Assisted Dying Bill [HL]
Lord Warner Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Carlile of Berriew (LD)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle, not least because he and I have a greater insight than most into each other’s parliamentary lives, as we receive a great deal of each other’s post on a mostly daily basis.
I hesitate to disagree with words used so firmly by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. I do so particularly because, not so long ago, he appeared as my counsel in a public law case with his customary brilliance. However, the emphasis of his assertion, that this Bill is perfectly clear, is in my view just plain wrong, mainly for the reason given so clearly by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth. As he was speaking, I was thinking back to the death two years ago of my then 98-and-a-half year-old mother. The family took enormous steps to assist her death. We put her in the place that we thought was most comfortable for her death—she did not agree, but that was characteristic of our robust and loving relationship. We took steps to ensure that all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren went to see her. We brought her her favourite alcoholic beverage, something rather eccentric called Wiszniowka. We did everything we possibly could to make her as comfortable as was possible. But we did not assist her to commit suicide. She died a natural death as a result of, unfortunately, rampant disease which she experienced in old age.
We debated earlier this week part of another Bill, the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill, in which something was described as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board, which was anything but a privacy and civil liberties board—it was a perfectly legitimate suggestion, but it was not what it said on the tin. This Bill empowers people who would otherwise be committing a serious crime to be excused from the criminal consequences of their action. It enables people—apparently doctors under its provisions as they stand—to kill other people deliberately, after consideration, with purpose. Anyone who believes that that is not the case is not taking a realistic look at the Bill. It is a matter for Parliament whether that is a proper thing for Parliament to do—I am not commenting on that at the moment, although I am opposed to it—but it is misleading to the public not to say what the Bill does, both in a provision such as that proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and in the Title, which we will debate at a later stage, if we get to it.
When we include in the Bill words like those proposed by the noble Baroness and others, we are providing clarity which tells us two things about impact: first, it tells us about the impact on the person who is giving the assistance—as I said, they are committing a serious act which would otherwise be a breach of the law which might well land them in prison; secondly, we are describing the impact on the person who is wishing to die. We are saying that this is not a normal death, even if it is a death which is assisted by what is sometimes called, very clearly, the doctrine of double effect. We are making it clear that that person is dying because they wish to do so.
I am surprised to hear so much opposition from supporters of the Bill to giving within it a clear description of what they intend. If they do not accept this kind of amendment, then others, including some journalists who have been commenting favourably on the narrow scope of the Bill, may well come to the conclusion that it is indeed just a stalking horse for euthanasia.
Lord Ashton of Hyde
We cannot have two people speaking at once. I am sure that the noble Lords can resolve it between them.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I have been sitting through these debates on assisted dying for some 12 years, sometimes on the Front Bench and sometimes on the Back Benches. I agree that I am getting older and my memory may be getting a little faulty, but I do not recollect in many of those debates people standing up with such skills of advocacy as we have heard this morning about this definitional issue in the wording of the Bill.
We have been talking about legislation which has been labelled assisted dying Bills over the 12 years from the first efforts in this area of my noble friend Lord Joffe. We have had commissions on it which have used the term “assisted dying”. The public have got used to the term “assisted dying”. If we really want to confuse the public at this point, changing the terminology of the Bill is a really good thing to do. We have sat through long public debates over this particular—
Baroness O’Loan (CB)
I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord, but I just wanted to inquire: why does he think that it would cause confusion to introduce the term assisted suicide rather than assisted dying, when the actual fact is that it is assisted suicide? I just do not understand the logic. People understand suicide and dying as two separate acts.
Lord Warner
If we are really concerned with what the public understand, it is a bit presumptuous to assume that they have been following these debates for 10 to 12 years but have not understood what we have been talking about in terms of assisted dying. We get a lot of criticism in Westminster—
Lord Warner
I realise that I have annoyed the noble Lord, but if I could just finish my sentence, it would be helpful, and it would probably speed up the business of the House if I could at least deploy my arguments before people interrupted them.
We have lived with this terminology of assisted dying for some time. I believe that it is patronising to the public to assume that they do not understand it. We are often criticised in Westminster and Whitehall for living in a special bubble. This seems to me a classic example of doing that. I must say that I am a little sceptical about this sudden enthusiasm for precision when we have not had much of that before.
Lord Carlile of Berriew
Uncharacteristically, the noble Lord makes an entirely false point. The first response is that my amendment does not specify any doctor. The second response is that for those who are registered with general practitioners—I guess, the vast majority of the population—there are almost no single-handed practitioners left in this country. Therefore, within the group of general practitioners with whom the patient is registered—the right word is “registered”—for this purpose, there will be a choice of doctors. In any event, the noble Lord knows well that it is intended that there should be a conscience clause placed in this legislation, and there will be doctors who will simply, out of conscience, not certify that patients have the diagnosis required for the gateway.
