Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

I have given notice of my intention to oppose the Question that Clause 23 stand part of the Bill. However, as the Minister has explained, Clause 23 will now be removed. I shall also speak to Amendment 155EZB.

When I read the speech made by the Prime Minister on 22 October, I must admit that I was struck by one word that sprang out at me from everything that he said. That was “confusion”. There seemed to be confusion in his mind. When he said that he was not saying what people wanted to hear and not playing to the gallery, I felt that he was confused because he was actually playing to two galleries. To one gallery, which you might call the rehabilitation gallery, he said:

“Just being tough is not a successful strategy in itself. Recognising that young people who can’t read, teenagers addicted to drugs … need help, so that they can become part of the solution and not remain part of the problem … is not soft or liberal, it is common sense. We will never create a safer society unless we give people, especially young people, opportunities and chances away from crime. Prevention is the cheapest and most effective way to deal with crime. The Government is engaged in what can only be described as a rehabilitation revolution”.

I felt in a way that I could side with all that. But then, on the other hand, he made remarks to the other gallery, saying:

“At every single level of sentence this Government is getting tougher … we are toughening up community sentences too. If you are on a community sentence you will be supervised—you will be properly punished—you will be forced to complete that sentence. We will pay charities, companies and voluntary organisations who come and help us rehabilitate our prisoners, but the payments will depend on results. By the end of 2015 I want to see Payment by Results spread right across rehabilitation”.

I could not help concluding that when political theorising and posturing collide with the hard facts of reality, there are only two ways out. One involves meaningless wishful thinking and the other involves meaningful rethinking. Having had a most useful meeting yesterday with the Minister, and having thought through what other people have said, my appeal is that we shall have meaningful rethinking of a lot of this, and not go on with the wishful thinking. The Prime Minister says that everyone will be supervised—well, who by? At present, 62% of probation officers have a caseload of between 30 and 49. How can they supervise all those properly? How on earth are you going to have everything delivered by 2015, when there is not even a payment by results project working now?

We have heard a lot about the feelings of people in the community. I absolutely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, that it is more about whether people are going to reoffend than about what the probation service actually does. We have heard about victims and offenders, but we have not heard about a very important part of the whole community sentence delivery—the probation service. I admit to being seriously alarmed about the state to which the probation service has been reduced since 1997. When the Minister started, I understood him to say that he was talking about the Government’s consultations. In addition to the community sentence consultation, which we have been discussing, there was also a probation consultation that ran in parallel. Originally, when they were both launched, we were told that they were running in parallel and that we would have a chance to discuss them both. We do not have the Government’s response to the probation consultation in front of us. Therefore, we are blind. We can talk until the cows come home about what we would like to happen but unless we know how it can happen and whether it can happen, it is all pie in the sky. Frankly, that worries me.

I believe seriously that this confusion stems from an even more serious confusion right at the heart of the criminal justice system. The aim of the criminal justice system is to protect the public by preventing reoffending. The criminal justice system consists of four parts—the police, the courts, prison and probation. The police investigate, the courts sentence and the prison and probation services administer that sentence—the Prison Service in custody, the probation service in the community. The aim of all that is to help those committed by the courts to live useful and law-abiding lives. That is what it is all about when we reduce it down.

Noble Lords may agree with what I have said in this House many times before: namely, that within the criminal justice system the position of prisons is exactly the same as that of hospitals in the NHS. In other words, they are the acute part to which you go if you need treatment, and you go there only if you need the treatment that only they can provide. If that treatment is never going to be completed in either hospital or prison, it will have to be continued in the community in the form of aftercare. Therefore, there is a connection between what happens in prison and what happens in the community, which is the work that needs to be done between the two. However, as with the NHS, the default position in the criminal justice system is in the community, from which you go to prison if you need that treatment. Unfortunately, that position has been reversed and now, thanks to the ridiculous NOMS among other things, instead of being separate, probation is subordinate to prisons, which is absolutely the wrong place because where probation ought to be working is with the courts and the police in the community. That is where it has worked traditionally. Then it works with all the organisations within the community which can help deliver the work that it has to do.

If you look at this the wrong way round and see probation as being subordinate to prisons, you get into a muddle, which is not helped by the fact that there is now no director of the National Probation Service. As we have said many times, there is no senior probation official in NOMS. Therefore, an awful lot is being said and done about the probation service without proper senior probation service advice at the heart of what is happening. What worries me about this is that I now hear that yet more reconstruction of probation is going to be done in isolation from all that has happened so far and that it will involve more competition and more people coming from outside. The role of the probation service is offender management; it is the public sector responsibility to manage offenders who are sentenced by the courts. I hope to goodness that whatever happens does not include dilution of that.

I also worry about the probation service because it clearly does not enjoy the confidence of the Secretary of State. That is alarming, not least because all the documents published about the probation service say that all the probation trusts are performing to level 3 or better, which means good, and some of them are performing to level 4, with 100% delivery of all their programmes. If they are performing as well as that, what is the problem? As regards community sentences and the talk about being punitive, every sentence is punitive because it involves an element of coercion and/or deprivation of liberty of the offender. It is said publicly that 65% of current community sentences already contain a punitive element. The aim is to get to 95% with a punitive element. However, people have mentioned all the exclusions, all the people for whom there should not be a punitive element, such as all the mentally disordered, all the people with learning difficulties, all those who are immature and all the mothers who have problems looking after their children. There is a whole raft of people. If you are going to say that 95% of community sentences are going to have a punitive element, you will confuse everyone.

Let us also not forget the definition of “punitive”. If punishment is clearly what we understand it to be, “punitive” is the “awarding”, “inflicting” or “act” of punishment, or,

“severe handling, belabouring or mauling”.

I hope that that is not what is meant. I hope that Ministers will remember that the staff who have to deliver these so-called punishments have to be under no illusion that the punishment is awarded by the courts in a civilised society and it is not on for anyone then to administer further punishment. If people talk about adding a punitive element, they are giving people doubts as to who is going to deliver that punitive element. Sure as anything, it must not be either prison or probation staff. That would be utterly wrong and would undermine the whole system.

As regards payment by results and the 2015 promise, I am interested to see that a pause has now been imposed by the Secretary of State, including a pause on payment by results in Wales and the West Midlands probation services. The pause is for reconsideration. In addition to all the questions that have been asked by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, and will no doubt be asked by other noble Lords during this debate, my plea to the Minister is that serious reconsideration be given to what is being proposed, because this posturing about punishment and the undermining of the position of the probation service, which has the responsibility to the community for delivering these sort of sentences, and the confusion being put in the minds of the staff who have to deliver this policy, must be avoided if the justice system is to work. I hope that during that reconsideration work will be done to examine what is actually possible, given the fact that there has already been a 19% cut in probation service resources since 2010, and more cuts are scheduled. It is no good saying that you will do things if you cannot, because you will do even more to undermine the confidence of the public.

I hope that the Minister will agree to this reconsideration and that we will not process the rest of the Bill until we have the government response to the probation consultation with us so that we can take all the factors into account when recommending what should go forward.