Justice
Chris Ruane Excerpts(4 years, 9 months ago)
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Chris Ruane
Many hon. Members mentioned the £80 million that was raised through the sale of Holloway. That huge sum of money could transform the number of women going into prisons across the United Kingdom. That would save the Government money in the end, too, so it would be a win-win situation. Will the Minister say something about that before he concludes?
Robert Buckland
I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for reminding me about that. As the Prisons Minister, I am responsible for a very large estate, and it would be difficult to hypothecate that money in the way that hon. Members desire. Having said that, some of the funds that were raised have provided a women’s centre there, and the money is being ploughed back into the estate anyway. It is being used to make our prison estate safer, more decent and much better. It is difficult to hypothecate that money purely for these particular purposes.
[Official Report, 24 July 2019, Vol. 663, c. 635WH.]
Letter of correction from the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, the right hon. and learned Member for South Swindon (Robert Buckland):
An error has been identified in the response I made, as the then Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, to the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane). The correct answer should have been:
Female Offender Strategy: One Year On
Chris Ruane Excerpts(4 years, 11 months ago)
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Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)
I welcome this debate, which has been sponsored by my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green). There is a cross-party dynamic here today and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee), who progressed this issue during the two years that he was in post. I also pay tribute to the right hon. Member for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Gauke), who I am reliably informed has just resigned. Their approach got buy-in from across the political divide.
I had the fortune, although perhaps “misfortune” is the word, to visit a women’s prison, at Eastwood in Gloucestershire, with the Select Committee on Welsh Affairs about 10 or 12 years ago. It was a depressing experience. The women in the prison freely gave evidence through their dinner time; they were rewarded by getting leftovers for their meal. We sent them a box of House of Commons chocolates as a reward, and they were not even allowed to receive that present. We need to treat all those who are in the criminal justice system with respect.
There is compelling evidence to indicate that custodial sentences of six months or less do not work. The Government have, at last, recognised that and have proposed to do something about it.
All women in prison are disadvantaged, but women in Wales are doubly so. Throughout 2016, 62% of sentenced women entering prison across England and Wales were serving sentences of six months or less. The comparable figure for men was 45%. In Wales, a massive 74% of women prisoners are serving sentences of six months or less. The cost of keeping a person in jail is a massive £50,000 a year. Some of those women are in jail for not paying their TV licence. It is £154 for TV licence; it costs £150 a day to keep that woman in jail. Women are put in jail for not paying their council tax. I am really pleased that the Welsh Government took the initiative earlier this year not to pursue people who have not paid their council tax for a custodial sentence.
I pay tribute to the women’s centre in Rhyl, run by the wonderful Gemma Fox: it does fantastic work on a shoestring budget. She only has about nine volunteers at the moment, and they look after 300 women a year. One hundred of those women have gone through the penal system. The women’s centre is not given the resources it should be, and more women are ending up in custody; in fact, North Wales is the worst police authority of the 43 in the country for sending women to prison.
Some 80% of austerity cuts have ended up on the shoulders of women. That has a consequential effect on their world view and on their ability to provide for their families. As a last resort, many of them have committed crimes, such as shoplifting or not paying their bills, and they have ended up in prison because of that.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend share my concern that one of the reasons why women end up in such positions is that they are not receiving the benefits that they are entitled to? Nottingham Women’s Centre told me that, in the last 12 months, its welfare rights adviser recovered £463,000 in benefits that had been lost to women. Would it not help if we sorted that problem out?
Chris Ruane
Absolutely, and I will finish on this note. The women’s centre in Rhyl is not just for female prisoners or women going into or coming out of the criminal justice system. It has a holistic approach to giving advice to women on parenting, domestic and sexual abuse, housing issues, finance and employment. Women go there to recover their confidence. There is a social mix there, with middle-class women as well as working-class women and those who have no job. These centres should be funded by central Government, not least with the £80 million that was saved from Holloway.
It says in the Bible that people should
“beat their swords into ploughshares”.
We should be turning our women’s prisons into women’s community centres.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
I will be brief. I want to urge the Minister to preside over a system where the courts are blind to the gender of a defendant and blind to their race or their sexuality. I was brought up with the belief that everybody was equal before the law, and that is the system that I want the Minister to preside over. It quite clearly is not the case at the moment. For every single category of offence—every single one, according to the Ministry of Justice’s own figures—a woman is less likely to be sent to prison than a man, is likely to be sent to prison for a shorter period and will spend less of their sentence in prison.
We have today a “belief in equality only when it suits” brigade. They do not want equality in sentencing or how the courts deal with people. They want to plead for special circumstances. All the things that the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) said at the outset about women in prison with trauma, mental health problems, domestic abuse or self-harm issues apply to many male prisoners in exactly the same way. This is not unique to female prisoners. Many male prisoners have exactly the same troubled backgrounds. She also talked about children—when sentencing, the impact on children should be considered when sentencing mothers. What about considering the impact of sentencing fathers on those children? Men have children too. Many women, it has to be said, have already had their kids taken off them before they are sent to prison because they are unfit to be mothers, according to the Ministry of Justice.
Philip Davies
Well, they have already had their kids taken off them, so why on earth is that a factor in whether they are sent to prison? They are deemed to be unfit mothers. We cannot have a get-out-of-jail card for people to say, “Oh, I’m a mother; I can commit any crime I like, but because I am a mother I shouldn’t be sent to prison.”
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Robert Buckland)
Of course, Mrs Ryan. I am grateful for the reminder, because the mover of the debate, the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) and I served on the Justice Committee together for some years. I pay tribute to her for this debate and for her work.