Lord Carlile of Berriew
No, I am not going to give way to the noble Lord; he can speak in a moment. I do not mean to be discourteous, but I know that he is well able to make his own points, and he will be able to make them in as contentious a way as he wishes, and as is sometimes habitual.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I want to pursue the line of argument that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has started. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, that this is an important group of amendments. The noble Baroness has raised the issues of practicality and, possibly, unexpected consequences of some of the amendments.
I want to reinforce the point about the impracticability of Amendment 13. It fails to reflect the fact that in many cases of terminal illness a person will move from the place where the illness was diagnosed and the care of their consultant and GP to somewhere else. We have a National Health Service. You still get treatment if you move from A to B; medical records pass from A to B most of the time, reasonably successfully. The care of that person will be transferred to another GP and another medical practitioner. They may well not have had care of that person for six months. It may simply be impossible to operate Amendment 13 in the case of people who are terminally ill. We need to reflect on the practicality of that argument. I do not believe that the noble Lord expected that consequence from his amendments. That was the point that I was going to ask him about if I had been able to intervene a little earlier. I am happy to give way to the noble Lord.
Lord Tebbit
I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way, but does he understand the concern that exists among many of us who saw that there were doctors who would certify that a woman’s health was at risk should her pregnancy continue who had never seen the woman concerned, who were pre-signing packs of such certificates to be used by their friends in the abortion business? How do we deal with that matter?
Lord Warner
The amendments would not deal with that matter. They would in many cases make it impossible for a terminally ill person who wanted to explore the issue of assisted dying to meet the requirements to have those conversations—let alone anything else—with a medical practitioner who was responsible for their care when they had moved house. I am not trying to make a wider point. I am on the narrow issue of the words in the amendments. I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, all the way on the impracticability of Amendment 13.
I move on to Amendments 20, 21 and 22 in this group. No one who supports the Bill is arguing that we expect doctors to have the gift of foresight about the length of time that someone will live for. I point out that the Bill uses a period which is commonly used in many other areas of public policy, not least in the area of welfare. If noble Lords read Section 82 of the Welfare Reform Act 2012, they will find a definition of terminal illness that is being applied by doctors day in and day out up and down the country—for those who are nerdy in these matters, it is on form DS 1500—to secure improvements in benefits because the person is terminally ill. Parliament, in the past couple of years, has passed legislation which sets out the terms of terminal illness, and doctors up and down the country are applying that legislation for the benefit of people with disabilities. The idea that the Bill is doing something different and novel in this area is, frankly, not true.
I also ask noble Lords to read the GMC guidance for doctors on issues such as end-of-life care and consent. In its admirable guidance, it is clear that there is a reasonable expectation that when a doctor thinks that someone may be terminally ill and may die before the end of 12 months, they may begin conversations with people. It is not unethical, it is not bad medical practice, where a doctor believes that someone may be terminally ill, not to do anything dramatic, but to begin to have a conversation with that person and their family. If you make it a shorter time for the person to have such conversations—six weeks, for example—all you are doing is putting enormous pressure on somebody who has had to come to terms with some catastrophic information about their life and circumstances. It would be inhumane, unfair and lacking in compassion to shorten the timescale within which doctors and their patients could have the conversations that they need to have.
I believe that the balance is struck right with the six-month term. In the United States, where assisted dying is legal, the bar has been set at six months and there is strong evidence to demonstrate that the model there works effectively and safely. Some very interesting work was done by a surgeon and public health researcher, Atul Gawande, who explains in his recent book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End that survival statistics form a bell-shaped curve in which there are a small number of people who survive much longer than expected—the tail of the curve. He says:
“We have failed to prepare for the outcome that’s vastly more probable … we’ve built our medical system and culture around the long tail”,
of small numbers of cases. His view is supported by a number of pieces of research. I shall quote one that shows that fewer than one in four patients outlived the prognosis when their clinicians predicted survival for six months or less. In the great majority of cases, you could argue that the doctors have been optimistic about survivability rather than the other way around. Therefore, I think that my noble friend has struck the right balance in this area.
I shall mention one other bit of GMC advice, which relates to Amendment 20. The GMC is very clear to doctors, beyond doubt or peradventure, about the issue of patient consent. In my view, the amendment would be a breach of that advice. The advice is clear that even if the doctor disagrees with the patient’s decision their right to refuse a course of treatment is absolute and doctors are expected to respect that right. Following the GMC’s advice, I suggest that putting another impediment on doctors, as that amendment would, would be unfair to doctors.
Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)
My Lords, unlike the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, I have always welcomed and embraced the Bill, or certainly one very like it. One of the great qualities of your Lordships’ House is that, especially on an occasion like this, we listen to the arguments and are prepared to mould what we are trying to achieve. When I listened to Amendment 13 from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and especially Amendment 13A from the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, I felt that they were reasonable. However, I have now heard the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Warner, very eloquently saying why they are very worried about this issue so I am still slightly up in the air about it, although I think, with regard to Amendment 13A, that it is essential that these are “licensed” medical practitioners. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, is trying as hard as he can to go with the House and to take on things like this.
My point, and I shall make it extremely briefly, is about the six months’ terminal illness. I think that this is right, and I shall tell the House why. I have had lots of letters, as have many noble Lords, and there is something that they nearly all say. I had one this morning from someone who is 80, saying, “I don’t have a terminal disease but I do want to feel that I would have the option, if I became really ill, to talk this over with my doctor and work out a way of assuaging great pain and causing distress through that pain to my family. It might just be that I would talk to my doctor about having opiates that might repress the respiratory system”. Is that assisted suicide? I do not know. I certainly think that it is an option; frankly, very few doctors that I know deny that it has happened in their lives. They have treated people, especially in country practices where, as the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, has illustrated, they have known the patient for many years, even decades, and they ease them out of this life into the next one. It seems to me that this is the luxury that most human beings want to be afforded. I think that that is what the noble and learned Lord is trying to achieve, and on that basis I very strongly support him.
Lord McColl of Dulwich
I thank the noble Baroness for that clarification. I note that in August 2011, 13,400 individuals receiving attendance allowance in England and Wales were considered terminally ill under the benefits definition. That would be a substantial group of people who might reasonably be eligible to have their death hastened by assisted suicide. We need to be very clear what we are talking about in relation to a terminal illness and, at the moment, there is a lot of room for ambiguity. Ambiguity does not lead to safeguards.
Lord Warner
Can I seek clarification from the noble Lord? What he is trying to do is challenge the point that I was trying to make. I should like to make clear to the Committee the point that I was trying to make—which I do not think was the point he was trying to rebut.
My point about Section 82 of the Welfare Reform Act is that it bases public policy on the assertion that it is reasonable to ask doctors to make a judgment on whether someone is likely to be terminally ill and die within six months. It does not say that we expect 100% perfection from those forecasts. My point was that Parliament has decided in legislation that it is reasonable to have a definition of terminal illness that we can expect the generality of the medical profession to understand and apply on a reasonably consistent basis. In my judgment—the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, may be able to correct me—it would be a breach of medical good practice and possibly an offence for doctors knowingly to sign those certifications if they did not clinically believe that the person was likely to die within six months.
Lord Warner
My noble friend referenced me in saying that doctors were overoptimistic. What I said was that one review of evidence has found that fewer than one in four patients outlived the prognosis when their clinicians predicted survival of six months or less. I said that that research rather suggests that doctors have a tendency to be overly optimistic about how long people will live, because it shows that when people thought they had six months to live, actually a large number of them failed to get through the six-month period.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, like the Government, the Opposition are not expressing a view on the Bill, and we have a free vote on this side of the House. I ask the Minister to help me with an interpretation of the meaning of Amendment 13, particularly in relation to the meaning of the provision that one of the registered medical practitioners has to have had the person registered with them for at least six months. Does he take that to mean that a patient has to be registered with a general practitioner for the provisions of the Bill to apply? I am assuming that when patients are under the treatment of other doctors, such as hospital doctors, they are not registered with them. This is important. If I am right—and I am expressing no view on the merits of the amendment—it would be helpful to the Committee to know from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, what would happen in circumstances where, for reasons which have been set out by other noble Lords, a person is not registered or has been removed, sometimes forcibly removed, from the list by the GP under the arrangements that apply. It would be helpful if he could clear up that point.
Assisted Suicide
Lord Warner Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Warner (Lab)
My Lords, however much we compliment the DPP on his guidelines, we have in effect put him in the role of an inquiring magistrate, as the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, made absolutely clear in his elegant address.
