Sentencing: Repeat Offenders

Debate between Alex Cunningham and James Daly

Tuesday 21st June 2022 Westminster Hall

[James Daly]

Thank you, Sir Gary. I agree with everything that my hon. Friend said. When we look at reoffending rates, we must look at what we are talking about, because we cannot talk in the generality. When I first appeared before the courts, I was representing up to 10 shoplifters a day. My hon. Friend has been on the bench for a long time, so he will know that that was the nature of repeat offending—drug-related acquisitive offending at a relatively low level.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I am interested in the hon. Gentleman saying that he represented 10 shoplifters a day. When I visit shops nowadays, they tell me they are deeply frustrated that shoplifters are allowed simply to walk out of the store because nobody is interested in ensuring that they are caught and taken through the court system. Does he share that lament?

[James Daly]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point. I am sure the Minister will confirm that I have that conversation with him on a regular basis. It is an important issue. The level of offending that I saw when I initially practised has vanished from the courts. I do not know where it has gone; I do not think it has disappeared into the ether. All constituency MPs know that shoplifting is still a prolific issue, but it is not appearing before the courts.

When we get down to the issue of repeat offending, perhaps the nature of the offending that appears in a sentencing exercise has changed. Where do we look for that offending? What specifically categorises it? I have to say that I do not agree with what the hon. Member for Easington says, although I understand why he said it in terms of categorising the offending as organised crime. That is a very general description of what we are talking about. Organised crime tends to be very high-level offending. When I look at reoffending rates, I look at the offences where it is a prolific problem, such as domestic violence and serious sexual offending; all of those offences, which have very specific different motivations and reasons why they are committed, are the ones that I look at. I only make the point that we cannot debate this issue in the generality. We cannot say that one sentencing option or one rehabilitative model is going to suit every single option.

We then get to the question—I raised this with the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—of how to deal with repeat offenders: with a non-custodial sentence or a custodial one? I think every hon. Member would agree with the hon. Member for Easington that, in the circumstances he spoke about, the gentleman should be sent to prison. I represented people who had committed 400 offences. What do we do with them after 400 offences? Everything has been tried. Every sentence that had ever been invented had been tried by many of my clients, and had failed spectacularly. What do you do with them? They have to be sent to prison, because if it is highly unlikely for a sentence to be carried out or for an offender to take part in the requirements, that sentence cannot be imposed.

The drug rehabilitation part of non-custodial sentences is not as straightforward as people suggest. All the offenders I have represented, save those who had serious mental health issues, have understood that they should not be doing what they were doing. They know the difference between right and wrong—it is not a moral question. In many circumstances, it is a question of addressing their substance problem or opioid problem. When courts impose drug rehabilitation orders, we cannot simply take a wand out and hit somebody over the head and suddenly everything is okay. For the orders to be successful, there has to be planning, work and stability in their lives. For an offender who is living on the street, with very little money, a drug rehabilitation order may seem a sensible sentence because that is what the problem is, and that is why the offence has been committed, but we should not impose a sentence if we know it is going to fail, even if it addresses the root cause of the problem.

On non-custodial sentences, I agree with the points that were made about the probation service—I think we have got back to a better place, but we cannot simply talk about terms and conditions and how extremely important they are, and all the other things that the hon. Member for Easington referred to. This is about the interaction of the individuals, in the circumstances that they face on bail. It is those that are going to decide whether a sentence is successful or not.

In the custodial environment, there is a real debate about what we view as success in what people are offered, and that is not just about violence. Most of the reoffenders I represented were not violent individuals—they were not going into prison and that was sending them on to a different scale. It was about how the fundamental stability issues were addressed, particularly employment. I hope the Minister will comment on this point, because the Government are doing some really good work in looking at the root causes of offending. They are putting a lot of money into job creation and education, which we should not just brush aside. Some really positive steps are being taken.

Some other measures are really showing the Government’s innovative approach to sentencing policy. They were not around when I was practising. Alcohol abstinence tags have a phenomenally high rate of success. Many domestic violence offences are committed by people who are drunk or who have serious alcohol problems. Alcohol abstinence tags, whether part of the sentence or the licence conditions afterwards, are showing real success and we should—“celebrate” seems the wrong word for a sentencing exercise—at least acknowledge that good policies are being put in place.

There is also GPS tagging, which is about making sure that the justice system knows where a person is after they are released. If a burglar is coming to the end of their sentence and there is a concern about what they might do next, if they are GPs-tagged and silly enough to commit an offence, they will be arrested and put back into the court system as soon as possible. There is some really good work in this area. There is integrated offender management, which brings all the services together to produce a bespoke package to help offenders who are struggling with their lives.