I will just address the remarks by the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain), for whom I have very high regard. I think he is a little unfair when he suggests that all the work that needs to be done under this strategy, or the progress that he envisages, could have been achieved in just one year. Those of us who have worked closely with the criminal justice system for many years know that the best and most sustainable reforms take time. We are dealing with a developing cohort of prisoners—men, women and children—who have differing needs and who need to be managed sensitively. It is not an easy task.
In saying that it is not easy, I am not shying away at all from the nature of the responsibility that I and the Ministry of Justice have to get this right. That is why, in the strategy, there was a refreshing frankness about the need to acknowledge the issue and to get not only the language but the approach right.
[Ms Karen Buck in the Chair]
Today’s debate has been, in great measure, mature, sensible and evidence-based, and I welcome the contributions from all right hon. and hon. Members. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) is right, by the way, in his figures when it comes to sentenced women offenders; about one third of them are in custody because of offences of violence against a person. He is correct about that. He is also right to remind us that justice must be equal, and that there will be plenty of occasions when, regardless of the gender of the individual before a judge, that person will have to go to prison for serious offences. I think the right hon. Member for Delyn (David Hanson), a former Prisons and Home Office Minister, acknowledged that.
We should not shy away from the reality facing judges and magistrates: there will be times when custody has to be the option, bearing in mind the seriousness of the offence. What I want to see from the criminal justice system—I speak at a time of change; we have an interregnum in my Department—is a system that is smart, not just in the use of resources, but in the administration of justice and our penal system, in a way that means that, when people have served their punishment and are released from custody, we end up with fewer victims of crime, not more. That is what reducing reoffending is all about.
There have been a lot of important pieces of information today; I agree with hon. Members who made the point that most custodial sentences for women are short. In 2018, 77% of custodial sentences for women were less than 12 months, compared with 62% for men. Over the same period, 55% of female offenders were sentenced to a custodial sentence length of up to and including three months, compared with only 35% of male offenders. To balance out the correct statistics that my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley cited, last year just over one third of immediate custodial sentences for women were for shoplifting offences, compared with only 11% for men, and the average custodial sentence served was just under two months.
I went to Eastwood Park women’s prison a few weeks ago, and the average sentence length there is about 10 weeks, which is not enough time to do much with a convicted prisoner or to do meaningful work, other than to provide as much support and help as possible for women who are often in a very difficult position. We must all understand the point about vulnerability and the evidence base about the female cohort in order to get this strategy right.
Female prisoners are more than twice as likely as male prisoners to report needing help for mental health problems. The figures are stark: it is 49% of women and 18% of men. About 60% of female offenders have experienced domestic abuse. Female prisoners are more likely to have been taken into care, experienced abuse or witnessed violence in the home as a child. Clear evidential facts rightly underpin our strategy.
The figures relating to custody for non-payment of television licences are, I am glad to say, low. Four women were admitted to custody for non-payment of television licences in 2018, and in the same year three women were admitted to custody for non-payment of council tax. It is important that I put that on the record for balance. Sadly, too many people in our country are living in very straitened circumstances, and plenty of people in those circumstances do not end up in the criminal justice system. We must be very careful when we talk about the cycle of poverty and what it means for offending. Having represented many women in very difficult circumstances as counsel, I know the challenges that many of them face. The lives that they have led are not lives that anybody here would choose to lead. I have seen it for myself. Eastwood Park was familiar to me because some of my clients served sentences there. That is why I was particularly interested in seeing its excellent mother and baby unit and talking to the women, some of whom were in for longer periods. Their experiences and what they had to say were profoundly interesting. Some of the younger women I met were in for only a very short period, but even to my unclinical eye some were clearly vulnerable.
The strategy recognises those facts. It recognises the range of women’s need. In setting out the three-pronged aims, it reinforces and embeds what Baroness Corston found in her groundbreaking report of 2007. The aims are that fewer women should come into the criminal justice system in the first place, that fewer women should serve short custodial sentences, and that we should create a positive environment that supports the rehabilitation of women who need to be in custody.
Hon. Members have spent much time rightly examining the work that has been done. Some criticism has been made of the £5 million multi-year funding. Of course, that is not the only part of our response to support women who are themselves victims or in a cycle of offending. I am sorry that an hon. Member who intervened in the debate but is no longer present found the system to be unduly bureaucratic. We must ensure that the way the funding is spent is based on sound evidence, and that it has a positive effect. That funding is being rolled out effectively, sustaining and enhancing 26 services to develop new women’s centres and to pilot innovative specialist services across England and Wales.
I make no apology for piloting initiatives. We have to get this right. The Government were rightly criticised for jumping the gun when it came to transforming rehabilitation and making assumptions that sadly could not be sustained. The Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar)—who sadly could not be with us today because he is addressing the House on an urgent question—and I feel very strongly about that. This is also about the work that is being done more widely.
Chris Ruane
Many hon. Members mentioned the £80 million that was raised through the sale of Holloway. That huge sum of money could transform the number of women going into prisons across the United Kingdom. That would save the Government money in the end, too, so it would be a win-win situation. Will the Minister say something about that before he concludes?
Robert Buckland
I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for reminding me about that. As the Prisons Minister, I am responsible for a very large estate, and it would be difficult to hypothecate that money in the way that hon. Members desire. Having said that, some of the funds that were raised have provided a women’s centre there, and the money is being ploughed back into the estate anyway. It is being used to make our prison estate safer, more decent and much better. It is difficult to hypothecate that money purely for these particular purposes.[Official Report, 9 September 2019, Vol. 664, c. 6MC.]