Unsurprisingly, the CPS has shown little appetite for bringing forward prosecutions of relatives and friends who assist someone to end their life. There has been only one successful prosecution for attempted assisted suicide since the new guidelines came into effect. However, the threat of prosecution still hangs over everybody, so Parliament now needs to respond to this very uncertain situation and provide an opportunity to consider the Bill of my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer—and, I hope, pass it. We now have groups of disabled people, health professionals and Christians calling for change—groups that, in the past, were portrayed as opposed to assisted dying.
In effect, we have seen that this issue is no longer a matter for the chattering classes; it has penetrated the soaps and it has engaged the red tops in consulting their readers about change in this area. Parliament needs to wake up and smell the coffee. It should stop listening to the noisy minority of opponents and start listening to the majority of our fellow citizens who want to see a change in the law in this area. The cruelty of making terminally ill people prolong their lives when they wish not to and then threatening to prosecute their relatives who help them to secure the peaceful end they seek is increasingly seen for what it is: barbaric.
The long-standing opponents of change need to see their opposition for what it is: a denial of personal choice to a small minority of people who wish to control their exit from the world. I gently suggest to them that they are on the wrong side of history on this issue and that they risk ending up like the opponents of abortion, of the abolition of hanging and of gay marriage in a kind of “Jurassic Park” civil society.
Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill
Lord Warner Excerpts(12 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Macdonald of River Glaven
I rise even more briefly to support the amendment. I do not know of a single lawyer, prosecutor, judge or prison officer who does not believe that women’s prisons are full of people who should not be there and, worse, who are being further damaged by being held there. The scandal is that we have all known this for years. Ministers know it, but nothing is done about it. The amendment is a modest proposal in the right direction, and it has my wholehearted support.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I apologise for missing the beginning of this debate, but I was caught on the hop by the speed of progress.
Prompted by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, perhaps I may, with some trepidation, remind the Minister of the Youth Justice Board—not to score any points off him but to make the point that that body was set up to produce focus over a continuing period of time and to bring a range of agencies together to focus on the need of that particular group of offenders. I think the Minister accepts that some progress was made in youth justice by that kind of approach, and I hope that he will apply that approach and the same logic to women. I thoroughly support my noble friend’s amendment.
Baroness Gale
My Lords, I join noble Lords all round the House in supporting the amendment. There has been not one word of disagreement, and I am sure the Minister has listened carefully to what noble Lords have had to say on this issue.
I believe, as does my Front Bench, that the amendment can help to focus a national debate on the needs of women in the criminal justice system more effectively over the coming years, whatever Government are in office. My noble friend Lady Corston referred to what the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick, said a few months ago. Two of the words he used to describe the state of the women’s secure estate were “aghast” and “ashamed”. I am sure that everyone who has spoken and has any knowledge of the subject would agree with those words.
In my view and that of many of my noble friends, the secure estate is too often no place for women. The majority of women in detention have not committed violent crimes. They are mothers, and each year more than 17,000 children are separated from their mothers because of imprisonment. Many of these women are victims themselves: one in four women in prison was in local authority care as a child; nearly 40 per cent left school before they were 16; over half have suffered domestic violence; and one in three has suffered sexual abuse.
I do not believe that anyone who has read the 2007 report of my noble friend Lady Corston has not been impressed by her recommendations—as my noble friend said earlier, it is now five years since the report was presented—by the examples she gave, by the intellectual force of her arguments and by the way in which these could be translated into effective solutions. We did not do enough to put those solutions into practice but we did make some progress. We continue to listen carefully to what my noble friend Lady Corston says on these matters because of her great experience in this field.
The Women’s Criminal Justice Policy Unit in the MoJ will help to bring her recommendations to life. It will provide a safe and collaborative environment within government and across departments for real joined-up thinking on these matters.
To deal with women’s needs in a holistic way—their health and social welfare needs and how local authorities, the Home Office and other bodies could work to keep them out of crime and out of jail—there is a need for all government departments to work in this collaborative way because the needs are so great and the challenges so important. The results would certainly be more beneficial, not just for the woman involved but for her family and the society that she comes from.
With this great agreement that women should not be in prison—every report that one has read over the years has said the same thing, and all Governments agree—I would hope that this amendment could be put into action. I pay tribute to my noble friends Lady Corston, Lady Gould and Lord Judd and the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who put their names to this amendment, and to all those who have taken part in this debate this afternoon. They spoke with such passion in the belief that something should be done on these matters. I know the Minister is concerned about this and I am sure that he will look at this very favourably in the cause of justice for women. I look forward to his response.
Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Lord Warner Excerpts(12 years, 12 months ago)
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Lord Warner
My Lords, I too would like to associate myself with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. I do not know whether this is career enhancing or not, but I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McNally, on his influence in his department. I do not know what he slipped into the water at the Ministry of Justice, but he might like to give a supply of it to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, so that he can do the same at Richmond House in relation to the Health and Social Care Bill.
