Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill (Third sitting)

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 30th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Thank you. We move on to the shadow Minister, Alex Cunningham.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Q Good morning, Mark. I want to reiterate the Minister’s thanks to the people out there who are working so hard—your colleagues in the prisons. I have a prison in my constituency, and I get an insight into the pressures that are facing not just prisoners and their families but prison officers and their families as well.

You recently made a film called “The forgotten service”. In that film, you talk about the lack of support for prison officers, particularly around mental health, and there are other issues as well. Somebody responded to that film by saying—I hope the Chair will forgive the swear word in the middle—

“I left 3 months ago from the high security estate, after 18 years I had seen enough. Too much political bullshit, ridiculous workload, rubbish managers causing dramas, and good managers having to pick up all the pieces”.

Few would disagree that the main measures in the Bill are right, but what needs to happen in prisons to ensure that they can cope with the ramifications of it?

Mark Fairhurst: Mental health is a massive issue at the moment. We are getting more and more members suffering from PTSD. When you take the sentiments in that statement from that member of staff who left the service, I can echo every one of those.

What you have got to understand is that staff on the frontline are doing an absolutely fantastic job. They will monitor individuals’ behaviours and make a referral. The current system goes through a three-stage referral process, with the ultimate decision being made to remove someone from the main population to a separation centre at stage three. Very few of those referrals from staff get approved, because of the red tape and the legal challenges. It seems to staff on the frontline that the legal challenges are the major stopping point and buffer to removing people, who are a real danger in the normal population, to a separation centre.

You will eventually have complete apathy from staff, who keep referring people they think should be separated from the main population and keep getting knocked back. That has a knock-on effect, because, day after day, they have to deal with people who are threatening them, who are underhand, who are trying to radicalise people. Day after day, they know that if they make a referral, there is a good chance that that person will not be moved from the main population.

[Alex Cunningham]

Q Yes, but what actually needs to happen in prisons to overcome some of these challenges that officers are facing?

Mark Fairhurst: You need mental health support. You need some sort of counselling service on site five days a week during the working week. You need training to help staff cope, to spot the signs of radicalisation and danger. There is good training on offer if you work in a separation centre, but not for the main body of staff who work on the wings. You need to recognise that staff are under stress, so you need to rotate their jobs so that they are not in a high-stress situation year after year. We need more staff on site to assist us as well, to help prevent trouble breaking out.

[Alex Cunningham]

Q That is helpful, Mark. I am sorry to keep cutting across you, but we have not got very much time. I want to talk about capacity. In answer to the Minister, you mentioned that a terrorist offender could be offered one of two radicalisation programmes. What is capacity like in the system for providing that sort of programme?

Mark Fairhurst: Spaces in the high-security estate, where most TACT offenders are housed, are at a premium. We have very few spaces at all in a high-security estate. We do have spaces on courses for deradicalisation programmes, but they are not mandatory; the offender has the choice of whether they wish to attend one. That is another issue: do we want to make these courses mandatory, and where is the incentive to go on a course if you know you will not be released early?

If we are going to increase sentences, I suspect that we will need extra headroom. We will certainly need the other two separation centres open, because of the rise of the far right, and we will certainly have to think about a high-security prison—perhaps specifically to house terrorist offenders. Although there are only approximately 230 in play at the moment, it may be an idea to separate them totally.

[Alex Cunningham]

Q Okay. The Minister talked about the fact that the Parole Board would not have any role to play in the future for these determinate sentences. Would you like to comment on that? Will there be a full set of expertise available to prepare society and those who will deal with prisoners outside, if the Parole Board, with its expertise, does not have a role?

Mark Fairhurst: I would like the Parole Board involved more, because it is an independent scrutiny body, but the measures we have in place at the moment are adequate. They work really well with the intelligence gathering from the shop floor, with the assessments and with multi-agency experts, including the security services. I do not think there is much more we can do, but I have no objections to the Parole Board being involved more as an independent scrutiny panel.

[Alex Cunningham]

Q That is helpful. I have one more question. Young people will be subject to the same legislation as older, more mature people. Do you have any thoughts on that with regards to rehabilitation and their future?

Mark Fairhurst: This is another issue. If you look at people under the age of 18 and at female offenders, do we have the capability to house them in a secure environment, or are we going to throw them into the adult estate? Throwing a young person into the adult estate due to the nature of their offence could have an adverse effect, so we need to come up with programmes for young offenders who commit terrorist crimes. I do not think we have that capability at the moment, but rehabilitation of a young person has more chance of success than rehabilitation of someone who is seasoned and radicalised. I feel that we have a big opportunity to make a difference in that field.