Hon. Members asked many questions, and sadly I do not have all the time in the world to deal with them. I want to talk briefly about the important work of Lord Farmer’s review and the vital issue of family ties. Women are more likely to be primary carers than men when entering the system. Of course, the innocent children of those relationships are the ones who suffer. We are very grateful to Lord Farmer for his review, and we will take his work forward. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley is right that the fact that someone might be a carer should not always be a reason for a court not to go down a particular sentencing path. Judges have to have discretion, and it would be bad sentencing practice for one issue to trump everything else.
I will try to deal with the questions asked by the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston. I feel very strongly about pre-sentence reports, and I have asked questions of my civil servants. There is an improved new checklist to make sure that the probation officer is asking the right question about women offenders, and we will roll it out nationally. Part of my aim is to see PSRs used more widely throughout the criminal justice system. I will write to the hon. Lady on all her other questions, because I appreciate that she needs time to respond.
Children’s Funeral Fund
Chris Ruane Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Edward Argar
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. I should, in recognising the contributions made by Members across both sides of the House, recognise his contribution to this campaign and this debate, and indeed that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), who has taken a very close interest in it. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) has, I believe, just become chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on funerals, so he will continue to be active on this. He is absolutely right. We do need to get the scheme right. We need to make it effective and legal, but as simple as we can. We are working to devise a comprehensive publicity programme to ensure that both the funeral sector and, of course, bereaved families are fully informed and fully understand how the fund will work, and how they can access it, in advance of its launch.
Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)
Could not the complexity be simplified if we just asked what they did in Scotland and Wales and replicated it? If it can be done speedily in Scotland and Wales, and in local authorities in Northern Ireland, why can it not be done speedily here, after the long and fantastic campaigning of my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris)?
Edward Argar
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. He is right that we can draw on the lessons from the devolved Administrations, and I will touch on that subsequently. However, there are different arrangements in, for example, Wales around the provision of coffins. I agree with the hon. Member for Swansea East that that is an essential part of this. We are looking to see if we can bring that within the scheme in a way different from that used in Wales. There are differences, and there is also a different legislative context given the devolution settlement—I will touch on that in a minute.
I entirely accept that for those dealing with the terrible burden of bereavement, progress has been slow. I want to reassure the House that, as the Prime Minister announced in the House on 27 February, work is on track in each of the areas I mentioned: a clear policy, a legislative vehicle to ensure that it is legal, and a strong and robust delivery mechanism to deliver the fund this summer.
Oral Answers to Questions
Chris Ruane Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)
The number and percentage of women given custodial sentences has dropped in many areas of the country. In north Wales, the figure has increased by 57%. Will the Minister look into the reasons for this huge increase?
Dr Phillip Lee
I am very happy to. Will the hon. Gentleman please send me the information?
Prison Officers (Work-related Stress)
Chris Ruane Excerpts(9 years, 6 months ago)
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John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
The background to the debate is the publication last month of a report on work-related stress and the well-being of prison officers. It was commissioned by the Prison Officers Association because of the union’s ongoing serious concerns about the health of its members, especially in the light of the Government’s policy of increasing the retirement age to 68 for prison officers and the startling cuts that have taken place.
The report was undertaken by three experts in the field of occupational health, and particularly occupational psychology, at the university of Bedfordshire. I pay tribute to those researchers for their assiduous work. They were Dr Gail Kinman, who is professor of occupational health psychology; Dr Andrew Clements, a lecturer in occupational psychology; and, assisting them, Jacqui Hart, a PhD candidate and researcher. All of them are appropriately qualified and have high reputations in the field.
Let me take the House through some of the findings of the research, which many of us have found shocking to say the least. The Health and Safety Executive establishes benchmarks to measure and monitor work-related stress among employees. Those benchmarks have been developed into a framework after extensive consultation with employers and the unions, and they are agreed standards by which organisations employing staff can assess the work-related stress experienced by those staff.
There are seven elements of work activity—described as the psychosocial hazards—and they are the most critical predictions of employee well-being. They relate first to the demands of the job—the work load, pace, and hours of work—and to control of work, which is the way a person can control their working environment. There is also management support, peer support—the help workers receive from their colleagues—and relationships, which includes interpersonal relationships, interpersonal conflicts and bullying. The benchmarks also include the measurement of the role and whether the job requirements are clear, and whether or not there is belief in the objectives of the organisation. The final benchmark is about change and how well that is communicated and managed in an organisation. The Health and Safety Executive has developed a self-reporting questionnaire that is widely used across industry and the public service.
Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)
Last week I met representatives from the Prison Officers Association to discuss mindfulness in the Prison Service. Mindfulness has been accepted by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence as an intervention for repeat episodes of depression, but it also improves compassion, reduces absenteeism, helps with relationship building, and reduces stress. Does my hon. Friend think that mindfulness in the Prison Service could help improve job satisfaction and the mental and physical health of prison officers?
John McDonnell
I pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend in this House in introducing mindfulness training for Members as well as staff, and developing that whole concept. I have explored the development of mindfulness which, despite elements of contention, has become extremely popular in its application in working environments. I will suggest to the Minister that we need a meeting to talk about the strategy from here on in, and one provision we could include in that is the offer of services such as mindfulness in the sector, which could prove extremely effective.
Chris Ruane
A new prison is to be built in Wrexham and the chief executive of North Wales health authority is predisposed towards mindfulness. Does my hon. Friend think that teaching mindfulness to prisoners and prison officers at that new prison from the outset would be a good experiment and pilot scheme for mindfulness in prisons?