I pay tribute to the Youth Justice Board under the leadership of Frances Done and John Drew, the chief executive. They have shown enormous resilience during this rather lengthy process in which a sword of Damocles has been hanging over them as to their future. It is a tribute to their professionalism that they have kept going and have continued to provide a sterling service. As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, during the London riots they did a good job and dealt with some very difficult situations. I think the whole House would want to pay tribute to their work.
Lord Elton
My Lords, in the briefest speech yet, I wish merely to say that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over 99 troubled Ministers.
Crime: Youth Justice
Lord Warner Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Lord Warner
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have changed their policy regarding the abolition of the Youth Justice Board in the light of the public consultation and the board’s assistance in dealing with the aftermath of recent street riots.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
No, my Lords, it remains the Government’s intention to abolish the Youth Justice Board and to carry out its main functions within the Ministry of Justice.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I suppose I ought to thank the Minister for that reply, because he has the disadvantage of his department having lost some of the responses to the summer consultation. However, is he aware that the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Magistrates’ Association have written trenchant letters to Mr Crispin Blunt, his colleague, saying that the Government have got this wrong and that the board should not be abolished? How many other organisations have written in similar terms in response to the consultation?
While he is about it, can the Minister explain to the House why it is right to abolish one commissioning board in order to improve ministerial accountability but in another department it is appropriate to install the daddy of all quangos at the same time—the National Commissioning Board, for the Minister's information—and can he assure the House, as the noble Earl will later, that that in no way affects ministerial accountability?
Lord McNally
My Lords, perhaps fortunately, I am responsible for the Ministry of Justice, and, there, we have come to the clear conclusion that we can operate the responsibilities of the Youth Justice Board better by creating a new youth justice division, which will be a dedicated part of the MoJ sitting outside NOMS, and maintaining continuity and expertise by agreeing that John Drew, the current chief executive of the YJB, will lead the division.
We have indeed received a number of responses—70 in all, I think—to the consultation, which closed on 11 October. The department is studying those responses and will report in due course.
Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Lord Warner Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Warner
Lord Warner
My Lords, I rise to move the amendment in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Ramsbotham and Lord Elton. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds intended to add his name to the amendment but just missed the deadline for the Marshalled List. I am sure that the House will want to hear his views on this matter at a later stage.
Across the Benches Members of this House are saying that the Government are wrong to seek the abolition of the Youth Justice Board. The same position appertained in Committee, with no speaker supporting the Government and five former Ministers, including three from the coalition Benches, saying that the Government were wrong about this. I will not repeat all the arguments made in Committee other than to remind the House that a series of independent reviews have said that the Youth Justice Board has done a good job, with the PAC recently saying that there was no foundation to the Government’s case for abolition.
The nub of the Government’s argument is that the YJB has done its job and youth justice can be left to local youth offending teams and Ministry of Justice civil servants and Ministers. The five former Ministers made it clear in Committee that leaving this specialist programme delivery work to generalist civil servants who move from job to job carries no credibility in terms of good government. Depending on locally financed YOTs, unaided at this time of severe financial retrenchment, is a recipe for youth justice sinking once again to the bottom of the pile, in terms of priorities, which is why the Youth Justice Board was set up in the first place.
Since the Committee stage, four of us—the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, the noble Lord, Lord Elton, and myself—had a meeting with the Minister and his colleague, Mr Crispin Blunt, who is responsible for youth justice matters. It would be a masterpiece of understatement to say that this was not a meeting of minds, despite the best endeavours of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who, throughout this sorry saga, has tried to retain a balanced and helpful stance. Particularly worrying has been the absence of any sensible ministerial response to the incisive questioning of the noble Lord, Lord Elton, on why ministerial powers under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 for holding the YJB to account are insufficient for discharging ministerial responsibilities to Parliament and the public.
In Committee, I teased the noble Lord, Lord McNally, about falling into bad company. I have to say that the more I learn of the Government’s thinking on this issue, the more it seems not unlike the stories of Richmal Crompton in Just William and the Black Hand Gang. It is at about that level of intellectual competence. In Committee, several Members set out the YJB’s success in reducing reoffending and the entry of juveniles into the criminal justice system. Since then, new figures on reoffending have been placed in the public arena. They show a further reduction in the number of juvenile reoffenders by 0.4 per cent in one year between 2008 and 2009—a number that continued in that downward trajectory throughout 2009.