[Alex Cunningham]

That is very helpful. Thank you.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

I suspect that your evidence is extremely useful to the Committee, but I have to ask for slightly shorter answers, please.

[Alex Cunningham]

Q Mark Fairhurst suggested that the radicalisation programmes are far from fit for purpose. You have suggested that yourself. You have also talked about the various different issues that a prisoner may be facing. Can you develop a little bit more what needs to happen? You talked about investing significantly, so there must be insufficient resources in the system. What actually needs to happen?

Professor Acheson: The amount of skill and training required to staff separation units—we know that only one out of three is running at the minute—is significant. If you are putting our frontline prisoner-facing staff, who will have the most influence and impact on individual terrorist offenders, in that sort of environment, it will take a huge amount of training, not only in the skill to deal with those prisoners, but in psychological resilience and so on. We know what seems to work in relation to violent extremism across Europe: it is the development of long-term, high-quality relationships, which are pro-social and expand far beyond the prison gates. That is very expensive, and it takes a lot of support to put that in place and to maintain it.

[Alex Cunningham]

Q We have talked about the fact that the Parole Board will not have a role for prisoners who have a determinate sentence. Would you like to comment on that, because of the level of expertise that they bring to that package you were describing earlier?

Professor Acheson: This is not a very auspicious time to talk about the Parole Board, but it is very good at managing ordinary offenders, and statistics would bear that out. I have said this earlier, and I do not want to repeat myself, but I do not believe the Parole Board is philosophically or organisationally the best suited to managing that risk. It is very good at managing ordinary offenders, but we have a new cohort coming through of profoundly different, ideologically motivated offenders, either through Islamism or through extreme right-wing philosophies, and we probably need a different, multi-agency approach to managing that risk all the way through the system.

[Alex Cunningham]

Q During these evidence sessions, I have been concentrating on the fact that young people will be treated the self-same way as older prisoners in relation to determinate sentences. Do you have a view on that, particularly as the immaturity of a younger person may lead them to act in a particular way, but their opportunity for rehabilitation is probably greater?

Professor Acheson: I agree that the potential is greater, but I think sometimes we confuse vulnerability with dangerousness, and we use that in relation to young people and women. We have some very dangerous extremist offenders in either camp—very few of them, but we do have a small number—and we must not conflate the two.

In general terms, and I speak as somebody who worked for the Youth Justice Board, we need, where we can, to ensure that the disposals that are at the judge’s discretion, including detention and training orders and some non-custodial interventions, are still considered heavily before penalising people who, as you have said, may be just immature.

[Alex Cunningham]

Q I watched a film with you in it, where you were talking about the circle of trust and accountability. Would you like to develop that in a quick answer?

Professor Acheson: The circle of trust and accountability is a system devised by Mennonites, I think, in Canada, where one of their community had been convicted of a high-profile sex offence and was returning to the community. That group of people said, “How can we welcome this person back into our community”—because that was the Christian ethos—“but also keep our kids safe?” They devised a system where there was community involvement in a circle around the individual, which managed to help him to reintegrate properly but protected the community as well.

I am very keen on that idea being replicated for terrorist offenders after release in the community, as a parallel to the state’s responsibility to keep people safe. In other words, there could be a community response like that one, where we are getting members of the community involved in protecting national security. We miss a trick in this country—research backs this up—in that we do not, particularly in relation to Muslim communities, enlist ordinary members of the community who have some standing and some credibility in supporting the reintegration of terrorist offenders.

Those offenders will suffer many of the same challenges that sex offenders do: shame, difficulty in finding somewhere to live and difficulty in finding something to do. All those things would point towards further offending and delay disengagement, so I am very keen on the concept being looked at in relation to released terrorist offenders here.

[Alex Cunningham]

Q We are a long way from anything like that happening in the UK.

Professor Acheson: I think we probably are. We are outriders in that respect in relation to the rest of Europe, which does heavily involve non-governmental organisations and community groups, for example, in reintegration. We have seen that in the Molenbeek suburb in Belgium, which is responsible for producing quite a number of jihadis, where the community has been involved and works in partnership with, although separate from, the statutory bodies whose first priority is safety and security. That is a necessary but insufficient way of dealing with the problem.

[Kenny MacAskill]

Q Mr Acheson, you are well sighted on the Scottish system with the Risk Management Authority and the order for lifelong restriction. You talked about good regime designs not being punitive, but the imposition of a significant sentence without the opportunity for early release must appear to be so. Do you think that the order for lifelong restriction is perhaps the better option for many who are convicted by a court, rather than a mandatory sentence?