John McDonnell
Given our concerns about that prison—a Titan prison that will house a larger number of prisoners than any other prison has housed—and about the scale of such a prison and the problems that will result from it, I think mindfulness would be an important strategy that should be built in from the beginning.
As I was saying, the health and safety questionnaire was developed in consultation with employers and union representatives. It is now used widely across the public and private sectors and is based on a self-report questionnaire. It is a standard procedure used by academics who in this case established a survey online. They received 1,682 respondents, which is as large as any national opinion poll, and it was a fairly representative sample.
Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)
I echo the thoughts of the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd), and thank you, Mr Speaker, and the Minister for letting me speak, and also my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). I also congratulate him on securing this debate.
I had not intended to speak. I was halfway out the door when I heard the subject of the debate, and I came back to listen to it because it is an important subject. My hon. Friend has given some crucial facts to us, such as that 60% of prison officers feel under tremendous strain and one in 10 feel that life is not worth living. These are terrible statistics. I would like to add to those the statistics that I have received from parliamentary questions, such as that 90% of prisoners have one of the top five psychiatric conditions, and, as my hon. Friend said, that there has been a 69% increase in prison suicides over the past year alone. If we have prison officers on one side who are highly stressed and prisoners on the other side who are highly stressed, that is a recipe for disaster. It is a potentially explosive situation which I think needs to be looked at in the round.
I want to be consensual in what I say, but I do think stopping prisoners receiving books, or proposing to do that, was a step backwards. It was a step towards the 19th century, not the 21st century. I hope the rest of my speech will be consensual, however.
Within society itself, there is a mental health crisis. According to another parliamentary question I put down, there was a 500% increase in the issuing of prescriptions for anti-depressants between 1991 and 2011, from 9 million prescriptions to 49 million. There is an issue in society, therefore, but it is exacerbated within prisons.
As I mentioned in my intervention, I believe that mindfulness can play an important role in helping us to get on top of these issues. Mindfulness was introduced in Parliament by me and Professor Richard Layard, a Labour Lord, in January last year. Some 115 MPs and Lords have been involved, and 10% of MPs have had mindfulness training. It has been introduced here in Parliament, which is a hothouse—there is a lot of stress here—and I think it can be rolled out to the Prison Service, the police service and the armed services.
What matters is how we pitch mindfulness as an intervention, so that it is accepted. In fact it is quite chic. Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post practises and preaches it. It is done by Apple, Google and all the top international companies. If it is good enough for the captains of industry, it is also good enough for ordinary workers like prison officers and police officers, and, indeed, their clients, in tandem—because mindfulness works best when it includes the teacher and the pupil, the GP and the patient, so that compassion is increased.
I believe that if we were to introduce mindfulness in prisons, it would help with a whole range of issues. Prisoners are literally a captive audience. They are in there 24 hours a day, and what do they do? Do they learn the skills that mindfulness brings—the skills of gratitude, appreciation, personal balance and equanimity that would help them to be better prisoners? Those skills would help them to be less violent towards the prison guards and to be better citizens when they move out into society.
This has worked in the past. Prison officers and police officers face stressful situations. A £5 million grant was given to the US Marines to undertake mindfulness training in a pre-combat situation. They were trained in the US before they went out to Afghanistan and Iraq and it worked. Indeed, it was such a success that it is now being rolled out to the US army. If it can work for big beefy Marines, it could work for British prison officers. The work with the Marines involved a five-year pilot project. The results are still coming in, but they are all positive.
The biggest impacts for the Marines were not only in the field among the officers and their fellow Marines, but in their relationships with their spouses and children when they got back to the US. My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington mentioned the fact that prison officers felt disconnected when they went home at night and were unable to take part in family activities because they were so stressed out. Also, they do not earn fantastic wages. All jobs are stressful, but sometimes these officers’ family lives and community lives are destroyed because of needless stress. Sometimes we politicians take decisions that make people’s jobs even more stressful, and the stress for those officers has been cranked up in recent years with the increase in the number of prisoners and the reduction in the number of prison officers.
We have a golden opportunity to introduce mindfulness in prisons. Prison officers and police officers were in Parliament last week, in Westminster Hall, to meet representatives of the Mindfulness Initiative, which is looking into the use of mindfulness in the criminal justice system, in education, in the health service and in the workplace. We have taken evidence from experts across the UK and around the world, and we are now drawing up policies that we hope to present on 15 January next year. I will send the Minister a copy of those policies, and I hope that he will be able to make an assessment of the role of mindfulness in the prison service and the emergency services.
I hope, too, that the Minister will consider introducing mindfulness in the new prison in Wrexham. Health services are devolved; they are a Welsh Government issue and a North Wales Health Authority issue. Prison services, however, are not devolved. There needs to be a meeting between the health authority, Ministers in Cardiff and Ministers here in London to consider setting up a pilot project to measure key indicators such as the absenteeism of prison officers, the recidivism of prisoners and the stress levels of all involved. If mindfulness worked in the Wrexham setting, perhaps it could be rolled out across the whole of the British prison service for the benefit of the prison officers, of the prisoners and of wider society.
Oral Answers to Questions
Chris Ruane Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Jeremy Wright
Of course management of the prison estate is the responsibility of this Government, as indeed when the last Government were in power it was theirs. There is a variety of reasons why the tornado teams attend, and the serious incidents that they attend are at roughly half the level they were under the last Government, so the right hon. Gentleman needs to be clear about the statistics he uses. Frankly, if he spent a bit more time doing the job he has and a bit less time chasing the Mayor of London’s job, he might get those things right. But let us get something else very clear. It is important that we maintain a safe, secure and decent estate, and that is exactly what we will do. Where there are increased levels of assault, which I agree are a matter of concern, we need to address that in a number of ways, and that is exactly what we are doing.
Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)
13. What his policy is on support for victims of crimes.
The Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims (Damian Green)
The Government are committed to providing more support than ever to victims of crime, and to giving them a louder voice in the criminal justice system. We have implemented a new victims code that tells people what to expect at every stage of the process. We aim to spend up to £100 million to support victims to cope and where possible recover from crime. This is roughly double what we currently spend, with offenders paying a much greater share. Last month we announced the first dedicated fund of £500,000 to support victims of male rape.
Chris Ruane
The Minister speaks of a code of practice. Will he confirm that if it is ignored by the police or the courts, the victim has no recourse whatsoever? The code is, in effect, toothless.
Oral Answers to Questions
Chris Ruane Excerpts(11 years, 4 months ago)
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Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)
I thank the Ministry of Justice for granting the appropriate licence to the university of Leicester to exhume the remains that have turned out to be those of Richard III. Will the Minister confirm that under the terms of the licence, it is up to the university to decide what to do with the remains and that the university has handed them to Leicester cathedral and that Richard III will be buried there?
Chris Grayling
On behalf of the whole House, I congratulate all of those who have been involved. It is an historic occasion and an extraordinary piece of history. I hope everyone will come together for a proper service to mark the occasion, and for a formal internment in the cathedral.
Mr Speaker
Order. I am immensely grateful to the Minister. I am sorry to disappoint colleagues, but Chris Ruane will have to have the last question.
Chris Ruane
You have not disappointed me, Mr Speaker. The prisons Minister misunderstood the position of my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas) on the issue of a prison for north Wales. Will he meet north Wales MPs of all parties to discuss this important issue, in the interests of clarity?
Jeremy Wright
I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman is interested in clarity, because Government Members have been somewhat confused about what the Labour party in north Wales wants. Perhaps it would help if the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends were to meet their local councillors and decide what the Labour party in north Wales wants. We will then be happy to talk to them.
Policing (North Wales)
Chris Ruane Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Susan Elan Jones
I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman has raised that subject—something told me it would appear. The position is clear. Before the last election, the Labour Government made it plain that, in common with the police, they would agree to 12% cuts in order to reduce back-office costs. I think that the hon. Gentleman is referring to what a future Labour Government may have to do with the so-called deficit plans of this Government, which appear to mean total cuts but very little growth. It would be dishonest of me to offer a prediction in such circumstances, but let me be clear: if there was a Labour Government in office now, we would be sticking to 12%. The hon. Gentleman is incorrect in what he says from his central office crib sheet.
Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)
Those calculations of 12% were given at a time when the economy was improving—GDP was going up, unemployment was going down and confidence was going up. At that point, things were on the mend. Since this Government have been in power, they have added an extra £158 billion to the bill. We have to recognise that.
Susan Elan Jones
That is absolutely correct. There is no question about what the previous Labour Government did, or about what a Labour Government would do if they were in power now.
The Government speak about back-office costs, but they seem to forget that forensics, family liaison and call-handlers, among others, fall within that definition. Surely no one in the 21st century can define front-line policing as a few Dixon of Dock Greens plodding amiably around the patch. In fact, it seems that everyone, except for the Ministers in charge of the policy, agrees that there is some link between the number of officers available and crime levels. In other words, fewer police officers will find it more difficult to police crime.
If crime increases in the coming months and years, I am sure that it will be blamed on snow, an extra bank holiday, the eurozone or, for all we know, on Britain not quite making it in the Eurovision song contest. The victims of crime, however, will ask why the Government did not listen when the experts told them that a 20% cut was too much. We need to act now to stop that happening.
The only officers whom the Minister seems to think are important are the ones who do not yet exist—the elected police commissioners. There is not one shred of evidence that imposing these outside managers on police forces will cut crime by one iota. The policy is a gimmick, pure and simple. It is totally unfounded on fact or previous best practice. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Police Authorities of Wales has recommended that the establishment of police commissioners—or, in their words, the “bureaucratic web” and a
“poor model of police governance”—
should be deferred. The Government, however, continue to press forward regardless.
The plan will not come free. Incredibly, even though North Wales police, like other police forces, is losing police officers because it has not been given enough funds to pay for them, the Government have still found £100 million—the cost of 600 full-time officers—to pay for these new positions. They argue that the plan will connect the public to the police service, but the idea that the public see more elected officials—bureaucrats by any other name—as the answer to crime, rather than more policemen and women, is totally absurd.
The creation of the new commissioner posts will bring politics into policing like never before, providing yet another difficulty and distraction for chief constables trying to do their jobs to protect law-abiding citizens in the midst of a funding crisis. Operational independence will be threatened as electioneering takes the place of long-term planning. Collaboration between forces could be threatened as commissioners from different political parties prefer to compete with each other, with an eye on the next election. That is not the way to run a police force. I imagine that most of our political parties will field candidates for the positions and that some of the victors will do the best job they can if they are elected, but that is not the point. The point is that the policy itself is a total shambles.
Next week, Parliament will be asked to vote on the police grant report, which will seek to cut a further 7% from North Wales police’s budget—£3.4 million. I see that the Minister appears to be working his electronic device. Perhaps he could throw this calculation in: £3.4 million. North Wales cannot afford these cuts. If we want to support our police and our communities, we must stand up against the reckless cuts that the Government are trying to push through. It would be totally irresponsible to go ahead when officer numbers have already had to fall and when communities are losing their police stations. Instead, our officers should get the backing they deserve and the funding they need to stay in their jobs and do them without interference.
