Legal Aid
Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts(14 years, 7 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord McNally
My Lords, I think the noble Lord gives the clue to his question. As he said very honestly in his response to the original Statement a couple of weeks ago, when in government, the Opposition were planning cuts in legal aid. Whenever one makes cuts, one has to draw the line somewhere, and the Opposition are rightly leaping to the defence of people on the wrong side of that line. We have made a decision in terms of making savings in the legal aid budget and we have done so in a way that we believe targets help to the most vulnerable.
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, over the past year, more than 300 specialist citizens advice bureaux caseworkers have dealt with 40,000 welfare benefit cases, 60,000 debt cases, 9,000 housing cases and 3,000 employment cases. These specialist CAB caseworkers have been paid for using legal aid funding. Will this continue?
Lord McNally
No, my Lords, but what is clear is that the citizens advice bureaux provide advice. The problem that we faced—and the previous Administration faced it too—is that legal aid is being used to cover a wider range of advice and help which can be better funded and supported in other ways. My honourable friend Jonathan Djanogly is having meetings with representatives of Citizens Advice in the next week. We will be looking at ways of helping citizens advice bureaux and other non-legal providers of advice.
Coroners and Justice Act 2009
Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts(14 years, 7 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord McNally
My Lords, the noble Lord is right. We are not taking forward Section 51 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. On military inquests, exceptional funding is almost invariably provided on the basis of a recommendation by the Legal Services Commission. I do not think that there is any question of such funding not being available.
Lord Thomas of Gresford
Is it the intention of the Minister or of the Government not to allow legal aid for the families of those who die in custody? If that is the case, will the Minister give an undertaking that neither the Prison Service nor the police will be represented by counsel and solicitors in such inquests?
Lord McNally
As far as I understand it, for deaths in custody, legal aid is automatic.
Legal Aid and Civil Costs Reform
Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts(14 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, I cannot welcome the Statement, but I welcome the fact that the Minister has said that not principle but finance has caused the reductions that we have seen. When I read the Statement, I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, could easily have issued a similar Statement in the previous Government. No doubt that is why his criticisms were so muted.
This is a considerable challenge to the legal world. Here I declare an interest as a practising criminal Silk, paid very often by legal aid. The suggested reforms set out in the Green Papers require very considerable attention from both the criminal Bar and the family Bar. It is the latter that will really suffer under the provisions that are being put forward.
I ask the Minister about the suggestion that there will be a new exceptional funding scheme for excluded cases. I had a number of discussions with the noble Lord, Lord Bach, when he was in the previous Government, on that very issue. Its importance is that it is wrong for an individual to be in a court, tribunal or inquest and to find himself facing a state-funded organisation such as the Army or the Air Force, or a well funded public company, when an allegation of negligence has arisen. The previous provisions for an exceptional funding scheme were largely concerned with inquests. The noble Lord, Lord Bach, will recall that it was not easy through that mechanism to obtain proper funding for families in distress who faced paid advocates at a very high level who were trying to make sure that their clients were not accused of any negligence. What is the new exceptional funding scheme? Will the mechanisms be improved? Will they be more apparent so that people understand how to obtain exceptional funding in the future? That is a very important issue and I hope that the Minister will be able to respond.
Lord McNally
I thank my noble friend. His question gives me the opportunity to mention a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Bach, to which I did not respond. If not exactly ring-fenced, criminal legal aid is more protected because we take the view that when people are on trial for a criminal offence, it is important that they have access to justice and legal aid. However, that does not mean making a choice between criminal and civil cases, other than that, in terms of access to justice, a criminal charge is more serious.
The exceptional funding scheme will go wider than assistance for inquests, and it will indeed be available for those who may find themselves out of scope in these decisions but who have an exceptional case to make. I note what my noble friend says. We are well aware that we are making tough decisions that are needed to ensure access to public funding in cases that really require it and in protecting the most vulnerable in our society, as well as encouraging the efficient performance of our justice system. As we have made absolutely clear, those decisions are motivated partly by economic circumstances but also by a view that the legal aid system, as the noble Lord, Lord Bach, acknowledges, needs to be recalibrated and rebalanced, and that is what we have tried to do.
Prisons: Population
Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts(14 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, the recommendation of the Corston report in 2007 was that female prisons should be replaced by,
“suitable, geographically dispersed, small, multi-functional custodial centres”.
That recommendation was rejected by the previous Government in August 2008. Will the Green Paper put that forward again for consideration?
