—of prisoners held in the north-east. The figures are quite interesting and reinforce some of the concern that I and other noble Lords have or might have about the situation. They show that 59% of young offenders have home addresses outside the north-east region and 39% inside it. So 39% of young offenders are in prison in the area where resettlement would occur but 59% are not. The 2% difference is because the data are not clear. The figures are pretty much reversed in respect of adult prisoners.
I repeat that 59% of young offenders are from outside the north-east region but are imprisoned there, while only 41% of those in the north-east are from the region. Some 39% of adults, those 21 years and over, come from outside the region, while 61% from inside. These are substantial percentages and the numbers are quite significant—289 young offenders and 2,048 adult offenders are currently in prisons other than in regions to which they would presumably be returning.
The Minister’s letter, which he may or not have read before he signed it—
Lord Beecham
I am glad the Minister is prepared to do that. The letter says that the vast majority of prisoners transferred to NOMS North East Region are from adjacent areas. An adjacent area could be the north-west of England. I know that there are significant numbers of prisoners from the north-west of England in prisons in Northumberland. The north-west region runs from Cumbria to Cheshire. To say that is an adjacent region does not take us very far, especially as I suspect most of the offenders will come perhaps from the Merseyside and Manchester conurbations. That would be a reasonable inference. This is a significant number of people to be resettled somewhere nearer home and that is just from one region. How much have the Government thought through the implications of dealing with this? Have the Government given consideration not only to the numbers but the length of time during which the resettlement will take place? I raise this point because it has been raised by organisations concerned with women prisoners especially. Has it been looked at from their perspective?
Incidentally, the letter says, in a point which rather echoes the point about women prisoners and which may account for the figures for young offenders, that there are fewer establishments holding young offenders and they are on average likely to be further from their home area. How realistic is this resettlement process likely to be? It looks to me as though the north-east region is accommodating considerably more than its “fair share” of prisoners. It would be interesting to know how many north-east prisoners are housed elsewhere but I suspect that we have a surplus of accommodation in the north-east and that is not going to assist in the resettlement process. How developed are the Government’s plans? The amendment therefore seeks details and for a scheme to be set out in regulations and laid before both Houses for debate. That would be ideal but at any rate some oversight of the detail and the implications of this scheme are needed, which as I say is welcome in principle but it is difficult to see quite how it is going to work. It may be that the Government are going to take some time over this and that may be necessary, but any indications at this stage would be gratefully received. I beg to move.
Legal Aid
Lord McNally Excerpts(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Deech
My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. I declare an interest as a regulator of the Bar, but not its representative.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, these matters were assessed as part of the impact assessments which were published alongside the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, and our current consultation on further reforms to legal aid, Transforming Legal Aid: Delivering a More Credible and Efficient System.
Baroness Deech
Does the Minister acknowledge that it is widely regarded that the Ministry’s own impact assessment on that consultation paper does not adequately address the threat to the vulnerable and to minorities? Has he calculated the extra costs to the justice system of the longer trials and appeals which will inevitably result from inadequate representation, inexperienced advocates and self-representing litigants? Does he agree that the delays and miscarriages of justice that are likely to result will more than swallow up all the estimated savings?
Lord McNally
No, my Lords. The noble Baroness puts forward a worst-case scenario in almost every aspect—one which I do not recognise.
The Lord Bishop of Exeter
My Lords, is the Minister aware of the findings of the Centre for Human Rights in Practice at Warwick University that cuts to legal aid are likely to fall disproportionately on already disadvantaged groups, such as those in rural areas, children, those with disabilities and those who are otherwise already vulnerable or marginalised? What assurances can Her Majesty’s Government give that there will be a level playing field of legal aid availability?
Lord McNally
My Lords, when I first answered Questions on legal aid more than three years ago, the first point I made was that legal aid was a system devised to help the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. It follows that if you cut legal aid, those are the sections of society that are likely to be affected. Economic circumstances have forced cuts on my department and we are trying to make the reforms to legal aid as focused and effective as possible, while still protecting the vulnerable in our society.
Lord Pannick
My Lords, I declare an interest as someone regulated by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. Does the Minister share the widespread concern that the Government’s proposal to introduce competitive tendering for criminal legal aid services will remove choice for the consumer, remove the incentive for the provider to maintain quality and inevitably result in the destruction of hundreds of small to medium-sized solicitors businesses up and down the country?
Lord McNally
My Lords, I am greatly reassured that somebody is regulating the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. Again, in response to this consultation, we have heard various parts of the legal profession harping on about the worst-case scenario, which we simply do not accept. We are in consultation and have put forward proposals about legal aid contracts. However, the legal professions are facing a number of changes, irrespective of what we are proposing on legal aid—a point I have made before from the Dispatch Box—and they will have to adjust to the new circumstances if they are going to survive. We are consulting with the Law Society and Bar Council, and with other bodies and individuals. We are listening and we hope to get a solution that will reflect what the Government can afford to pay on legal aid at the moment but that will also leave us with the protections for our legal aid system that many of us have taken pride in.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
My Lords, can my noble friend tell the House what the rise in the cost of legal aid has actually been in this country? Is it not inevitable, if we have to find savings in the public sector, that legal aid should find savings like anywhere else?
Lord McNally
That is no more than the blunt truth. In 2010, when we came in, a spending review took place that asked for 23% cuts across the board in my department, which at the time was spending £10 billion a year on prisons, the probation service, legal aid, courts services and staff. All five of those have had to take the burden and brunt of the cuts. It is very difficult to make decisions at this time, but we have consulted and listened and are continuing to do so to try to make sure that we end up with a legal profession able to help the most vulnerable in our society through the legal aid fund.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames
My Lords, I know that my noble friend is aware of the widespread view expressed during the consultation on criminal legal aid that competitive tendering on price will prove unworkable and that the proposed changes are being introduced too fast and with too little preparation. In the light of the consultation, will his department consider introducing the changes more gradually and trialling or piloting them before their more general introduction? I declare a similar interest to that declared by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick.
Lord McNally
My Lords, it is about 10 years since the Carter report had a look at this matter. It is more than three years since the previous Labour Government made cuts to criminal legal aid. The Labour Party, in its 2010 manifesto, was the only party to say that it would look for further cuts in legal aid. In that time there have been changes—alternative business structures and other changes—to the legal profession, yet we are still told that this has come as a surprise. Instead of asking for more time and putting forward arguments that are mainly scare stories, it would be good if the legal profession responded to this consultation with a productive dialogue that could put legal aid on a sustainable and lasting footing.
Lord Woolf
Will the Minister assist the House by indicating the steps he is proposing to take, or has taken, in order to monitor the impact of the changes that are being made?
Lord McNally
Of course we continuously monitor this. Some of these proposals are consultations; they are not in place at the moment. We are suggesting that the legal profession keeps in close contact with us, and also that barristers and solicitors start thinking about how best to organise themselves to function in circumstances in which money may be a little tighter than it once was. These are circumstances that many other professions and many other areas of our society have to face.
Offender Rehabilitation Bill [HL]
Lord McNally Excerpts(10 years, 11 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, the purpose of this Bill can be summed up very simply: to improve the support we give to offenders in order to break the cycle of reoffending. There are many noble Lords speaking today who have championed reforms on this topic with successive Governments. Faced with such experience and expertise, it may seem unnecessary to dwell on why we need an Offender Rehabilitation Bill, but let me remind the House of the problems that have inspired this Bill, and of what has driven those who have campaigned long and hard for those reforms.
