Offensive Weapons Bill

Debate between Lord Ramsbotham and Baroness Meacher

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 26th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. The one thing we know about short sentences is that people do not receive any education, training, therapy—anything at all, in fact, because, well, they are not there long enough to benefit. Therefore, as the noble Lord said, why on earth do we spend all this money only to create hardened criminals? I very strongly support these amendments.

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I too support the amendments. I was at the speech given by the Secretary of State for Justice last Monday, in which he said that in the last five years, there have been just over 250,000 custodial sentences of six months or less, and over 300,000 of 12 months or less. He went on to say that nearly two-thirds of the offenders had gone on to commit further crime within a year of being released. He also said that the Government were now taking a more punitive approach than at any time during the Thatcher years, which I thought was a strange admission from him. I wrote to him pointing out that this Bill appears to be him against the Home Secretary, and he replied today that “work in the area will require careful collaboration with other government departments to ensure a consistent approach to sentencing reform which reflects my ambitions and, most importantly, keeps the public safe”.

Everything has been said about the growing body of evidence that diverting children away from the formal justice system is more effective at reducing offending than punitive responses, and I agree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Elton, on that. I also deplore the removing of judicial discretion, which works against the Sentencing Council’s guidelines. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child resolved that the interests of the children must be placed first. Mandatory short prison sentences have been proved to be ineffective—I have seen them to be ineffective—because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, said, there is nothing happening in any young offender institution which is worth the while, and if people are there for a short time, nobody has time to establish their needs, let alone tackle them. Therefore, I strongly support the amendments.

Offensive Weapons Bill

Debate between Lord Ramsbotham and Baroness Meacher

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 30th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I must first apologise to the Committee that I have been horribly absent, but there was an event in the other place that I had to attend—I will not bore your Lordships with the explanation, but there really was no option.

Amendment 63 aims to ensure that vulnerable children or young people found with an offensive weapon in a public place are assessed for addiction. So many of these vulnerable children and young people are addicted to drugs. If they are found to be so addicted, they should not be processed through the criminal justice system; rather, they should be referred to a rehabilitation service for help with their addiction and related problems. Many of them are homeless and have all sorts of mental health problems and so forth. The Government have recognised that short-term prison sentences are generally unhelpful. Re-offending rates following such sentences are very high. In the case of drug addicts, a prison sentence will generally achieve—I really mean this—absolutely nothing positive, but it is very likely to increase the vulnerability and addiction, and therefore the criminal activity of these young people.

Several noble Lords attended an interesting meeting yesterday where senior police officers and a police and crime commissioner from the West Midlands explained this. I quote one of the officers, “The police cannot reduce the illegal drugs market, however many drug dealers we arrest and imprison”. That is a powerful statement on behalf of men on the front line who deal with these things day in, day out. Those people spend their lives that way. Neil Woods, who has written two books about his time as an undercover officer arresting drug dealers over many years, explained that he came to realise that he was not achieving any reduction in the availability of drugs. He was completely wasting his life away, so he changed to a very different view about how these things should be dealt with.

The police officers also talked about how much more effective alternatives to punishment are in persuading young people to back away from the illegal drugs market. Ronnie Cowan MP talked about the work in Glasgow where young people are diverted from the criminal justice system and helped to return to a normal life. Perhaps the Minister will tell the Committee whether she is familiar with the work in Glasgow. If she is not, it may be worth her looking into it before Report.

This amendment is really important from the pure efficiency point of view on reducing addiction and crime in this context, but let us also look at it from the point of view of the children and young people involved. As I said at the beginning, a very high proportion of children found carrying a knife or another offensive weapon in a public place will be vulnerable children, who have become addicted to drugs or been targeted by the drug gangs. The Children’s Commissioner estimates that at least 46,000 children in England are involved in gang activity. It is estimated that about 4,000 teenagers in London alone are being exploited through child criminal exploitation in what has come to be known as county lines. These vulnerable children should be seen as victims of trafficking and exploitation rather than as criminals.

