Crime, Reoffending and Rehabilitation

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, like others, I welcome the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, to his position on the Front Bench. I must declare that I chair the Commission on Alcohol Harm. As the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, predicted, I will talk about alcohol as one of the things that leads into the funnel that eventually ends up in prison, an area that so many noble Lords have spoken about today.

Like my noble friend Lord Bird, I think it is particularly important that we focus on some of those antecedents. Last year, more than one-quarter—28%—of homicide suspects were under the influence: 13% with alcohol, 5% with illicit drugs and 10% with both at the time of the homicide. The cost to the country of alcohol-fuelled crime is £11.4 billion a year, and 20% of offenders supervised by the probation service have a known alcohol problem. Last year, Dorset neighbourhood police received more than 8,000 crime reports that were linked to alcohol in the 12 months to September 2021.

As has been said, alcohol is consistently found to be linked to domestic abuse, and 37% of domestic violence is alcohol related. To bring this to life, I shall quote Alexandra, who features in the Commission on Alcohol Harm’s report:

“I stayed in my bedroom, it was like a cage but the safest place possible. I was too scared to leave or to talk to anyone. The solution was to be invisible and quiet, hoping she would not come after me. But she did. She abused me, and my dad, mentally, emotionally, sometimes physically. For years, on a regular basis.”


How does somebody like Alexandra stand much of a chance when she grows up and goes into the world outside having been hidden away for years with that problem?

Knife crime has increased in our society, but for every such offence there are 15 violent crimes in which the victim judges that the perpetrator was under the influence of alcohol. The crime survey indicated that 39% of victims of serious offences believed that alcohol played a factor in the incident. Overall, alcohol-fuelled incidents account for 40% to 60% of violent crime, year in, year out.

The problem is far worse in areas of deprivation. Alcohol-related mortality is 20% higher in the north-east than the English average and alcohol-related violence is 5.5 times more prevalent in low socioeconomic groups. There is an important figure here for the levelling-up agenda, and this debate should feed into it.

The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, when introducing this debate, made an astoundingly important speech and I hope it resonates. It is not only his speech; it reflects his commitment to trying to solve some of these problems over the years.

I will focus on one solution relating to alcohol and driving. Recently I spoke to a magistrate. She said that drink-driving used to be the main offence, but now it is either both drink and drugs or drug-fuelled driving offences. Driving rehabilitation schemes provide a way forward. I will focus in particular on the alcohol abstinence monitoring requirement, which the amendment to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 allowed to be piloted.

This idea came from South Dakota, where Larry Long, a judge, had recognised that alcohol was the root problem of people repeatedly coming through his courtroom, and that the antecedents to alcohol abuse needed to be addressed. The catalogue of rotating cases, suspended licences, ignition locks, impounding vehicles and prison sentences were all known to fail. But with the abstinence scheme, and what are called sobriety tags, people are required to be sober for up to 120 days. In the pilot, 3,121 offenders were monitored and over 3,000 remained sober during the period. For 97% of the days monitored, they remained sober. Interestingly, afterwards they continued to remain sober, and that becomes really important because it shows the effectiveness of this scheme. As one offender said:

“I was pulled over on a Saturday morning and was devastated to blow over the limit. Like many others, during lockdown a drink at the weekend had turned into maybe a glass of wine … and it made me reflect. I’ve not found wearing the tag hard, but it has given me extra motivation to reduce my intake.”


There are other schemes as well: Checkpoint in Durham is trying to address this.

In relation to drugs, I hope we can learn from Hawaii, where the Hawaii Opportunity Probation with Enforcement—HOPE—scheme is trying to do the same with substance abuse probationers, who are addicted to drugs.

I would love to continue, in this debate, and talk about other factors, but time does not allow. I will mention simply that in Cardiff, John Shepherd has done a great deal of work with the police to try to decrease crime on the streets, particularly when there are celebrations going on in those city streets. We need to address these antecedents head on, and not be seduced into thinking that somehow a little bit of education will cut down the alcohol abuse that we see.