Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Matt Rodda

Report stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 21st July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alex Cunningham]

In Committee, Members had a robust debate about many aspects of this Bill, which we support but believe can still be improved. I start with new clause 1 and the probation service.

We cannot begin to tackle terrorism without recognising the important role that the probation service plays in keeping people safe. New clause 1 requires the Secretary of State to commission a review and publish a report on the impact of the provisions in the Bill on the National Probation Service. It would have to consider the probation support provided to offenders convicted of terrorist offences, how probation support provided to offenders convicted for terrorist offences has varied since implementation of this Bill, the type and number of specialist staff employed by the National Probation Service to work with terrorist offenders, the turnover of probation staff, the average length of service of probation staff, and the non-staff resources provided to manage offenders convicted of terrorist offences.

For the probation service to be fully functioning and effective, it must have the resources it needs. The Minister said that the spending review last September laid out a significantly increased funding package for the Prison Service and probation service, which is supposedly flowing to the frontline, but the National Probation Service is in a far from satisfactory state, and we know about the disaster that ensued when large parts of it were privatised. Thankfully privatisation is no more, but we still have to get the service right.

The NPS has a workforce including 6,500 probation officers and a budget of more than £500 million. Earlier this year, Her Majesty’s inspectorate of probation painted a picture of a service in crisis, with hundreds of vacancies, overstretched officers and managers, and crumbling, overcrowded buildings, including hostels for recently released offenders. Inspectors rated all of its divisions as requiring improvement on staffing. None of the areas are fully staffed. There were high rates of staff sickness—an average of 11 days per person, 50% of which related to mental health difficulties. There are 650 job vacancies nationwide in the probation service—a full 10% of the establishment.

Although the probation service is not in the Minister’s portfolio, I am sure he will agree that that is not satisfactory. We can only hope that things are improving. In Committee, the Minister talked about the welcome resources being invested in the service and about the spending review coming this autumn. Can he confirm that he is satisfied that there are sufficient resources to achieve what he wants, or are Ministers bidding for more from the spending review? Perhaps more importantly, will he confirm that the necessary support will be put in place to bring the National Probation Service up to full strength, to tackle the issues raised in inspection reports, and to provide staff with the support they need for their mental and physical ill health, to help them back to work and while they are there, and put an end to the high sickness rate? All those things put pressure on the service and the ability of staff to cope with offenders day to day—in this context, with some of the most dangerous ones.

In Committee, I also asked about whether all probation officers will have counter-terrorism training, and the Minister addressed that in a letter to me. He said:

“Governors and front-line staff are being given the training, skills, and authority needed to challenge inappropriate views and take action against them…Staff are also trained how to recognise aspects of an offender’s behaviour which might indicate terrorist sympathies. Over 29,000 prison staff have been trained.”

We all welcome that.

The increased workloads for highly specialised and rare probation staff are a cause for concern. Research shows that more time spent with offenders is essential for proper assessment and rehabilitation, but that is not possible with such high case loads. The very long license cases, such as lifers and those with indeterminate sentences, are a special challenge for probation staff because they never really come off their case loads, and more new cases are constantly added. Specialist probation officers are thinly spread and consequently hold very high case loads of terror-related cases—over 120% of normal. That level is appallingly high, and the Government recognise that it needs to come down. Their recruitment of more specialists to manage counter-terrorism offenders is also to be welcomed. That said, the general issue with increasing the number of specialists in probation is that they can only be recruited from experienced staff, and with high sickness levels and a 10% vacancy rate, how can Ministers be confident that they can provide a quality service, not just for those convicted of terrorism or related offences but offenders in general?

There is a danger that huge amounts of experience are being lost and that lots of generalist roles will need to be backfilled with newly qualified staff before the more experienced staff can move on to specialist roles—and that in a service where a full third of all employees have less than three years’ experience in probation. I asked this in Committee, but I do not believe an answer was forthcoming, so can the Minister now tell me what modelling the Department has done on the expected net effect on the total probation caseload over the years and decades to come as a result of the changes in this Bill? Ad hoc measures are not good enough; there need to be properly considered measures and funding given to the probation service to make it an effective mechanism to tackle terrorism and do one of our country’s most difficult jobs.

I turn to the related issue of de-radicalisation programmes in prison, and new clause 2. When someone has committed a terror offence and has gone to prison, there is an expectation that this person will be kept away from mainstream society for the purposes of keeping the public safe, and an expectation that their time in prison will be used effectively. This means that all efforts will be made to ensure that the individual does not return to the same destructive path that they were on prior to being arrested. In order to achieve this, there needs to be a properly structured and expert-driven de-radicalisation programme available for all those who are identified as being in need of enrolling on such a programme.

For the purpose of informing Members who were not members of the Committee, I will reiterate a number of points I made during that time. Although the minimum sentencing for terror offences has been increased, there is a suggestion that we could simply be delaying inevitable further offences unless we take action to use the offender’s time in prison to de-radicalise them, and we can only do that if there is an effective de-radicalisation programme in place. While we heard in evidence that many good things are happening in our prisons around de-radicalisation, there were also concerns expressed about the adequacy of the programmes and their availability.