Gangs are deliberately targeting vulnerable children. They watch for a child walking home from school day after day alone, head down, looking miserable. These children are unsafe, unloved or unable to cope for one reason or another. Gangs take advantage of their vulnerability. They threaten or trick children into trafficking their drugs for them. They may threaten a young person physically or threaten a family member. They often offer food, which the child or family may desperately need, alcohol or clothing to the child or their family in return for co-operation.

Once children have received gifts, they feel indebted to the gang. They quickly feel they have no option but to continue. As many noble Lords will know perfectly well, the gangs use these vulnerable children to store their drugs and to move cash proceeds or the drugs themselves. No doubt they give them a knife or something else to protect themselves with. The county lines groups use high levels of violence, including the ready use of firearms, knives and other offensive weapons, to intimidate and control members of the group and its vulnerable victims. The victims are exposed to varying levels of exploitation including physical, mental and sexual harm. Some of the young people are trafficked into remote markets to work. Others are falsely imprisoned in their own homes, which have been taken over using force or coercion. I must say that I had not heard of that until I read it rather recently.

The National Crime Agency report County Lines Violence, Exploitation & Drug Supply 2017 analysed the exploitation of vulnerable people, including those with mental health or physical health problems. Sixty-five per cent of police services reported that county lines activity was linked to the exploitation of children. The police know perfectly well that we are dealing with victims here. Once involved, victims may want to get out of their situation but do not want to involve the police for fear of self-incrimination or retribution by the perpetrators. They are really caught in the middle. These victims may carry a knife or other weapon for self-protection, as I have mentioned. The real question is whether they are really criminals for carrying that knife for self-protection. Other noble Lords talked about what is in the mind. These children have got a knife not to attack others, but to protect themselves. That surely makes all the difference to one’s approach to dealing with these children.

This is a very complex problem but the courts and the prison system are not the right vehicles for dealing with victims. Yes, send the gang leaders to prison, though retraining and psychological treatment will be essential for them, too, if they are not to spend their time in prison, come out of it later and then start all over again, with just a little more bitterness added to what they already had. I hope we can have a discussion—a serious discussion—before Report about drug issues in relation to the Bill. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and I beg to move.

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment because it advocates one public health approach, along the lines advocated in the serious violence strategy. The sad fact is, however, that too many of the intervention and preventive measures outlined in the strategy are not sufficiently resourced and may not materialise.

Last week, the drugs, alcohol and justice cross-party group that I co-chair heard about an initiative from Thames Valley Police, about which I immediately wrote to the Home Secretary, encouraging him to take an interest in it. It is a diversion scheme—modelled on the mental health diversion scheme so successfully introduced after the report by the noble Lord, Lord Bradley—requiring those found to be in possession of drugs to attend for voluntary treatment. The interesting thing was that the constables on duty in the Thames Valley streets reported that they found it extremely simple and clear to use.

As many other noble Lords have pointed out, knife carrying is a symptom of wider social issues. Many young people carry them because they fear for their lives. However, in confirmation of my warning that too many of the intervention and preventive measures outlined in the serious violence strategy are not sufficiently resourced, the Institute of Mental Health in Nottingham —I declare an interest as a member of its external advisory board—has found that only 18% of the community commissioning groups recognise that they have any responsibility for funding probation, which includes mental health and drug treatment. This emphasises the need for this significant programme of work—words used by the Home Secretary to describe the strategy—to involve a wide range of government departments, including liaison between the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Health on this issue.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Lord Ramsbotham and Baroness Meacher

Monday 25th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 3 I shall speak also to Amendments 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13 and 14, which are all to Clause 4 of the Bill. Indeed, they are all amendments in effect to the Child Poverty Act 2010. They represent a repetition of amendments that I tabled in Committee about the annual reporting on health and well-being and on children aged five, as opposed to at key stage 4. For very logical reasons, the Public Bill Office has put Amendment 3 before my old amendment, which is now Amendment 5, because maternal nutrition obviously comes before children who have already been born. Therefore, I shall speak first to Amendments 5 and 6 to amplify what I said in Committee, on which I had a discussion with the Minister before Christmas following the rather inconclusive conclusion to our debate that evening, following timing problems in the House. I particularly want to talk about the link between extreme poverty and mental health, particularly of children, which was highlighted in the previous amendment.