I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us why he thinks he knows better than Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, better than the Association of Police Authorities and better than the Police Federation of England and Wales. I hope that he will tell us what he thinks North Wales police should do differently to avoid losing officers, how they can make our large rural areas more efficient to police and what possible reason Members have for voting through a further 7% budget cut next week. However, I hope even more that Ministers will listen to the evidence and hear how it affects north Wales and other parts of the UK, and that they will have the courage to think again.
Chris Ruane
On that partisan point, will the right hon. Gentleman tell us what happened to the 3,000 extra police officers that his party promised before the last election during the middle of the economic crisis?
Tom Brake
I am very happy to respond to that; indeed, I have responded to similar points in a number of debates since the new Government were elected. The financial circumstances do not allow such pledges to be funded. It is as simple as that. What this discussion has revealed is that we need to have an important debate—perhaps if we set aside partisanship, we could have that debate—about using police officers effectively. For example, if we recruit more police officers and put them in a call centre, it might add to police officer numbers, but it does not necessarily equate to a more effective police force.
Mr Llwyd
The hon. Gentleman refers to Rhyl. That also surprises me. There has been a fairly high crime rate there for some years. Of course, we understand that this policy will be reviewed in the coming weeks. I hope sincerely that those who will be making the decisions will have some regard to what is being argued here today. I support fully what the hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) said.
Guto Bebb (Aberconwy) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Crausby.
This has been an interesting debate, but it did start out in an extremely partisan manner. Indeed, many hoteliers in Llandudno in my constituency would be amazed at the glee with which their loss of business is seen by Labour Opposition Members. To return to the issue that we are debating today, we need to consider the comments made by the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd). The new plans have had teething problems. They are clearly not working in his constituency, and I accept his comments. But it must be stated that the chief constable’s decision to change the way that the service operated in north Wales has been positive in some parts. In my constituency—I have visited the police station in Llandudno and Llanrwst, for example—the response to the changes has been positive, with the view of the officers being that they are spending less time on paperwork and getting more support across north Wales. That is important, because previously north Wales was, for some bizarre reason, split into three almost independent sections—east, central and west—and little or no support passed between them.
The changes have ensured that the police are able to serve north Wales as an entity. From my position, representing Aberconwy in the centre region, there has been an improvement, with support officers coming from Corwen, for example, to support officers from Llanrwst. We should welcome that effort to ensure that we make best use of the resources. I pay tribute to the chief constable, who is doing a difficult task in trying to deal with cuts to the budget, which are not being denied by Labour Members. We have heard the shadow Chancellor comment that he cannot guarantee a reversal of any cuts. Yet in a debate such as this we get opportunistic chants from Opposition Members claiming that things would be significantly different if they were in power.
It is important that we consider the way that police numbers grew in north Wales during Labour’s time in office. It is true that the number of police numbers in north Wales increased by 13% between 1997 and 2000—I pay tribute to the Labour Government for increasing police numbers—but in the same period the number of civilian officers working for north Wales police increased by 84%, so it is debatable whether resources were put on to the front line.
Chris Ruane
Does the hon. Gentleman think that the increase in resources is a prime reason why north Wales was one of the safest places to live in the whole UK?
Guto Bebb
It is interesting that the hon. Gentleman says that the increase in resources is necessarily the reason why North Wales police have performed well. The hon. Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) said that higher police numbers equated to falling crime. It is tempting to say that that must be so, but during Labour’s time in office there was a significant period when the number of police officers in north Wales increased but crime increased and a period when the number of police officers declined and crime declined.
There is a perception that more officers working will have an impact on crime levels, but statistics from the Labour party’s period in office do not necessarily support that view. My view is that the use made of those officers is just as important as the number of officers. Similarly, getting rid of waste and double practices, such as having three areas in north Wales that did not work together, is just as important as the numbers.
The number of police officers in north Wales has been reduced by 108, according to statistics that I have seen from North Wales police, but the chief constable has also said that it is looking to recruit an extra 72 officers in the next financial year. There is a tendency for the Opposition to portray everything as bad and fragile, when in the year to September 2011 there was a 1% decline in the total number of crimes committed in north Wales.
It is dispiriting for officers in north Wales, who are working hard to try to deal with these issues, to be told that the police service in north Wales is failing, when we have seen a decline in police numbers.
Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) on securing this important debate on an issue that is dear to our hearts as elected politicians and to our constituents. I will not be police-bashing. The police in north Wales have done an excellent job over the years, including the former chief constable, Richard Brunstrom. Despite all the shenanigans and publicity-seeking, he put the extra funding that we provided into front-line services. Mark Polin, the new chief constable who replaced him, is also doing an excellent job.
However, things are not right in north Wales. The latest statistics show that there was a 1% drop in crime, but if one drills down and looks at the areas of crime, there has been a 12% increase in household burglaries, a 30% increase in fraud, a 10% increase in theft, and a 60% increase in robbery. Those increases are directly attributable to the cuts in the number of police officers and back-office staff. North Wales used to be the safest place to live in the United Kingdom, and if we are too complacent and do not stand up and be counted, and if we do not challenge the coalition Government, we will not be doing our job as Opposition MPs. The Opposition have been told not to be party political about the matter, but it was a political party that made the cuts. That political party stood on a manifesto of putting 3,000 extra police officers on the beat, but it cut the number by 16,000. Those political decisions were made by political parties, and Labour MPs in opposition will hold the Government to account.
