Immigration Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, I declare a number of immigration interests. As Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons I was responsible for inspecting all places of immigration detention, during the course of which I found much wrong with the system, such as the use of inappropriate detention rules which, fortunately, I was able to correct. From 2007 to 2009 with my noble friends Lady Mar and Lord Sandwich I was a member of an independent asylum commission which submitted three reports to the then Government, containing detailed analysis of what was wrong with the asylum system and numerous recommendations for improvement.
In 2008, I forwarded a carefully researched dossier to the Home Secretary, entitled Outsourcing Abuse, which listed details of more than 70 cases of injury to failed asylum seekers undergoing enforced removal. In 2010, I was a member of a government advisory board on the use of child detention, whose recommendations I hope to see realised in this Bill. Finally, in 2011-12 I chaired an independent commission on enforced removals whose recommendations were forwarded to both the Home Secretary and the chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee. This followed the death of an Angolan, Jimmy Mubenga, in an aircraft at Heathrow at the hands of G4S escort officers and on which the coroner’s inquest verdict was unlawful killing. Therefore, I hope that noble Lords will forgive me if I focus tonight on the clauses and schedules in the Bill to do with enforced removals.
Before that, I must declare my acute disappointment that yet again a Government have failed to tackle a major millstone that prevents the immigration system from being able to function properly: namely, the 502,412 unresolved cases, of which more than 190,000 were in the migrant refusal pool in July 2013. I was first introduced to this problem one day in 1997 while visiting Birmingham prison, where I was told that a number of foreign national prisoners had gone on hunger strike. When I went to see them I found that they were not foreign nationals who had committed offences, but Asian people who had been living in England for more than 20 years, most married with families and many with their own businesses. They had suddenly been rounded up, mostly in Yorkshire, and taken to Birmingham purely because it appeared to have space, so that their details and their right to remain could be checked. The trouble with having such a millstone around a system’s neck, particularly when resources are limited, is that progress is impossible because so many staff have to spend their time trying to keep its head above water. By progress I mean such things as introducing time limits on the completion of essential bureaucratic processes.
I was faced with a similar, but far smaller situation, when I was commanding troops in Belfast. Every base had a card index for everyone who lived, or had been questioned, in an area, going back several years, which was used to verify the identity of anyone stopped on the streets. Then we were issued with a computer system, but no guidance as to how it was to be loaded with data on literally thousands of cards. The only possible solution was to ground all my military policemen for two weeks and sit them at computers until they had transcribed every detail.
The only way that the Home Office will remove its millstone is to do something similar and draft in temporary staff until the millstone is cleared. Only then will there be time and space for change and improvement. Because of the avoidable damage that a chaotic and dysfunctional immigration system—which seems likely to be made worse by some of the proposals in the Bill—does to the national image, I would have expected that to have been appreciated and actioned years ago. I await the Minister’s comments on that suggestion with interest.
I turn now to Clauses 1 and 2 of Part 1, Clause 58 of Part 5 and Schedules 1 and 7. One of the depressing things about submitting a report to the Home Office, however constructive and well researched, is that you know that no one there will take a blind bit of notice of anything that is not produced in-house. My commission was appalled to find that the restraint techniques used by contracted private sector escort officers were required by the Home Office to be used only in prison. No one had bothered to check with the NHS, which had rejected the pain-compliant prison techniques, devising its own pain-free ones that were more appropriate for patients. Neither had the police, who come under the Home Office and who had developed pain-free techniques suitable for use in crowded and restricted public places such as river ferries been consulted. No training requirements were laid down and escort officers were neither accredited nor licensed. No one in the Home Office is qualified to do this, but no one had thought of approaching the Security Industry Authority, which is.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said, the standard of casework is abysmal. All too frequently, escorts are told nothing about the characteristics of the understandably concerned people whom they are to escort until shortly before a flight.
Independent oversight was totally lacking until the Chief Inspector of Prisons was invited to observe a return flight and was appalled at the way in which escorts talked openly to and about returnees in front of him and them. Extraordinarily, independent oversight is said to be the responsibility of the Home Office Professional Standards Unit, which is incapable of doing what is required and bizarrely is itself overseen by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which has nothing to do with asylum casework. It is hard to imagine anything less fit for purpose. We also strongly recommended improved powers for the Immigration Services Commissioner to deal with rogue advisers.
As this detail had not been found by the Home Affairs Select Committee, which had published a report previously on enforced removals, I discussed our findings with its chairman in the fond hope that he might take them formally into evidence in a reopened inquiry, in which case the Home Office might take them seriously, too. But despite assurances from time to time, he has not yet done that, so I hope that amendments to the Bill will provide the vehicle. I do not believe that Clause 1, or paragraph 5 of Schedule 1, which allows untrained and unlicensed immigration officers to use unspecified but allegedly “reasonable force”, when there is such an authentic catalogue of unreasonable force being used by those on Home Office contracts, including a charge of unlawful killing, should be allowed to stand. I go further by suggesting that it would be wholly irresponsible of this House not to try to ensure that current practice is wound up in favour of something more akin to our claim to be a civilised nation.
There is much else in the Bill about which other noble Lords have already expressed their unease. Yet again, we seem destined to spend long hours trying to improve legislation produced in haste and rushed through the other place without sufficient time for scrutiny. Bearing in mind how many Members of Parliament have regular contact with immigration problems in their constituencies, I am surprised that so little was done to amend what was laid before them. No doubt making up for that deficiency is a prospect to which the Minister looks forward with eager anticipation.
Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I will speak also to Amendments 22QYB, 22QYC and 22QYD.
Clause 50 states who may issue a community protection notice or a fixed penalty notice. Amendment 22QW queries whether paragraph (c) of Clause 50(1) is necessary. It provides that a community protection notice or fixed penalty notice may be issued by,
“a person designated by the relevant local authority”.
Paragraph (b) refers to the notices being issued by, “the relevant local authority”. The authority will have to designate a signatory because whatever it does must be done by someone acting in its name. Therefore, I am puzzled as to what paragraph (c) adds.