In any situation, it is grossly inefficient to tax people who cannot pay. Local government has been quite right to draw the Government’s attention to the inability of councils in England and Wales to collect the £1 billion in three years that they were instructed to start taxing in April 2013. Of course, as has been said many times during the passage of the Bill, there is a cumulative impact on the health and well-being of residents when the benefits provided by central government for survival are being reduced in value as the rents that they have to pay rise. Therefore, in fact, we are talking about the cumulative effects of a great number of issues that are not in themselves all the responsibility of the Department of Health, or, indeed, the Department for Communities and Local Government, which have to deal with the outcomes.

The economic and social costs of mental health provision, which is the subject of this amendment, have been calculated by the Centre for Mental Health, in which I declare an interest as a vice president, as being £105 billion in 2009-10, which is reckoned to be an underestimate. That is a huge amount of money and a great deal of that is caused by the conditions that we have been discussing in this Bill. It is of interest that Dr Angela Donkin, who is a deputy director at the Institute of Health Equity, has said that the national audit in 2010 found that 82% of homeless people had at least one physical health problem, and 72% had at least one mental health problem. So there is a huge cost to all this poverty.

Some 10.4% of those in fuel poverty, living therefore in extremely cold houses, showed higher levels of respiratory conditions, cardiovascular disease and poor mental health as the result of the conditions in which they lived. You then add food poverty, which has been mentioned—and, again, the lack of proteins, iron and the correct vitamins, minerals and fatty acids leave a higher susceptibility to illness and infection and heart and lung complications. It is said that preventing low birth weight should be an absolute must for all public health officials, but all their efforts will be hampered by inefficient incomes, which mean that people cannot buy what is required to produce that high birth weight. Finally, there are many mental disorders, particularly evident in women who, in addition to handling the family budget, suffer from maternal depression, which is bound to impact on the children and their social development.

As I mentioned before, we have a situation here where the Chancellor is apparently directing, without ever taking evidence from such as the Barrow Cadbury Trust, whose evidence was used by the Mayor of London to calculate the London living wage—and also, I fear, there is a lack of tie-up between the Treasury, the Department of Health and the Department for Work and Pensions as well as the Department for Communities and Local Government. There is too much silo working. My amendments aim collectively to ensure that the collection of evidence by one ministry or another should be made available to all the others so that they have an aggregated picture on which to make their judgments.

Amendment 3 would introduce reporting on maternal nutrition—an addition to what I tabled in Committee. Also, it has been taken forward considerably since we debated it in December, particularly in a speech by the Prime Minister on 11 January, when he announced his life chances strategy. In addition to maternal nutrition, he also endorsed what was in my previous Amendment 4: the suggestion that reporting on children should not be left until key stage 4, at the end of schooling, but should be done at the age of five, because we would then have some chance of taking remedial action based on something that we had found early, thus increasing life chances. It is interesting that in his speech on 11 January, the Prime Minister said that,

“we must think much more radically about improving family life and the early years”.

He called that a “life cycle approach”—one that takes people from their earliest years through schooling and through adolescent and adult life.

This strategy clearly points to the importance of early child development and getting children ready for school, thus endorsing the assessment currently done of every child by the age of two, which I mentioned in Committee. Without measuring a child’s progress at the age of five, the Government cannot know how successful or otherwise any remedial treatment initiated following the health visitor assessment at two has actually been in preparing children for school.

I also mentioned in Committee that the All-Party Group on Speech and Language Difficulties, which I co-chair, in a report on the links between disadvantage and speech, language and communication needs, found that children with a low IQ from advantaged families overtook children with a higher IQ from disadvantaged families by the age of five. That is a terrible factor to consider: that overtaking will happen unless remedial action is taken. Therefore, I strongly believe that tackling child poverty and improving children’s life chances—the right reverend Prelate has just spoken about this, and we have just voted on it—is a national endeavour and responsibility. My amendment is designed to present the Government with the opportunity, through the evidence produced every year, to learn about what is actually happening to our children, and then to enable all the departments involved, not just the Department for Work and Pensions, to use the information to improve life chances, and thus to invest the nation’s money in its future—our children—more wisely.