Last year, around 600,000 crimes were committed by people who had broken the law previously. Almost half the offenders released from our prisons offend again within a year. That goes up to a staggering 58% for those sentenced to prison terms of less than 12 months. And yet there is no statutory requirement for most of this group to receive supervision and support after release. As a result, many of them leave the prison gates with little more than the £46 in their pockets.
Such offenders have a host of complex problems: a shocking number of them will have been through the care system, and many have come from broken homes and are addicted to drugs and alcohol. As noble Lords will know, a greater proportion of women than men in custody are serving sentences of twelve months or less—21% compared with 10% of men in 2011—and many of those women will themselves have been victims of domestic violence.
The Bill aims to transform the support available for offenders given short prison sentences by introducing a 12-month period of rehabilitation in the community after release. The first part of this period will involve release under licence, in the same way as with longer-sentenced prisoners now. Indeed, the first clause of the Bill extends release on licence to all offenders given custodial sentences apart from those of a single day. However, for many offenders, this will not give long for those providing services to intervene. That is why Clause 2 creates an additional supervision period, solely for the purpose of rehabilitation, which will “top up” the licence so that every offender released from a sentence of less than two years has at least 12 months of supervision after release.
The conditions of this supervision period, which are set out in Schedule 1, reflect its explicit purpose of rehabilitation. They can include visits from the offender’s supervisor, drug testing and appointments in relevant cases, and participation in activities that the supervisor thinks will support rehabilitation. Activities may cover a wide range of different interventions. For example, they could include restorative justice where appropriate and where both victim and offender consent. I remind noble Lords of the Government’s strong commitment to increasing the use of restorative justice. In particular, I take pride in the fact that the Crime and Courts Act 2013 now puts pre-sentence restorative justice on a statutory footing for the first time.
We might also expect to see providers make greater use of mentoring. Excellent work is already going on, for example, in prisons. My right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister in a speech this morning drew attention to the work being done in Peterborough prison, where older, longer-serving prisoners are actively mentoring those serving shorter sentences. Given their experience, those who have been through the criminal justice system themselves can sometimes be most effective in convincing others that they really can and should turn their lives around.
Supervision after licence will allow maximum discretion for the professionals who work with offenders to tailor their interventions to the needs of each individual. However, it also balances that with a period long enough to tackle the complex issues that prisoners released from short sentences often face.
The Bill also creates a new role for the magistracy in overseeing the effectiveness of supervision after release. While the supervision period will apply automatically to all short-sentenced prisoners after release, magistrates and district judges will be able to hear cases in which an offender is alleged to have breached a requirement of supervision. Clause 3 will give them a range of options for dealing with a breach, including a fine, unpaid work, a curfew or, ultimately, committal back to custody for up to 14 days. This will give magistrates a much greater oversight of the delivery of sentences for this group of offenders. We intend to engage with the Judicial College and the Sentencing Council on the support and guidelines that this new role might require. I look forward to hearing the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, on these matters, given his experience as a magistrate.
I now turn to the wider Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. Noble Lords will know that, on 9 May, the Government published their strategy for reforming the services delivered to offenders in the community. We will create a new public sector National Probation Service, working to protect the public and building upon the expertise and professionalism which are already in place. The National Probation Service will report to the Secretary of State as part of the National Offender Management Service. This will give the probation service a stronger role within NOMS and the Ministry of Justice. The National Probation Service will play a fundamental role in protecting the public from the most dangerous offenders in our communities. Probation professionals in the National Probation Service will continue to work to protect the public from those who pose the greatest risk of harm and have committed the most serious offences.
Alongside this, we will open delivery of services for offenders in the community to a diverse range of new rehabilitation providers, as envisaged in the Offender Management Act 2007. We expect to see a wide variety of voluntary and private sector providers, from local community groups to regional and national organisations. In particular, we want to see a system which values and utilises the local expert knowledge of the voluntary and community sector. These providers will work alongside the National Probation Service and will manage the vast majority of offenders. We expect that most staff currently performing probation roles will transfer to the new providers. We will put in place a new system where the skills and expertise of probation professionals, coupled with the innovation and versatility of voluntary and private sector providers, support the rehabilitation of all offenders.
Opening up these services will allow us to make savings which we will invest in rehabilitation. It will also allow us to make better use of the money we already spend on managing offenders. We will create incentives for providers to focus relentlessly on reforming offenders, giving those delivering services flexibility to do what works and freedom from bureaucracy, but only paying them in full for real reductions in reoffending. Our payment structure will ensure that providers have to work with all offenders, including the most prolific and hardest to reach.
Finally, we will also put in place an unprecedented nationwide through-the-prison-gate resettlement service. This will mean that one provider will give most offenders continuous support from custody to the community. We will support this by ensuring that most offenders are held in a prison designated to the area to which they will be released for at least three months before release takes place. I hope that noble Lords will be as enthusiastic about this last reform as we are. It has long been recognised that closeness to home is an important factor in an offender’s resettlement process—and something on which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has long campaigned. Our reforms will draw on the best that organisations across all sectors have to offer, allowing access to offenders at the start of their time in custody through to release and beyond.
Linked to these wider reforms, parts of this Bill will support individuals working with offenders—whether they are staff of the National Probation Service, voluntary and community sector workers and volunteers, or those working for new rehabilitation providers—to use their experience of working with offenders to provide innovative services. Just as the new supervision period provides the maximum discretion, so we have tried to match that for non-custodial sentences. For community orders and suspended sentences, Clause 13 will create a new rehabilitation activity requirement. This combines the existing supervision and activity requirements and gives those supervising an offender more discretion to tailor activities to their needs during the course of the order. Clauses 14 and 15 make similar reforms to the programme and attendance centre requirements. These reforms build on the efforts we have already made to strengthen community orders, so that sentencers and the public can be confident that they are a robust sentence which combines punishment with effective rehabilitation.
I am sure that today we will hear genuine concerns about the pace and direction of our reforms, but I remind the House that a number of noble Lords across all Benches have campaigned for many years for greater support to be given those sentenced to less than a year in custody. They have argued for better through-the-gate services and for more effective and better respected community sentences. These are ambitions which this Government share and this Bill gives a real opportunity for them to become a reality. The hard fact is that without our wider reforms we would not be able to afford to extend rehabilitative support to offenders released from short sentences, but neither could we afford the status quo, with offenders passing through the system again and again, with more victims hurt and more communities damaged. It is the need to tackle that cycle of reoffending, particularly for offenders released from the shortest prison sentences, which drives these reforms and is the central purpose of this Bill. If we can cut deep into the 58% reoffending rate for those sentenced to less than 12 months, it will change lives—not just for victims but for offenders, whom it may well help to move away from a life of crime.
I know that the objectives underpinning this Bill are supported by the whole House. The provisions themselves will be subject to close and careful scrutiny today and through every stage of the Bill’s passage through this House. But I believe it is a piece of genuinely radical reform deserving of your Lordships’ support, and I commend this Bill to this House. I beg to move.
Lord McNally
My Lords, first, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, for that measured response. I thought his peroration wandered into Beecham territory, but for the most part it was moderate and constructive, and for that I am most grateful. I see him as a kind of David Beckham figure, coming to dazzle us on the Front Bench and then all too soon going away again. However his participation today and, I hope, in Committee and at other stages of the Bill is now guaranteed.
It is very difficult responding to so comprehensive a debate. It is one where Governments can never win. We pilot, analyse and consult, and then we run out of steam. If we push ahead with radical ideas, we are going too fast and failing to consult. I am not quite sure how to respond to the tour de force of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. He ended on “The Tempest”, but his message was more from “Life of Brian”. He is quite sure that the Secretary of State is,
“not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy”.