I have added my name to Amendment 22QY standing in the name of my noble friend Lord Greaves—he got there first—because my real objection concerns subsection (4) of Clause 50, which provides that only someone in a post,
“specified in an order made by the Secretary of State”,
can be designated. Surely, designation must be a matter for the local authority. Does the Secretary of State have to intervene at this level?
Amendments 22QYB and 22QYC probe whether all police community support officers have the relevant technical knowledge to deal with community protection notices. On previous Committee days we discussed some of the difficulties that may arise in using the existing statutory powers that environmental health officers have, for example, as opposed to using the new mechanisms provided in the Bill. A lot of technical knowledge needs to be applied in deciding whether an infringement has occurred, especially in respect of noise.
My last amendment in this group concerns serving a notice. A fixed penalty notice can be handed over to the individual or be delivered to that person’s address either by hand or by post. If it is to be delivered by post, I am concerned to know when it is deemed to have been issued. If it is issued when the notice is put in the post, it will reduce, by at least a day and possibly more, the time that the recipient of the notice has to pay. I have already said that I am concerned about how short that time is. I beg to move Amendment 22QW.
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, the point I am about to make has been made in connection with a great deal of other legislation and concerns the abilities of those with learning difficulties and disabilities to understand the content and implications of notices such as those we are discussing. It is important to ensure that the legislation includes reference to the provision of appropriate adults or advocates or whatever sources are used to make certain that the full implications are explained to those who may have such difficulties to avoid them getting into yet further trouble, completely inappropriately.
Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Earl of Listowel (CB)
My Lords, I speak as vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on children and young people in care and leaving care. Half of young people in custody have experience of care: they have been fostered or have been in residential care. Many of those unfortunate young people, who are in that position principally because they have been abused by their families, are also likely to get tangled up in the law and in the situations with which we are concerned here.
I begin by putting two questions to the Minister. First, there has been concern in the past that the assumption relating to media reporting when dealing with children is reversed in these circumstances. One of the tabloid newspapers published a string of photographs of children and their addresses some time ago. This was a few years ago and perhaps things have moved on, but I would be grateful to the Minister if he could write to me on where things stand with regard to publicising the names and photographs of such children.
My second question relates to youth services. We all know that the devil makes work for idle hands. With the cuts that have come about, youth services have taken a very heavy blow. Research has shown that where there have been summer activities for young people, the crime rate among young people reduces. We need to think about the positive things that we can do as well as the negative things—the stick and the carrot, if you like—when we discuss this issue. What guidance and advice on protecting youth services are being offered by central government to local authorities at this difficult time? In particular, what advice is being offered to the new PCCs, which have a lot of resources and which could perhaps funnel some of them towards supporting youth services? I was very gratified to hear recently how much support the Government are giving to mentoring young people in the criminal justice system and in schools. That information would be helpful.
I am sorry to speak for so long but I should like to make just one point. Many of these young men—boys, I should say—grow up without a father in the home. We know that two-thirds of black boys in the United States grow up without a father in the home. According to the OECD, the level of lone parents in this country is even higher than that, so many boys here are growing up without fathers in the home. The risk is, and my experience shows this time and again, that such young men feel a sense of guilt. They are not rational in trying to understand why their fathers are not interested in their lives. They think that it is something that they did that caused it. I can think of an occasion when I was with a group of looked-after children in Parliament. Somebody popped their head in to ask a question, suggesting that somebody might have done something wrong, and there was an immediate look of guilt among them—“What have we done wrong? What are we to blame for?”. You hear from adults who have had such an experience that they are ridden with guilt and feel negative about their lives, even about the good things in it. The risk is that, by having a low age of criminal responsibility or by introducing these measures for people of such a young age, the state is coming along and saying, “Yes, there isn’t anything good in you. We will put your photograph in the local newspaper. You will be described as a bad person”. In that, we are reinforcing what their parents have told them and what their experience has been.
I remember as a boarder at school becoming particularly attached to my housemaster, who was with me for several years. When he moved on to be the headmaster of a new school, for several weeks I would ask myself before going to bed at night, quite unreasonably, what I had done to him that was driving him away. I felt guilt for driving him away. I cannot stress enough that my experience points to such a sense of guilt in these young people. Yes, they must be made to feel responsible; no, they should not be allowed just to be called victims. There are sanctions available but I worry that there may be a perverse outcome if we keep the age as currently proposed in the Bill. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, 10 days ago, a number of us debated in this House the Second Reading of the Age of Criminal Responsibility Bill, introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia. I commend some of the things that were said then about the ability of children of the age of 10 to comprehend fully all the businesses of the criminal justice system when they were motivated against them. During the debate I cited the fact that the well known 10 year-olds Thompson and Venables, responsible for the murder of Jamie Bulger, were said by the psychiatrist involved in the case to have a developmental age of four.
You cannot expect a child with the developmental age of four to be able to comprehend exactly what is involved in the criminal justice system, whether it is an injunction, which does not carry a criminal record, or an anti-social behaviour order, which does. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, introduced age very early in this Bill, because all the way through we ought to have at the back of our minds that we are talking about anything to do with children of the age of 10.
We are way below the United Nations recommendation that the age of criminal responsibility should be nearer 15. We are way below what happens in Scotland and countries such as China. I am not sure that it is civilised to throw the criminal justice system at children of 10. Therefore, while I am glad that the intention is not that the injunction should carry a criminal record, we ought to take seriously the question of whether 10 is an appropriate age to start whatever process we have, because within society there should be other ways of doing it. I know that these are not very satisfactory at present, but let us not forget the conditions in which a lot of these children live their lives. I have always thought that it was unfortunate that Mr Blair, in his famous statement about being,
“tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”,
rather lost sight of being tough on the causes. It seems to me that we have to get to grips with the causes, as much as anything else, when we propose the injunctions and so on that we are talking about.
The other thing that concerns me is that we have here a Home Office Bill that talks about children, while in the Moses Room we have the Children and Families Bill, which also talks about children. We learn there that the Department for Education is not actually the key organisation in the development of children initially, but the Department of Health. Then we find that the Department for Work and Pensions has a role to play in all this, as, of course, does the Department for Communities and Local Government. Therefore all sorts of initiatives are going on, all aiming at the same thing, which lack co-ordination. I feel that there ought to be a Minister of child development in the Cabinet Office, responsible for pulling all these threads together, otherwise we will go charging off in a lot of directions, which will be unco-ordinated, and the casualties will be the very people whom this Bill claims to protect.
Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)
My Lords, perhaps I might follow my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham on an issue which I raised at Second Reading: the position of the court granting an order. I raised the question of whether there was anything in the Bill that provided for rules to be made requiring the court to make sure that the individual understood the order that was being made, bearing in mind the consequences if the injunction was to be breached.
I think I am right in saying that nothing in the Bill requires rules to be made to deal with that matter, but will the Minister tell us whether the guidance deals with the position of the child in court? Obviously, the guidance deals with the steps preliminary to taking this action against the individual. However, if the age of 10 is to be adhered to, it is extremely important—for all the reasons that the noble Lord has given—that the individual fully understands the consequences of the order, as well as the need to obey it.
If there are no provisions in the Bill about rules to be made, it comes back to the guidance and the responsibility on those who are guiding the individual to ensure that the order is fully understood, and that there is a reasonable prospect of the child fulfilling what he or she is required to do.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, in principle I am very keen on the idea that Governments should lay down what should happen and leave the how up to local areas to decide, because there will obviously be different local conditions. I remember that fairly soon after the ASBO was introduced, there was considerable concern about what great differences there were in how it was being introduced in different parts of the country. It was shown that there was something of a postcode lottery in it. I suspect that we have heard less and less of that over time because people have got used to the ASBO.
One reason for that is because the ASBO was quite tightly defined; the definition of what amounted to an ASBO was there. What concerns me about the injunction is that I agree with the Joint Committee on Human Rights that,
“conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person”,
is insufficiently precise. I fear that if there is no more precision in this initially, we shall have exactly the same as we had with the introduction of the ASBO: there will be a postcode lottery. If the injunction is to be enforced properly—I support the idea of it not being a criminal activity—there is a need to sharpen up the precision to prevent that and to give better guidance to the local authorities who will have to enforce it.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
My Lords, this has been an interesting debate. All speakers have sought to be helpful to the Minister, perhaps seeking to protect the Government from themselves by this amendment—they were certainly not trying to be a nuisance or annoyance in identifying so many difficult issues that arise here. So I do not expect to have an IPNA taken out against us but, on the balance of the judgment that is in the legislation before us, I suppose we should wait and see. This debate strikes at the very heart of the issue, and the contributions that we have heard today reflect the balance of opinion at Second Reading.
The noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, made a very powerful case and addressed a number of the concerns that were raised, including the concerns of those who have argued against the amendment. Like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, I spent a number of years as an MP, although not as many as he did. Anti-social behaviour was then and remains a very serious issue. I recall that many of those dealing with the problem welcomed ASBOs, despite some of the failings and problems we have heard about, and I think that ASBOs have improved with time and experience. The test of “harassment, alarm and distress” was rightly a higher bar than we see before us today, because it recognises the seriousness of the issue, but it also recognises the penalties for breaches of the order. That is an important point to make in the context of this debate.
I find it very interesting that, in the Second Reading debate and again today, the anti-social behaviour orders gained support from distinguished Members of your Lordships’ House with expertise in law, policing and the magistracy. There were criticisms, and I still have some criticisms about the implementation of anti-social behaviour orders and measures. There are those who do not understand how seriously and dreadfully victims of anti-social behaviour are affected. Unless you have suffered yourself or have spoken to people who have been through that totally debilitating experience, it can be hard to understand how that constant, unrelenting pressure of harassment, intimidating behaviour or excessive noise can leave people terrified of living in their own homes and very distressed. I remember one lady who I spoke to at great length on many occasions. She was so distressed by what some might regard as kids mucking around, but very seriously so, that she was terrified to live in her own home. We are now seeing ASBOs being more appropriately used and we have seen a reduction, as we have heard, in their breaches.
We have also heard that there can be injunctions for anti-social behaviour under housing legislation and that the test of causing nuisance and annoyance already exists, but that is in very limited and specific circumstances. The noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, made that very clear in her comments. Anti-social behaviour injunctions were brought in in 2003 and have been used sensibly and wisely since then. Today, we have all had correspondence from housing associations—in many cases, very similar letters—explaining why they want to retain the power they have and explaining the benefits they have been able to bring to their tenants, in many cases, very vulnerable tenants, because of those powers. Their letters highlight a problem referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, a few moments ago, and by others; a problem which the Government have created by trying to rationalise the number of orders, procedures and interventions that can be taken against anti-social behaviour. Clearly, housing associations with very vulnerable tenants welcome the powers they have, but these are not appropriate for every single case of anti-social behaviour. We are not against all forms of injunctions but we are against making this test—on the balance of probability, for nuisance and annoyance—the test that should be applied in all cases where somebody complains about something that they consider to be anti-social behaviour.
In some cases there has been a misunderstanding that only small areas are covered; perhaps only social housing estates or council estates. In fact, anti-social behaviour, and certainly the test that the Government wish to apply, of nuisance or annoyance, is much wider spread than that. In many cases, injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance can involve similar and indeed wider matters than those raised in current ASBO applications. They can address relatively minor issues involving nuisance neighbours and minor disorder. Because as an order an ASBO can represent a serious slight upon the reputation of a respondent, as well as carrying serious consequences for breach, it is completely inappropriate for something of that seriousness to have a lower standard of proof to apply.
Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, I must admit that when I saw the streamlined proposal, as the Minister described it, contained in the 200 pages of the Bill, I groaned at the thought of yet another dog’s breakfast of unconnected legislation that we would have to slog through.
When I read Part 1, I was immediately reminded of the words of Winston Churchill on 20 July 1910 that the way in which it treats its crime and criminals is a true test of the civilisation of any country. I say that because I was struck by the immediate reference in Part 1 to the fact that we were dealing with 10 year-olds under the Bill. I was therefore struck today by the brief sent to us by Justice, which many noble Lords have no doubt read, which states:
“The overall restriction of a person’s liberty should be proportionate to the seriousness of the illegality that the order seeks to restrain and to the status of the order as a civil preventative measure”.
I read on, but immediately had two thoughts.