That does not just concern Committee members and witnesses. At last Tuesday’s Justice questions, the hon. Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) pressed the Minister, the hon. and learned Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer), on how programmes could be improved. Helpfully, the Minister replied:

“Twenty-two trained imams are doing de-radicalisation programmes in our prisons, but those are not the only measures that we are introducing. We have increased our training for prison and probation officers to deal with terrorism and we are bringing in new national standards for managing terrorists on licence. We want more counter-terrorism specialist staff and we want more places in approved premises as a transition from prison to the community.”

When I challenged her on the inadequacy and quality of the provision, she said:

“we continually evaluate the programmes that we operate within our prisons.”—[Official Report, 14 July 2020; Vol. 678, c. 1361.]

If that is really the case, and if the Government are so confident that the programmes have been successful, what do they fear from commissioning a formal review of them and reporting to the House?

We really do need to know what is happening in prisons in relation to this. What programmes are being delivered? Who are they being delivered to? Who are they being delivered by? When are offenders undertaking the programme? How many de-radicalisation programmes is one offender in for a minimum sentence expected to cover? How is the success of these programmes measured? We need to understand the effectiveness of the programmes, where they work, where they do not, what can be improved, and what the Government are going to do to drive those improvements.

Neither the healthy identity intervention nor the desistance and disengagement programme courses, which form the main part of the programmes, have undergone any form of evaluation process to date. In Committee, the Minister said that most of the de-radicalisation work and programmes are done operationally inside the prison and probation service, and are not specified in legislation. He said that Ministers need the flexibility of being able to change guidance through statutory instruments, and I accept this. But we were never asking for the programme details to be placed in the Bill through this new clause—a new clause that would, I think, help to secure the public’s trust in our approach to tackling terrorism. This new clause is not about clearly outlining deradicalisation programmes in legislation; it is about reviewing how effective our deradicalisation programmes are, so it is only right that they are reviewed, with the results laid before Parliament.

That brings me on to the general financial impact of the Bill, new clause 3 and the resources it will need behind it for it to be successful and properly implemented. In Committee, the Minister told me that the impact assessment estimated an additional 50 people in prisons. Although I still believe that is an underestimation, bearing in mind the rise of far-right terrorism and other groups whose members will end up in the system, I will not rehearse those arguments yet again. I believe the cost of implementing this Bill is estimated to be about £16 million a year, but I do not think that honestly reflects the impact it will have on all service areas. Who knows, but providing the mental health support our prison and probation staff desperately need will be costly, and if we do not have that investment from elsewhere in the Department’s budget, we are not going to see the all-round service we all want delivered. So will the Minister confirm that he has covered the additional cost of creating space for new prisoners, the additional cost of having more than one specialist centre, the additional cost of having further specially trained prison officers and the cost for probation services of expanding the sentence for offenders of particular concern regime?

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a detailed and comprehensive speech, examining many of these difficult issues, which we all face. I have reflected on what he has been saying, and I believe that the way to approach these difficult issues is by having an open mind and asking a series of questions, rather than coming at any of these things with pre-conceived ideas. I am grateful for his thought and his incisive questioning of the Government, in a spirit of cross-party co-operation.

[Alex Cunningham]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that. He rightly says that this is about having an open mind. I was trying to persuade the Minister and the Conservative Members in Committee that they should have an open mind on a number of issues, because we are facing real challenges on deradicalisation programmes, the resources within the probation service and the fact that young people are going to be treated exactly the same as adult prisoners in the system—I will be coming on to that later.

We also want to understand whether the resources are available for the use of polygraphs and to deal with the impact on youth offender teams. I have already talked about the impact of longer licensing on the National Probation Service. Such measures as are in this Bill always have ripple effects, so we ask the Secretary of State to lay before the House, within three years, a report on the real financial impact of all these things. There should never be an issue of resources when it comes to justice matters, and a review would not only identify where there are issues, but arm the Secretary of State with the evidence he needs to resist further cuts to his Department’s budget and instead win some additional resources.

We should ensure that prisons are properly staffed and that those staff are properly supported, be it for their personal security or to provide them with adequate services when they suffer mental illness as a result of their job—services that we know are currently totally inadequate. I asked about these measures in Committee, but we still need reassurances. This is about not just funding for prison places, but the wider financial impact on society, especially when offenders get released from prison and need help rebuilding their lives. That is a particular concern for those who are young and may leave prison with no support system. These provisions do not come cheap, and I hope we are going to get some clearer answers on meeting the costs of the different services that I have laid out.

Throughout Committee, I stressed the importance of recognising that young offenders are different from older, adult offenders and that their age ought to be taken into consideration when they are being sentenced, even for the most terrible of crimes. That is why we tabled amendment 30, parallel amendments for Scotland and Northern Ireland and the remaining new clauses in the name of the Leader of the Opposition, myself and others.