One rather more serious point, which I make in all comradeship to both the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and my noble friend Lady Linklater, is that sometimes if a department makes any move at all, they are so precise about what is wrong that you lose all sense of whether they are supportive of at least the attempt. Of course, there are questions about so radical and innovative a policy. I will try to cover some of them in this reply and I will also look forward to a very thorough examination in Committee.
Since he was one of the last speakers and his name is at the top of my pile of notes, perhaps I may thank my noble friend Lord Bates for his intervention. It gave me a breather and he made a very important point about education. We will be bringing forward thoughts on education and its place in the youth sector, but it also has an important role to play in rehabilitation in the adult sector. It ties in with a point that is often made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about mentoring and the benefit of initiatives such as the Toe by Toe project, whereby literate prisoners help illiterate prisoners to master reading and writing.
I will try to cover the major points in my response and note some of the key ideas. I will follow up the idea from the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, on ex-service personnel because there is growing concern about how many of our ex-servicemen seem to end up in the criminal justice system as offenders. We will look at ideas that have worked and we will certainly follow them up.
A number of noble Lords expressed concern about whether there will be scope for small providers. We intend to put in place market stewardship arrangements so that the smaller voluntary and community sector providers can bid to be a prime provider or to be a partner. We are running a two-part £500,000 grant to support VCS organisations to overcome the barriers to participating in the rehabilitation reforms and, as has been said, this morning my right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister announced further funding. I should also like to follow up with my noble friend Lord Marks the idea of a chartered institute of probation officers or some such body. That is something that sits well with the idea of a National Probation Service. I have said many times from this Dispatch Box that I have great admiration for the probation service and at no time have I suggested that it is the fault of the service that we have a 56% rate of reoffending, or indeed any other percentage. The service does an excellent job. What we are doing here is not a condemnation of the probation service but an attempt to restructure provision in a way that gets us better value from the money that we are making available for rehabilitation. I take the point made by a number of noble Lords, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Howe and Lady Healy, about women. It is something that we may explore in Committee.
I will deal with some of the broader points made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle later, but I do not think that ever in my political life have the words, “Public is bad, private is good”, passed my lips. It is an absurd assumption and is certainly not part of the motivation behind this Bill. However, diversity, variety and flexibility are good, and those are what we are trying to promote in what we are doing. I will deal with the matter of breach, raised by my noble friend Lady Berridge, later, but perhaps I may flag up that I have visited one of the Clink restaurants, and very good it was too. They are a real and functioning example of rehabilitation; the hospitality world is one in which the range of skills required matches well with those of prisoners.
I have noted the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, that the previous Government themselves examined payment by results and were none the worse for that. As we have pointed out before, much of this restructuring depends on the 2007 Act. I am not scoring points here; I just want to make the point that it has been a direction of travel for a long time in both prisons and probation because, as has been said a number of times, the private and voluntary sectors have been involved in rehabilitation for a long time. I have seen provision by St Giles Trust, Turning Point and others that demonstrates that. We want to look again at social investment bonds. As the noble Baroness said, they could and should be a major long-term part solution to some of the issues we face. However, I acknowledge her experience and take her advice about the need to find a long-term basis for such investment.
My noble friend Lord Dholakia let it out of the bag that he is my long-term mentor on criminal justice matters, and I hope that I am all the better for that. He made the important point that we should not confuse voluntary with amateur. The voluntary sector has a great deal of professionalism to give us in this area. I hope also that we can press forward on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, and we certainly intend to do so as soon as possible.
I take on board the warning from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, that we should proceed with caution and about the danger that what we are doing will somehow legitimise and justify an inflation in short-term sentencing. I do not think that will happen. As the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, recognised, we are talking to magistrates and the Sentencing Council with this very much in mind. The noble and learned Lord also made the point that this kind of attempt has been made before with custody plus, and we will try to learn some of the lessons from that.
As well as raising the issue of women in prison, which I am very willing to explore further in Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, warned against setting people up to fail. I see that as a proper warning and one that we will take to heart when putting these reforms in place. I was glad that my noble friend Lady Linklater welcomed the emphasis on mentoring. She, too, expressed concerns about the probation service and mentioned that it is now 100 years old. I do not believe that we will lose the skills base through these reforms. They will be redeployed across the sector. However, I will say quite frankly that I believe that a National Probation Service along the lines that we are contemplating will have far more status and influence on policy than the service did as, if I may say, the poor relation of NOMS within the Prison Service. Under our new structure, the National Probation Service will have within NOMS direct reporting to the Secretary of State, and I think that that is an advance on what has gone before. My noble friend Lady Hamwee also welcomed mentoring, and I take to heart the importance of getting a complete buy-in to this from prison staff.
I suspect I shall run out of time for all the other issues. We are trying to give discretion to the courts when they are sentencing. Applying the provision to all offenders then setting the appropriate level of supervision is a much more practical approach than deciding at the time of sentencing not to supervise an offender and then realising too late that they actually pose a risk of reoffending and need supervision. A blanket, one-size-fits-all type of supervision will not be applied; there will be proportionality and judgment in taking this forward. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, gave an example of somebody who has been in prison for an offence that is unlikely to be recommitted and has a minimum requirement for supervision: that is exactly what will happen.
My noble friend Lord Dholakia, the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, spoke about the danger of raising the threshold for imposing custodial sentences. The Bill is focused on improving rehabilitation for those whom the court decides need to go to prison. We have already made changes to the community order in the LASPO Act and the Crime and Courts Act to ensure that sentencers have tough community sentences at their disposal. The fact remains that, as the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, said, some people need to go to prison, even if only for short periods. The current custodial threshold is already high. The court must not pass a custodial sentence unless it is of the opinion that the offence is so serious that a final community sentence cannot be justified. Other matters on the details of application would be better left to be dealt with in Committee.
The noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, asked me specifically whether 14 days committal for breach activates its own 12 months of supervision. It does not: committal is the ultimate sanction for breach but the objective is to get the offender back on to the original rehabilitation programme. That also covers how we intend to extend this to 50,000 offenders and apply it with a sense of proportion in each specific case.
On the question of women, we have, through my honourable friend Helen Grant, taken on a women’s advisory board and will be taking forward proposals on female offenders. I welcome the opportunity to discuss this in Committee.
A number of noble Lords, including the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle, the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, my noble friend Lord Dholakia and the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, raised concerns about the participation of small charities. Our reforms will open up the probation service to a far wider range of potential providers. We want to encourage partnerships between voluntary or charitable organisations and between VCs and the private sector. In reply to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle about faith group involvement in rehabilitation, I recently went to Liverpool as a guest of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool and saw some of the projects being run there. The noble Baroness, Lady Healy, may be interested to know of Adelaide House, a very interesting project for the resettlement of women offenders. I want to put on record my appreciation of all the faith groups, which already have a network and a committed flock who readily make themselves available for rehabilitation work. That is something we want to work with and build on. In St Albans and Norwich, which I have visited in the past couple of years, the cathedrals are being used as centres for getting the various groups together on projects that work.