First, I spent nearly 41 years in the Army trying to ensure civilised conditions in which all our children could grow up. I little thought that, 20 years later, I should be standing in this House feeling that I was fighting for the same. I was then tempted to suggest that I might take out an injunction against Part 1 to prevent a nuisance or annoyance.
I then reflected on two other things. One was an extraordinary conversation I once had in Belfast with a Republican woman called Kitty O’Kane who used to encourage small boys to throw stones at soldiers. We were able to include her in a picture of an incident, which I gave her; we knew her well enough to describe her to the artist. Asked why, when she knew that we were there to try to restore law and order, she put those boys into danger and at risk of being shot, she said to me, “Have you got a map?”. I said yes, and she said, “Take it out”. I took it out of my pocket. She said, “There are no football fields”. She was absolutely right. Where was there in all that part of West Belfast a place for young people to let off the inevitable steam of growing up?
I then thought of the infamous phrase of Mr Tony Blair when, as shadow Home Secretary, he promised to be,
“tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”.
Somewhere along the route, he found an “r” and became tough on the causers of crime rather than the causes. It is the causes that we need to tackle and which have been avoided. The trouble with being tough on causers is that he cranked up that toughness over and over again, and we now have a tough Minister of Justice who announced that he wants to be tough on mentally disordered offenders but failed to tell us how he intends to do that. Parts of this Bill, although it is welcome, follow that cranking and have taken some things to a new level of toughness which, to my mind, stand starkly against the civilisation of which Winston Churchill talked.
Many noble Lords will mention—some have already mentioned—some of the areas which I find very difficult in Part 1. There is the injunction to prevent nuisance and the low burden of proof that a person,
“has engaged or threatens to engage in conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person”.
For heaven’s sake, just think. We have all been parents or grandparents of 10 year-olds. Can we think that there has never been an occasion when they gave us an opportunity to say, “You are causing an annoyance, or you look as if you are likely to cause an annoyance”? Now we are threatening them with detention for three months or imprisonment for two years and eviction from their houses. What are we doing as a civilised society? No wonder that the Home Affairs Select Committee said that the power was far too broad and that the Joint Committee on Human Rights said that this part ought to be removed.
There are already terrible problems with breach. Fifty-seven per cent of those on anti-social behaviour orders breached between 2000 and 2012, and 53% were given an immediate prison sentence, cranking up the prison population. Thirty-eight percent were under-18s—who are said to be rarely likely to be given an ASBO. I am always suspicious when I hear “rarely used”. That applied to under-18s on ASBO and to people on indeterminate prison sentences. Look what has happened. What are we going to do? Are these people, having been sent into prison for breaching, to be given the supervision orders that are part of the transforming rehabilitation programme coming from the Ministry of Justice? Are they to be subject to supervision for a year? Who is going to provide it? Where is it going to come from? Has this been worked out?
I come to naming and shaming. Why should, suddenly, Section 49 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 not apply? I am very worried about evictions and this riot-related possession because I do not think that this thing has been thought through enough. Again, the Joint Commission on Human Rights and the Law Society say remove it. I believe therefore that there is a great deal to be gone through in Part 1.
There is no time to go through all the various measures, but I have one other thing to say to the Minister. I am very disappointed that there is one omission in another clause of the Bill, which is to do with extradition. This issue falls much wider across the criminal justice system and the system involving the employment of private sector companies to conduct public services. I refer to the regulation of the individuals employed to carry out services. The Minister will remember the case of Jimmy Mubenga, the Angolan killed by G4S guards while under restraint on his way back to Angola. The Crown Prosecution Service will have to go back and reconsider their decision not to prosecute because the coroner in the case recently found that this was unlawful killing.
In inquiries—one that I led and one that the Home Affairs Select Committee led—we discovered that there is no supervision at all of these individuals employed from private security companies by the Security Industry Authority. What I hoped for and expected in the extradition part of this Bill was that the mechanisms for enforced removal would receive supervision, and that that would include the regulation of individuals employed by the Government to carry out that extradition on their behalf. That, of course, leads me to worry about the supervision or regulation of those supervisors who will be employed in community rehabilitation companies by the Ministry of Justice to replace the functions of the probation service. Time does not allow me to expand on that, but why has this been excluded and what is the Home Office to do about this regulation? The position of the Security Industry Authority needs looking into.
Drugs
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure and privilege to be able to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, on her maiden speech in this House. Having heard the content of what she said, we look forward to other contributions that she will make to the work of this House. Although she mentioned that she had 20 years of experience in the NHS, she did not mention that in addition she has been a member of the Commission for Racial Equality, a trustee of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and has served as the Legal Services Ombudsman. I think that I can safely say on behalf of all Members of the House who have been privileged to hear her that we look forward to her contributions in many areas. I am sure that if they are of the quality of what we have just heard, they will be a huge enhancement to the work of the House.
I congratulate my noble friend Lady Meacher not only on securing the debate but on the exemplary way in which she introduced it. I entirely share her views on criminalisation and the need for both national and international reform of current drugs policy. I declare two interests: one as a member of her All-Party Group on Drug Policy Reform; and another as chairman of the cross-party group on justice, drugs and alcohol, which aims to link practitioners in the field with Members of this House.
I listened with interest as the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, introduced the word “military”, because the one thing that I have always thought was utterly inappropriate in talking about drugs is the word “war”. It introduces entirely the wrong perception of what people are meant to be doing. Yes, of course drugs are an evil and need to be tackled, but war is something entirely different. As for “military”, as was touched on by my noble friend Lady Meacher, I add that when I was serving in the Army, every time we went off to do something somewhere we felt that we had the country behind us and, in particular, that we had cross-party support behind us. That was broken, of course, in Iraq in 2003 and has been a matter of great concern ever since. On this issue, it has always seemed to me that cross-party agreement is essential, because the inevitable result of cross-party wrangling is inertia. In tackling something as urgent as this, with all the social and financial penalties for the life of this great country that it brings, the last thing we need is inertia caused by unnecessary wrangling on what should be a centralised policy.
