Crime Reduction Policies

Elfyn Llwyd Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray, even if it is somewhat earlier than anticipated—such was the degree of consensus about the green deal in the preceding debate.

What are the most effective ways to keep our constituents safe from crime, and how can we spent taxpayers’ money cost-effectively to achieve that objective? The Justice Committee sought to answer those questions and keep them under review, while challenging the traditional media and political debate about who can sound toughest on crime, which tends to cast no light on the matter.

The Committee’s major initiative in the previous Parliament was a substantial report entitled “Cutting crime: the case for justice reinvestment”, published in January 2010. In this Parliament, we sought to follow up that work. I am pleased to have the opportunity to discuss the Committee’s inquiry on crime reduction, which led to the production of two reports.

The first report was an interim one addressing the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, which have been the subject of several debates here and in the main Chamber. Today, I want to focus predominantly on our broader inquiry, entitled “Crime reduction policies: a co-ordinated approach?” There is a question mark at the end because we wanted to assess the extent to which there is a truly co-ordinated approach to policies and programmes for reducing crime and reoffending.

In all those reports, including the report in the last Parliament, we have been greatly assisted by our staff, especially senior Committee specialist Gemma Buckland. Witnesses, including experts, the judiciary, social work professionals, victims and ex-offenders have also been invaluable. In all those categories, we have learned a great deal from those who have been willing to give evidence to us and to receive us in their institutions, prisons, courts and various other places.

We must assume that the objective of reducing crime is shared by politicians of all parties, as well as the general public. Overall, we are all pleased to find falling rates of crime across the criminal justice system. We are not convinced that that can, in practice, be attributed mainly to the success of any particular national crime reduction policy or local policy—indeed, it follows a pattern right across western Europe. All sorts of explanations have been put forward, ranging from better vehicle security to the removal of lead in petrol, and a whole variety of others in between. There is still considerable academic uncertainty and disagreement about some of the causes, but multiple factors are at play and there is a great deal more work to be done.

That welcome reduction does not alter the fact that in our courts, prisons and on community sentences, we see a lot of people who not only commit crimes, but go back to committing more crimes when they have completed their sentences. We want the fall in crime to continue and we want to deal with the persistently high rates of reoffending. We are still in need of a supportive framework that will get to the heart of the deep-seated challenges of reducing crime and levels of victimisation. We think the Government should seize the opportunity and address two key areas that are in need of reform or development: local partnership and preventive initiatives.

On local partnership, which I think has been one of the most significant developments in recent years in tackling crime, there have been significant changes in the landscape since 2010—since our previous report —including the introduction of police and crime commissioners and the transfer of public health responsibilities to local authorities, which reflects an ongoing broader and welcome shift of power from Whitehall to local communities. That has resulted in an assortment of local accountability structures, but our evidence highlighted the clear benefits of collective ownership, pooled funding and joint priorities, all of which have been facilitated by that approach. However, there remains a considerable way to go before health can be considered a fully integral part of the crime reduction picture.

The current situation, where all local agencies are accountable but there is no single statutory leader, risks confusion and abdication of responsibility. We were genuinely worried that the number of changes taking place and the climate of financial austerity would make local partnership working much more difficult, and that it would reduce. The picture we have so far shows that that has not happened, and that institutional change and severe financial pressures have been coped with remarkably well in many local partnerships.

We are watching the situation carefully, but thanks to the good will of all involved, we have not noticed people being taken away from the table, if I may put it that way, of joint and shared activity. We did not find evidence that funding cuts had resulted in any renunciation of the commitment to work together. Indeed, local government representatives regarded further joint working as more essential, given the ongoing financial restraint.

Of course, some major elements are not around the table and not part of the process—most obviously, courts and prisons. We believe that a prison system that effectively rehabilitates a smaller number of offenders, while other offenders are rehabilitated through robust community sentences, has the potential to bring about a bigger reduction in crime. The through-the-gate resettlement support envisaged under the Transforming Rehabilitation programme might go some way to achieving that, but it is not at all clear that there is capacity in the prison system sufficiently to facilitate it. Seeing courts as purely instrumental institutions misses an opportunity for encouraging greater innovation, and we believe that there is the potential to make broader systemic savings.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Does the Chair of the Justice Committee agree with me that integral to all that is the need for proper, extensive drug rehabilitation out in the community? That seems to be a missing link, bearing in mind that 65% of all acquisitive crime—theft, in particular—is carried out by people with drug problems.

[Sir Alan Beith]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right; I agree with him and will say a little more about the issue. It always strikes me very forcefully that if a judge or magistrate is presiding over a case and sentencing, and decides that an offender really needs a significant drug rehabilitation programme as part of a supervision programme, that judge or magistrate has to find out whether it is available. If custody is the answer, however, a van will come along, take the prisoner away and it will be somebody else’s problem to find somewhere to put them, but the sentence will be carried out. That is a mismatch within the system, and it also reflects the weakness of drug rehabilitation provision in the community at large. Had that been accessible, it might have prevented that person from getting involved in the drug-related crime in the first place.