Lest I get into trouble for going on too long, I will just deal with the question of payment by results. Our payment mechanisms will ensure that providers have to work successfully with all offenders, including the most prolific and hardest to help, if they are to be paid in full. There will be a fixed fee for service, ensuring that they deliver the sentence requirements, and licence conditions for every offender. The remainder of their payment will be dependent on the reductions they make in reoffending. To be paid in full, providers will need to achieve an agreed reduction in both the number of offenders who go on to reoffend and the total number of offences committed by those in their cohort. So they cannot just focus on the easy wins; they will have to work with the most prolific offenders and keep working with those offenders who have already reoffended. We will be developing the details of our payment mechanism in discussions with providers and practitioners. I am sure that will be developed in Committee.
Lord Beecham
Could the noble Lord clarify whether it is the intention to bring those details back to the House or to Parliament for approval? In what way will there be parliamentary scrutiny of the detail?
Lord McNally
Those are matters of contract with the providers, but the noble Lord can probe me further on that in Committee, when I will try to give more specific answers.
It does not surprise me, given the speakers list today and the range of experience and expertise on view, that a lot of questions have been asked. I hope we can delve deeper into this in Committee. I do not accept that this is not worth pursuing. Most people have welcomed the objectives and, as I have told the House before, we must accept that, in these straitened times, the department cannot call on other resources to fund ambitious programmes. However, we are spending just less than £1 billion on the wide range of rehabilitation services. We have heard about holistic approaches and making sure that we have buy-in from other departments and from local government; these are all important to its success and I passionately believe it is worth trying. I understand the dangers but, in the end, you can spot so many dangers that you are paralysed. I do not believe that is the right approach. We should press ahead with this, let this House use its expertise to examine it in detail and see if we can put in place a piece of legislation that will give the framework to bring in ideas, flexibility, innovation and value for money in an area where there is a great deal of common agreement about objectives, as today’s debate has shown. As we take this Bill forward, our job is to see if we can tease out the practicalities so that it is also effective. I beg to move.
Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.
Prisoners: Indeterminate Sentences
Lord McNally Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Lord Lloyd of Berwick
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what further steps they will take to release prisoners serving indeterminate sentences for the protection of the public in the light of the recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights in James, Wells and Lee v UK.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, the European Court’s judgment did not find sentences of imprisonment for public protection to be unlawful. Therefore, it remains for the Parole Board to determine whether to direct the release of an IPP prisoner once he has completed his tariff. The National Offender Management Service continues to improve opportunities for IPP prisoners to progress towards release.
Lord Lloyd of Berwick
The noble Lord will know that currently more than 3,500 IPP prisoners have passed their tariff date and are waiting to come before the Parole Board. Does he accept that, at the current rate of release on licence, which is running at about 400 a year, it will be nearly nine years before the backlog is cleared? If so, is there not an overwhelming case for the Lord Chancellor to exercise the powers he was given under Section 128 of the 2012 Act to vary the release test to make it easier for these prisoners to satisfy the Parole Board?
Lord McNally
My Lords, the noble and learned Lord’s figure on the release of IPP prisoners is roughly correct; I do not think it is until Thursday that we release the full figures, but his estimate is not far out. That compares with 300 releases in 2011, 97 in 2010 and 53 in 2009. I hope he will acknowledge that the abolition of IPPs in LASPO and the greater flexibility that we are now employing in trying to manage the IPP sentences are going in the right direction. I acknowledge that it is a slow process. I will take back to my right honourable friend the Lord Chancellor the noble and learned Lord’s point about the power that was given in the LASPO Act, but even if that power were exercised the Parole Board would have to take public safety into account in making its decisions.
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, at its conference in 2012 the Prison Governors Association passed a motion overwhelmingly welcoming the ending of what it described as the “iniquitous” IPP system. It also said that unless some action is taken either to resource appropriate interventions to reduce perceived risk or to review the Parole Board criteria on what constitutes risk to the public, existing prisoners will face disproportionately long sentences. What action have the Government taken?
Lord McNally
My Lords, I think the key word is “risk”. The fact that these prisoners were given IPP sentences indicates that it must have been in the mind of the judge imposing the sentence that they posed a significant risk to society that had to be dealt with before they could be considered for release. That was the intention behind IPPs and that must remain uppermost in our minds when deciding the future of these prisoners. However, we are bringing in accredited courses, which may help to make the point that they are available for these prisoners. Other interventions such as work, education and employment may also provide evidence of reduced risk. NOMS is investing in interventions that have the most beneficial impact in reducing risk, and priority for those programmes is given to IPP prisoners.
Lord Wigley
Does the Minister accept that these prisoners are in a totally invidious position, a Catch-22 position, in that they have to undergo rehabilitative courses in order to be considered for eligibility for parole, yet the vast majority of them have not been offered such courses? Does what he said a moment ago about new courses mean that a substantial number of these prisoners will now be offered them?
Lord McNally
My Lords, within the constraints that we are having to operate in we are trying to introduce new courses. I fully accept that one of the reasons we abolished IPP is that it contained that Catch-22 whereby you had to fulfil certain courses, which may not be available, to qualify for release. I believe that NOMS is doing its best to bring in new systems and that there is greater flexibility in qualifying for release. However, I go back to the point that we are dealing with men who were sent to prison because the judge who sentenced them judged that they posed a serious risk.
The Lord Bishop of Liverpool
My Lords, one of the problems is that when a prisoner is transferred to another prison, they find that there is no accredited course in that prison. Who has the specific responsibility for ensuring that when a prisoner is transferred, there is an accredited course in the prison to which that prisoner is transferred?
Lord McNally
I understand that almost all IPP prisoners now have a managed programme to help them prepare for release. That should be part of sentence planning. But, again, I freely acknowledge that in some cases prisoners have been moved for other reasons and then find that they cannot complete the relevant courses. We are trying as best we can to iron out of the system what the noble Lord referred to as a Catch-22 situation so that prisoners can qualify, but to leave with the Parole Board the overriding assessment of whether they are suitable for release or whether a risk remains.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, what is the Government’s estimate of the number of prisoners to whom the judgment in the European Court of Human Rights case of James, Wells and Lee v UK applies? Have the Government estimated the cost of providing sufficient resources to comply with the requirement to ensure that prisoners have an opportunity to progress and to be properly assessed for release on licence?
Lord McNally
I am not sure of the number of prisoners to whom the judgment applies, but cases are being taken. It may be of interest to hear that two of the three prisoners involved in that case are now back in prison due to breaching their terms. We are being very careful to make sure that the system is flexible enough and effective enough to allow prisoners to earn—that is the reality of it—their release. However, we have to consider this issue in the context of prisoners who were given this sentence, when it existed, because they posed a threat to the community. It is for the Parole Board to assess whether they are fit for release.
Defamation Bill
Lord McNally Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Lord McNally
That this House do not insist on its Amendments 1, 15 and 16, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason 16A.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, Amendments 1, 15 and 16 constitute a partial enactment in statute of a number of the recommendations made by Lord Justice Leveson in his report on the culture, practices and ethics of the press. The reasons given by the other place for disagreeing with these amendments reflect the fact that, as the House will be aware, on 18 March cross-party talks were resolved successfully and a draft royal charter was agreed as the vehicle by which the recognition body should be set up.
Detailed criteria by which self-regulators would be assessed were also agreed, and provisions to enact Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations on incentives in costs and exemplary damages have subsequently been included in the Crime and Courts Bill. A further “no change” clause has also been included in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill as a safeguard against political intervention with the royal charter. These measures have cross-party support.