Alongside these achievements, the YJB has significantly cut the number of young people going into custody. The board’s abolition puts all this at risk. Given my considerable experience in this area, I say that the abolition of the YJB is likely to mean an increase in the number of young people being placed in custody unnecessarily—at great cost to the taxpayer and likely damage to young people.
The Government have totally failed to make the case for the abolition of the YJB and we should ask them to think again by passing the amendment. That is my overwhelming preference, and it is in the best interests of vulnerable young people and of the public purse. However, if it turns out that we are unable to achieve this, the second amendment in the group, Amendment 21B, becomes important, because it prevents the YJB’s functions disappearing into the maw of the Ministry of Justice and, probably in reality, into the maw of NOMS, without any clear focus on youth justice issues. Having a separate agency with two independent non-executives is better than any ministerial warm words, particularly when one realises that the Ministry of Justice has accepted this model for prisons and the Courts Service. We should retain the Youth Justice Board and its name should be removed from Schedule 1. I beg to move.
The Lord Speaker (Baroness Hayman)
I have to inform the House that if the amendment is agreed, I cannot call Amendment 21B, by reason of pre-emption.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I am grateful to everybody who has spoken in this debate. There have been many powerful speeches this afternoon, particularly from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. My experience of the utterances of the senior judiciary, whether serving or retired, is that they do not use words like sacrilegious and sacrilege lightly, so the Government would do well to reflect on what the noble and learned Lord said.
The Minister says that he wants to build on the work of the Youth Justice Board. If I thought that he was going to do a loft conversion I would not be too bothered about this, and I certainly would not have moved this amendment. However, he has sounded consistently like a man on the phone to the JCBs, and it is that which has caused great concern, however much tribute he gave to the work of the YJB in the past.
I do not think that we have learnt much more about the case that the Government can marshal on this decision to abolish the YJB. The Minister has been honest and straightforward about it but I emphasise that he and the Government will find that, if they abolish the board, the cost of custody and the cost to the system will rise substantially. I do not think that anyone who has spoken in favour of the amendment wants the Government to be under any misapprehension —that will happen if they get rid of the board and take the functions inside the ministry. It will not only cost the taxpayer more but will do a lot of damage to a generation of young people who get into the criminal justice system and who are both troublesome and very troubled. I have heard the arguments and I wish to test the opinion of the House.
Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Lord Warner Excerpts(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Warner
Lord Warner
My Lords, it is appropriate that we move from discussing victims to discussing the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales because many of the victims of young offenders are themselves young people. I am moving this amendment in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, because I am deeply concerned about the Government’s decision to abolish the YJB, particularly regarding the inconsistency of that decision with the content of their own, perhaps I may say, rather creative White Paper, Breaking the Cycle, with its emphasis on prevention and rehabilitation.
First, I declare an interest as the first chairman of the board between 1999 and 2003 when I left to become a Health Minister, which I suppose is a logical kind of progression. I was very involved in developing the policy on the youth justice reforms, of which the board was a part. In deciding to abolish the YJB, the Government have shown very poor understanding of the history of unsatisfactory youth justice policies that led to the reforms.
Putting responsibility for youth justice back into a government department with many other responsibilities would simply repeat the mistakes of the past—dare I say, especially post-1979. It was the failure of the Home Office to work with other agencies and to deal with the special needs of children who offend that led to the establishment of the board after the highly critical 1996 report by the Audit Commission entitled Misspent Youth. Given that the Government think that the board’s job is done, which I find surprising, does the Minister really believe that young people will stop offending because the Ministry of Justice is in the driving seat? We should stop pretending that the board’s work is complete, for reasons that I will outline.
The history of youth justice is one of fantasy and error. The fantasy is that young people will grow out of offending, so we do not need to do too much. For some young people that may well be true, but for many the culture of offending that surrounds their daily lives is deeply established, difficult to resist and requires specialised interventions that are bespoke to young people. The error is to avoid the uncomfortable fact that many of the agencies involved with young people who have offended have no history of working together to tackle these complex issues and are reluctant to commit resources to this area without much prodding.
The purpose of the YJB was to oversee the work of the multi-agency youth offending teams and to keep on the case of their participating agencies, as well as to produce research and new ideas of what works best with young offenders. That work continues to need the attention of a national body which is independent of government and composed of members and staff with expertise in dealing with young offenders. This expertise has taken a decade to build up. Now the Government want to throw away all the hard work that has been done because of some misguided idea that they can save a bit of money and get the board’s work done by a few civil servants and, perhaps I may say, a motley crew of transient Ministers—that goes across the political spectrum—both of which are groups with no lasting investment in the work of youth justice. This is a costly error of significant proportions both for young people and the communities affected by their offending behaviour. The Government will find this out in a few years’ time as youth crime figures rise and more young offenders are banged up in costly, overcrowded establishments with fewer and fewer proper educational or behavioural change programmes.