When we were in the United States, both for the previous parliamentary inquiry and the present one, we saw instances of problem-solving courts playing a much more central part in the rehabilitation of offenders. They were adapting their procedures, particularly when dealing with drug offenders, to use the collective will, both of the professionals and of all those who were coming before the court, to motivate people to get over the drug problems that were causing their acquisitive crime. It was fascinating to watch a court in Texas, for example. Those who had successfully met the conditions of their sentence were coming up before the judge and the other ex-offenders were sitting in the court applauding the success of the person who had, as it were, qualified to stay outside prison, because of the way in which they had carried out the conditions of their sentence.

I referred earlier to preventive initiatives. We are concerned by the Government’s approach to preventive measures on such things as health and substance misuse. The abuse of alcohol and drugs, as the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) said, are significant in many crimes, but their manifestations often have other root causes. The Government’s approach, which is still focused largely on the activities of the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, may over-emphasise the extent to which measures taken within the criminal justice system can tackle those problems, when a much broader spread of measures is needed involving a wider range of institutions.

It is very striking—we have come across evidence of this—to see the extent to which the criminal justice system is used as a gateway to mental health, drug or alcohol treatment. We come across ex-offenders who have committed further offences because they know that they can get either, in the most basic sense, a bed for the night in prison, or treatment, which they are having difficulty getting outside the criminal justice system. The solutions to some of those problems lie beyond the criminal justice system and the direct responsibilities of even the Minister who will answer this debate. His response might be that he straddles two Departments, which is helpful in this context, but maybe he needs to take two or three more Government Departments under his wing to achieve the co-ordination that we think is necessary.

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[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I am always very pleased to see my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), but today I was absolutely delighted when he walked through the door, because for some time previously I had thought that I was opening the debate with a speech that was not tailored for opening such a debate. I agree with everything he said. I would not say that there is unanimity—there are different views in the Committee—but the views that the right hon. Gentleman has expressed are all, I think, shared by the Committee. They are deeply held as well.

It is a great pleasure to speak in today’s debate on our report, “Crime reduction policies: a co-ordinated approach?” It has been a great privilege for me to have served on the Justice Committee during this Parliament. If I may say so, it is one of the most fulfilling experiences that I have had during my tenure in this place.

Our report, which was published in June 2014, was critical because this Government seem to have failed to invest adequate time in reviewing where money should be spent to tackle the problem of reoffending. We drew attention to the fact that the prison population remains stubbornly high, and inadequate funds, it seems to us, are being directed towards early intervention schemes such as family nurse partnerships and the troubled families programme. We also noted the correlation between the underfunding of mental health services in the community and higher offending rates. We made the case for introducing radical new forms of intervention into the court process, similar to the measures that we saw in Texas, to which my right hon. Friend alluded, such as addiction recovery courts, which we believe would deliver huge savings in the medium and longer term.

I talk briefly about our experience in Texas. Some members of the Committee, including me, wondered why we were visiting what we considered to be a rather inglorious and illiberal penal system, but what we found there was absolutely astonishing. To quote from the report:

“Texas has long been regarded as a state with some of the ‘toughest’”—

and, I might add, the most illiberal—

“criminal justice policies in the US. In 2007, its prison population was projected to grow by more than 14,000 people over a five-year period, costing taxpayers an additional $523 million for the construction and operation of new prison facilities. With bipartisan leadership, policymakers identified and enacted alternative strategies in an attempt both to increase public safety and avert the projected growth in the prison population at a net saving to the state as they would cost only $240m. These included investing in: parole and probation policies; expanding the capacity of community-based treatment programmes and residential drug and alcohol treatment facilities; expanding drug courts and other specialist courts to place offenders who committed minor crimes in treatment programmes; and expanding the nurse-family partnerships programme (an evidence-based, community maternal health initiative, referred to in the UK as family nurse partnerships, that serves low-income women pregnant with their first child) using savings generated by reductions in prison expenditure with a view to improving outcomes for low-income children and families. At the same time funding was authorised for the construction of three new prisons which could proceed only if the new policies and programs were not effective. This has not been necessary. Furthermore, one prison has since been closed and the legislature has authorised the closure of two more. Texas now has the lowest crime rate since 1968.”

That is quite a testimony about the experience of Texas, from which we can readily learn.

It is fair to say that there is scepticism, to put it mildly, among members of the Committee about the changes to the probation service, and I will come to that in a second or two. As the Minister knows, we are also concerned about the evaluation of crime reduction polices. We asked the Ministry to clarify how the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms would be evaluated, and how the evidence of success, or indeed failure, of differing approaches would be used to inform policy. I think that that is an entirely reasonable question to ask, but it is still something that challenges the Government. I am not making a political point against the current Government—successive Governments have not dealt with this very well—but that approach is widely used in the United States and the experience there is that it leads to money being better spent in the longer term.