I go back to my experience as Chief Inspector of Prisons. I have always thought that if anything encapsulates the nonsense of the present position, it is the way that drugs are treated in prisons. There is something called the mandatory drug test, which is meant to give a picture of drug use in prisons. It is absolute nonsense. Five per cent of people in prison are tested. I always remember going into a cell and finding nine pieces of paper on the wall. I said to the person, “What are those?”. He said, “They are my certificates for being drug-free. If you come next week, there will be a 10th. They always test me because they know I am drug-free and it makes the figures look good”. That is absolute nonsense. The only way to find out the actual size and shape of the problem is to test every person when they come in and decide from that what needs to be done with them.
The second thing that I found was that when the drug treatment and assessment programme started, it ended up with a lot of assessment but no treatment, because prisoners were moved around the country, away from the people who might have worked with them in prison and carried on doing so when they were released. Prison policy was totally against consistent assessment and treatment. I then found that there were masses of dealers in every prison. They were causing not only misery in prison by what they were doing to the prisoners who failed to pay them their dues for illegal substances, but terrible problems for their families outside. The misery was widespread, not helped by the fact that there did not seem to be proper liaison between the drug treatment organisations outside the prison and those people who were responsible for it.
Last week, those of your Lordships who saw the prison inspection report on HMP Oakwood would have seen that drugs were easier to obtain there than soap. It seems to me that our prisons, where we have people who cannot leave and could be treated, are the very place where we ought to have proper policies. You can do the assessment; you can start the treatment and make certain that it carries on. The whole situation shows the lunacy of the prohibition that seems to dominate our policy.
However, I do not want to end on a doom and gloom moment because I am very glad to see that while prison healthcare was not part of the NHS when I started as chief inspector, it is now. I am very glad to see that the prisons have put the responsibility for drug treatment in the hands of the NHS. That is an absolute endorsement of the way that we ought to go, and which my noble friend has so clearly recommended in her excellent report.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I remind all noble Lords that this is a time-limited debate. Contributions from the Back Benches are of five minutes, which means that when the clock strikes five noble Lords should be looking to conclude their speeches.
Immigration and Security
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(11 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, on obtaining this timely and important debate and on his introductory speech. I suspect that we have come to the same conclusions by slightly different routes. My personal experience with immigration controls, and therefore with the immigration and asylum system, began when I was appointed Chief Inspector of Prisons. When I was made responsible for the inspection of what were then called immigration detention centres in 1997, I was absolutely appalled by the amount of inefficiency and waste that I found. Immigrants and asylum-seekers were being detained for months, even years, while their cases were allegedly examined in what I can only describe as a dilatory manner. The process for foreign national prisoners sentenced to deportation was started only after they had completed their prison sentences. Legal arrangements for the speedy resolution of asylum applications were totally inadequate. Detention centres lacked detention rules and used totally inapplicable prison rules. There were many other examples.
Later, I was one of the commissioners of an independent asylum commission that examined the whole system and reported in 2009. At the heart of our concerns was the UK Border Agency, with its culture of disbelief, whose word on performance figures we simply could not believe, making us wonder quite how Ministers, deprived of actual facts, could come to meaningful conclusions. Worryingly, appreciation of the faults in the system was not helped by Ministers using that false UKBA evidence to counter outside concerns about actual facts. That is one of the main contributors to the unsatisfactory situation which the Home Secretary is now trying to resolve. This year and last I have been conducting a review of the removal process of those sentenced to deportation and discovered a quite horrifying muddle in case handling, quite apart from the actual conduct of the deportation to be.
I must declare my interest as a member of the recently formed soft power Select Committee, which is due to report to the House later this year or next year. When I was director of public relations for the Army, my job was to protect and project the Army’s image. Our national immigration policy should have both those same intents in mind. The National Security Council reports on border issues every year, and I am sure that the national security protection work of the National Crime Agency and the Border Policing Command will come under its regular scrutiny. The Select Committee has also learnt that the National Security Council is responsible for the co-ordination of the projection of soft power. If it, too, already has those, why should it not exercise them more?
Immigration controls are an essential ingredient of national security. In the past, however, too many involved in exercising those controls have seen them as a process and an end in themselves which they have not related to wider implications. I am very glad that maximum use of technology and intelligence is being made, because this is the key to tackling a whole range of border security checks. I welcome introductions such as the immigration and asylum biometric system. However, at that heart of all that are people. We must be concerned about the people who use and interpret the technology, not the technology itself. There are currently 17 agencies working to secure our borders, which is far too many, not least because there is a lack of clarity over who is actually in command of them and to whom they are responsible and accountable, collectively and individually.
Earlier in the year, the Home Secretary reorganised what used to be called the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, so famously dismissed by John Reid as not fit for purpose, which is now called the UK Border Agency. As I understand it, the outside structure, if that is the right term, is now to be the Border Policing Command, within the National Crime Agency, which will be the national lead for border security and will oversee a single intelligence picture, co-ordinate and task other agencies involved in border security and work with overseas partners to disrupt early those who pose a threat to border security. Secondly, there will be a border force that will concentrate on screening and managing all goods and passengers arriving in the United Kingdom.
Within the Home Office, there will be an immigration and visa service and a law enforcement service, each with its own director-general, who will be a member of an oversight board, chaired by the Permanent Secretary, whose membership will also include policy, the passport service and the border force. In announcing the new organisation, the Home Secretary said that she was doing this because the UK Border Agency was too big, lacked a clear culture, lacked transparency and accountability, lacked adequate information technology and was subject to a complex policy and legal framework.
If the UK is to project what the Home Secretary wants, which is a culture of customer satisfaction among businessmen and legal visitors, it is absolutely essential that our immigration controls are seen as being focused on national security and are not seen by potential international clients as an excessively bureaucratic and intimidatory ordeal to be undergone before doing business with, studying in or visiting this country. It is essential that the officials responsible for such aspects as student and business visas are continually reminded of how their attitude and efficiency rebound on our national reputation. I have been very struck by the volume and strength of complaint made by witnesses to our Select Committee about this. If it results in the falling off of either business activity, which affects our economy, or of student numbers, which affects both our economy and our influence in the world, it could be said to be damaging to our long-term security.