I take this opportunity to address an issue that I know is of concern to the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, on how provisions are being taken forward to provide access to justice and cost protection for those of limited means. It may be helpful to provide the House with an update on the action we are taking. As noble Lords are aware, we asked the Civil Justice Council to report on the issue of cost protection by the end of March. It has done so, and recommended that the regime of qualified one-way cost shifting, or QOCS, should be adapted to defamation and privacy cases. A number of adaptations are necessary, given the rather different nature and variety of defamation and privacy proceedings compared with personal injury claims. We are now considering the CJC report, and as your Lordships will appreciate this is quite a complex area. While the report does not represent a blueprint of the new rules to be applied, it does set out the issues that need to be addressed, and makes recommendations on how to address them.
It will be for the Civil Procedure Rule Committee to make the rules on costs protection in due course, once the Government have set out the way forward. My officials will work with the Committee on this. I am conscious that the CJC has not consulted on this issue, and I believe that we need to consult before we finalise the proposals. Our aim is therefore to work with the Rule Committee in drafting appropriate rules, perhaps with alternatives, on which we can consult more widely over the summer.
I know that the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, will be interested in that consultation, and I will ensure that he and other noble Lords with an interest in this area are included in the consultation. Depending on the outcome of that consultation, we then aim to implement a costs protection regime later in the year.
I hope that provides reassurances to the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, and to others, about the promises I have made about cost protection at various stages of the Bill. During our debate on the Crime and Courts Bill provisions on 25 March, both the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, indicated that they were happy for the Bill to complete its passage without Amendments 1, 15 and 16. I hope that remains the case, and that noble Lords will agree to the removal of these amendments. I beg to move.
Lord Lester of Herne Hill
My Lords, first I would say that we often refer to Fox’s Libel Act. I hope that when this Bill becomes law it will be referred to as Lord McNally’s Libel Act, because he above all has had the energy to drive it forward. He said at one stage that he would not allow the Bill to be overwhelmed by what he called the tsunami of Leveson. The reason why I strongly support Motion A is because it provides a way of avoiding being overwhelmed by the tsunami of Leveson. It removes what I consider to be unnecessary hostage-taking in some amendments to the Defamation Bill. It has now been freed in the Commons, and therefore I strongly support it. I have some difficulty with the reason, in a sense, because it says that,
“the draft Royal Charter … and … the Crime and Courts Bill and the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill will be sufficient to implement the recommendations in Lord Justice Leveson’s report”.
I think that is completely true. Whether Lord Justice Leveson’s report will eventually pass muster is quite another question, but that is not to be debated now.
Lord McNally
That this House do not insist on its Amendment 2, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason 2A, but do propose Amendment 2B in lieu.
“( ) For the purposes of this section, harm to the reputation of a body that trades for profit is not “serious harm” unless it has caused or is likely to cause the body serious financial loss.”
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, in speaking to this Motion, I shall speak also to Motions B1 and B2, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, and Motion B3, tabled by my noble friend Lord Lester of Herne Hill.
Amendment 2 concerns two distinct but related issues which have already featured extensively in debates in both Houses during the passage of this Bill. These are whether there should be restrictions on the right of bodies corporate and other non-natural persons to bring an action in defamation, and whether any non-natural person which is performing a public function should be prevented altogether from bringing a claim in relation to a statement concerning that function. I shall focus my comments on government Amendment 2B and the other amendments that have been tabled, rather than on Amendment 2 in its original form.
Amendment 2B amends Clause 1 to make clear that a body trading for profit will satisfy the serious harm test only if it is able to show that the statement complained of,
“has caused or is likely to cause the body serious financial loss”.
In speaking to Lords Amendment 2 in the other place, the Government made it clear that although we were opposed to that amendment, we recognised the strength of feeling that exists on the issue of whether there should be a specific provision in the Bill requiring non-natural persons trading for profit to show financial loss, and that we would consider the point further. This amendment reflects the outcome of those considerations.
As I have explained at earlier stages of the Bill, we amended what was initially a “substantial harm” requirement to one of “serious harm” in order to raise the bar for bringing a defamation claim. The amendment therefore refers to “serious” financial loss to reflect that aim, and now links explicitly to the serious harm test. The use of the phrase “serious financial loss” makes it absolutely clear that the financial loss required to meet the serious harm test must itself be serious. By contrast, the reference in Lords Amendment 2 to “substantial financial loss” could inadvertently have had the effect of weakening what has to be shown to satisfy the test.
Secondly, the term that we have used to define those who will be subject to this requirement—
“a body that trades for profit”—
is a much clearer and simpler definition than that used in Amendment 2. These are the bodies that this House has expressed concern about, so we have phrased the amendment specifically and directly to meet those concerns. A vaguer formulation such as that in Amendment 2 would have risked inadvertently catching other bodies, such as charities, which are not the subject of concern. I believe that this effective and proportionate approach addresses the concerns that have been expressed in this House and elsewhere.
The Government are unable to accept Motions B1, B2 and B3. In relation to Motion B1, as noble Lords are aware, in the case of Derbyshire County Council v Times Newspapers, the House of Lords held that local authorities and central governmental bodies are already prevented from bringing actions for defamation. Motion B1 would add Amendment 2C, which seeks to extend that principle and put an absolute bar on any non-natural person performing a public function from bringing a claim in relation to a statement concerning that function. This would remove completely the right of a wide range of businesses and other organisations to protect their reputation. We consider that to deprive them of this right would be excessive and disproportionate. Although the amendment focuses on criticisms in connection with the exercise of a public function, that criticism could have a wider impact on the reputation of the business more generally. It is important to recognise that unjustified and defamatory allegations can cause considerable damage which affects all those connected to a business, including shareholders and employees.
Viscount Colville of Culross
I would like to express my relief that the Defamation Bill has finally been unblocked and returned to your Lordships’ House. I thank the noble Lords on both Government and Opposition Front Benches for their tireless efforts to make sure that the Bill reappeared in this place.
I strongly support government Amendment 2B. During my career I was a journalist, and I spent some time on small regional newspapers. There were a number of occasions when I felt the mighty weight of companies bearing down on my reporting. I am ashamed to say that on some occasions, even when I had a powerful and well supported case revealing wrongdoings by a company, the legal letters from the company’s representatives threatening libel action, and the uncertainly of the outcome under the present libel laws, meant that those articles were not published. We live in an era when business PR regards anything but abject praise as an attack on a company. It seems to me that an amendment which demands a threshold of serious financial damage to a company before it can sue for libel will allow a much greater atmosphere of transparency and openness when questioning its activities.
I support the amendment put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and I listened with great respect to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, as I always do. Why, if Northern Ireland is having such problems with this, should the rest of the United Kingdom suffer? Why should it not be allowed to have the benefits of the Bill? It extends the Derbyshire principle into statute rather than waiting for it to work through common law, as suggested. This amendment attempts to incorporate the Human Rights Act 1998 which says that a private company performing public functions should be considered as an organ of the state. The ever increasing expansion of private companies being subcontracted to run public services makes it ever more urgent that the Derbyshire principle should now be established to cover those companies as well.
I have a short example. Last year, the Guardian received evidence from whistleblowers about the company, Serco. The allegations stated that the private health care provider, Serco, which runs the GP out-of-hours service on behalf of the NHS in Cornwall, had not employed enough skilled staff to meet patients’ needs and that the company was altering performance data to show a more positive outcome. Throughout May of last year the solicitors, Schillings, on behalf of Serco, sent a series of letters to the Guardian threatening it with libel action if it went ahead and published the evidence. The Guardian ignored these threats and published a series of articles by Felicity Lawrence. Then in July 2012, a report by the Care Quality Commission found that Serco had indeed not employed enough qualified staff to meet the patients’ needs, and a National Audit Office report this year found that there was evidence that the performance data had been altered to overstate the service’s performance.