The work of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy shows what could be achieved by taking such an approach. The institute identifies, on the basis of cost-benefit analysis, how best to invest money to reduce crime, and there has indeed been a sharp decline in crime and imprisonment in Washington state. In the report, we recommended, as our expert witnesses told us,

“that there should be an independent and authoritative body to evaluate evidence on the effectiveness of crime reduction policies.”

I do not know how that might be done, but we have experts in our universities who study such things. Perhaps it would be useful to have a pilot study involving one or two experts in one or two universities to track what is happening and to see how money can be best spent, especially in these rather austere times. Those data could help us to plan better in the medium and longer term. At the moment, some prisons are being closed, and some prison officers are being made redundant, only to be re-employed within three or four months to do the same job again, perhaps in another part of the UK. With the greatest respect, I do not think that that is good policy. It underlines the absence of a think-tank that could work out how to spend money in the criminal justice system to achieve the best outcome.

I share the feelings that my right hon. Friend expressed in his closing remarks about the tabloid drumbeat. It is difficult for Members from the larger parties to discuss penal policy without having to looking over their shoulder. I am in the happy position of not having to look over my shoulder, and I do not read the Daily Mirror or the Daily Mail anyway, but that is by the bye. If a party considers something that appears to be rather benign, suddenly, according to the tabloids, it has become soft on crime, but members of the Committee and many others know that some criminals are more fearful of a medium-term or longer-term community penalty, if it is properly structured, than they are of going to prison for nine or 10 months. That is a fact. We also know that in the case of community penalties, the reoffending rate is lower and the likelihood of rehabilitation is higher. For some reason, however, community penalties are considered by the tabloids as being soft on crime, and therefore they are anathema to any practitioner. That is absolute nonsense. In my view, it is time that all political parties came together and said, “We will go for what works and forget about what the tabloids will say.” The tabloids speak largely from a position of ignorance, in any event.

As I have mentioned, the Democrats and the Republicans got together in Texas. They were able to put aside yah-boo politics on penal policy, even though I imagine there would have been plenty of that, considering the nature of the previous penal policy in Texas. If they were able to do that, I do not see why we cannot put aside the need to shout the loudest and to be the most beastly towards people who offend for whatever reason.

I want to focus on two aspects of the report: the Government’s plans for the future of the probation service, which I believe to be badly thought out; and the reforms to our prison estate, with reference in passing to the proposed Titan prison in north Wales. I should say that I will speak with my party political hat on, and not everything I say will represent the views of the Justice Committee.

As we know, the probation service performed excellently until the rehabilitation reforms were introduced. The Ministry of Justice seemed to be determined to carve up the service and put pieces of it out to tender, and that, in essence, is what Transforming Rehabilitation has done. I cannot understand why a service that had won a gold medal for excellence a couple of years earlier had to be fixed; clearly, to use the vernacular, it was not broke. I understand the rationale for ensuring that the under-12-month cohort are properly looked after and rehabilitated—I do not think that anyone in this Chamber or elsewhere would argue with that—but it seems to me that the common-sense approach would have been to extend the remit of the fully qualified, professional, gold award-winning probation service to do the work in the first place. That would have avoided all the carving up, bids, tenders and community rehabilitation companies —all the changes that were not necessary and could well damage the delivery of probation services.

As we know, in June the 35 probation trusts were abolished and 21 community rehabilitation companies were set up alongside the new National Probation Service. The latter will supervise offenders deemed to pose a high or very high risk to society, which is likely to be about 30% of all probation cases. The remaining 70% will be outsourced to the CRCs—private companies. Quite apart from the rather shambolic way in which the Transforming Rehabilitation agenda has been put into practice, it is frankly dangerous for the Ministry of Justice to divide up cases by relying on such a changeable factor as risk.

I speak from some 30 years’ experience of the criminal law as both a solicitor and a member of the Bar when I say that any probation officer, as well as any police officer or criminal practitioner, worth his or her salt would be able to tell Members that the level of risk posed by any individual to themselves or others can change day by day and be affected by a range of issues. Risk is volatile by nature, and I worry about how untrained individuals working for community rehabilitation companies will manage to recognise when risk escalates, sometimes very quickly indeed.

Speaking of risk, the Ministry of Justice has been aware for months of the risks posed by its untested proposals to communities throughout England and Wales. The internal risk register for the new plans, which was leaked to the press but not published by the MOJ, warned that there was a risk of more than 80% that the plans would lead to

“an unacceptable drop in operational performance”,

as well as, crucially, “delivery failures.” Perhaps the most perverse element of the plans is that private sector companies might be handed a bizarre incentive to allow reoffending to increase among the cohort that they supervise so as to increase their profits—that might be idle speculation, but I will throw it in anyway.

