Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I shall be addressing my remarks only to certain parts of this somewhat hybrid Bill, starting with the provisions for legal aid cuts. Obviously all departments—indeed all of us but we are discussing departments—must share the burden of these cuts. The legal aid system may indeed have become bureaucratic and expensive. In 2009-10 it spent more than £120 million. But as one young lawyer’s e-mail pointed out, the average salary for a young legal aid lawyer is £25,000, which is comparable to that of a teacher or policeman. So quite clearly other parts of the system need attention as well as what we pay lawyers.

Upstairs in Committee on the Welfare Reform Bill, one of our major concerns is to see that the most vulnerable sections of our community—children, the disabled, those with special educational needs and their carers—are protected as far as possible from the otherwise laudable attempts by government to get those who could be in work back into employment, an aim which would be even more laudable were the jobs available. But with the many changes that the LASPO Bill brings, the need for expert legal advice for vulnerable groups will be of even greater importance if the resulting, long-term costs for this group are not to escalate, as other noble Lords have mentioned. A particular area of concern for SEC, the Special Educational Consortium, is that young people with SEND aged between 16 and 25 who are not in school, or not in provision formally designated as a school, will be outside legal aid. Nor apparently does it cover young people with a learning difficulty assessment, which sets out the support they need beyond school; that is, in a college. As SEC points out, help and advice in that particularly difficult transition to adulthood can be important for SEND families.

Equally worrying, the Equality and Human Rights Commission points out that the new criteria for receiving legal aid for private family law may well mean that fewer victims of domestic abuse will be eligible for support. The basis for these concerns is that almost 50 per cent of family court cases where a report is ordered may have involved domestic violence. Government reassurance that legal aid advice will be available beyond doubt in these circumstances is therefore important. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, made that point clearly.

We all know that imprisonment of children is both expensive and ineffective, with 80 per cent of those imprisoned reconvicted within a year. It is therefore good to see, not least because one-third of children currently remanded to youth detention are subsequently given community sentences, that Clauses 91 to 94 of the Bill, dealing with youth detention, place two sets of conditions on the court before a child can be remanded. The Government are rightly commended for this by the Prison Reform Trust, and for giving the court in Clause 73 extra powers conditionally to discharge the young offender or indeed to give a second referral order.

I turn to what follows, or should follow, from sentencing and punishment: rehabilitation. As the Prison Reform Trust points out, young men aged 18 to 20 are disproportionately represented in the prison population and clearly have not been, and are still not being, diverted from falling into a repeat pattern of offending. A much more focused approach to rehabilitating young offenders is needed. The Prison Reform Trust gives as examples two successful intensive-alternative-to-custody schemes run by Greater Manchester Probation Trust and West Yorkshire Probation Trust, both of which have achieved good results.

However, it is surely even more important to focus, much earlier in a child’s life, on early intervention. We now have conclusive evidence from Frank Field, Graham Allen and others that this approach is the way forward. The Government are again to be congratulated on taking an important step by committing to early testing of all children at the start of their primary schooling. Funds for further research are still needed to identify those chaotic families with many generations of offending behind them as the real targets for extra help and supervision. If this is achieved it will not only help to ensure useful and satisfying lives for such children, but will be saving a considerable amount of the literally millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money spent unnecessarily on prisons.

Last, and certainly not least, I turn to women. As the CAB and Equality and Human Rights Commission point out, indirect discrimination is unlawful unless it can be objectively justified. Yet over the past 15 years numbers of women in prisons have doubled. Many of these have themselves been victims of serious crime, domestic violence and sustained sexual abuse. One-third lose their homes and, worse, around 18,000 children are separated from their mothers. In 2009, women accounted for 43 per cent of the 24,114 incidents of self-harm in prison, although women are only 5 per cent of the total prison population. One essential amendment, backed by PRT, NCW and others—and certainly backed by me—would be to require the Government to produce a strategy to promote the just and appropriate treatment of women in the criminal justice system. When he replies, I would be very grateful if the Minister could give us any hope that the Government will indeed consider producing such a strategy.