Bach Commission: The Right to Justice

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by drawing attention to my interests as set out in the register, in particular my membership of the board of trustees of the Centre for Justice Innovation.

It is a great pleasure to participate in a debate introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Bach, the police and crime commissioner for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. The noble Lord is the first Member of your Lordships’ House to have been elected as a PCC, and I look forward to the day when many more noble Lords will feel moved to follow his example and serve their communities in this important way. I join with many others who have congratulated the noble Lord on securing time for this debate and who have commended him for producing such a comprehensive and readable report, and more importantly, for producing an agreed set of practical proposals for action.

As a non-lawyer who has spent most of his professional life concerned with the criminal side of our justice system, I had serious doubts about whether it would be sensible for me to speak in today’s debate. I certainly do not feel qualified to comment on most of the report’s recommendations, and I do not intend to do so. However, I want to express my strong support for two recommendations discussed in the chapter entitled “Education, information and advice”. In particular, I enthusiastically endorse the proposal that public legal education in schools should be improved, and I welcome the idea of,

“a centrally branded and easily navigable portal for online information and advice”.

I am especially keen on these recommendations because I believe that they would also have important benefits for the criminal justice system, and would therefore like to see them become the subject of more public debate and public funding.

Indeed, I would go further and say that the need for better information and more support is even greater in relation to the criminal justice system than it is on the civil side, especially when we consider the needs of our black, Asian and minority ethnic citizens. I shall quote from a recent excellent report from the Centre for Justice Innovation of which, as I say, I am proud to be a trustee. It is entitled Building Trust: How our Courts can Improve the Criminal Court Experience for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Defendants. It states:

“while the British judicial system has a reputation as one of the fairest in the world, our criminal justice system does not command the trust of our Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) citizens. A majority (51%) of British-born BAME people believe that the criminal justice system discriminates against particular groups and individuals, compared to only 35% of the British-born white population”.

I am sure that I do not have to spell out in detail the negative consequences of this situation for both the BAME community and our society as a whole. Suffice it to say that, for the BAME community, the perception of racial disparity in their treatment by the criminal justice system may lead to defendants receiving more severe sentences by making them less likely to plead guilty and thus not benefit from the one-third reduction in their sentence that is available to those who plead guilty at the first opportunity. In fact, adult BAME men and women who are tried in Crown Courts are respectively 52% and 35% more likely to plead not guilty, compared with similar white men and women.

For society as a whole, the consequences are even more serious, because there are reasons to believe that perceptions of unfair treatment in the criminal justice system are likely to increase the chances of BAME offenders going on to reoffend and thus threaten the safety of their communities and beyond. The Centre for Justice Innovation report makes a number of important recommendations for tackling these issues. There is not enough time for me to mention them all, but let me just say that none of the recommendations would have been out of place in the Bach report. Of course, this should come as no surprise. Although the Bach report does not mention the special needs of BAME people explicitly, there is no doubt that they exist in relation to the civil justice system too.

Although it has not attracted nearly as much attention in the media, it seems that there is a “trust deficit”—to use David Lammy MP’s words—on the civil side of our justice system, just as there is on the criminal side. That loss of trust in our justice arrangements is not something that can be ignored until after the Brexit issue has been settled. As the noble Lord, Lord Bach, said in his admirable foreword to the report—speaking of the institutions of our justice system—when,

“trust in our institutions and in the rule of law breaks down … society breaks down”.

My right honourable friend the Prime Minster has said that she wants to create a country that works for everyone. It is clear from the Bach commission’s findings, which we have discussed today, and the work of the Centre for Justice Innovation and others, that as far as both our civil and criminal justice systems are concerned—institutions that lie at the very heart of a free democratic society—this country does not yet work for everyone. I urge my noble friend the Minster to take this important message back to his ministerial colleagues.