Queen’s Speech

Earl Attlee Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful that the gracious Speech indicates that the Government intend to put more resource into the criminal justice system and the police. The difficulty is that I am not convinced by the strategy and am rather more with the noble Lord, Lord Hastings. However, I do not support the idea of a royal commission, simply because it would recommend only what it thought was politically possible. I think that people like me and the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, need to push for much more drastic reform.

During a recent debate introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, I told the House that I have spent the last two years, among other things, taking a very close look at the UK’s prison system. I also said that I have concluded that the system is hopelessly and fundamentally flawed.

Your Lordships know perfectly well that minor offenders can sometimes go on to commit very serious offences unless the pattern of behaviour is halted early. For these younger prisoners—those younger than 26 to 30—it is essential that the causes of their offending are addressed. Very often these are illiteracy and innumeracy, coupled with a lack of hope, pride and self-discipline. That is why I proposed a new sentence of being “Detained for Training” at Her Majesty’s pleasure, or DFT for short. Release would depend on achieving the required standard of literacy, numeracy, trade training and personal conduct as an alternative to being incarcerated for a set period predetermined by the court—something that the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, touched on.

Offenders on DFT would not necessarily be accommodated in a classic prison building, and I suspect that I share some thinking with the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. Furthermore, the term “personal conduct” would include abstention from substance abuse. There would have to be a cap of, say, five years for those who still did not want to comply.

Some outside this Chamber have queried the economics of my DFT proposal and the possible views of the Treasury. The latter, as noble Lords know well, is always a problem with any new policy. I am neither equipped nor qualified to lay out exactly how to run a DFT system, nor can I say how much it would cost to run, other than to observe that the current system is a very expensive way of achieving very little with prolific minor offenders.

I fully take on board the point that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, keeps making about the need for the current and any future system to be properly managed and led. The most obvious need is to keep operations separate from policy determination and accept that mistakes will be made and things will go wrong. I should like to make it clear that I do not believe that the problem with our current penal system lies with either the prison governors, at all levels, or prison officers. The problem is what we tell them to do with the prisoners.

The current economic model with regard to the prolific minor offender is that, after several community sentences, we spend, say, £40,000 on his—the vast majority are male—first sentence to immediate custody. We totally fail to address his weaknesses in literacy, numeracy and personal conduct. All noble Lords are aware of the 60% reconviction rate within 12 months, and that figure is flattered by those who are extremely unlikely to reoffend post-release. So we spend another £40,000 on the next relatively short prison sentence, as observed by the noble Lord, Lord Hastings. Surely, if we properly sorted out the offender the first time round, even if it meant spending £60,000, we could avoid the cost of the second and subsequent prison sentences and all the associated harm to the community they entail.

I am not convinced by the new policy of increasing sentences for serious offences even further. The exception is the provision for deported foreign offenders, which is welcome. We know that our sentences are much longer than those of comparable states and, as a result, our incarceration rate is very high. I fear that one driver of this is that policymakers and the general public take a middle-class view of deterrence. For instance, I never use my handheld mobile phone while driving because I know that I risk having an accident and, most importantly, a prison sentence. A prolific minor offender simply does not care. I really do not think that the actual length of the possible prison sentence matters to a very serious offender at all. What really matters is the probability of being caught and being sentenced to prison, as observed by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. The most important thing is to be effective in steering youngsters away from a life of crime.