Strangely, prior to the introduction of the reforms, Ministry of Justice figures showed that all 35 probation trusts were hitting all their targets with “good” or “excellent” performance levels. Again, I wonder why change is needed if it was just a matter of extending the remit. The reoffending rates for all adult offenders on probation supervision were the lowest they had been since 2007-08. As I mentioned earlier, in October 2011 the probation service was awarded the British Quality Foundation gold medal for excellence—no mean feat.

It is frustrating and wrong that in this instance the MOJ has put dogma before common sense. I know that the argument will be that in these austere times the money was not there to extend the remit of the probation service, but at some point we will find out how much these changes have cost. I would be prepared to bet that the cost of putting all these services out to tender, dealing with all the CRCs, forming national probation groups, changing offices and premises, getting rid of and re-engaging staff and all the rest of it, dwarfs the cost of extending the remit of the professional probation service to deal with the under-12-month cohort—but time will tell.

The National Association of Probation Officers recently challenged the Ministry of Justice by judicial review, but that did not lead to any substantial rethink on the part of the MOJ, which leaves the probation service in much the same position as it was in before the challenge. However, substantial problems have been reported to many of us, calling into question the ability of the new CRCs to meet the huge demands of the job. Examples have come to my attention of delays in the production of court reports, information not being communicated to the courts, problems with the compatibility of National Probation Service and CRC IT systems, and very low morale among staff. Case loads are erratic, and there is even talk that private bidders will look to increase again the number of offenders who are tagged. There is concern that rehabilitation programmes and other interventions will be slashed because they will not be seen as “cost-effective” options for the CRCs.

For example, Warwickshire and West Mercia CRC wrote to the National Probation Service and magistrates at the end of December to draw attention to the fact that there is a serious shortage of staff in CRCs who have been able to deliver the Building Better Relationships programme for domestic violence offenders. The letter says:

“This has been further compounded by a couple of staff resignations of the very few trained tutors in the CRC…we continue to experience staffing problems across the CRC to meet a growing waiting list.”

The letter concludes by saying that, as a result of that shortage, CRC staff will be returning some cases to court, owing to their having insufficient time to complete the BBR programme. The letter implores magistrates to reserve the BBR programme for defendants who are at

“high risk or very high risk of harm”.

The situation is made worse by the directive that went out to magistrates courts telling them to order stand-down reports, which should be produced on the day of request. If CRCs are understaffed, it will be a massive task for anyone to do the work, let alone to get it right. The problems resulting from getting it wrong would be very serious indeed.

I hope I am wrong, but I am afraid that the changes will have a serious impact not only on reoffending but, crucially, on public safety. A number of CRCs have been forced to cancel or postpone the delivery of sex offender programmes. Furthermore, I understand that domestic violence cases are being allocated to unqualified probation officers, owing to a lack of trained staff in the CRCs. Conversely, in some regions, the National Probation Service is no longer sending representatives to multi-agency risk assessment conferences, which focus on crucial information sharing among professionals. Rehabilitation is being damaged seriously as a result of the reforms.

In July, when the Secretary of State gave evidence to the Select Committee, several Members pressed him on the need for the Government to revise their timetable in the light of the problems I have described. His response was characteristically lackadaisical: he said that they were merely “teething problems” that would “inevitably arise”. I do not think that any of the problems were inevitable. As the Select Committee’s report makes clear, the reforms must be managed very carefully if we are not to see further detriment.

Turning to the prison estate, in the past year there has been a 27% increase in serious assaults in prison, and assaults by prisoners on officers have risen by 12%. In 2013, 1,588 incidents occurred, with 2,843 prisoner-on-officer incidents in the same period, 289 of them classed as serious. The increase in assaults has correlated with a reduction in the number of prison staff across the estate: it can surely be no coincidence that violence is rising when in 2000 there was one officer for every 2.9 prisoners and by the end of 2013 there was one officer for every 4.8 prisoners. Having been in several prisons as a professional, I have experience, and have found very low morale, which combines with overcrowding to create a heady, potent and dangerous mixture. I caution that we are now in a difficult position in the prison estate. Prisons can be dangerous places, and the Government must consider how they can reduce crime and violence within prisons.

I have long argued that north Wales needed a local prison. Imagine my dismay, having campaigned for nearly 20 years, when it was announced that the prison that will be built in north Wales is not in fact designed to service that area at all, but will rather be a Titan prison, designed to benefit our friends on the other side of the border. I say that for simple reasons: the Wrexham prison will cater, for the most part, for category C adult males, which excludes all adult male category A and B prisoners from north and mid-Wales. Juvenile and female prisoners will not be accommodated either.

