Offender Management: Checkpoint Programme

Lord Woolf Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Woolf (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the preceding speakers, who are all so knowledgeable about this subject, and I also endorse what has been said already as to the achievement of the noble Lord, Lord Bates, in securing this debate.

For me personally, this debate raises issues which cast in proportion the remarks which were made in a Sunday newspaper last weekend, which I read when I had the good fortune to be sitting on a Caribbean beach. I think we do not realise that the way we operate so often causes us to focus on the negative because we start off every day by asking questions, and you do not ask questions about things going well. What is important about this debate is that we are focusing on something which goes well.

I am glad to see here our newest Member of the House, who made a maiden speech when I was not here recently but which I have read. She will be very conscious of that point, because she has as great a knowledge of the working of the criminal justice system as anybody I know. Of course I refer to my fellow Cross-Bencher, my noble and learned friend Lady Hallett, who is here with me today. She would know how finding the positive things and making them work is so important and how sad it is that, again and again, useful initiatives do not result in long-term ends.

Octogenarians can have a very valuable service to perform—and I claim to do this today—because they have seen and heard it all before, and they have the long experience of what could work. This is not exploited in the way that it should be exploited so as to prevent the need to return again and again. I say that on the basis of the report I did into the prison riots, which were held a long time ago now, and on the basis of the speech I gave on the 25th anniversary of my report into those matters.

One thing that I hope will happen today as a result of this debate is that this excellent initiative, which has been shown to have so many important qualities, is taken up and embedded. If we cannot manage big reforms, let us focus on many little reforms and achieve a good result as a whole.