The Guardian is big enough to resist these libel threats, but a smaller paper or website might well not have been able to do so. Had the service been run by the NHS it could not have issued those threats, but under the present law Serco was able to do so. Why should a company carrying out public functions be able to threaten critics with libel—possibly using public money—while a public body itself carrying out those functions would not be able to do so? In considering how to vote, I ask your Lordships whether we should not provide a level playing field in this matter.
Lord McNally
My Lords, I am very grateful for the contributions that have been made. This is not the Bill that my noble friend Lord Lester introduced into this House just over two years ago. It is not the Bill that the Government produced in draft for pre-legislative scrutiny. I am proud that it is a Bill that has gone through every process of political and parliamentary procedure, from a resolution at a Liberal Democrat conference to being an Act of Parliament, if we are successful today. However, this means that people around the House and campaigning groups around the country have not got everything they wanted from this Bill. One of my political heroes was the late George Woodcock, the general secretary of the TUC, who once said that good trade unionism was a series of squalid compromises. I do not suggest that the compromises that we have arrived at thus far are squalid. Nevertheless, when looking at a Bill such as this, it is necessary to remember the various pressures—some of which have been reflected in the useful debate that we have had—before making a judgment about challenging the other place once more.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, raised the matter of cost still being in doubt. I would personally like to have had a clearer position, but we are working through on this. I have given enough assurances that we will make sure that the cost issue is clearly dealt with before this Bill comes into force. There are enough indications of the way that Parliament, Lord Justice Leveson and the CJC want to go that I am pretty confident that we can get a cost protection measure in parallel with the Bill which will satisfy the wishes of this House.
Perhaps I may also deal with an issue that has been raised in a number of interventions, including by the noble Viscount, Lord Colville. We have a dilemma that has happened under successive Governments. It is that what was once a clear line between the public and private sectors is increasingly becoming blurred, wavy, or even dotted. It is not as clear as it once was. I personally believe that at some stage we are going to have to deal with the anomalies created by the blurring of those distinctions and the fact that far more private sector companies carry out public service duties. However, I hope from what my noble friend Lord Lester said, and I said, that there is sufficient argument to say that for the moment we should rest on common law to deal with this matter. I fear that if we try to push too hard to implement this into statute now we will not convince the other place.
On the workings of the Civil Procedure Rule Committee, another matter that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, mentioned, it is not true that we will have to wait two years for case management. We are hoping to have guidance on case management in place, as with the costs, by the time that the Bill comes into force later in the year.
Before I move on, I am pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord Browne, in his place. I want to put on record that the noble Lord, Lord Browne and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, are a model of constructive opposition in the way they have handled this Bill. I hope that does not ruin his reputation. He will never recover from that.
The noble Lord, Lord May, referred to Committee stage as being a perverse pleasure. I think I know what he means, but it was a pleasure and an honour to have so distinguished a scientist contributing to our deliberations. It is an area which, along with the academic freedom that the noble Lord, Lord Bew, referred to, has been among the things that I have been most concerned that this legislation should try to protect.
The noble Lord, Lord May, referred to the question of Dr Wilmshurst. Another name that has often been referred to has been Simon Singh. They have been the cause célèbre about the deficiencies in our law. I have constantly said to my officials, “How will it be different after our Bill becomes an Act?” It will be different in both those cases. People pursuing them would have to satisfy the serious harm test. The defendants would have the new public interest defence contained within Clause 4 of the Bill. Alongside the Bill we are introducing cost protection measures to provide additional protection to those with limited means. More generally, to support the scientific and academic debate, the Bill also creates a new defence against libel for peer-reviewed material in scientific and academic journals and extends qualified privilege to reports of scientific and academic conferences.
Although I am not sure that we will ever be able to protect everyone from the speculative chilling solicitor’s letter, I hope that people receiving that chilling letter will realise that the law has changed. It has changed to protect them and build in protection for the Dr Wilmshursts and Simon Singhs of the future.
Lord Lester of Herne Hill
I am grateful to my noble friend. Although my noble friend is not a lawyer, and has the great advantage of not being a lawyer, would he agree with me as a matter of common sense, that it cannot make the slightest difference whether it is the prison department or a private contractor managing the prison so far as the Derbyshire principle is concerned, because the Human Rights Act makes that quite clear?
Lord McNally
I have no doubt that my noble friend is right. What I would prefer to do, as we have been arguing throughout this, is to leave that matter to a judge and a court, when it comes before it. Where I do think there is a relevant question—not that my noble friend’s question was not relevant, it is just that I did not want to answer it—is on the question of charities. I can confirm to my noble friend Lord Phillips that it is not our intention to catch charities. We think that it is very unlikely that a court would find that a charity was a body trading for profit. There is a clear distinction between trading for profit and simply making a profit to reinvest as part of the more general purposes of the organisation. I hope that will give comfort to my noble friend.
He was another one that was concerned about bullying, and I have just made the point about balancing. I was pleased to hear about Bill McNally, not least that he was a successful poacher.
The points made by the noble Lords, Lord Bew and Lord Lester, about Northern Ireland are worrying, and I will take up the point about whether there can be some cross-party demarche to our fellow parliamentarians in the Northern Ireland Assembly, because it would be a great pity if Northern Ireland were to be out of step on this.
I understand why I am being asked to make definitions. However, the fault lines are moving and we will have to trust the courts with this strengthened Bill for them to make the right decision in this area. I take the point made by the noble Lord, which is very valid. Although I and Parliament have made clear our desire for a direction of travel here, there is a danger that the Derbyshire principle may be eroded because of this new configuration. However, trying to put the Derbyshire principle into statute at this time is not the way forward. The common law can be trusted to develop in the right direction. As I have said previously, no law on earth can prevent a speculatively threatening letter from a solicitor.
The Bill has been the work of many hands. If a piece of legislation were to be subject to a paternity test and DNA testing, this Bill’s DNA would be far more likely to be that of my noble friend Lord Lester than me. However, I have enjoyed—I think that that is the right word—taking the Bill through with the help of many hands and some very constructive contributions. I hope that the House’s last and most constructive contribution will be to accept the Government’s amendment and reject the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for making reference to my noble friend Lord Browne of Ladyton, who has just talked about surrogate parentage. Perhaps we can all claim a little of that. However, the contributions of the noble Lords, Lord May of Oxford, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, Lord Bew, Lord Faulks and Lord Phillips of Sudbury, and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, actually reflected what was going on in Committee and on Report. The Minister used the tactful words, “development of thinking”; we are therefore not going to talk about u-turns, but simply welcome the development of thinking behind the new government clause.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bew. It sounds as if Northern Ireland in itself is a bad example, let alone the suggestion that this House or Parliament should make our laws on the basis of something decided in that Province. No matter how important that Province is, that is not the right way to make our laws here.
As regards two further issues, the first was on whether permission should be sought by corporates before they start an action. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, made a slip of the tongue, for which he is not renowned, when he said that in order to bring an action, companies would have to show serious financial loss. Of course, that is not right with the Bill at the moment. Corporates do not have to show financial loss in order to bring an action, but only to succeed in one. That is the crux of the matter in terms of whether permission should be given before they are able to start an action.
Lord McNally
Before the noble Baroness sits down—no, she is absolutely right—and before she lures Lord May and others into her Lobby, would she confirm that what we are doing in this Bill would have significantly assisted both Simon Singh and Mr Wilmshurst? We have not left the situation as it was. We have made significant changes and built in significant protections, which should be taken into account before people decide which way to vote.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
If they read my article, they would see that it says that this Bill has gone a long way towards what we want and it is only a shame that it is not perfect. As somebody who likes perfection, I am going to ask the House if, particularly on the first amendment, we should ensure that organisations carrying out a public service should not have the right to sue for libel.