Therefore, while I am sure that the proposals announced by the Home Secretary have the potential to be an improvement on what was in existence until March, I fear that they were based on an incomplete and in-house assessment of the main problem. True economic migration needs to be limited, as does the abuse of student and family visas. However, every aspect of immigration control is ultimately dictated by national security and so the whole system, particularly if it currently includes 17 agencies, needs to be reformed with a view to making it more accountable and transparent.
I am very glad that the role of the independent chief inspector of the UK Border Agency is to be increased. I pay tribute to the present holder of the appointment, John Vine, whose reports are always penetrating, constructive and worth reading. I would rather that his independence was marked by him being a Crown official, and therefore Her Majesty’s chief inspector, because that extra degree of independence is always useful when dealing with myriad different agencies. Who, for example, is responsible and accountable for the non-circulation of and failure to act upon alerts produced by the National Border Targeting Centre, an organisation that hopes to cover every arrival in the United Kingdom by 2014 and which the Home Affairs Select Committee, whose continuing focus on the failings of the UKBA is to be warmly applauded, recommends should be accountable to Parliament?
There have been, and are, many concerns about the way in which immigration controls are themselves controlled and conducted. There are too many of them for anyone concerned with national security to be comfortable with. The internal reforms announced by the Home Office are good, but only in part. I would feel much happier if the National Security Council, responsible for protecting the security and projecting the image of the nation, were to institute an outside examination of the immigration system, rather than rely on a series of in-house palliatives, to ensure that this nation is protected and its image projected in the way we would wish.
Crime and Courts Bill [HL]
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(11 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, in her foreword to the Strategic Objectives for Female Offenders published last Friday, Helen Grant, the Ministry of Justice Minister responsible for women, wrote:
“The issue of women in prisons is a deeply emotive one, in which there is very genuine interest from Parliamentary colleagues”.
I am sure that the noble Lord, as a member of the Government who purport to be as genuinely interested in the issue of women’s justice as Helen Grant professes, will understand why I say that a number of genuinely interested colleagues are deeply upset that this amendment is coming up at such a late hour, because understandably they and others have had to leave the House. Tragically, this is an all-too-familiar story where women’s justice is concerned, about which we should all feel ashamed.
If the Committee in the other place was genuinely interested, I cannot imagine how it accepted, without debate, the Minister’s assertion that the amendment successfully introduced at Third Reading in this House by my noble and learned friend Lord Woolf—sadly, he cannot be here tonight, as noble Lords have heard—was unnecessary. The amendment sought to obtain much needed statutory protection of measures to ensure that the distinct needs of women offenders were prioritised and met. It was said to be unnecessary because it specifically mentioned probation trusts and, because probation was under review, it did not make sense to legislate on probation provision, and because the Government were already committed to working on women’s provision, the legislation was not needed. The genuinely interested Committee threw out my noble and learned friend’s amendment, denying other genuinely interested colleagues any opportunity of considering it at Report. What a message such treatment sends to those who are encouraged to believe that the Government are genuinely interested in the position of women in the criminal justice system.
If this was the first occasion on which similar dismissal had been the fate of proposals concerning the specific needs of women offenders, it could perhaps be more easily understood. The point about probation is a semantic quibble because, whatever the outcome of the review, someone will be responsible for the provision of services to female offenders. But the point about legislation is important, because the amendment is an attempt to ensure that consistent and continuous action is taken by successive Ministers, rather than a continuation of past practice, which I can best characterise as being seven times bitten and, understandably, eight times shy.
The strategic direction announced by the Minister includes sections on enhanced provision in the community and transforming rehabilitation, with at its heart an advisory board. In principle, I welcome strategic direction, because a strategy is a single aim uniting the contributions of all those concerned. But as this one contains nothing new and is noticeably short on detail, I can best describe it as pretty thin wine. While not against advisory boards per se, I am not happy that the Minister should put so much hope in this one, because boards do not provide leadership or take positive action, and positive action, not yet more advice, is what is so badly needed.
The Minister said that the board had been convened,
“to develop polices to tackle female re-offending, to help women into gainful employment and safe environments, and off the ‘conveyor belt to crime’”.
Of course, nobody could be against such aims, but I am deeply cynical about how they will be implemented and overseen, in view of bitter experiences in the past. Over the past 16 years, I have heard much the same from a succession of Home and Justice Secretaries and Prison and Women’s Ministers and I have seen a plethora of policy, advisory and women’s issues boards set up to develop policies and to help women off the “conveyor belt to crime”, after recommendations made in two thematic reports of mine when I was Chief Inspector of Prisons, a report by the Prison Reform Trust, three reports by the Fawcett Society and finally the report by the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, only for them to disappear without trace. I note that, like its predecessors, this board is expected to,
“take a creative, innovative look at the scope … for improved sentencing options”,
as well as,
“designing the system to ensure that women’s needs and priorities are recognised in the provision of services in the community and through-the-gate of prison”,
and working with partners within and outside the criminal justice system,
“to ensure that the needs and profile of female offenders are recognised and understood”,
while also promoting “community sentencing options”.
Here I make no apologies for repeating what I have said time and again in this House: history, and particularly recent history, proves that nothing will happen until and unless some named person is made responsible and accountable to a Minister for making it happen. As nobody has been appointed in the case of women, virtually nothing has happened.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. Over the years I have come to recognise that in the Minister we have a fully paid-up supporter of the probation service as well as a fully paid-up supporter of making improvements to the women’s justice system. Therefore, I am conscious that we are talking to somebody whose heart is certainly in making the improvements that we all know to be necessary. I also thank all those who have contributed to this debate. In various ways they have emphasised just how genuinely interested this House is in making progress and how disappointed it is that over the past 16-plus years we appear to have been there and then not there, and then there again and not there again, and so on. This has got to stop.
I do not discount what the Minister says about the commitment of Helen Grant and the leadership she is going to apply. That is not my point. I am not making suggestions for new structures. All I am saying is that in every other organisation things work where you have a determined Minister assisted by someone who is responsible and accountable to that Minister for the delivery. That is what is missing and it has been missing over and over again. It is not new and it is not something that I am plucking out of the sky, because it happens everywhere except here. I just pray that one day this penny will drop because I fear that Helen Grant, well intentioned though she is, will find that the advisory board will not be the mechanism and she will not be able to oversee the consistent delivery all over the United Kingdom. It is consistency that we want.