Experts suggest that the Wrexham prison will hold only about 500 Welsh prisoners out of 2,000 inmates in total. Therefore, three quarters of the prison’s population will come from the north-west of England. We all know that keeping prisoners close to their context, home environment and family is key to a good rehabilitative programme. I am afraid that that is not the case here, as those who come from north-west England will be farther away from their loved ones, contexts and families. Again, I hope that I am wrong, but I think that rehabilitation will be more difficult for them than it would have been if they were held more locally.

To make matters worse, 58% of cells in the new prison will be designed to hold two prisoners. That is contrary to the UN standard minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners, which uphold the principle that the level of cell sharing is a key measure of decency. I have questioned Ministers about it, and am still unhappy about the decision. It is worth pointing out that our prison system in England and Wales has never met that criterion.

It is generally accepted that Titan prisons of that scale are difficult to manage, are located farther away from the communities from which inmates come, and do not have a positive impact on inmates, leading to higher rates of reoffending. To refer back to the Texas experience, Titan prisons do not rehabilitate; they merely perpetuate a revolving-door scenario that is of no use to anyone. It is no use to the community, the individual or the state or country that spends money on it; it is pointless. If Texas sees fit to close such prisons, why on earth are we building them?

Once again, cost reduction has been prioritised over common sense. In its December 2013 report “Managing the Prison Estate”, the National Audit Office stated:

“Understandably…the estate strategy’s focus is cost reduction and this has limited how far it can address quality and performance. Consequently, the Agency’s decision-making has sometimes traded good quality and performance for greater savings. For example, it closed some high-performing prisons before new prisons were performing well”.

The report goes on:

“Making cost savings was the main impetus behind the Agency’s estate strategy.”

I am afraid that that is a statement on the MOJ’s priorities. I understand the need to consider how every penny is spent, but I think that the current policies are short-sighted about prisons, and definitely so about probation. I hope that I am wrong, but I think the impact on reoffending and rehabilitation will be far from positive.

I know that I sound very downbeat, but I thought we should consider those two points. The Minister has read the report, and the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed has given a good account of the other matters that concerned the Committee, but I considered it appropriate to tackle those two issues. Knowing the Minister, I am sure that he will respond in kind in due course.

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[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Brady. May I apologise to other Members? I was happily working away elsewhere, thinking that large numbers of people would be debating the green deal—in fact, I thought that that debate might overrun—and I was advised that this debate would start at about 3 o’clock. I am grateful for your flexibility.

I came to the Committee during the last stages of its consideration of the report, and I was available for only the last couple of sessions, so I congratulate those Members who were involved in preparing the report. As I have said before, certainly in the Committee, this is the first such Committee I have served on in the 17 years I have been in the House—I cannot think why—and it has been a real challenge. It has been interesting to see not just how a Select Committee works, but how this whole area is examined by Parliament and opened to democratic accountability. The report is a good example of what a Select Committee can do and how it can create an agenda that the Government then have to address.

I want to deal with two issues, which are raised in the sections of the report on access to mental health treatment and access to drug and alcohol misuse treatment. I want to do that in the context of the figures we now have on deaths in custody, which are extremely worrying. In other debates, I have been more than angry about the various reform proposals the Government have implemented and the way they have impacted on staff in the system—in the judicial system and in prison. I do not want to go over those issues again; I have put my views on the record with real anger, because I felt that the impact of the reforms was detrimental to all those operating in the system.

Let me turn, however, to the two issues I want to raise. In the press this morning, we seem to have the latest figures—I believe the Government will announce them next week—for deaths in prison. The figures, which come from the Howard League for Penal Reform, confirm that last year saw 82 prison suicides—the highest number in our prison system for seven years. Ministers, including the Secretary of State, have expressed concern about that, but we now need to put emergency measures in place to address the problem.

Of the 82 prisoners who took their lives last year, 14 were young people between the ages of 18 and 24. It looks from the figures that the highest numbers of deaths occurred at the biggest prisons. Four people took their lives at Wandsworth prison, in south London. The jail holds 1,633 prisoners, but it was designed for 943. Four people took their lives at Elmley, in Kent, which holds 1,231 prisoners, but which was built for 943. There were 235 deaths in prisons in 2014, with more than 120 people dying from natural causes, and a further 24 deaths yet to be classified. There were also two alleged murders, one in Cardiff and another in Altcourse prison.

I am concerned about the suicides, because they might well relate to the concerns in the report about access to mental health treatment and supervision, and we have to examine that area with some concern. However, I am also concerned about the non-self-inflicted deaths. Obviously, some people will naturally come to the end of their lives, but I am anxious that those numbers have also increased.

There seems to be a steady increase in non-self-inflicted deaths; that may just reflect the increase in the overall prison population, but it is nevertheless significant. The number of deaths has gone from 52 in 2001 to 109 in 2014. That is a doubling, and there has also been a doubling in the prison population, so the figures may well simply be a reflection of the increase in the prison population. However, my concern in 2001 was that the number was too high, and we should address these issues to reduce the number of non-self-inflicted deaths.