Lord McNally
My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, and the contribution she made to the discussion on women in prison. Four thousand women in custody is far, far too many, and we are developing a strategy which will ensure that the women’s estate has custodial and community settings, is fit for purpose and meets the needs of women offenders. However, I have to be frank with my noble friend that at this point in time we face the same problem as the previous Administration in providing the kind of small multifunctional custodial centres which the noble Baroness recommended.
Criminal Justice System
Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts(15 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Thomas of Gresford
To call attention to the reform of the criminal justice system, in particular to the effectiveness of alternatives to custody; and to move for Papers.
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, I declare an interest as a practising member of the criminal Bar. I have had three interesting experiences this year. First, a man charged with murder was held on remand. Until his arrest, he was a complete alcoholic who consumed at least a bottle of vodka a day and was permanently drunk. You would not have wished to meet him in the street. He did not enjoy that way of life but he could not get out of it: indeed, he was open to attack on the evidence in his drunken state. Prison had transformed him. Now, he was sober and he made sure he avoided the drugs scene in prison. Since he was intelligent and with a sense of humour, he was given the responsibility of teaching fellow prisoners to read and write, and he was enjoying it. He had a new purpose in life. It was sad to contemplate that on his release he would have no support, no job, no wife and no money, and that the only way open to him would be the bottle and probably a dismal end on the pavement.
Another, who had held managerial responsibility in a large firm, found prison interesting. He had met people inside with such schemes and plans for making easy money that he wondered why he had spent his life working so hard for promotion within his company. When he got out, he felt he would not need to work again. The prison had asked him to help fellow prisoners complete their examination papers so that they could present good results for their educational schemes: the prison feared that it might lose funding from the Government if the results were bad. He felt, “Everybody’s doing it. Why not me?”.
The third, a first-time prisoner, told me: “That fellow Clarke was right. Prison does not work”. In his view, what happened inside was that each prisoner learnt to go up a grade in criminality: he would graduate out of prison ready for action. It was not a particularly uncomfortable regime. One elderly and homeless man who had hit a policeman over the head with his stick was held on remand. He had nowhere to go and no intention of leaving prison, if he could help it. There was no work to do inside, the food was good and delivered on time, and there was a 70 inch telly to watch the World Cup. He said that when England scored, there was very little reaction but that when Chile scored the place erupted with joy.
This is what we are paying for. According to Ministry of Justice figures, 2007-08 saw £22.7 billion spent on the criminal justice system in one context or another. Spending in 2009 on prisoners in real terms increased by 42 per cent over 1997; that is, £48,000 per year for each prison place.
Last year saw 61 per cent of prisons officially overcrowded with 25 per cent of the prison population being detained in overcrowded conditions. As the Criminal Justice Alliance has put it in its helpful briefing:
“Prison overcrowding damages every positive aspect of the work of the Prison Service. It results in prisoners being held in inhumane and degrading conditions, compromises work to rehabilitate prisoners and contributes to high reoffending rates, with 49% of ex prisoners and 61% of those serving sentences of 12 months or less reoffending within a year of their release”.
That can be compared with the reoffending rates in 1993, when Kenneth Clarke was last Home Secretary. Then there were fewer than 45,000 prisoners and reoffending rates were 53 per cent, but over two years, not one.
“Tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”.
A major cause of crime has been the policy of the previous Government to warehouse offenders in prisons with insufficient resources of time and money to tackle their offending behaviour; to create universities of crime, such as the one I have talked about, where they can improve their criminal skills; and to release them into the community with inadequate support—inadequate because the resources have been spent on building more prisons. It has been entirely cyclical.
The supporters of this policy argued that at least when criminals were locked up, they could not offend. The logic of that argument was that offenders should be locked up more often and for longer and longer periods. That is exactly what happened. I once complained to a very senior member of the judiciary at a function in the River Room here that when we knocked about at the Shrewsbury Assizes and Quarter Sessions in our youth, we would never have believed that the courts would impose the sort of sentences that are now routinely handed out and upheld in the Court of Appeal. His response was that although judges were not elected, they naturally responded to the pressures of the media and the direction of political travel. But reoffending is a serious matter because reoffenders are likely to commit more serious crimes.
