Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Monday 28th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I will confine my remarks to two clauses in the Bill: Clauses 1(1) and 23. I raise Clause 1(1) because I suspect that I am not alone in being somewhat confused about the Government’s direction on policing. On the one hand, we have the formation of a National Crime Agency, and on the other we have had the appointment of police and crime commissioners, with the focus on the local direction of policing. The two do not seem to fit. My interest in policing in this country was stimulated by the Royal Commission on the police in 1962, which I had to study for the staff college exam at the time.

I remember being particularly taken by the memorandum of dissent tabled by Dr AL Goodhart, of Oxford. It was logical and to my mind entirely sensible. In essence, he said that he was convinced that it was essential to establish a centrally controlled police force that was administered on a regional basis. He believed that all these Royal Commissions, ministerial committees and other inquiries would continue indefinitely until necessary steps were taken to introduce a rational and efficient system of government for the police that does not currently exist. How right he has been. Since 1962, there has been a continual dialogue about the governance of the police. It is still not resolved and I do not believe that this proposal resolves it any further.

Dr Goodhart acknowledged that the commission recognised that in modern conditions a certain amount of joint action on the part of various police forces was essential. Hear, hear to that. I had examples when I was serving in the Army. You could not follow a drug trail through England because some counties did not have drug squads and therefore you could not follow them. I realised that all was not well then, and although there have been patch-ups since then I do not believe there has been proper co-ordination.

Dr Goodhart concluded his report with the delphic statement that he believed that the history of the Metropolitan Police,

“illustrates how uncertain is an argument based on a prophecy of what the public will or will not accept”.

That is something that we have been privy to recently. The public not accepting something was not an argument against setting up a national police force. However, he says very clearly that responsibility is meaningless unless it includes the power to direct.

One thing worries me about this proposal for the National Crime Agency, which I support because it is a national directive and in principle I am right with it. We are left unclear about it because the protocol that accompanied the appointment of police and crime commissioners said that they were,

“responsible for the totality of policing”.

The National Crime Agency requires the police to implement whatever they are following. The Bill says that the Home Secretary,

“may determine strategic priorities for the NCA” .

Why “may”? Surely the Home Secretary is responsible for the strategic direction of policing anyway. There should be no “may” about it. If there is “may”, I suspect that there will be even more confusion.

I wonder about these two-way tasking arrangements and how the director-general “may” task police forces and other law enforcement agencies to carry out specified activities. Who is accountable to the public for all this? I suggest that unless this is ironed out so that the roles of the National Crime Agency and police and crime commissioners is resolved and everyone knows in which direction we are moving, there will be not just needless conflict but continued confusion, which will impact on the ability to resolve crime as intended. I merely voice my confusion and say that I hope that this issue will be resolved during the passage of the Bill to make certain that everyone is absolutely clear about their responsibilities in connection with this activity.

Clause 23 is very brief. It says:

“The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision for, or in connection with, dealing non-custodially with offenders aged 18 or over”.

At first glance, one wonders why that is necessary. There are already non-custodial sentences for people aged 18 and over, and hundreds of thousands of them are issued and served every year. Of course, the clue is in the statement that the Minister made about the consultation document that is due to be concluded on 22 June and which he said might result in amendments being tabled in Committee.

I have to admit that I am concerned about this statement. Although the memorandum on delegated powers says at paragraph 204 that this clause,

“is designed solely as a placeholder to allow the Secretary of State to take forward proposals”,

I get the impression that this is opening the way for secondary legislation, which I do not believe is satisfactory for looking at young offenders in particular.

I detect some confusion between the Bill and the Explanatory Notes. The Bill talks about offenders aged 18 or over, and while that is strictly true of children it does not differentiate between them and young offenders, whereas the Explanatory Notes talk about “adults”, although 18 to 21 year-olds are not regarded as full adults, certainly in the prison system. We have a wealth of evidence in front of us, most recently an admirable document published last week by the Transition to Adulthood Alliance, which talks about ways in which young offenders, particularly the 18 to 25 year-old group, should be looked after, and it is this group that I hope we will be able to focus on during the passage of the Bill.

I am very disturbed that the word “punishment” should appear so often in the Bill. I once had a discussion with Michael Howard—now the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne—when he was Home Secretary. He castigated me for saying that prison was punishment and not for punishment. I said that I thought I was speaking in accordance with the policy of his Government because I had heard the phrase uttered by the noble Lord, Lord Brittan, a previous Home Secretary. He said, “I couldn’t disagree with you more”, so I asked, “What sort of prisons do you expect me to find when I inspect?”. He said, “Decent but austere with a positive regime for tackling reoffending based on opportunities for education and learning job skills”. I said, “Where’s the punishment in that?”. He replied, “I think we’ll resume this conversation some other time”, but we never have. That, to me, has always reflected the confusion in the rhetorical reference to punishment without really thinking through what it means. The punishment is the sentence awarded by the court. If you add punishment later, you will encourage the people who administer the sentence to say that inflicting punishment is one of their roles. However, it is not. I find it very interesting that in commenting on the Bill people are saying that introducing a punitive element into the sentence is likely to remove some of the rehabilitative content, and we do that at our peril.

I shall not go into all the details of the possible community sentences that could be introduced for this group because countless examples of how they work, how much cheaper they are and how much more effective they are can be found in masses of documents. The examples include Rethinking Crime and Punishment, a programme chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, in which I had the privilege to take part. It has listed just how effective these things are. Examples are coming out of people’s ears, so why do we need to go through it all again? It is proven and we ought to get on with it.

When people say that the public have no confidence in a community sentence, I have often thought that one thing wrong with them is that they do not do all the things that are done in prison. Why should they not, as in the state of Massachusetts, consist half of education in the widest sense and half of community reparation? By education I mean education, job skills, substance abuse treatment, mental and health treatment and social skills; in other words, all the things that are done with people in prison. Why do you have to go to prison in order to get those things? Why should there not be proper male and female adult offender teams, looking after such people in the community in the same way as the young offender teams do, so that there is proper, meaningful supervision.

All that has been said, so why do we need to say it all again and why do we need secondary legislation to introduce things that have already been proven? I am confused. My appeal to the Minister is that if we are seriously to help the Government move forward on this, could they please ensure that at the end of our debate in Committee people take note this time of the fact that we cannot afford not to do these things. I think of all the effort that was taken to introduce changes, amendments, adjustments and advice during the passage of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, only to have it all rubbished down the other end, where it was said that it was budgetary and therefore we could take no account of it. These things should not be dismissed for budgetary reasons because there may well be savings, not least in the lives of the people whom we hope to improve.