[Mr Llwyd]

I fully agree with what the hon. Gentleman says about suicides, but perhaps I can offer an explanation, and I mean to be helpful. The number of non-self-inflicted deaths could reflect the fact that the largest increase in the prison population is in the over-65 cohort, because of historical sex abuse and so on.

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[The Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims (Mike Penning)]

I thought at first that I was going to serve under the chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray), but I am pleased to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady.

I sympathise with the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) for arriving during the debate, and I think we all accept and understand why. Actually, I was running back and forth to the main Chamber like some glorified Whip earlier, to try to ensure that the Chair of the Select Committee was here. Anyway, we are here now. It is important to mention the tone of this debate and the tone and concept of the excellent Committee report, and the way it was written. How on earth did the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington manage to stay off a Select Committee for 17 years? I need to get some training from him, because clearly I was in the wrong queue when I arrived at the House.

The Government and the Department have responded to the Committee, so I will respond in general to comments made today. At the same time, I will try to have a slightly more positive look at some of the things we are doing. We have heard about the doom and gloom in some understandable contributions by hon. Members who have deep-seated views in this area, which I fully respect and understand.

There is a tiny bit of politics to mention. The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter), said that whoever comes into government would be entrapped by contracts. I remember when I was a Transport Minister in 2010, the National Audit Office saying that I had inherited a £1.7 billion overspend on a private finance initiative on the M25. So we have to be careful that we do not have selective memory loss as to what happened with previous Administrations, compared with where we are now.

I know that the reforms, particularly of probation, were unpopular with certain Committee members and certain parties in the House. I respect that view. I do not think we were ever going to convince certain Committee members about it when we put the word “privatisation” in. We were obviously going to have a difficult time when using that word. However, the measures have gone through this House and through the other place, so we will see. Obviously, we will do everything we possibly can to ensure that they work.

The 12-month cohort is massively important but was untouched in previous Administrations of both sides. I am not being party political about that: that is probably the last thing I would be in responding, as anybody who knows me would say. I am not a lawyer. Does that make me a bad person? I am not from the legal profession. I do a lot of this, as the Secretary of State does, from gut feeling. A lot of my personal views will come into what I will say today and those views are also part of the policy.

I should like to mention a couple of examples from the report and particularly a couple of comments by the Committee Chair. It is obviously better that we prevent people from committing crime in the first place. We do everything we can, throughout our education system and with non-governmental organisations and the voluntary sector, to prevent them from committing crime in the first place. That is the best way to have a lower prison population and less people on probation and in our courts. That is absolutely where we would all like to be. We are doing a lot of work, and a lot of good work is going on out there, to make sure that happens.

When a crime is committed there is always a victim. Very often, we feel that the public forget that, as do some of the national newspapers that the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) mentioned. Sometimes that victim does not even know they are a victim, interestingly enough. Then there is a cost and there are implications, including a cost for the person who has perpetrated that crime, because something is coming down the line.

I have every sympathy with people who say that we need to do everything we can, and use as many different schemes as possible—some really exciting schemes have been out there for many years and new ones are coming forward—to prevent a person from going into a custodial sentence. We need to make sure—the Secretary of State has already announced this—that we do not hold people on bail for extortionate lengths of time, so that they do not get the stigma and do not face issues relating to that. I think that 28 days, with obvious exceptions, will be needed.

Cautions have been around for a long time, but did not have an enormously good reputation. I chair the Victims’ Advisory Panel and one of the biggest things they talk to me about is cautions. They say that the police give lots of cautions and it is like a slap on the wrist, and that it means people can commit another offence and get another caution. One of the most exciting things that is going on at the moment—it is being piloted in West Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Leicestershire—is deferred prosecutions. There are two sorts of deferred prosecution. For a really minor offence—for trivial things—basically victims come in with the police to say, “This is what we would like them to do in the community, to make recompense for what they have done.” However, if they do not do that, there are further sanctions. The next level is a deferred prosecution.

In both cases, the person has to indicate that they are guilty—they have to admit the offence—which is often the hardest thing. Of course, that has to be done under caution. However, once they have admitted that offence a set of measures is put in place and, if that person breaks those, the consequence will be that they will go into the criminal justice system. Those measures may involve going on to a drug and drink awareness or rehabilitation course, a fine or community work. That is done not by the front-line police officers, but by the back-room staff. That individual knows that if they break the community agreement they will go into the criminal justice system. We are starting to see this being taken much more seriously by the person who has perpetrated the crime and by victims themselves, who feel that there is some natural justice within the system. The secondary part of this is that people cannot have a deferred prosecution within two years for a similar crime, so there cannot be a rollover situation.

[Mr Llwyd]

Deferred prosecution is an excellent idea. Is this a pilot and when will it be evaluated and, hopefully, rolled out elsewhere? I think it is a good idea to concentrate on this aspect.