Chris Ruane
I will not give way yet. I have a few more messages for the right hon. Gentleman. He stood up and said that he was party political for 13 years, and that he hoped he had done a good job in holding the then Government to account. We are going to be party political, and we will hold the right hon. Gentleman and his party and the other coalition party to account.
Chris Ruane
I will provide solutions. I will come to them. When my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), the shadow Minister, announced an inquiry into the future of policing, the Minister said that that was political abdication. Now is the time to have an inquiry, as we are going into a double-dip recession with massive cuts. Now is the time to analyse the issues facing a modern police force in the 21st century, but the Minister called that political abdication.
Another issue is the decline in the number of criminals caught and prosecuted. In north Wales, there was a drop of 11.5% between April and November last year. I do not believe that that is the fault of the police. North Wales is a big geographical area. It requires a lot of policing and resources, and a lot of funding.
I have given the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), a bit of a roasting, and the hon. Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb) deserves the same. He did not stand up for his constituency when his party pulled out of holding its spring conference at Llandudno, and he has not stood up for policing in north Wales. The cuts are dangerous, and are having a dangerous impact in our communities. All he can say is to ask what the Labour party did. He and his Government are in power now, and they are implementing cuts too far and too fast.
Guto Bebb
I said that it is easy to spout platitudes from the Opposition Benches. The truth of the matter is that the Labour party has not explained how it would deal with the current deficit and ensure that the cuts in north Wales would be avoided in view of the shadow Chancellor’s comments that he would change any spending cuts undertaken by the Government.
Chris Ruane
The hon. Gentleman’s complacency is unbelievable, as is that from his colleague, the junior Minister at the Wales Office, the Under-Secretary of State for Wales. When faced with these horrendous statistics, he said that it was most important that crime continues to fall in Wales, and that the latest figures showed that recorded crime is down 7%, which is even better than the 4% fall for England and Wales. That is complacency.
The Home Secretary did not stand up for policing during the cuts review. Other Ministers stood up for their Departments and their cuts were lowered. The chief police officers said they could cope with 12% cuts, and that was what the Labour agreed to. Our answer was to listen to what the professionals had to say, and to back them with 12% cuts. That was our answer then, and that is our answer now. The Tory and Liberal cuts are too far, too fast. There are also cuts in court costs. Denbigh magistrates court and Rhyl family court have both closed in my constituency. The prison population is at an all-time high. We are coming to a double-dip recession, and we know that crime patterns follow employment patterns.
The cuts are wrong; the pacing is wrong; the timing is wrong; and the scale is wrong. The pacing is wrong because the cuts are front-loaded. All the cuts are coming to suit the political timetable of a general election in 2015. The Government are front-loading the cuts and introducing them thick and fast to avoid the political consequences in 2015. The timing is wrong. We may be going into a double-dip recession when crime rates will rise, but the policing cuts are bigger than ever. The scale is wrong, because 12% is acceptable, but 20% is not.
Hon. Members have asked what Labour would do. When Labour left power, unemployment was coming down, confidence was going up, and growth was going up. Since then, all three have gone in the opposite direction. That has led to £158 billion of extra deficit, which is the responsibility of the coalition parties. That is what the shadow Chancellor meant when he made his comments. He cannot plan for 2015 and say that he will not cut this or that. We do not know how much more of a pig’s ear the coalition Government will make. How high will the £158 billion go? Will it perhaps go to £258 billion? Our solution would not have been to have an extra £158 billion of extra deficit.
Mr Edward Leigh (in the Chair)
Order. Could we please have less mumbling from hon. Members. They may try to intervene if they wish.
Chris Ruane
Hear, hear. That is excellent chairing, Mr Leigh. I agree with every word you said.
In other areas, such as youth unemployment and youth crime, the Rhyl city strategy in my constituency put 420 young people back to work in 18 months, but that was ended within three weeks of the coalition Government coming to power because of political spite. It was an effective Labour interventionist policy, and it was ended because of political spite. Since then, we have been promised a Work programme but, as I suggested to the Prime Minister last week, it is a doesn’t work programme, because the number of people the Government said would go back to work will not do so. We have massive youth unemployment and massive police cuts in north Wales. We have seen what happened in the inner cities—riots—and the coalition parties should be very careful about making such cuts.
I pay tribute to the coverage of this issue by the Daily Post, in both its reporting and its political commentary, and I will conclude with an editorial from 8 December:
“The blame for any fall in standards arising from these budget cuts will rest with the Government, not the chief constable.”
Chris Ruane
The only way to get rid of a police officer is to force them out after 30 years under regulation A19. When those police officers retire, however, they are on a pension that is two-thirds of their pay. Will my right hon. Friend say how that is a saving?
Mr Edward Leigh (in the Chair)
Order. Before he replies, I will ask Mr Hanson to conclude his remarks by 12.20 pm in order to give the Minister a chance to reply.
The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Nick Herbert)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) on securing the debate. She referred to the fact that she asked me a number of questions on the Floor of the House about police funding. On the most recent occasion, she referred to me as the Prime Minister. That is the only nice thing that has been said to me since I became the Police Minister. I was grateful to her for the brief compliment that she paid me, even though it was done in error. That said, I regret the way in which she chose to introduce the debate. She kicked off with a partisan attack on the Conservative party.
Nick Herbert
No, the hon. Lady kicked off with an attack on the Conservative party and she made it clear that that was to be the tenor of her speech.