My other amendments—Amendments 7, 9, 10 and 12 to 14—are textual adjustments to reflect the content of Amendments 3 to 6. I beg to move.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I strongly support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham. The main amendments in this group are of fundamental importance if the Government are to make a success of their own DWP policy. The Government want to focus upon the life chances of children rather than upon poverty alone—but I do not believe we should lose sight of the significance of poverty, particularly when the levels of poverty will worsen so severely in the coming years. I was relieved to hear the Minister assure the House that the Government will continue monitoring poverty as before, whatever becomes of the amendment on which the House has just voted when it gets to the other place.

Of course, there is a lot more to successful parenting and the life chances of children than income alone. As we all know, sufficient income is a necessary but certainly not a sufficient condition for a successful childhood. Parents’ mental and physical health and well-being are essential to successful parenting. If a mother is malnourished, she is most unlikely to provide for her child’s mental and physical needs. If she is depressed, she may not be able to look after her child at all until her mental health improves.

As my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham reminded us, the Prime Minister himself has highlighted the early years as one of four areas in which to anchor the Government's approach to life chances. The Government’s life chances strategy can, in my view, set a course for improving school readiness for the poorest and most disadvantaged children—but only, of course, if it is introduced across the country and is adequately funded. But only by monitoring progress in improving the health and well-being of children in workless households, particularly during the early years, is there any hope that policies will be developed and adjusted over time to ensure that they help rather than hinder the life chances of those children. Any Government will need to learn from their mistakes over time—and as we all know, Governments certainly make mistakes.

Psychoactive Substances Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Ramsbotham and Baroness Meacher

Tuesday 14th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher]

My Lords, all that needs to be said has been said. I will simply express my support for these amendments, on the grounds that for a child of 14 to get a criminal record will be far more serious for them than any damage that might be done by some rather dubious psychoactive substance. That is not to say that I in any way support young people taking these things, but we know that they do. All the literature— certainly that from Portugal—suggests that avoiding a criminal record is an enormous plus for a young person; they are much more likely to remain with their studies and get a job when they leave school. It is therefore a very serious matter to include these activities, whether it is sharing a substance with a group of friends or some such activity. The Government designate such an activity as a criminal offence at their peril in terms of the longer-term consequences, as well as the probable long-term costs to the Government, of dysfunctional young people, unemployed people and people getting into a criminal lifestyle.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I, too, support these amendments but for a slightly different reason. I have a Private Member’s Bill, which I hope will come forward, to amend the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. In it is something that I found when inspecting the prisons in Barbados. I found that at the age of 18 everyone’s criminal record was examined and everything except for violent and sexual offences was expunged so that a child did not take forward a criminal record after that age. I mention this merely because I think we ought to take very seriously the matter of people—particularly young people—taking forward into later life an early criminal record.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Ramsbotham and Baroness Meacher

Wednesday 23rd November 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, this amendment has its genesis as long ago as 1996. As Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, I found that, at the end of their sentence, prisoners were released with a discharge grant of £46 or, if they had no address to go to, £92. The numbers claiming £92 went down when home detention curfew or tagging was introduced because, in order to qualify, they had to give an address. They were then required to go to their local jobcentre and sign on for whatever benefits they were entitled to, so having to live on their discharge grant until those came through, which could take up to three weeks and sometimes longer. I ask Members of the Grand Committee how they would cope if they were a single parent with dependent children having to live on £46 for three weeks, probably having lost their accommodation thanks to the rule brought in by Mr Peter Lilley in 1995 whereby council accommodation would be forfeited after 13 weeks of absence and their possessions removed. That is not to excuse those who break the law, but it offers an explanation for the appalling high reoffending rate among recently released offenders.

