King’s Speech

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Waldegrave of North Hill (Con)]

My Lords, before I come to say a word of congratulations to the new Minister, I must say a word of congratulations and welcome to my noble friend Lord Goodman, whose moving speech showed those in the House who did not know him before what a profound and thoughtful voice of modern conservatism his represents. He will be very welcome here.

I also welcome the Minister. His appointment has raised great hopes among the huge network of voluntary workers who try to do things to improve the prison estate; I must mention that my wife is a trustee of Give a Book, founded by Victoria Gray, which does reading groups in prisons. So many people are welcoming his appointment that the hopes are very high. I have to make a declaration of interest—or of thanks; I am not sure that it is in order in the House—because my daughter is a serial social entrepreneur. Her latest venture —having co-founded Now Teach, she has now co-founded Now Foster—is a charity that would not have got off the ground without the help of the Minister, his father and the Alex Timpson Trust, so I thank him for it.

The only piece of advice I give to the Minister is this: do not throw out the baby with the bathwater—if I may refer to some of my right honourable friends in that way. He inherits some very good things, and he should keep them. One excellent thing he inherits is a first-rate Chief Inspector of Prisons in Charlie Taylor. He inherits also Charlie Taylor’s report of 2016, from before he was the inspector, the Review of the Youth Justice System in England and Wales. The previous Government accepted the principles of that report, but imitated the actions of a snail somewhat in pursuing it; eight years later, only one of the new secure schools in Kent has actually been opened. There has been a rather pointless argument as to whether academy chains or local authorities should run them—who cares, if they do the job?

That point helps to address one of the critical failings of our present system. The previous Government brought down radically the number of children in the justice system, which was very good. However, according to the good work of the staff of, for example, the Children’s Commissioner and the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, there are probably around 1,500 children locked up—no one quite knows where all of them are, or even their exact numbers—often far from home, and without any education or wraparound care. As Charlie Taylor said in his report all those years ago, we are doing nothing, or worse than nothing, for them if they are locked up without education around them. Many are locked up—necessarily so, I fear, in many cases—by the use of the High Court’s inherent powers, with no proper placement available for them at that time. That causes what Sir James Munby, the former President of the Family Division, called in June this year a “shocking moral failure” in our treatment of those children.

This is not a very large problem in numbers—it is a failure of interagency working and of the complexity of bringing people together to do it—so solving it really is doable. Charlie Taylor laid out a good policy, the previous Government accepted it, and it should now be done. I urge the Minister, among all the many other pressing priorities that he will have, to look at this aspect of the failure of our current system, because it is rectifiable. He and his colleagues could put it right—not easily, otherwise it would have been done—with the resource available to them. If they can do that, they will have done something very important, alongside all the other things that they have to do. Those 1,400 or 1,500 of the most vulnerable children in our system need the most care of all.