Public Bodies Bill [Lords]
Debate between Crispin Blunt and Alun Michael(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Blunt
Youth justice is an extremely important issue and these points have to be put properly on the record. I am slightly surprised at the hon. Lady’s intervention, because she makes it at precisely the moment at which I am trying to deal with issues that I believe are of some importance to her, as a Welsh Member, as well as to the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth, who is sitting right behind her.
The Youth Justice Board currently has a team based in Wales, which works closely with the Welsh Assembly, and we will continue to have a Welsh-based team under our proposals to bring the functions of the Youth Justice Board into the Ministry of Justice.
The Government have listened and responded to the concerns of all interested parties. A full public consultation has just concluded, and we will carefully consider the responses before laying draft orders before Parliament. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark asked about the balance of the responses to the consultation. There were, I think, 2,800 responses to the public bodies consultation, of which 68 were about the Youth Justice Board. It will not surprise him to learn that the balance of the responses was not supportive of the Government’s proposal—that is not a remotely surprising pattern when it is proposed to change something. However, before we lay the draft orders, there will be an opportunity to see the detail of them.
The youth justice system needs clear and visible leadership from me, as the responsible Minister, supported by a governance structure that retains a dedicated focus on youth justice. That is what we will provide as part of our proposals to abolish the YJB. I believe that is the best way to help us reduce offending and reoffending by young people, and I ask the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth to withdraw the new clause.
Alun Michael
The Minister has been seduced by office into bad decisions, but in the best interests of securing a vote on the retention of the Youth Justice Board, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the clause.
Clause, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 1
Power to abolish
Amendment made: 5, page 1, line 13, at end insert—
‘() a co-operative society,
() a community benefit society,
() a charitable incorporated organisation, or’.—(Mr Blunt.)
Schedule 1
Power to abolish: bodies and offices
Amendment proposed: 32, page 21, line 11, leave out
‘Agricultural Wages Board for England and Wales’.—(Mr Gareth Thomas.)
The House proceeded to a Division.
Cutting Crime (Justice Reinvestment)
Debate between Crispin Blunt and Alun Michael(14 years, 1 month ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Crispin Blunt)
First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) who is sitting opposite me. We have followed a similar path from our respective Whips Offices to Front-Bench responsibility, and I congratulate her on becoming a shadow Justice Minister. I notice that she did not spend an enormous amount of time defending the record of the previous Administration, which was probably wise.
In recounting the record, she commented on the number of courses that people have completed, and the expenditure on programmes. I want to draw attention to one way in which things are changing by saying that those are inputs. We are not going to measure inputs; we are going to measure outputs and what is achieved by the system. We will give those who operate the criminal justice system and in whose charge offenders are placed, as much professional freedom as we can to enable them to exercise their best professional judgment and effect the rehabilitation revolution that we so badly need.
Alun Michael
The Minister makes an interesting point by suggesting that he will measure things by outcomes. That is a sensible way to proceed but he must tell us how he will manage it without the inputs.
Mr Blunt
I would like to draw the attention of the right hon. Gentleman to a passage in his contribution where he talked about methodology. I was trying to write his remarks down, but he went through that part of his speech rather too quickly. He said words such as “the requirement of that methodology”, “centrally driven”, “clinically measured”, “setting targets” and “evaluated annually.” I recommend that he go back and look at such passages in his speech, and imagine what that language is like for someone who is on the receiving end of the methodology and targets that flow from it. That is the system we have inherited.
I have talked to professionals in the field, particularly the youth offending teams who are overseen by the Youth Justice Board. The leaders of the youth offending teams spend far too much of their time looking upwards to respond to the oversight that they receive from the Youth Justice Board, rather than looking downwards to deliver their services. If the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me, that is an example of where we have got the balance wrong and where changes are needed. It is the same for the probation service and the performance measurements and targets that are imposed on it. We must move to a system that gives professionals more freedom to exercise their judgment in the best interests of the people in their care.
Alun Michael
I am grateful to the Minister for generously admitting that he was not keeping up with my explanation. It had nothing to do with the work of the Youth Justice Board; I was pointing out that the simple methodology of partnership working by local people in a local area who work together to identify the problems and produce solutions, has worked through the crime and disorder reduction partnerships over the past 12 or 13 years. The problem with the youth offending teams is not that of looking upwards or at centrally-set targets. The issue is about whether the professionalism exists in the Minister’s Department and the Home Office to support that sort of work. I suggest that it does not.
Alun Michael
I counsel the Minister that now is the time, when there is still something of a honeymoon going on, for him to build bridges across the Chamber as well. Contributions that are a little less partisan and some recognition of the considerable achievements of the last Government would help to create the consensus across the Chamber that will be very important for Ministers in future, as well as for good practice in Parliament.