In December 2007, I was pleased to be appointed to Lord Justice Gage’s Ministry of Justice working group on sentencing which contained a cross-section of the judiciary, magistrates, the criminal Bar, experienced solicitors and criminal justice professionals. I felt I was among friends who understood the system. I discovered that we were set up following the recommendations of the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, in his July 2007 report, to consider the feasibility of a structured sentencing framework, in effect a grid system, which would automatically deliver the appropriate sentence to the sentencer. It was based on the system adopted in the state of Minnesota. I learnt that the introduction of the system in that state had driven up imprisonment at a rate of 6.6 per cent annually—the numbers were on their way to doubling—but there was no prison overcrowding because more prisons had been built. The statisticians from the Home Office wanted, through our working group, to have a tool which would predict future rates of imprisonment more accurately so that more prisons could be planned in time to house the units who would be sent to them from the courts.
I do not recognise units. Like all practitioners, I see people with all their faults—grave or less grave, usually the product of poverty and deprivation, poor education and collapsed home lives. I became something of a nuisance on the committee, intervening too often and with too much emotion. Although I was not actually asked to do so, I resigned. Without any input from me, however, Lord Justice Gage and his working group roundly rejected the formulaic, Orwellian approach of the statisticians and recommended the setting up of the Sentencing Council.
We now have a Lord Chancellor who also knows what he is talking about. I have no doubt that he knocked about the Assizes and Quarter Sessions of the Midland Circuit in his youth. We wholly welcome his call for “intelligent sentencing”. We fully support his drive to switch resources into,
“rigorously enforced community sentences that punish offenders”,
at the same time as helping them to get off drugs and alcohol and into work. Perhaps we may be permitted to emphasise that he has adopted everything that his coalition partners, we on these Benches, have been saying for years. I fell out of bed when I heard the Lord Chancellor say on the “Today” programme that the key question was “What works?”.
The political rhetoric of the past 20 years has distorted the pursuit of a rational strategy for the effective use of resources. The rabid article in today’s edition of the Daily Telegraph, in addition to being ludicrous and more defamatory than even my noble friend Lord Lester would wish in his defence of freedom of expression, illustrates precisely how criminals are demonised. In the eyes of that contributor they are beings from another planet who must be locked up or society as we know it will fail.
We must no longer talk about which political party is harder or softer on crime and criminals; we must ask what is the most effective use of scarce resources to reduce offending and reoffending. The Justice Committee of the House of Commons, in its report Cutting Crime: The Case for Justice Reinvestment, called for a policy to drive down prison numbers to a safe and manageable level—perhaps two-thirds of the current prison population based on the 1991 recommendations of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and on comparable figures from other western European countries.
Of course serious and violent offenders must be locked up to protect the public—no one would dispute that—but the majority of those locked up today do not fall into that category. Here is the challenge for the Sentencing Council: how can sentencers be given a better understanding of what works to reduce reoffending and offending, and thereby ensure justice and public protection? That should be its aim. The policy announced by the coalition Government means a wider use of restorative justice for young people and as a response to low-level offending. It benefits the victim as well as the offender. It means the development of drug and alcohol treatment programmes within community sentences. It means identifying and treating mental illness in offenders, as recommended in the review of the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, with its policy of diverting people with mental health problems from the criminal justice system to more appropriate treatment in the community.
In August 2009, a prisoner serving a short sentence for possession of a knuckle duster in his car said to his social worker:
“I would like to have a psychiatrist, a psychologist, have a word with me regularly, on a regular basis, to see if there’s somewhere underlying like where I have a problem that I haven’t seen. If I’m at fault myself in any way, I’m open to all kinds of suggestions”.
That was Raoul Moat. He had no such treatment.
The policy that we are putting forward means investment in prisoner education, to improve literacy, to develop skills and internet technologies which will lead to jobs on release. It means the effective resettlement, employment and housing of prisoners, with advice in prison and “through-the-gate support” on their release. It means the abolition of the iniquitous indeterminate sentence for public protection as recommended by the Chief Inspectors of Prisons and of Probation—a sentence which is fundamentally flawed in principle, unworkable in practice and, above all, unjust.
Others in this debate will speak of the specific problems of women offenders, children and young adults and I shall not venture into those areas. However, there is light: there is before us the hope of a progressive and radical reform of penal policy, comparable to the enlightened era of Roy Jenkins, our former leader in this House. I am sure that his watching shade will nod approval to our aims.
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response and all noble Lords who have contributed to this wide-ranging and fascinating debate. We have covered many topics, particularly in relation to the problems of women and young people in prison. We have listened to the plan of action of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, which I commend to the Government for their consideration. We have heard from people with great experience of all sides of the criminal justice system. I also commend my noble friends Lady Hussein-Ece and Lord German for their maiden speeches. I have known the noble Lord, Lord German, for more than 30 years. He is a great addition to the Welsh voices in this Chamber and we look forward to hearing more from him. I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Hussein-Ece, with her great experience in local government, will have a great deal to say.
