Offensive Weapons Bill

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 26th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I too support the amendments. I was at the speech given by the Secretary of State for Justice last Monday, in which he said that in the last five years, there have been just over 250,000 custodial sentences of six months or less, and over 300,000 of 12 months or less. He went on to say that nearly two-thirds of the offenders had gone on to commit further crime within a year of being released. He also said that the Government were now taking a more punitive approach than at any time during the Thatcher years, which I thought was a strange admission from him. I wrote to him pointing out that this Bill appears to be him against the Home Secretary, and he replied today that “work in the area will require careful collaboration with other government departments to ensure a consistent approach to sentencing reform which reflects my ambitions and, most importantly, keeps the public safe”.

Everything has been said about the growing body of evidence that diverting children away from the formal justice system is more effective at reducing offending than punitive responses, and I agree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Elton, on that. I also deplore the removing of judicial discretion, which works against the Sentencing Council’s guidelines. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child resolved that the interests of the children must be placed first. Mandatory short prison sentences have been proved to be ineffective—I have seen them to be ineffective—because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, said, there is nothing happening in any young offender institution which is worth the while, and if people are there for a short time, nobody has time to establish their needs, let alone tackle them. Therefore, I strongly support the amendments.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I also support these amendments, particularly Amendment 32, which would remove Clause 8. I worked in an intermediate treatment centre many years ago. It was an astounding institution. May I say how grateful I am to the noble Lord, Lord Elton, for leading this extraordinary work?

I am a trustee of a mental health service for adolescents, a charity that works with a local youth offending team, and also works in schools with young men, mostly BAME boys with behavioural issues. It is called Sport and Thought, and it can transform lives; teachers are shocked at the difference that this intervention can make. It involves working with a therapist and a football coach. There are such good and effective ways of turning these young peoples’ lives around, so I really do share the concerns voiced.

Crispin Blunt, the former Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Prisons and Youth Justice, was speaking at an open meeting three weeks ago. I raised the question of mandatory sentencing. He said that it does not work, it inflates the numbers of people going into prison and is completely counterproductive. To have mandatory sentencing for 16 and 17 year-olds is against logic.

We must remember where we came from. About 10 years ago, we had 3,000 children in custody, by far the largest number in Europe. All parties were very concerned about this, and thanks to the work of the coalition Government, we reduced it to 1,000. We do not want to go back there. I recognise the deep concerns about this terrible offence of throwing corrosive substances at people. Yes, there must be a robust response, but in trying to protect children from these offences, let us not put them in harm’s way.

I visited a prison four or five years ago with the chair of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales. She said that because we had been so effective at reducing the numbers of children in custody, those in prison now are the very toughest and most challenging children. She said that by obliging courts to put many of the children subject to this offence into custody, they are very likely to be bullied or to traumatise themselves. It makes them into more hardened criminals in the longer term if we do this.

I have to think about our responsibility in this area. It is very easy to appoint blame but let us look at the very high rate of exclusions from schools at the moment. I think that we are still waiting for Mr Timpson’s report, but when children are excluded from school, they are so much more likely to get involved in this sort of activity. Look at the cuts in funding for early intervention services; as an officer of the All-party Parliamentary Group for Children, I know very well how all those important services for supporting families have been deeply cut, due to understandable financial and economic circumstances—but they have been cut to the bone. So many children’s centres have been closed down.

Another issue, which perhaps does not get talked about enough, is that many of these children—many boys—are growing up without fathers. In certain ethnic groups, 60% of these boys grow up without fathers in the home. My noble friend Lord Hogan-Howe was talking about investing more in mentors for such young people, which can make a huge difference in their lives.

When dealing with challenging young people, my experience from a long time of working with troubled adolescents is always that it is so tempting to come in hard, perhaps if you are working in a children’s home and a child provokes you. The extreme is known as pin down, where one might chain children to beds or whatever. It is always tempting to come in hard but the thoughtful, considerate, effective professionals stand back and try to be dispassionate. They try to do what is most effective, not what appeals most to the emotions.

I recognise the difficulty that the Government are in and that they wish to make a robust response, but perhaps they might listen to the advice of the noble Lord, Lord Elton. I strongly support Amendment 32, which would remove Clause 8 from the Bill.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, I am happy to support the noble Lord’s amendments today. The noble Baroness wants to stop short sentences; debates are going on now in the country about those. We have heard the quote from David Gauke, the Justice Secretary, who wants to reduce these short sentences and the prison population. I agree with him, and with the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, that we need many fewer people in prison. The problem we have is that for the court to be able to impose a community penalty, there must be an option of imprisonment for it to impose. I am a supporter of the greater use of community penalties, but they have to be of a standard that challenges the offending behaviour and helps with the rehabilitation of the offender; otherwise, they have no effect whatever. I agree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Elton, about the importance of these penalties being effective.