When I was Chief Inspector of Prisons, and on several occasions since then, including in your Lordships’ House, I have asked why benefit claims could not be processed while someone is in prison so that on release they do not receive a grant but the first of future regular payments. As very many prisoners are receiving some form of benefit before they go into prison, it should not be beyond the wit of man to suspend those payments during the period of imprisonment and resume them on release. However, every sort of reason has been put forward about why that is impossible, which I put down to lack of will power: the prisons from which they are released may not be in the same geographical area where they live and, therefore, not in the area where their nearest jobcentre is; there are no Jobcentre Plus employees in prisons who could process the claims; or the prison into which they were received and which suspended their payment may not be the same one from which they are released. I think all this is baloney and that the Government, by not grasping the nettle, are contributing to the reoffending rate.

My amendment is designed to put an end to that nonsense by regulating that individual benefit claims are processed during a person’s imprisonment so that the discharge grant becomes a thing of the past, except for those who do not qualify for benefit. There are other spin-offs to this process that can only help the conduct of imprisonment, because an individual’s national insurance number is a unique identification weapon armed with which there is no reason why one cannot pass information regarding individual claims around the system. Unique national insurance numbers, without which benefit claims cannot be made, will also help to prevent identity fraud, because pretending to be someone else will deny provision.

My amendment specifically mentions those who were in receipt of benefits at the time of their reception into custody, but I shall amend it at a later stage to include the assessment of all people inside and the initial assessment of those whose entitlement is discovered only when they are in custody. What I am proposing is in fact in line with something that has already been set in train regarding the work programme. The Deputy Prime Minister announced on 16 August that the Government intended to mandate prison leavers to the programme immediately on release from prison, with national implementation for jobseeker’s allowance claimants from March 2012, and to work with the Ministry of Justice on a pilot integration of reoffending outcomes into work programmes.

To enable that to happen, Jobcentre Plus advisers will process jobseeker’s allowance claims in prison—although for some extraordinary reason it is said that discussions with claimants will be voluntary and not mandatory. They will then make a record of all prison leavers that will be retained for 13 weeks from the date on which they leave custody. If a claim for jobseeker’s allowance is made during that time, the prison leaver will be referred to the work programme at the point of claim. To a layman, this all seems convoluted and bureaucratic. If the Department for Work and Pensions really is fully committed to supporting the rehabilitation of offenders, why can officials not sit down with those from the Ministry of Justice and work out a system that applies to every single prison leaver, not just those who are in the market for the work programme or jobseeker’s allowance?

The reason for proposed subsection (3) in my amendment is that, all too often, resettlement essentials in prison are left until the very end of a sentence, in which case it may be too late to process benefit claims. However, if processing is started immediately so that a prisoner’s status on release is well known in advance, that will be avoided. This applies to the work programme as much as to the universal benefit. Of course there will be problems with those serving short sentences but, as I have suggested, suspension and resumption rather than initiation may well be the required process.

Bearing in mind the unnecessary reoffending and misery that present procedures have caused for too long, I have corresponded with both the Ministry of Justice and the Minister over this amendment, being amazed that successive Governments should not have done something to rectify this over the years—particularly this Government, in view of what they currently have in hand at both the MoJ and the DWP. I am very grateful to the Minister for his response to my letters but, with respect, I suggest that in drafting his answer his officials may not have made the connections that I have tried to describe. I therefore ask him to reconsider his written refusal to support my amendment, dated 26 October, and meet me to discuss further action before Report. I beg to move.

[Baroness Meacher]

My Lords, I have not prepared any comments on this amendment, but it seems to me to be of enormous importance. I cannot imagine that the Minister would not wish to support it.

One very obvious proposal would be for every prison to work out the release rate of their prisoners and to determine how many hours per week of a Jobcentre Plus person they need in the prison to process all these prisoners in order that they are paid their full benefit entitlement before, I suggest, they go out of the door or within the first week.

It is a fact that a very large number of prisoners reoffend within that very early period following release, which seems almost inevitable. What else are these people supposed to do? I therefore hope that the Minister will indeed meet my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham to consider how to do it. It has surely to be done; it is a matter of how best to do it—whether to have people in the prison doing this work to overcome the problems of people moving from one area to another and even while they are in prison. I can see that that is a problem for individual jobcentres, but, one way or another, I hope that this can be resolved.