The Minister called for rationality in criminal justice policy. That is what we need. That is what we have been after. We want to get away from the red mist that arises among newspaper editors and sometimes the public. It creates a climate of fear. We live in a country that does not need fear of crime. We should be able to deal with the problems that arise; we should cope and not for ever be worried about the risk that somebody will do terrible things to us. It has been a great debate. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion in my name.
Supreme Court: Retirement Age
Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts(15 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord McNally
I treat that intervention with all the respect it deserves—and in that I do not make a joke
Lord Thomas of Gresford
The Minister will know that there is certain angst that Supreme Court Justices no longer get a peerage. Will they get an automatic peerage on retirement at 70, or will it depend on performance in the eye of the Government of the day?
Lord McNally
That is another matter which is under review and discussion. Arguments are being made both ways about how, when or if a Supreme Court Justice should get a peerage.
Law Reform: Murder
Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts(15 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Thomas of Gresford
The Minister will recall that the piecemeal reform of the law of provocation carried out by the previous Government was described by the Law Commission as “bizarre”. Will he assure us that if there is a reform of the law of murder, it will be done as a whole?
Defamation Bill [HL]
Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts(15 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, on her maiden speech and, as a Welshman, welcome her to this House. She reminded me of an occasion some years ago when I spoke at Peking University in Beijing about this House of Lords. I had some 200 students looking at me rather blankly, even when I said that this House was full only when we were discussing sex and fox hunting. That should give your Lordships an idea of how long ago that was. I wondered if there would be any questions. At the end, I was asked by a young lady, “To what extent do the provisions for pensions brought in by the Labour Government reflect the values of the Fabian Society?”. To be asked that question in Peking University in Beijing rather floored me, and I asked her to tell me the answer. I am quite sure that she knew what it was.
I welcome the Bill and the initiative of my noble friend Lord Lester in bringing it forward. The common law treated freedom of expression as a residual liberty, that is to say, a liberty which existed in the gaps between the criminal law of obscenity, libel or contempt of court. If historically there ever existed a recognised freedom, it was a freedom to express opinions or disclose information when the actual expression of those opinions was not forbidden by law. In 1885, Dicey, in his Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution stated that,
“at no time has there in England been any proclamation of the right to liberty of thought or to freedom of speech”.
Legislation frequently fails to bring about the consequences it was intended to achieve. We thought that the Human Rights Act would have acted as a magic potion to resolve all the problems involving or relating to freedom of expression, yet here we are today. However, the Human Rights Act focused minds on the whole concept of freedom of expression, and in so doing altered perceptions. More people today are alive to their right to freedom of expression than at any time before. That is a spontaneous reaction which is to be applauded, but as soon as people became aware of another right, the right to privacy, the tension between that right and the right of freedom of expression inevitably followed. The clash of the tectonic plates, a phrase that my noble friend Lord Goodhart used, then emerged
The Human Rights Act places demands on our judges which they may not have entirely succeeded in meeting. The jurisprudence which has emerged reflects those tensions. There has been some inconsistency of approach and a certain muddle. It is that muddle which brought about the super-injunctions, that concept which figured in the Trafigura case, the injunction used to prevent the publication of a report on alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. There was an attempt to invoke that ban on the subsequent reporting of parliamentary questions asked by Paul Farrelly MP relating to that report. Although that application was eventually withdrawn, the matter has not really been settled once and for all.
Perhaps once such a situation developed, the terms of the injunction should have been varied, but there ought never to have been any room for doubt whether parliamentary proceedings could be subjected to a super-injunction of that type. The Parliamentary Papers Act 1840, which was meant to provide such a degree of protection, was not strong enough to resolve the matter beyond dispute. A major advantage of my noble friend’s Bill is that it abolishes the 1840 Act, but Clause 7 places parliamentary proceedings on a distinct, protected statutory footing by affording them absolute privilege. It may not prevent an application for a super-injunction in future, but it will curb encroachments into areas that ought never to have been curtailed in that way. It is a very good example of what the Bill does to achieve simplicity.