Not everything that the YJB has done has been perfect; mistakes have been made. The reduction in research expenditure, for example, was a mistake. But the board’s overall achievements are considerable. Over the past 10 years, there has been a 30 per cent reduction in the number of young people brought into the youth justice system, from 90,000 to 60,000 young people. This policy of diversion, started in my time, has gathered pace since then, but it takes investment in and commitment to preventive programmes and independent board leadership to do this in a criminal justice system that is all too often preoccupied with short-term considerations. Stopping young offenders reoffending is one of the hardest things to do in criminal justice, but the latest figures show that between 2000 and 2008, the volume of reoffending by young people dropped by 25 per cent. At the end of 2008, the number of young people held in custody was under 2,000 compared with around 3,000 when the YJB was set up. It was the board that introduced more intensive supervision in the community to give the courts an alternative to custody. It is these reforms and improvements that the Government are now choosing to put in jeopardy with their ill-considered abolition of the board.
It is not just me banging on about something I helped to establish; independent reviews have said much the same thing. In 2004, the Audit Commission’s review of the reformed youth justice system said:
“The new structure works well. The YJB sets a clear national framework with minimum standards and takes a lead role in monitoring progress and developing policy”.
Dame Sue Street, a former Permanent Secretary in her government-commissioned 2010 review of the YJB concluded that:
“Overall, the YJB earns its place as a crucial part of a system which aims to tackle one of the most serious social policy issues in the country”.
Another government patsy, the National Audit Office, in a report published in 2010 said:
“The board has been an effective leader of efforts to create and maintain a national youth justice system with a risk-based approach, and in recent years key youth crime indicators have been falling substantially”.
The Public Accounts Committee endorsed the NAO report and the central role of the YJB in its report published less than a month ago. The PAC went on to say in that report:
“The planned abolition of the Youth Justice Board has arisen from a policy decision and not as a result of any assessment of the board’s performance. The Board has developed and maintained a distinctive focus on youth in the justice system and has contributed to positive outcomes in recent years. There is a risk that some of the factors that made the Board successful will be lost in the transition”.
It is not a risk, but a racing certainty that absorbing the YJB’s functions into the Ministry of Justice will be a major setback for an effective youth justice system and will have to be reversed in the future.
When the youth justice reforms were designed in 1996 and 1997, we gave careful thought to and took expert advice on the issue of putting the YJB’s functions in the Home Office. We decided that innovation, monitoring and encouraging local performance, tackling bad performance, reducing custody, increasing prevention and leading change would not be advanced by placing the functions in a government department. I would suggest that most objective observers would say pretty much the same thing today. Even as we consider this Bill, my intelligence is that a bureaucratic struggle is going on in the Ministry of Justice about who gets these functions, thereby reducing job losses in the successful part of the MoJ that wins the struggle. Despite its chequered career, which compares unfavourably with the YJB, the National Offender Management Service seems to be the front runner to absorb the work of the board. Can the Minister give a categoric assurance that under no circumstances will any of the YJB’s functions be transferred to NOMS or the Prison Service?
Before I close, perhaps I may be permitted to detain the House briefly with an anecdote from my time as YJB chairman which illustrates my concerns. We discovered that the Prison Service was in breach of its contract for providing education by keeping youngsters in their cells and not sending them to education classes. After repeated warnings and threatened sanctions, nothing changed, so I authorised the withholding of a monthly payment to the Prison Service. This captured the attention of top management and led to a major row, played out in front of the then Home Secretary. Eventually, the Prison Service got its money, but only after a significant improvement in performance. Frankly, I cannot see the MoJ’s civil servants deploying challenge mechanisms of that kind to underperforming large-service providers, but perhaps the Minister will tell us that a series of Rottweilers is now staffing the MoJ.
I close by giving the Minister some youth justice advice from an old hand. It is not unusual for people of previous spotless character to fall into bad company. They suddenly find themselves in a successful gang after being ignored by everyone for years. “What is wrong with a bit of vandalism?”. But it is never too late to change, and to go in for an intensive course of restorative justice and see things from the victim’s point of view. I am prepared to set the Minister up with an intensive programme of rehabilitation before Report in the hope of returning him to the straight and narrow. We might even be able to find a compromise between absorption into the Ministry of Justice and staying as an NDPB by using the model of an arm’s-length executive agency with independent non-executive directors. When I was working in the YJB, we never gave up on anyone, even Ministers. I beg to move.