[Mike Penning]

These are 12-month pilots at the moment in the three constabularies that I mentioned. There is involvement from local government, either county-wide or in some cases with a unitary authority, and from the Crown Prosecution Service regarding those who break the terms of a deferred prosecution. The police are also involved, as are a lot of NGOs and the voluntary sector, and the NHS. We are about four months into this 12-month pilot and some interim work will being coming forward. However, it is interesting that chief constables and police and crime commissioners are saying to me, “Can we join this now?”, because the anecdotal evidence is coming through.

Of course, I am a Conservative politician and am perceived to be, even though I have never been asked on the doorstep whether I am right, centre-left or centre-right, or whatever. I am passionate about this, because it brings an old-fashioned term back into the justice system for the victim: “natural justice”. They can see—it is tangible—that a person will pay back while still in the community and, even if they break that, they have had every chance. It gets offenders on to the drug or alcohol rehabilitation schemes—sometimes both together. I do not know whether the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington was in the Chamber when I made an intervention on the Chair of the Select Committee, but I said that these are complex areas. There are people with learning difficulties, mental health conditions and alcohol addiction. We have all seen that when we visit the different projects in our communities, and it is difficult.

I remember visiting an excellent charity in my constituency—Members have probably all heard of it —called Druglink when I was first elected. I said, “You have been funded to tackle the drug rehabilitation side, but surely you have a twin problem here, because I know from the community I grew up in that drink is as big a problem.” Druglink said, “Absolutely, but we are not funded to deal with drink. You are the first person to come and raise that point.” It is important that we have a joined-up process, and the deferred prosecutions are an enormously positive thing.

We are having this debate on an opportune day, because the national crime statistics have been released and they show that crime is down again—by 25% over this Parliament and by 11% in the past year—in nearly every area of the country. As the Police Minister, I praise the work that the police are doing in the 43 authorities I am responsible for. They do a fantastic job, day in, day out, with most of it unseen by the public. The public see their bobbies and their police community support officers, but we all know that that is a tiny proportion of the work that the police do on our behalf every day.

I fully accept, as does the Secretary of State, that the rehabilitation of our courts, how they are structured and the whole of that area need to be looked at. Why do we have a magistrates court 400 yards from a Crown court? That does not make sense. I know that the Committee is particularly interested in the need to join up the IT in the criminal justice system.

I am involved in the replacement of the Airwave product, although I will not be the Minister who takes the decision on that, no matter who the Government are, because Airwave is based in my constituency. I thought it would be improper for me to take that decision, so I asked to be removed from that. Airwave is the police comms system—it is not a radio system, but a comms system, because we have to move data through it as fast as we can. We need to have the camera data that PCs have at the scene of an incident—I will come on to body-worn cameras in a second, because a lot is changing there—spread through a comms system. We need a streamlined communications and IT system that takes the data through the courts, into probation and out the other side. That platform, which is being worked on at the moment, will be vitally important. Government IT programmes are always difficult to talk about. I have been there; I was a shadow Health Minister when Spine was being discussed.

I will touch on some of the equipment and technology that is coming into front-line policing and which will transform certain areas of the criminal justice system. I will give two examples, one of which I have already mentioned. First, we are undertaking serious pilots of body-worn cameras. In legislative terms, we will need to move very fast on them, no matter who is in Government. That technology is out there and is protecting our officers. There are real signs that when people realise that a police officer is wearing a camera, their aggressive attitude to the officer completely changes. A gentleman has rightly gone to prison for a very long time for attacking an officer, and that conviction was largely based on the video evidence of a lady police officer in Hampshire, who was wearing her camera when she arrested the man for a domestic violence incident. He was handcuffed and was under the influence of drugs, and just like that he grabbed her by the throat and pushed her to the ground. She became unconscious after the fourth hit of her head on the kerb. He smashed her head on the ground another five times. The video evidence not only helped convict that gentleman, but helped secure the length of sentence that I think all of us here in the Chamber would agree he deserves.

We need, however, to see how we can take the technology forward. For instance, there is the evidence around statements. Kent police want to take a statement at the scene of an incident on camera and use that as evidence going forward. We should be able to do that, but we cannot under current legislation, and we are going to see whether we can change that. One reason why they are looking at doing that is simply because when people see, even when they are sitting with their lawyers and representatives, what they were doing the night before, it becomes—I am sorry to use strange language in the Chamber—a no-brainer. In such situations, the solicitor leans over to the client and says, “You are going to say you did not do it, but there it is. Now we need to move on.” The technology will transform what happens in every space.