Professor Acheson: I am not sure which would work better. I am certainly on record as saying that I support the Government in much longer sentences for terrorist offenders, primarily because it is a unique opportunity to incapacitate an ideologically motivated offender and bring services around that individual. Those services need to be extended through the gate and into the community.

We need to focus on this as a national security issue that we need to deal with in a different way, so lifelong restriction may have its merits. The key thing is that we make sure that support and control exist around offenders who are being released and who may go back into extremist offending, so that in whatever way we apply restrictions on their liberty—including TPIMS, for example—we do it in a proportionate way. There is absolutely an argument that punitive measures increase alienation. I think that might be a trade-off, in some respects, for people with whom we may never be satisfied that they are safe to release. We have to embrace the idea that there will be a few offenders who must be kept in prison indefinitely, because they either cannot or will not recant a hateful ideology, and they have the means to mobilise that into violence in the community.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

Q Thank you. Would you agree that the historical involvement of the Parole Board in offering the possibility of early release does not really have any meaningful impact on prisoner rehabilitation or behaviour? Or to the extent that it does, that it may simply stimulate false compliance—pretending to comply with deradicalisation programmes in the hope of securing early release?

Professor Silke: It is a complicated question. In general, I agree with Mark Fairhurst’s point that the potential for early release is an important incentive for behaviour in custody. If we lose the potential for early release, we are losing a tool from the toolbox, and we need to question whether that is sensible, or whether there are advantages in keeping it in some shape or form.

Does false compliance happen? Yes, it certainly does, but if we look at reoffending stats, compliance seems to be genuine in most cases. Nobody has a 100% effective intervention for dealing with these types of prisoner or any other type of prisoner, so we should never expect an intervention to be 100% accurate. However, the stats suggest that what is happening in prison with most terrorist prisoners is currently effective, and so if we are making changes to the regime and to the interventions, we need to have a careful think about what the knock-on consequences might be.

Personally, I prefer still to have the potential for early release at some stage as a tool in the toolbox for these serious offenders. I think it can make a difference in some cases. From my perspective, the Parole Board usually brings a serious and considered assessment of the available evidence in a particular case, which is often very welcome. Again, by removing that from the equation, are we losing something that has value?

[Alex Cunningham]

Q Good morning, Professor Silke. Are the current deradicalisation programmes in prisons fit for purpose? If not, what needs to happen?

Professor Silke: The problems are relatively new. My view is that they work far better than most members of the general public want to think. Again, the proof is in the very low reconviction rates that we see after people have been released. If it is working in the vast majority of cases, that is an encouraging sign. If there are failures, we need to look into that. One thing that the Bill does not do in its current format is try to identify what is different about the failures compared with the rest of the prisoners who are being released—what went wrong in their cases compared to the others? I am not sure that we are getting at that at the moment.

The evidence base around both risk assessment and interventions for terrorist prisoners is in development. It is massively better today than 10 years ago, and I think it will continue to improve. I know that the Ministry of Justice is involved in a range of programmes to improve the evidence base around ERG and healthy identity intervention, which I strongly welcome. Many Governments are involved in similar efforts overseas.

[Alex Cunningham]

Q You talked about the potential for early release and how important that can be. I do not think any of us here are advocating that the more senior offenders should not serve the full 14 years, but do you think that the Bill has the right approach to terrorist offenders under 21?

Professor Silke: That is a very good point. There are differences between very young offenders and the older, more established offenders, and I am not sure that that necessarily comes across strongly in the Bill. That is probably an area where our understanding is more limited than it should be. It needs more attention and research.

[Alex Cunningham]

Q The Bill does not recognise that they are any different, in the way it is formatted at the moment. How could we improve it?

Professor Silke: One of the things we will need to do is refine it, in terms both of risk assessment and intervention, to tailor it more for younger offenders. At the moment, there is a question mark over whether what is currently available has young offenders firmly enough in its sights.

[Alex Cunningham]

Thank you.

[Kenny MacAskill]

Q Professor Silke, I do not know whether you are aware, but in Scotland there is a sentence called the order for lifelong restriction, which is indeterminate but allows for release or indeed for detention to continue. Given your views on the benefit of some sort of early release being available for those who show remorse or rehabilitation—indeed, the avoidance of people being released at the end of their determinate sentence because they have served it—do you think that an order for lifelong restriction may be a more appropriate sentence for some terrorists in Scotland?

Professor Silke: Honestly, I do not know enough about how it works to make an informed assessment of it. I am always cagey about anything indeterminate, which might imply indefinite detention. The advantage of having a fixed term, rather than something quite open-ended, is that at least you know exactly what you have to work with.