Lord McNally
I shall certainly take that back. Part of the problem with the two issues that the noble Earl raises—both the advocacy commitment and the social worker commitment—is that they are responsibilities of local authorities. One thing that we have made clear in this approach is that we intend to make local authorities much more responsible for the delivery of these parts of the youth justice system. However, we note the point and can return to it at Report.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I am grateful to all those who have spoken in this debate, especially the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, who appears to have damaged his career prospects in doing so.
I began to feel a bit sorry for the Minister as the afternoon wore on. He dealt with the debate with his customary charm and evasion, and I pay tribute to those skills—particularly with some of the noises coming from behind him. If he thinks that he has trouble with me, I think that he has a lot more trouble with the noble Lord, Lord Elton.
It is interesting that five former Ministers spoke today from different Benches. They all showed a healthy scepticism about the ability of government departments to take on these jobs. It is worth bearing in mind that it is not just a load of head-bangers like me who are saying that but some of the Minister’s colleagues, who have spent their time in the salt mines of government. I note that the Prime Minister was not entirely overwhelmed by the performance of the Civil Service this week in some areas of its activity, so if the Minister gets too energetic in defending the MoJ’s civil servants, he may want to think about whether he will join the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, in the doghouse in terms of his ministerial prospects.
There is quite a lot here for the Minister to dwell upon. Perhaps I might just correct him and others who spoke this afternoon: they are youth offending teams not youth offender teams. It helps you to convey a sense of knowledge about the sector if you get the titles right, I have always found. I will not spend long talking about the issues that were raised but I will spend a few moments on the secure estate. The noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, raised the interesting point about money. He was quite right to do so, because the secure estate gobbles up most of the Youth Justice Board’s budget. It will gobble up a lot more money if the good work that Francis Done and others have done is not continued to keep down the number of young people going into custody down. The Government might find that any savings they make by taking some of these functions in-house will, in a few years, result in a some surprises in the Ministry of Justice’s budget if not such a great job has been done as that carried out by Youth Justice Board in commissioning services and keeping youngsters out of custody.
The noble Lord, Lord Elton, raised an interesting point, which I would certainly want to reflect on before Report. It was an important point about whether one can ensure the good behaviour of future Ministers in this regard.
The Minister mentioned that his colleagues wanted the adult criminal justice services to learn from the advantages of the youth justice service. That is a praiseworthy objective, but it seems to me that he is more likely to achieve that if he looks at the instrument that was used with the youth justice services to try to drive change. It took a long time to get some of these programmes—their structures, relationships and working practices—changed when the Youth Justice Board was set up. The youth offending teams did not all say, “Hurrah! Parliament has passed the Crime and Disorder Act and we’re all going to change our practices”. It took a lot of hard graft to get people to do that. You are seeing the results of that hard graft coming through in the work of the Youth Justice Board in the past few years. Before you throw it all away, you need to think about how long it takes to get change in most public services.
I will reflect on what the Minister said. I am after not a Pyrrhic victory but a real victory. I am very encouraged by some of the responses from across the House on this amendment. I will reflect on everything that was said, but in the mean time I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Rehabilitation and Sentencing
Lord Warner Excerpts(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Warner
The Minister has not so far mentioned youth justice so perhaps I may ask him some questions about that issue. I welcome much in the Statement about rehabilitation and reoffending, but is he aware that many of the issues of concern expressed in the Green Paper—such as young people’s first entry into the criminal justice system, restorative justice, reducing custody, improving the rates of reoffending when they have been sentenced and giving the courts more options on sentences—have been pioneered by the Youth Justice Board and the changes in the Crime and Disorder Act? Can the Minister explain why the Government want to abolish a body that has done the very kind of things that are in the Green Paper?
Lord McNally
My Lords, I pay genuine tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, as the chairman of the Youth Justice Board, and, as I have done before at the Dispatch Box, I put on record my admiration for its work. The decision to bring it in-house within the MoJ and to include it in the list of arm’s-length bodies to be abolished is a matter that is still before the House, but we of course hope that it will accept our recommendation. The general feeling is that the YJB had been a successful operation over the past 10 years. There were some criticisms of it here and there but, on the whole, it had been a success. However, that success now allows us to move to a stage where youth justice is much more a local and community responsibility undertaken by the successful operation of youth offending teams. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Warner, does not see the decision to abolish the YJB as a condemnation of it; it was a stage in the progression to what we hope will be a successful youth justice operation.