I deliberately did not mention all sorts of things that are in Transforming Rehabilitation because this is a much more general issue, but I am extremely encouraged by the Minister’s response to the suggestion of an annual report. That will be an excellent opportunity for this House to demonstrate not just its commitment to this but its very genuine interest and wish to apply the collective experience and knowledge in this House in the best interests of both the Government who are responsible at the time and the women whom we hope are going to benefit from what can be done. I am conscious that the Government have laid down things that they intend to do, which I hope that we can monitor, and on the hopeful note from the Minister, I withdraw my amendment.
UK Border Agency
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(12 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, like other noble Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and congratulate him on obtaining this important and timely debate. In doing so, I salute his tireless and determined championing of the causes of those who seek sanctuary in this country following torture or ill treatment in their own country.
I want to concentrate on one aspect of the UKBA’s performance with which I am currently engaged: the enforced removal of those for whom entry has been denied. I declare three interests that will colour my contribution. First, as Chief Inspector of Prisons, I was given the responsibility of inspecting immigration detention centres. To my surprise—but not entirely surprising, given the number of Prison Service officers in the then Immigration and Nationality Directorate—I found that immigration detention rules were not based on UN and European Union detention rules but on UK prison rules, which are wholly inappropriate because immigration detainees and asylum seekers have not been convicted of crimes. My inspectors and I spent 18 months working with the IND, amending the rules to make them fit for purpose. My main concern was the lack of a coherent strategy, or any leadership or direction, in the immigration and asylum process.
My second interest was as an independent asylum commissioner, a commission that reported in 2009. As I had done with detention rules, we deliberately gave the UKBA the opportunity to comment on our findings before we published our recommendations. In commending the then Border and Immigration Agency for making strenuous efforts to deal with asylum claims more efficiently, we found what the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, has just described—the culture of disbelief that persisted among decision-makers. The adversarial nature of the asylum process and the lack of access to legal advice for applicants led to perverse and unjust decisions. My belief in the culture of disbelief was proved by the then Minister, Mr Byrne, the very afternoon that we published the report. He was asked on “World at One” about the remarks that I had made on the “Today” programme. He said, “I have not read the report but I disagree with every word of it”.
The year before, on behalf of Birnberg and Medical Justice, I had written the foreword to a report called Outsourcing Abuse, in which I said that if even one of the 48 detailed cases from a list of nearly 300 alleged assaults by security guards employed by private security companies on contract to the Home Office is substantiated,
“that amounts to something of a preventable national disgrace”.
In 2010, my noble friend Lady O’Loan in her report on the dossier on behalf of the Home Secretary found that although there had been no pattern of systematic abuse by escort officers, it clearly happened, and that there was no management or training of guards. She recommended a review of the training provided for the use of force, involving annual retraining to ensure that in any case in which force is used, officers are trained to consider constantly the legality, necessity and proportionality of that use of force.
This is where my third interest is: as chairman of an independent inquiry into forced removals on behalf of Citizens UK, the largest alliance of civil society organisations in the country, which works on many issues, not just immigration. I want to concentrate particularly on the case of Mr Jimmy Mubenga, who died on 12 October 2010 from cardio-respiratory collapse after being restrained by three G4S detainee custody officers in an aircraft at Heathrow while being removed to Angola.
Two days ago, Mr Gaon Hart of the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there was,
“insufficient evidence to bring any charges for Mr Mubenga's death … Although counsel advised that there was a breach of duty in the way Mr Mubenga was held”.
However, it was not enough to tell a jury what may have caused a person’s death, and there was,
“insufficient evidence that the restraining methods used … were, in themselves, illegal”.
He added that,
“experts suggested there were shortcomings in the training given to the security guards”,
and that the training on positional asphyxia—where the position of an individual affects their ability to breathe adequately, causing death due to lack of oxygen—and the warning signs for identifying it, were both flawed.
Moreover, although G4S had followed training recommended by the UKBA and the National Offender Management Service, which had been found to be safe and fit for purpose after official review—an official review that incidentally was carried out by the National Offender Management Service on its own techniques—was criticised by experts, as was the lack of specific training for the use of restraint in aircraft. I understand that the CPS is writing to the UKBA, to NOMS and to G4S expressing these concerns; and I ask the Minister whether copies of these letters can be put in the Library.
I have to say that in the face of all the evidence that we have gathered during our inquiry, quite apart from all the other evidence that was available, I find that CPS decision, at kindest, perverse. Passengers reported hearing Mr Mubenga cry out that he could not breathe and that the guards were killing him. There had been Home Office warnings to G4S in 2006 about the dangers of using positional asphyxia. There had been stringent criticisms by the coroner in the case of Gareth Myatt, a 15 year-old who died in Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre following the use of similar procedures for restraint by G4S guards. He, too, had called out that he could not breathe before he died. As an inquest is the only public forum in which this death can now be scrutinised, I ask the Minister to confirm that this will be conducted as soon as possible by an experienced coroner, and that public funding will be made available to ensure full support for Mr Mubenga’s family.
The Home Affairs Select Committee in another place has also investigated rules governing enforced removals, although in nothing like the same depth as my inquiry. The Government’s response has not been as full as I would hope. It confirms that all guards must be certified by the Home Secretary, which includes certification that they have received training in restraint techniques approved by the National Offender Management Service. I believe that that is perverse.
Unfortunately, time does not allow me to cover all the points that I shall present to the Home Affairs Select Committee in the report in November because I want it to follow them up, but they include the recommendation that the regulation of all detainee escort officers by the security industry authority is in line with an amendment to the Private Security Industry Act 2001, which currently excludes them. This must include not just initial licensing but annual top-up training, connected to annual training on a physical intervention skill model. Frankly the current training of security guards is not effective. If the UKBA had bothered to look beyond the inappropriate NOMS techniques, it would have found that special mental hospitals have for years rejected them in favour of those that are non-pain compliant, except in extreme circumstances when removing a weapon. Unfortunately the three special hospitals have used slightly different techniques that have never been codified, and I have written to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, about this.