Many years ago, I was a magistrate and served on the Coventry bench when I lived in the Midlands. We would often get people coming back into the court who had breached or not delivered on their order. When you talked to them, all they would say is, “I was given X number of hours as a community penalty. I have now turned up for three Saturdays in a row and no one is there to actually see me, so I’ve booked the day off—or I might be given an hour and then sent home”. They got to the point of thinking, “I’m not going to come back again”, because they turned up and it was a complete waste of time. So if we are to have a community penalty, it has to be rigorous and challenge the offending behaviour. We cannot have a situation where people turn up and have nothing to do. That is very important.

I also spent a bit of time recently with the Met Police in Greenwich. There is a really good unit there that works with young people who are on the edge of falling into criminality. The unit works with these people and has made a tremendous change to them. When they work with them, you can see the change. As other noble Lords have said, it is probably the first time that an adult has taken any interest in them whatsoever. That has an effect. I met some of the older young people whose lives have been changed and were now helping the younger people. They said, “Yes, it was PC so-and-so who helped me to turn things around”. Lots of good work is going on but it has to be meaningful. People are not going to turn up each day if it is a complete waste of time; we cannot have that.

For the present, however, we have to leave these matters for the courts to decide. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said, we may need to think about decoupling community sentences from prison sentences, so that they can impose a community penalty. That would of course require us to amend the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and I hope the Government will consider that. We might bring that back at a future date because it could give us the chance to do other things. Given the amendments before us, I do not think that fines are necessarily the right thing. The courts need to have a suite of things but if we could decouple those, it would certainly be progress. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

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[Lord Ramsbotham]

I rise to oppose the KCPO proposal, as I did in Grand Committee. I shall not repeat all the arguments that I raised then, because other noble Lords have already mentioned them. However, I ask the Minister: who dreamed up these KCPOs? Were they a Home Office invention? It appears that the Youth Justice Board, the Children’s Commissioner and local government services were not consulted. The Magistrates’ Association, the Association of Youth Offending Team Managers, the Local Government Association, The Children’s Society and the knife crime APPG are all opposed to it. We hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, that the police and crime commissioner in Durham is also opposed to it.

I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, mentioned the cost, because there is no reckoning or details of the cost available to Members of this House. I question the pilot and am also worried about Amendment 63, because that seems to click in only if the KCPOs are approved. I hope that the House will not approve them.

[The Earl of Listowel]

I express my deep concerns about what the Government are proposing. I also felt that the Minister made a very strong speech, making it really clear to us again, sitting in this place, that this is about young people, usually on housing estates, being stabbed, bleeding out, dying and losing all that potential in their lives. This is a very grave situation.

That does not mean we should do anything that comes to mind to respond; we need to make an effective response. I am particularly concerned, as vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Looked After Children and Care Leavers, about the criminalising of young people in care. My noble friend Lord Laming’s report two years ago focused on work to reduce the criminalisation of these children, who are so overrepresented in our prisons. The police have recently created a protocol for working with children’s homes to lower the rates of criminalisation. However, I feel certain that if this KCPO is introduced, we will see more children from children’s homes ending up in the criminal justice system. I strongly oppose what is being proposed.

We were recently briefed on county lines. Your Lordships will be aware that drug dealers are grooming children to send far and wide across the country to provide new markets for their drugs. The Children’s Society commented that it will often be children in poverty, from children’s homes, and in difficult circumstances, who are sent away to deal drugs. They will often be supplied with knives or will get them from doing this work. These are the kinds of children who get drawn into this.

--- Later in debate ---

A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, and the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, asked about funding and said that there was no point in doing this if funding is not in place. My honourable friend partly answered that point yesterday. Of course, we have made an additional £970 million available to the police for next year and will provide £200 million over 10 years for the all-important early intervention youth fund. We have the National County Lines Coordination Centre. In 2018-19, £1.5 million will go to the community fund; £17.7 million has already been put into the early intervention youth fund for work with PCCs and CSPs to provide the joined-up support mentioned by noble Lords. I think I have answered all noble Lords’ questions.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, will the Minister ensure that in any pilots, an assessment will be made of the impact of KCPOs on young people in care who are looked after by their local authority and care leavers?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Earl is right to point out that children in care are the most vulnerable people in all the areas we look at. Of course, they will be a prime consideration because they are the most likely to be vulnerable to the sorts of things we are talking about. Local authorities, as their corporate parents, are responsible for them.

Finally, the Government do not pretend for one moment that KCPOs are the magic wand to answer all the problems of knife crime. I emphasise that they are one tool, but an important one, to end the scourge affecting young people, communities and their families. With that, I beg to move.