As my noble friend Lord Lester said, the internet throws up new difficulties. Pressures on freedom of expression have grown with the internet and the dominance of the clickerati. As one commentator put it, internet users do far more than just download information. A single download may unwittingly create a legal quagmire that crosses continents and encourages challenges and hard-fought legal battles which threaten long-cherished principles. Freedom of expression touches everyone: lawyers, politicians, journalists, newspaper editors, internet providers and servers, celebrities, scientists, large corporations, small charities, NGOs, or even ordinary individuals. The example cited by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, from Mumsnet, shows what a burden it is for an organisation such as that to have continually to edit its internet site. The whole area of the law is as complex as the issues or interests which it is required to address.
I commend my noble friend on having cut through the maze and on introducing a degree of clarity into the arena. He has done so at a price, knowing full well that he will not be able to satisfy everyone, as our debate today demonstrates. Nor can he address every issue in the Bill; he has had to leave out certain considerations and, in doing so, he has opened himself to criticism. However, he has put together a Bill, which, to use his words, could pass, could be effective and be brought into law. It is a reflection of judicial interpretive trends over the past decade and of his professional experience and knowledge of this area of the law. He has, modestly, invited help in fashioning this vital piece of legislation, and it will be up to the Members of this House to consider how wide-ranging the Bill should be in the absence of a complete overhaul of the law, but we would not be here if it were not for my noble friend zeroing in on the principles which, to cite him, seek to strike a fair balance between reputation and public information on matters of public interest.
It is a difficult balance to strike. Dr Dario Milo, an outstanding South African lawyer and academic, in his UCL thesis, The Constitutionalisation of the Law of Defamation, argued that constitutional rights must shape the contours of modern libel law: freedom of speech, rights to reputation and dignity and the protection afforded to the public interest. He pointed to the clash of constitutional rights in the decision of the Canadian Supreme Court in the Toronto Star case, where the court ruled that a new defamation defence was required as a result of the constitutional protection of freedom of expression, the defence, as the court put it, of reasonable, responsible communication on matters of public interest. That is the concept which my noble friend Lord Lester has adopted in Clause 1. What was fair comment is now termed by my noble friend in Clause 2 as “honest opinion”. That is an easily understood expression founded in the Dr Singh case, to which the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, referred. He was accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association. The Court of Appeal stated in that case that judges would not rule on matters of scientific controversy, as it was not up to them to disentangle fact from opinion where scientific controversies were concerned. The court felt that the term “honest opinion” better reflected the realities of the issues.
In stating the key issues to be addressed by the Bill, my noble friend Lord Lester has rightly put the public interest at the forefront, and has attempted to resolve the issues relating to privilege, be it absolute or qualified, and to place responsible journalism on a clear footing, following the Reynolds guidelines and the Jameel case. I noted the criticisms of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hoffmann, about the attempt to include in the Bill the principles stated in the Reynolds guidelines, but a number of judgments were given in that case, and my noble friend has attempted to put together a list of guidelines drawn from a number of judgments. Like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hoffmann, I have some reservations about Clause 13. I acted for the leader of the Workers’ Party of Singapore, Mr Ben Jeyaretnam—Jeya—when we brought an action for libel in this country against the Straits Times, which had disparaged our success in Jeya’s earlier appeal to the Privy Council. That was a successful appeal which caused Singapore to abolish appeals to the Privy Council. The action was struck out on the basis that the Straits Times had little circulation in this country—about 1,000 copies were distributed—and that Jeya had no reputation here to speak of. That was the decision, which could not be appealed because of cost.
When Jeya died last year, the Guardian and the Times carried obituaries, which indicates the reputation he had in this country. I also represented him in Singapore in one of the libel cases which were brought against him by the then Prime Minister and others. We lost, surprisingly, but at least I did not suffer the fate of Mr George Carman QC who appeared in the next case brought against Jeya in a Singapore court: the damages were doubled because Jeya’s counsel pursued the slightly dangerous line that that Government used actions for libel as a means of ruining political opponents—it was absolutely true at the time.
Introducing this political element reminds me of the election we have just had. The success of the leader of our party in the prime ministerial debates led to the most incredible flood of abuse from some of the right-wing popular press. I had a letter published in the Guardian saying that it is an illegal practice under the Representation of the People Act to defame a candidate, even though my noble friend had successfully removed criminal libel from the statute book only months before, which might have been a better way to proceed.
Libel actions are all about cash. You have to be wealthy, destitute or mad to bring proceedings in this country. We acted for Jeya pro bono, which is the only way in which people can bring an action unless they fall into one of the categories to which I referred. There are, of course, many problems to be resolved: costs, damages, conditional fee agreements and success fees, which were referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. I am particularly concerned that the ordinary individual is inhibited and denied access to justice. His reputation may be badly damaged in his own area by a local newspaper or other media outlet, but there is no remedy for a person in such circumstances. I hope that these are matters that we will pursue at another time, but I urge noble Lords to support the Bill and to give it a fair reading.