I asked the UKBA to attend our evidence session, and we heard from the restraint trainer at Ashworth Hospital, who told us that not only had he done what he had done with non-pain techniques, but that the Liverpool police had asked him to devise techniques for getting people on and off crowded Mersey ferries, and that he could do the same for aircraft. Last week, the Minister of Justice announced the introduction of new minimising and managing physical restraint, formerly known as control-restraint techniques, for use in juvenile custody, recommended by a restraint advisory board set up for the purpose. This has now been reconstituted as the Independent Restraint Advisory Panel.
I asked the Minister whether the panel could be charged with similarly examining restraint techniques for the UKBA, independent of NOMS. We found that the measurement of successful returns passed to Ministers is not a qualitative process but merely counts the number of reports received from contractors. The only training received by the eight monitors who report on a contractor’s performance and the conduct of individuals was to watch a session of contractor-run training. Far from recruiting and training staff when contracts change, old ones—no doubt bringing old habits with them—are merely TUPE-ed from one contract to another. The Immigration Service Commissioner is prevented from regulating unscrupulous alleged legal advisers who exploit immigrants, and so on.
We have found good things, such as the Independent Family Returns Panel, whose procedures we have recommended to the UKBA for single returnees as well, not least because the in-depth examination of the appropriateness of return might avoid scandals, such as reported by Freedom from Torture and others, of previously tortured people who, their case being disbelieved by the UKBA, were returned, tortured again, and escaped to seek asylum once more.
My successor as Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, coined the phrase “the virtual prison” to describe what Ministers were told by officials as opposed to what she saw on the ground. I fear that one of the most besetting sins of the UKBA, and indeed of the Home Office over the years, has been its continued refusal to listen to facts from outsiders. I just hope that Ministers will discard the former practice and listen, because it really does matter. The image of this country is presented by the UKBA, and currently too much of what we represent is being let down by procedures that, with good leadership, good management and good training, could be avoided.
Crime and Courts Bill [HL]
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(12 years, 1 month ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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.
Queen’s Speech
Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, as the Minister forecast, with the time available, I shall concentrate on only one issue. It will not surprise your Lordships to learn that that issue is imprisonment.
I entirely accept that the Government’s No.1 priority in this whole legislative package is costs. In that regard, I am very concerned about the costs of imprisonment. If you have, as was the position last week, 87,212 people in prison, at a cost of £37,573 per prison place, the total cost is well in excess of £3 billion. I suggest that a great deal of that is wholly unnecessary because those people need not be there.
I note that the gracious Speech mentioned that the Government’s legislative programme would focus on economic growth, justice and constitutional reform, which is entirely understandable. It also stated that,
“my Government is committed to reducing and preventing crime”.
I was very glad that, although for the first time in many years a separate criminal justice Bill is not forecast, there is a criminal justice system element in the Bill that the Minister mentioned. I look forward to taking part in that.
In considering the costs of imprisonment and its impact on the prevention of crime, or the prevention of re-crime which is the role of the Prison Service, I shall draw attention to five limiting factors which should be considered carefully if they are not to inhibit the Government’s ability to deliver what they want.
First, I refer to an interview given by Sir David Latham, the recently retired and excellent chairman of the Parole Board, which was reported in the Times on Monday. He said that the Secretary of State for Justice believes strongly that the country cannot afford to keep on jailing more and more people, that he has a desire to stop people being put in prison as much he possibly can, and that he has been frustrated in not being able to persuade the Cabinet to do the things that he wanted to enable the prison population to stabilise and decrease. I could not agree with that sentiment more.
One aspect of that, which we debated during our debates on the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill and which brought it into stark relief, is the issue of indeterminate prisoners: people not knowing when they are likely to get out. There are 6,017 of them at the moment—a considerable number—and a lot are already over tariff. If, at £37,000 per year, you have people who need not be there, you now have the added burden that some are suing for compensation because of the delay in their release. The country is having to find £300 for over six months and £1,200 for over two years, and there is likely to be an increase of 30% in such claims during the coming year. That can hardly be a sensible cost. It must inhibit the ability of the Prison Service to do what the Government say they are committed to doing—preventing re-crime.
The second issue was introduced in the recent Act: the victim levy of 40% imposed under the Prisoners’ Earnings Act. Interestingly, today the Chief Inspector of Prisons has published his report on the inspection of HMP Standford Hill, a resettlement prison in Kent where sending people out to work is an absolutely key part of the resettlement process. He said:
“The levies deducted under the Prisoners’ Earnings Act”—
40% of the prison wage, deducted as pay back to victims of crime—
“had begun to mean … that prisoners could no longer afford to meet the travel costs of getting to work, which meant they lost the work and the resettlement opportunities”.
That ought to be thought through carefully. The imposition is affecting the ability of the prisons to do what the Government want.
I also refer to the recent reports on two prisons in the prison newspaper, Inside Time, this month: HMYOI Brinsford, where young offenders are held, and HMP Durham. In each, the reports said that one area of concern is the lack of time out of cell. In Brinsford, one-third of the young men are locked in their cells during the core day and in Durham prisoners spend 16 to 20 hours a day locked up two to a cell designed for one. I mention that because if they are locked in the cell doing nothing, nothing is being done to resettle them.
However, with regard to what is possible in resettlement, a report just published by the Prisoners’ Education Trust, which surveyed 500 prisoners from 81% of the prisons in the system, said that, when applying for a course in the education department, you are put on a waiting list but not told that you are on one, how long the list is or where you are on it. One man said that he had been on the list for two and a half years to do a health and safety course. I am sure that that is not true everywhere but it is a cautionary tale. If education is a vital part of resettlement and preventing re-crime, surely it is important that this aspect is looked at.
Finally, I mention the issue of women, which has been raised many times in this report. Women in Prison has recently reported that of the 43 recommendations in the admirable report of the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, seven have been implemented, there has been some progress on 18 and no progress on another 18.
I do not want to be a Jonah about this because I believe passionately in the rehabilitation revolution and that it is perfectly possible for prisons to do more to help the Government achieve their aim of reducing and preventing crime. However, they must be enabled to do so and that means that, before legislation is introduced, the impact assessment of what is proposed is carefully looked through. In this case and in this Session, that should include careful post-legislative scrutiny of what has been introduced to see that it is fit for purpose to do the job for which it was designed.