I would like to deal with a few factual matters. The hon. Lady kept talking about 20% cuts. She said that there would be 20% less money; she talked about 20% budget cuts. That is, of course, the persistent implication of those on the Opposition Benches. It is correct that in the spending review there has been a 20% reduction in central Government funding, but all the Opposition Members know perfectly well that police forces are not funded just by central Government and therefore it is simply not the case that there are 20% budget cuts in the North Wales force or any other force in the country. It is important that I make that clear, because the difference is very substantial.
I wonder how many hon. Members think that there will be no precept rise in north Wales in the next three years. I ask them to intervene on me if they think that there will be no precept rises. There is no intervention. Clearly, none of the Opposition Members thinks that there will be no rises.
Chris Ruane
Can the Minister answer the intervention that I made on my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn? How is it a saving if an officer who has been employed for 30 years is forced out of his job and paid a pension that is two thirds of his pay to sit at home doing nothing? For an extra third, he could have been kept in his job.
Nick Herbert
That is a completely different point, but the hon. Gentleman should ask himself why chief constables are taking decisions about the early retirement of a minority of officers if they think that that will not save them money.
Let me return to the point that I was making, because it was important. I was asking hon. Members whether they thought that in north Wales there would be no precept rises in the next three years. No hon. Member appears to think that there will be no precept rises. Clearly, they all think that there will be precept rises. Even if there are no precept rises in the next three years, the real-terms reduction in funding is just over 15%—not 20%, but just over 15%. That is a cash reduction of 7%.
Police Detention
Chris Ruane Excerpts(12 years, 12 months ago)
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Nick Herbert
I think that the best way that I could respond would be by quoting the legal expert Professor Michael Zander QC, whom my hon. Friend may have heard on the “Today” programme this morning. He said:
“The only justification for the ruling is a literal interpretation of the Act which makes no sense”.
Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)
For the third time, was the Home Office advised of the oral judgment in May, yes or no?
Nick Herbert
For the third time, I say to the hon. Gentleman that I have explained the timeline in detail. When he looks at the record, he will see that I said—I am happy to repeat this—that Greater Manchester police approached the Home Office in May, but we received the written judgment from the court only on 17 June. Therefore, action was taken as soon as possible to understand the effects and seek advice once that written judgment was taken.
Police Funding
Chris Ruane Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)
I have a background in criminal law, and have spent a large part of my time down the years prosecuting and defending people in various trials, including murder trials.
I have been out on the beat with members of the Hexham constabulary, who do an amazing job in supporting the police and the community. They undoubtedly need our support, and we should provide that support unequivocally—for the police force and for the operational command—if at all possible; but if we are to do that, we must change the position that we acquired on 7 May. There is currently a significant financial deficit, and that means that we must make choices. Whether we like it or not, we have had to make cuts. That gives no one any pleasure, but we have been forced to do it by our present position.
We are adopting a good procedure in attempting to do a series of things at the same time. There will be a settlement. My local chief constable, who has done an amazing job, wrote to me outlining the cuts that she might have to make, which are undeniably significant. My hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) and others have pointed out that the cuts are a problem that we must address, but choices need to be made, and the chief constable is dealing with them very well. There will be a reduction of 450 officers or civilian staff. In this context, I should remind the House that she was the chief constable who looked after Raoul Moat and all the difficulties and problems that followed on from the events in the summer. She has done a sterling job in trying to hold everything together, but when I asked the Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs what he would cut and what his approach would be, he initially said, “I can’t really answer that question,” but at the very end of his speech he said, “This will require the Home Secretary to go back to the Chancellor and ask for more money.”
Guy Opperman
That is an interesting observation, but when the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) was Home Secretary he famously said there would not be enough money to pay for various things, and the home affairs budget would clearly have gone down. It is not in dispute that that will present the Department with a significant problem. Efforts are being made, but a choice had to be made, and I applaud the Government on the choice they made and for going ahead with it.
I asked the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) whether he supported the police and crime commissioner changes. We find from talking to our constituents that the centralisation of control under Labour over the past 13 years is a significant problem. The legislation that the Labour Government brought in put ever more work under Whitehall control. The Home Secretary was given ever stronger powers to intervene and to direct police authorities. Labour’s approach failed to recognise the fundamental problem of policing, which is that those who should be in the driving seat, and those who suffer when things do not work, are the public, not the Government.
In the last year prior to the change in Government there were 52 documents of central policy guidance, and a further 60 on planning. The average length of the manuals was just under 100 pages, and they included 4,000 new promises. The principle is very simple: the police are there to serve the local community, not Whitehall, but for too long they have been serving Whitehall.
Guy Opperman
I make this simple point: what would Labour have cut? All parties would now be facing this difficulty and, frankly, it is fanciful to argue there would not have been any cuts whatever to, say, the Birmingham or Northumberland police forces.
I want to turn now to the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill. When under the leadership of the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), Labour planned for elected representatives. In the 2008 draft legislative programme it announced that its Policing and Crime Bill would include proposals to provide
“a clear and powerful public voice in decision making through directly elected representatives”.
To my untutored mind, having done nearly 20 years at the Bar, that sounds remarkably similar to what we are introducing now. Labour referred to elected representatives in a policing Green Paper published in July 2008. I accept that I was in another place.
Guy Opperman
No, you are wrong. The promotion is delightful, but it is premature. Mention has been made of “Strictly Come Dancing” and other things, but I was not in the House of Lords then. Instead, I was probably somewhere near the Old Bailey. My point is that even Ed Balls has conceded that there is more to do on accountability.