Queen’s Speech

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, I had intended to be disciplined in my speech today and deal only with the famous, cryptic five words that other noble Lords have referred to. However, I can reduce what I was going to say because of the contributions from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and the noble Lords, Lord Cormack and Lord Butler. I agreed with pretty well everything those three said, and they said it more eloquently than I would have done. So, I will allow myself a minute on another subject—women in the criminal justice system.

A great deal has been said about the proposals in the gracious Speech, but the issue of women prisoners has not been to the fore so far. I come to this from three pieces of experience. In the 1970s, I went with Joan Lester MP—a wonderful parliamentarian who was, sadly, only in this House for a short time—to visit the three mother and baby units that then existed in England. I saw for myself the cycle of deprivation that allowed one teenager expecting to give birth in Holloway to have Holloway Prison as the place of birth on her own birth certificate. If ever one needed an example of the cycle of deprivation, it was there. Nearly 20 years later, I chaired the trust of a local hospital where women came from Holloway to give birth, as they no longer gave birth in prison. They came in shackles, chained to a prison officer. That was prison and Home Office policy. We changed it, but only after many, many women had gone through that and because some brave midwives stood up and spoke out.

There was much that needed to be done and there is much that still needs to be done. Reference was made at Question Time to the current storyline in “The Archers”. I understand that the Lord Chancellor is, like me, an addict of the programme and is concerned about the description of what is now happening to a pregnant woman in the criminal justice system who is in prison. I hope that, in the reforms which have been outlined, particular attention will be paid to the situation of women, and women with children in particular.

I move on to the cryptic five words. I endorse what has been said: while the issue may be both the primacy of the Commons and secondary legislation, I agree with the conclusions of your Lordships’ Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee that,

“the nature of secondary legislation is such that the key issue is not, as the Strathclyde Review suggests, the ‘primacy of the Commons’ but the role of Parliament in scrutinising and, where appropriate, challenging the Executive”.

The final say must go to the democratically elected House, but not the only say. At the moment, we do not have a satisfactory way of distributing responsibility for scrutiny between the two Houses and I endorse the suggestion to urgently set up a Joint Committee to look at how we can do this properly.

I have one more thing to say. It may be because we have talked so much about the prison system, but I think that the Strathclyde review was set up to administer a “short, sharp shock”. I first heard that phrase in relation to the young offenders’ estate. This time, it was about an old offenders’ estate—your Lordships’ House. The concern of the Government was not only this one defeat on secondary legislation. Its concern was a string of defeats on primary legislation, on amendments to Bills in an absolutely proper parliamentary way. This is because the Government have got themselves into a terrible state over the size of the House of Lords but are not addressing the issues of the inflated numbers in the Lords and how party representation is distributed. I would have been far happier if the gracious Speech had talked about addressing the issues of secondary legislation and proper parliamentary scrutiny as well as the size of this House, which is bringing it into disrepute.