Mr Blunt
I can well understand, given the quality of the inheritance that we received, why the right hon. Gentleman would be anxious for me to pursue that line.
Let me comment on some of the other contributions to the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) made the point that we can be either smart or stupid about our attitude to crime. He spoke about the need for confidence in community sentences, to which I want to return.
The hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) was kind enough to take interventions from me in relation to his experience of a veterans court in the United States. I re-emphasise that I shall want to consider the evidence that he provides to me in that area. I just caution him to be slightly careful, in terms of commenting on leaks, numbers of job losses and everything else, about taking the opinion of some trade unions in this area too directly. Their record of accuracy is not highly precise. The National Association of Probation Officers over-estimated the number of veterans in the justice system by about a factor of three.
Mr Blunt
I fear not. A very careful study by the Defence Analytical Services Agency assessed the number at 3.5%, but let us not be diverted by that. I was making a wider point about the reliability of the people whom the hon. Gentleman was adducing in evidence. I think that as the position becomes clear with regard to the consequences of the spending review, the probation service will realise that the Lord Chancellor has batted for it in a particularly effective way. If we are to address issues and change the balance in relation to short sentences—we do not expect any savings in terms of the prison system if there are changes in patterns and fewer people being given short sentences—the first thing to say is that we will not end the capacity of the magistracy and the judiciary to use short prison sentences if they feel that that is necessary, but we would obviously hope that their use would be reduced. That means either community sentences or longer sentences. Those are the two alternatives that arise from it, so it would be unwise to assume any reduction in the overall number of prison places required, as a result of a change in policy in that area, because some of the changes will involve people going to prison for longer so that they can be effectively rehabilitated within the safety of custody.
The other point that I want to make to the hon. Gentleman is that the public sector is not the only source of money. I commend to him the social investment model that has begun at Peterborough; it is a model that we will wish to widen. If we can get external investors to invest, so that savings can be made—that is much at the centre of the principle of the justice reinvestment report—it frankly does not matter where that extra capacity comes from.
In the end, this is not about just money; there is an enormous capacity in the community. In the voluntary sector, the charitable community and the private sector there are people who want to give their services, in whatever form, to the Ministry of Justice and to the state, to help us with the task of rehabilitating offenders. At the moment, our system is not very good at making it easy for those people to give their services, or to sell them to us, on a not-for-profit or indeed a for-profit basis, to grow this country’s capacity to deliver rehabilitation. The responsibility that sits on me now, in terms of designing the policies—on rehabilitation in particular—that we will present in the Green Paper, is to create a system that will make it that much easier for us to draw on the capacity that is sitting out there in the country; to ensure that in co-ordination with the existing state services, in probation and elsewhere, we can deliver a much more effective rehabilitation package than we do today. This is not about replacing those services but about adding to them.
The other half of that process is to ensure that all the existing state services, particularly those delivered at a local level, are co-ordinated that much more effectively, to deliver the interventions that are needed to address the multifaceted problems that normally afflict most people who are on a cycle of reoffending and who need particular help to break free from that.
My hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) referred to our right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and to the very good report that he oversaw as chairman of the Commission for Social Justice. Early intervention is not about just the criminal justice system but about what I have described as the entire life cycle of the offender and the potential offender, and that is why I have a place on the Social Justice Cabinet Committee, which is chaired by my right hon. Friend, precisely to start making interventions earlier and earlier in the process. It is about trying to keep children out of care. It is about looking at the whole business of family intervention programmes for when the indicators start arriving, such as when children are excluded from school and are sent to pupil referral units. Good work was done by the previous Administration, and I happily acknowledge that, but we have to encourage a culture in which we invest early to prevent problems later. At the same time, we are of course left with the responsibility of dealing with the problems that we have now, which is why it is essential to create extra capacity, in whatever form we can.
The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner), who I think will make a welcome contribution to the work of the Justice Committee, acknowledged that the previous Administration were perhaps not as tough on the causes of crime as they might have been. When the then Leader of the Opposition coined the slogan, “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” that slogan was empty, as is now clear in his own diaries and in his account. The policies to deliver on that had not been developed when the slogan was coined in 1994, and that is one of the dangers of dealing in rhetoric without there being the reality underlying it and—[Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth is chuntering. The policies began to be developed from that point on, but at that point they did not exist. One has to be careful about the catchphrase that sounds great but does not have the policies—
Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)
Order. I ask the right hon. Gentleman not to intervene from a sedentary position.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Crispin Blunt and Alun Michael(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Alun Michael (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the Minister undertake to read the excellent report drawn up on a cross-party basis by members of the Select Committee on Justice not long before Dissolution, which proposes a number of ways in which the large amount of resources that go into the criminal justice system could be focused more effectively on reducing reoffending?