Crime and Courts Bill [HL]
Lord McNally Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Lord McNally
That this House do not insist on its Amendment 131A, to which the Commons have disagreed and do agree with the Commons in their Amendments 18A and 131B in lieu.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
I beg to move Motion A standing in the name of my noble friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach.
Noble Lords will recall that when this House considered the Commons amendments to the Bill on 25 March it accepted a series of Commons amendments that form part of the cross-party deal on Leveson and ultimately seek to establish an incentive-based, self-regulatory system for the press as envisaged by Lord Justice Leveson.
In advance of the debate on 25 March, the Government recognised that there was continuing concern in relation to the impact of the new system on small-scale blogs. Indeed, Lord Justice Leveson himself was clear that he did not expect very small publishers to join the new self-regulatory body. In recognition of the continued debate around the extent of the definition of “relevant publisher”, this House accepted the government amendment, Amendment 131A, to allow a period of further reflection over the Easter Recess and thereby ensure that the issue remained in play and could be discussed further in the Commons during the next round of ping-pong.
It might at this stage be helpful to remind noble Lords briefly of the context of these further amendments and explain the rationale behind the definition of relevant publisher. At present, four interlocking tests serve to define who is, and is not, a relevant publisher and therefore affected by the system of incentives. A relevant publisher must publish news-related material, which must be written by different authors, be subject to editorial control and be published in the course of a business, whether or not carried out with a view to profit.
Further to this, a number of specific exclusions have also been set out in the new schedule provided for in Commons Amendment 131. These exclusions include special interest titles, scientific journals, publications by public bodies and charities, book publishers and company news publications. However, the provision as drafted raised concerns on the part of small-scale blog sites that they could be caught by the definition of a relevant publisher, and that this was not an outcome we sought in establishing the definition. We have now had the opportunity to hold discussions with a number of relevant parties to understand their concerns about the extent of the relevant publisher definition. These were valuable discussions and Amendments 18A and 131B agreed yesterday by the Commons reflect the outcome of those discussions. I can also confirm that the amendments were agreed in advance on a cross-party basis.
Amendment 131B develops the list of exclusions from the definition of relevant publisher. Specifically, it exempts microbusinesses where they are either a blog or where their publications are only incidental to their other business activities. Microbusinesses which publish news-related material that is incidental to the main activities of their business are also exempted, whether they do so online or offline. The definition of microbusinesses in this amendment captures any business with fewer than 10 employees and a turnover of less than £2 million. This definition is frequently used by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. We consider that measuring both the number of employees and the turnover of an organisation, and setting the bar at this level, provides the most appropriate proxy for potential impact and harm and ensures that the incentive system is proportionate.
The aim is to make certain that the incentive system affects only those publishers Lord Justice Leveson intended to capture and that, by extension, many blogs, small web forums and think tanks will fall resolutely outside the incentive framework. Noble Lords will appreciate that it is, of course, ultimately and properly a matter for the courts to decide in any particular case whether a publisher falls within the revised definition of a relevant publisher. It is worth noting here how blogs may be perceived to be different from, for example, the online edition of a newspaper. Blogging takes many forms and is an evolving concept. However, there are some key features which distinguish blogs, even where they are edited and multiauthored, from online news reporting. A blog is used primarily for the expression of opinions, comments or personal experiences by an individual or group of individuals. Multiauthored blogs usually cover a single subject of interest, such as food or fashion, or a particular viewpoint, such as a political blogsite. Blogs do not usually report in a factual or neutral way on news or current affairs but are led by the personal views and voice of the individual or group of individuals concerned. The amendment intentionally contains no definition of a blog. It will take its natural, commonly understood meaning and, in the usual way, the term will ultimately be subject to interpretation by the courts.
Amendment 18A allows those parties not captured by the new exemption to benefit from the incentives around exemplary damages and costs, should they choose to join a recognised regulator. We consider this ensures that the system is fair and that those parties not captured by the definition can remain competitive. By joining a recognised regulator, parties not captured by the definition will now have the opportunity to benefit from the system of incentives we are putting in place.
Before concluding my remarks, I will clarify again the effect of the definition of “relevant publisher” on some other interests, in particular news aggregators. It is not our intention that these provisions should capture news aggregators such as Yahoo!, MSN or Google. News and content aggregators who license or otherwise acquire news-related content from third parties control this content only in so far as they decide how to present it in its totality to the end-user. To that extent, they are not subjecting the material to “editorial control” as defined in the provisions.
Lord Justice Leveson did not intend services that provide a platform for bloggers to post content to be captured. Again, the control that is exercised by aggregators here is limited to the high-level presentation of the content. It is for these reasons that news aggregators are not intended to be captured by our definition. Likewise, the definition is also not intended to capture political parties. These were not the target of Lord Justice Leveson’s reforms and it has not been the Government’s intention to capture them. In order to qualify, an organisation must meet all four tests in the definition: it must be publishing news-related material; the material must be written by different authors; it must be subject to editorial control; and it must be carried on in the course of business. An individual MP who runs a blog site should also be safely outside the definition as they would be unlikely to qualify for the four tests. If for some reason it was felt that they did, they would also be able to look at the microbusiness exemption.
It is also likely that many smaller political campaigning organisations will be able to take advantage of the new microbusiness exemption. They will qualify if they are microbusinesses and operating a multiauthored blog. If they are operating a multiauthored blog but publication of news-related material is incidental to their main activities, they will also be exempt.
I would like to underline that the activity of running a web forum is also not caught by this definition. I draw noble Lords’ attention to the additional provisions in the legislation which explain that the moderation of websites does not qualify. This is also true of blogs if they are posted without the exercise of editorial control. Therefore, a site like Mumsnet, to the extent that it runs a blog forum, is not caught by these provisions. However, any site, including Mumsnet, that moves into commissioning and publishing news stories may be caught by the definition.
I hope that this has helped to provide some clarity on who it has been the intention to capture in the definition and, equally importantly, who is not caught. I believe that these provisions provide a proportionate approach to implementing a crucial part of Lord Justice Leveson’s reforms. I commend these amendments to the House.
Lord Avebury
Before my noble friend sits down, perhaps he could help me on material that is published in the cloud. He went into very helpful detail on blogs, but material can be aggregated in the cloud in specific folders. Can the Minister say whether that is exempt in the same way that blogs are?
Lord McNally
I am not as au fait as the noble Lord and I have only just come to terms with clouds and things like that. What exactly is his concern?
Lord Avebury
Would material which is aggregated in a cloud folder with something such as Dropbox, where you can put a number of different items which may be news or other kinds of material, be exempt in the same way that blogs are?
Lord McNally
I am reliably informed, post haste, that such aggregates in clouds are not covered. If by any chance that is not true I will write to the noble Lord and make sure the letter is circulated to the House. I cannot see over my shoulder but I sincerely hope that the Box is currently nodding firmly.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara
I can inform the Minister that the Box looked absolutely transfixed by that recent exchange. I do not know who is more surprised, them or us, by the ability of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, to come to the white heat of the technological revolution and ask a question that has stumped us all. On this side of the House, we would venture to say that we think they are covered, but that just adds a little piquancy to the debate which will, I am sure, be resolved before we get too far down the line.