The picture is complex. This problem has been around for a long time. Over many years, including under the Labour party, community rehabilitation orders have sadly been spectacularly unsuccessful, but that is not a reason for us not to keep on trying to use modern technology to learn from some of the things that have happened in the past and to have a real debate about how we can affect individual lives. Not everyone is the same. Each person we rehabilitate and bring back into a life where they are not committing offences is a success. That should not be viewed in the thousands, but in each individual success. We are all committed to doing that, while also, getting back to the original point, sending people to prison for sentences that are lengthy enough to deter reoffending behaviour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham]

I agree. I think employers should play a greater role in prisons and we should encourage more of them in. However, we need to provide the right environment for employers. Many years ago I was employed by National Grid, which had a scheme working in partnership with prisons—I think forklift truck drivers were the main output from one prison in the south. Those people did not reoffend—or very few of them did—because they worked with the employer while they were still in prison, they had day release into the workplace and then they got a job afterwards. That is the real answer: education followed by a job.

We know that community service sentences have enormous potential for reducing reoffending as an alternative to short prison sentences, which, under this Government, only entrench offending behaviours. A large body of evidence suggests that community orders are more effective in reducing reoffending than short sentences. Under this Government, community sentences are being set up to fail because the Government do not seem to care about stopping repeat offending at source.

The number of hours of community service was falling significantly even before the pandemic, but has now fallen to less than 1.5 million, from over 5 million five years ago. Public trust in community sentences is flagging because those schemes have stopped being seen to be viable. The number of offenders completing a community sentence has fallen by a quarter in the past five years because offenders are breaching the terms of their sentences, often by not turning up.

Labour has proposed a better way forward. The public need to see that justice is being done in their communities. That is precisely what Labour’s community and victim payback boards would do, by providing publicly available data on the work that offenders are doing, determined by the communities and victims affected. We have put the victims of crime and the communities blighted by it at the centre of unpaid work schemes through existing safer neighbourhood boards. Another reason for the failure of community sentences, particularly where repeat offenders are concerned, is down to the fact that judges no longer trust that they will be delivered. The fault with that lies in the problems experienced by the probation service, which this Government have created with the service’s disastrous privatisation in 2014.

[James Daly]

I would be astounded if the hon. Gentleman had any evidence to back up the claim that judges do not trust community sentences. I do not know whether he has seen the Government’s work on community payback, which is extremely visible and effective. It is essentially already doing what he has just said.

[Alex Cunningham]

I accept that some progress has been made in this area, but we have a long way to go if we are to make it effective for many more people in the system. That is an illustration that the Government have belatedly realised their error and are starting to put things right. There are still worrying hangovers, such as recruitment and retention, from the previous system of community rehabilitation companies.

The rate at which probation officers are leaving the service has increased by a quarter since 2015. Resignations have consistently outstripped retirement and other reasons for leaving the service over the past five years: 60% of all leavers are choosing to walk away. The causes cited by some include high workloads, stress and poor pay, given the nature of the work and the rising cost of living. My hon. Friend the Member for Easington talked of some of those issues.

The workloads of existing staff have now reached unsafe levels. That is reflected in the alarming growth in certain serious further offences in recent years; that is, offences committed by repeat offenders who are the subject of probation supervision. I am sure the Minister will tell us how we are going to reconfigure the probation service, to ensure that we can put that right. SFOs for murder were higher in the three years to 2020 than they ever have been—surely, the most severe form of repeat offending that there is.

The public have a right to be concerned about these serious violent crimes in their communities, because this Tory Government have shown time and again they are not capable of dealing with the issue. There is no better example than repeat knife crime. The Government promised in 2015 to lock up repeat knife offenders, but almost half of repeat offenders avoided jail in 2021, and knife possession offences across England and Wales have increased by a fifth since the Conservatives came to power. The Minister and I spent a considerable length of time in Committee for the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill Act 2022. I hope the measures it introduced will have the effect that the Government hope. Of course, many of the provisions have yet to be enacted.

The root of the problem with repeat offending is the neglect of youth services and youth offending teams, which could be preventing offending by engaging young people, instead of leaving them to their own devices and the influence of others who drag them into crime. That neglect has resulted in enormous rises in the scale and cost of violent youth crime, which now stands at more than £11 billion under this Government. Being soft on repeat offending and soft on its causes blights communities and costs taxpayers. Labour has shown it will tackle reoffending and repeat offending head on, and bring security to our communities. That is what my hon. Friend the Member for Easington wants.