Immigration: Refugee and Migrant Justice
Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts(15 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord McNally
My Lords, the UK Border Agency has been asked to treat RMJ clients with common sense and to allow time during this period of adjustment. Therefore, according to my briefing, the right reverend Prelate’s first assertion is not true.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, there is room for both. Let us listen to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford.
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, RMJ says that it is owed £1.8 million by the Legal Services Commission. Is that the correct figure? The Legal Services Commission was supposed to be abolished by the noble Lord, Lord Bach. Will the coalition Government revive it, or would it not be better for it to disappear as soon as possible?
Drugs and Crime
Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts(15 years, 1 month ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, on introducing us to this important discussion paper. I declare an interest as having, over many years, represented and prosecuted in many drugs cases, involving the use and possession of drugs, drug-related crime and the importation of drugs.
The paper accords very closely with Liberal Democrat policy, as set out in the report of the commission under the chairmanship of my noble friend Lady Walmsley some years ago. It is a serious problem that costs the economy a huge amount, as the noble Baroness herself pointed out—some £19 billion a year. However, the punitive approach has not proved successful for drug addicts and alternatives must be found to the sanctions of the criminal justice system.
Drug dependency is brought about by a multitude of factors, as set out most clearly in the report. They include a history of social and personal disadvantage; temperament and personality traits; prenatal problems; poor education; adverse childhood experiences that lead to non-existent self-esteem; a lack of bonding within the family that creates social isolation; and, sometimes, psychiatric disorders. Drugs are seen by many such individuals as a panacea to relieve adverse conditions—a form of escapism. We are dealing, in most cases, with vulnerable and damaged individuals.
Heroin does not cause people to become violent, as alcohol does, but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, said, it does make people unemployable. It has that great impact on our society, accordingly, of carrying these people along. I remember one defendant being asked, when cross-examined severely by the prosecution for having administered drugs to his girlfriend, who had died, “How do you know she liked it?”. He said, in a chilling way, “Everybody likes heroin”. It was freely available to him, and more available, he told me, in prison than it was outside. That is one of the factors that we must grapple with.
I cannot follow the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, in referring to people who take recreational drugs in a moderate way. Those who think that taking cocaine socially is clever should remember that their affluence is promoting the importation of drugs by very serious and dangerous criminals, who do not hesitate to use violence to protect their trade in the cities of this country. As for cannabis, I am afraid I missed the 1960s; I was bringing up a family at the time. However, I recall prosecuting three men for growing cannabis. In fact, what they were growing was agricultural hemp and they had to smoke 10 spliffs to get the effect of one. Nevertheless, they got three years’ imprisonment for it and what that did for them I cannot imagine. Imprisonment exacerbates all the problems. It exposes the individual to older criminals, gangs, illicit drugs within the prison estate—which I referred to—and a worsening addiction which, on release, can be the root cause of further reoffending.
It has been demonstrated that more than half of the prison population in the United Kingdom uses drugs, whether it is heroin or crack. If they are there for just three months, or serving a short sentence of that sort, they cannot be dealt with in any constructive way. No treatment can be effective within that period. As the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, pointed out, prison presents additional health problems from HIV to TB to other factors due to overcrowding and prisoners being locked up for substantial periods. These worsen the psychological factors that led to the original drug dependency.
The noble Lord, Lord Rea, referred to drug courts, as mentioned in the report. We on these Benches have watched the pilot scheme under which drug courts have been rolled out in England, particularly the west London drug court. Its statistics are impressive. According to Judge Julian Philips, a stipendiary magistrate since 1989 who was appointed judge in the west London drug court in 2005, there has been a drop of 20 per cent in shoplifting in the area. He said that his methods have been extremely effective. Perhaps others can speak about that. A confirmed addict needs £100 for one day’s worth of drugs. That means that he has to fence £400 or £500 worth of stolen goods to feed his addiction. An average addict will commit 127 crimes a year. Following the approach adopted in west London, some 60 per cent of addicts do not reoffend during the course of a court order, and 20 per cent remain drug free. That compares with an average over the country of 3 per cent, as reported by national treatment agencies.
A complete review is needed of how the resources are used. We should not waste money sending drug addicts to prison but use those resources in a positive and constructive way along the lines that this most helpful paper sets out.