Following the Leveson trail is a bit like appearing in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”. We pop up at odd times as other events seem to be filling the spaces. We pay a small contribution to it and then we discover that the whole event has moved on, another Bill has appeared, and yet another set of amendments appears which look awfully like the ones we have just been discussing. Only earlier today, we knocked out one set of amendments, yesterday we could have done the same, today we hope they will stick. I want to reassure the Minister that we will be supporting him in this event and he will not need to use the wiles he displayed when he almost reached across the Dispatch Box to my noble friend Lady Hayter to try to persuade her not to push her vote. The vote was unsuccessful so he won out in the end anyway: he has all the luck.
As the Minister has explained, these amendments, inserted into the Bill late in the process, provide for new rules on exemplary damages and costs. They are an essential part of the cross-party agreement on a royal charter which is part of the new framework of independent self-regulation, guaranteed by law, as recommended by Lord Justice Leveson. This part of the Bill aims to provide publishers with incentives to sign up to the new system of self-regulation that should meet the criteria set out in the royal charter. Publishers that join a recognised regulator will receive protection from the award of exemplary damages in media disputes, the opportunity to use an arbitration service and cost benefits from having access to this service. That is one reason why it would benefit local as well as national newspapers. If a complainant chooses not to use the arbitration service, they can still be liable for costs even if they win.
Lord Justice Leveson’s report was mainly about the press but the original drafting of this Bill had the unintended effect of catching blogs. That said, Lord Justice Leveson did express the hope, in Recommendation 73 of his report, that online publishers would also join a regulator. The Bill therefore needs to be amended to ensure that exemplary damages did not apply to blogs and they could receive the benefits of joining a recognised regulator. In recognition of the fact that this is a complex area, your Lordships’ House agreed a placeholder amendment on 25 March. The Government’s decision to hold a mini consultation and pause for reflection to consider how the Bill should deal with the blogosphere was sensible and we agree with the policy objectives that the Government are seeking to address to exempt micro businesses from the definition of relevant publisher where they are a blog or where their publications are merely incidental to their other businesses and to enable such micro businesses to receive the benefits and cost incentives of joining a recognised regulator. The Minister has been helpful in setting out a number of accompanying thoughts around these points and the issues relating to what would and would not qualify, and I think they will bear further consideration once we see them written up in Hansard.
However, the main point is that the amendments we are now looking at and which we support define a small blog as one whose turnover is below £2 million and has up to 10 employees. It exempts such businesses from exemplary damages and enables them to benefit from the cost advantages of an arbitration service if they join a regulator, and that last point will be particularly welcome to the community. As I say, we support the proposals, and I am grateful for the manner in which they have been pursued within the all-party agreement which has underpinned the whole process, so we will not be dividing the House.
In the time available, I would like to make a couple of ruminations about some of the issues that we are talking about today, and within that are two questions to which I hope the Minister will be able to respond. The first is that the digital world as we know it is changing rapidly and the complexity and parliamentary arithmetic of changing the royal charter means that it will be hard to alter the legislation after this Session, so it needs to be right. What consideration have the Government given to the health and future of the blogging industry, and can the noble Lord share with us the Government’s thinking on this point? I understand that the indicators for a micro-business have come from a definition used by BIS, and in that sense they are not specific to the blogosphere. I have had representations already, and I am sure that other noble Lords will also have received them, from those who argue that the figures being used are on the high side, as rarely do we find 10 employees or even an annual turnover of £2 million in a blog company. That would make for a very healthy company, but it is not how the sector operates. Can the Minister estimate roughly how many blogs this definition would capture at present?
I turn to a related but more general point. We are talking about an industry that is in the process of change. For example, the print circulation of newspapers is estimated to shrink by at least a quarter in the next five years and yet we are facing a rather bizarre situation where newspapers are exempted the full 20% rate of VAT on print sales despite the fact that in many cases online traffic now represents the majority of their audiences. This is something which is bound to grow as we go forward. In fact, we are fast approaching a situation where what we previously believed, which is that we in this country do not tax reading, is becoming the reverse of what will happen. Those who read using electronic means, which will include those who are caught by this amendment, will be paying 20% VAT. Is this something that the Minister can say is under consideration, because it seems to me that we will need to face up to it before too long?
I am very grateful to the Minister for mentioning Mumsnet because it was the subject of discussions in another place, and others have raised it. The break point that he expressed is one to which we may need to return. Perhaps when he concludes he will reflect on this. At what point do those who blog and use it as a campaigning tool get caught? There is some doubt in what he has said about whether Mumsnet, which is not a charity but exists largely to circulate material that is in favour of a particular point of view, could possibly be caught by this exception. It is one of a number of areas in which, as the Minister has said, time will show us what emerges. However, a little more clarity at this stage would be helpful.
Finally, the Minister was keen to assert that it would not be sensible at this stage to define a blog. He was then caught quite quickly by a question related to blogging which illustrates that sometimes it might be sensible to have in primary legislation clear definitions which we can all use. I understand and support the idea that it is probably wrong to try to be definitive at this stage and that we should see how things go, but if that is the case, are there are any thoughts about how the Government might consider revisiting the issue within a reasonable time if it turns out that we need to move? After all, as I have said, this is the digital age and things are moving fast. What is a blog today may change into something else, and we want to be sure that we have the flexibility which I do not currently see in the Bill.
Lord McNally
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, not only for that reply but for the constructive role he has played in getting us as far as we are today. It is important to retain an all-party approach as we take this through. The noble Lord asked how many blogs this amendment will cover. We cannot provide an accurate estimate because blogs are constantly started up and then stopped. However, we feel that this is the right figure in order to exclude all those who we hope and intend to exclude. On the definition of a blog, I was tempted to call in aid that used by Clement Attlee when he wanted to exclude Trotskyists from the Labour Party. They said, “How do we know who are Trotskyists?”, and he said, “It’s a bit like an elephant—when you see one, you know one”. In a way, we are groping with blogs in an age of technology that is constantly and frighteningly rapidly changing.
We have tried to get some key features which distinguish blogs from online newspaper reporting. A blog is used primarily for an expression of opinion. Multi-authored blogs usually cover a single subject of interest. In all cases, blogs do not report in a factual and neutral way on news or current affairs but are led by the personal views of the individuals. While an online news site may contain comment, opinion or bias, comment pieces are not its principal focus. What constitutes a blog may change over time as convergence increases.
It is a difficult area. When we debate these areas, we often point out that future-proofing is virtually impossible. We hope that the definition I have given today has been sufficiently carefully drafted to provide the maximum possible clarity to organisations seeking to know whether they are caught. We have produced a handy set of questions on our website to help organisations to work this out. This is intended as guidance only. Ultimately, as in the case of all legislation, the decision on whether an organisation comes within or outside the scope of any particular piece of legislation will fall to the courts. The intention of the definition is to capture news publishers who were the focus of Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry and his subsequent recommendations. They are intended to act as the key incentive for those publishers to join the new press regulator, while also protecting those not intending to join.
On Mumsnet, protection is the interlocking test, but such an organisation may branch out or develop a kind of activity which takes it into the realms of news and newspapers—a news media. Again, we would have to be flexible. If an organisation develops in a way that makes it a news organisation, it would have to consider its position. Lord Justice Leveson, in making his recommendation and recognising the changing architecture of our media, specifically said that he hoped news organisations that were primarily online would consider themselves willing to join any new regulator.
Parliament at both ends of the Corridor has done a good bit of business in dealing with a specific concern that was raised. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for his very constructive and helpful approach, not only at the Dispatch Box, but in bilateral discussions.