Judicial Review and Courts Bill

Debate between Alex Cunningham and James Daly

Report stage
Tuesday 25th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[James Daly]

That assessment is completely at odds with my 16 years of working in this field. When a case is committed to the Crown court, it is on the basis of the maximum sentence that could be imposed in the circumstances. The increase in sentencing powers will bring many more cases—burglary, affray, first-time offenders—back into the magistrates courts and avoid the ridiculous situation whereby straightforward cases that can be dealt with in a magistrates court are committed to the Crown court for no reason.

[Alex Cunningham]

I am not saying that we oppose the proposal—Labour legislation first put it on the statute book—but people in the magistrates courts will get higher sentences and may well feel the necessity to appeal, so we will potentially have more appeals.

Working People’s Finances: Government Policy

Debate between Alex Cunningham and James Daly

Tuesday 21st September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alex Cunningham]

I also congratulate my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Jill Mortimer), on her maiden speech. I am sorry that her Tees valley colleagues have now abandoned her, because I wanted to share some child poverty figures with them. Since 2015, the number of children in poverty has gone up by 1,800 in Stockton South, by 2,000 in Hartlepool and by 1,900 in each of Darlington, Redcar and Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland. Will the hon. Member for Bury North (James Daly) address the children in the Tees valley and persuade Tees valley MPs to vote against the universal credit cut?

[James Daly]

From recollection, and my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool will tell me if I am wrong, Ben Houchen got 74% of the vote. Conservative MPs have been elected in Labour areas of the Tees valley because we give hope and we have a plan. This Government’s plan for jobs is working, whereas Labour has offered nothing to the Tees valley over the past decades. The Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool and other Members in that area are putting forward plans that are changing lives, for which they should each be extremely proud.

I come to the second part of the debate. In Bury, we have seen unprecedented support during an incredibly difficult period. How do I, as a Member of Parliament, feel about the Government policy? How do I look at what we should be doing to change people’s lives, give hope and inspiration, and make sure that people can make the best of themselves, having the best career, best-paid job and best future? I have heard no arguments —no plan, definitely—from any Opposition Member in respect of how that is going to happen; I have heard no hope, no vision, no anything for children in Bury or in the Tees Valley about how their lives are going to be transformed by a Labour party. I have heard bland generalities.

The shadow Minister said that the Labour party would create a high-skills, high-wage economy, but they are going to be too late, because this Government are doing it already. We are investing billions of pounds in skills uptraining, not only to give young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds the best chance to have a highly paid, skilled job, but to regenerate our areas. In an area such as Bury, we have to have that skillset so that we can bring in high-tech manufacturing and make sure that those jobs are closer to our communities, so that people, including young people in Bury, do not have to go to Manchester or London to have a highly-paid job.

This Government have a plan that is delivering; the plan for jobs is delivering, and we can see the kickstart figures. We are creating, through youth hubs, kickstart and all the other programmes that have been outlined, a set of policies and programmes. Bury College is part of a bid for institute of technology status for Greater Manchester. What does that mean? It means colleges in Greater Manchester are working with the University of Salford to create the means by which high-skilled, high-worth employment is going to be on the doorstep for people, with the skills training that is being delivered. I had the privilege of going to Bury College with the Minister two weeks ago; the T-levels that have been introduced by this Government are inspiring aspiring people and changing lives, making people’s futures brighter—we cannot overlook that.

We have a transformative Government. Every decision made is regarding levelling up. Everything we decide to do is done to transform opportunity. Sadly, the Labour party is not interested in that and certainly does not have a plan to do it. So I congratulate this Government. There are challenges. We are dealing with a £400 billion pandemic, for which there is no panacea, but this Government have done what they have needed to do to protect people’s livelihoods and interests, and to support families throughout this period, with unprecedented financial support. We are now on to the next stage. The plan for jobs is working; it is hope, it is aspiration and it is changing futures and lives in communities such as Bury. I support the Government wholeheartedly on that vision for our country.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Alex Cunningham and James Daly

3rd reading
Monday 5th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[James Daly]

No, I will not.

I am rather curious. We have heard comments from Opposition Members that they support heavier sentences and further action being taken, quite rightly, to protect the victims of serious sexual violence, so why in Committee did they vote against what was then clause 106—the clause that will abolish the automatic halfway release for certain serious violent or sexual offenders? We have a Leader of the Opposition with a terrible record of leading the CPS, and we have an Opposition who have recently voted against more serious sentences and more deterrent sentences.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Not against rape sentences.

[James Daly]

I have been absolutely amazed by the comments of some Opposition Members that deterrent sentences do not work. The point of the Bill—and the point of the responsibilities that my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor has—is to increase sentences and increase public confidence in the justice system. That is exactly what he is doing.

[Alex Cunningham]

What about rape—