We have to look carefully to ensure that when such evidence is used in court, it is used in the correct way and is not ruled inadmissible for technical reasons when the evidence is there. To give an example—the gentleman is serving 18 years, so I am sure he will not mind me commenting on the fact that he was found guilty—in another piece of footage I have seen, the police were called to a house. The neighbours had heard a lady screaming, and not for the first time. When the police knocked, a gentleman in his mid-50s opened the door and was asked whether his wife was in. He used every excuse in the book not to let them in. When he eventually did let them in, the police found his wife who had been pummelled—that is the polite way of describing it. She was unrecognisable. They could not see her eyes or her lips. She was petrified and did not want her husband prosecuted, until she saw the video of what she looked like when the police arrived. She said, “Enough”, gave evidence against him and he went to prison. That is how we can use technology in a positive way to get people to come forward.

Prison Officers (Work-related Stress)

Elfyn Llwyd Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman warmly on obtaining this Adjournment debate. The Prison Service is little short of being in crisis. Since 2010, prison officer numbers have been cut by 41%, but the prison population has gone up. The ratio of prison officers to prisoners has never been so bad, and that is a danger. Both the hon. Gentleman and I are officers of the justice unions parliamentary group, and I hope that the Minister will agree to meet us to discuss this important issue.

[John McDonnell]

I know that the Minister cares about this issue, and I alerted him in advance of this debate that that is one of the requests that we would make. The survey is shocking. Even the in-house survey carried out by the National Offender Management Service has some shocking results in comparison with other areas of the public service. I will come on to my request for a meeting on how we might take this issue forward.

In the survey, the prison officers scored considerably worse than any other sector on all the seven hazard indicators. There were large gaps—the well-being gap—on issues such as demands of the job; the control that people feel they have of their work; management support, which is extremely disappointing; and relationships and change. The gap was less on peer support, so prison officers appear to get better support from their colleagues than they do from management.

The survey was compared with the London prisons survey of 2010. The levels of well-being for peer support were similar, but the scores for management support, control, the roles that people play and relationships were considerably poorer. The management of change was rated considerably poorer than in the earlier survey.

The quotes from the individual members surveyed can be more revealing than the figures. One of the questions was about time and other pressures of work. I could cite numerous quotes from the report—I have provided the Minister with a copy—but I shall give just a few:

“The pressure is on from the time you walk in to the time you walk out. It is full on all the time. You try to get a moment to yourself but something always crops up and you are off again.”

Another officer says:

“Currently, with the staffing shortfalls and the new regime they’ve got in place, it is constant crisis-management every day of the week. There is no let up.”

On every question, the individual responses are stark and revealing. On management support, one officer said:

“No support or care. No compassion. More time spent defending ourselves against management than against inmates.”

Another said:

“Previously, every person I had to line manage I knew as an individual. I knew their strengths and their weaknesses. Now I’m lucky if I see the staff I report on once every couple of months.”

Prison officers work in a very specific environment, dealing with challenging individuals, so there is always a risk of violence and intimidation, but I did not realise the scale of that until I read the survey.

--- Later in debate ---

[John McDonnell]

I fully agree with my hon. Friend. A question was put to prison officers in a survey, and 75% indicated that working after 60 would very much or significantly impair their job performance. The prison officers do not think that they can do their job effectively after the age of 60. I have to say that sometimes we just have to listen to the people who do the job.

I had some discussions with prison officers and a number of them agreed with the view that they were being asked to do an impossible job. They said that they were being put under unacceptable further pressure and that the Government needed to look again at the issue of pension age and at why this uniformed service was discriminated against in comparison with the others.

Let me suggest a way forward. We received research commissioned by the POA but undertaken independently by the university of Bedfordshire, and there is also the Prison Service’s own survey. Particularly concerning are the differences between the scores highlighted for members of the Prison Service in comparison with others in the civil service. There were large discrepancies between how people felt about their job and how they were being treated. Let me cite an example. When it came to recommending Her Majesty’s Prison Service as a great place to work, only 21% were positive. In the area on “my work” there was a score of minus 15% in comparison with the civil service survey and from high performers the score was minus 18%. On “my manager”, it was minus 24%; and on “resources and workload” it was minus 19%—and so it goes on. When it came to discrimination, bullying and harassment, 19% said that they had experienced discrimination at work over the past 12 months, while 18% had experienced the bullying or harassment themselves. Even in the National Offender Management Service survey, some of the figures are somewhat worrying.

The overall evidence from the university of Bedfordshire and even from the Government’s own survey shows clearly that we need another way forward. First, we need an urgent meeting between the justice unions parliamentary group and the Minister to discuss the research and to establish how to develop support for staff and tackle some of the identified issues of work-related stress.

Secondly, in light of this research, I urge the Government to look again at the pension age of prison officers. If necessary, they should commission further research if the current research is not satisfactory. If we need a more detailed examination of forcing prison officers to work until they are 68, I would welcome the opportunity at least to engage in a further review of that decision, backed up by further research.

The third issue is about staffing. I know that the Minister will report that new staff are being recruited. I hope that that happens as quickly as possible and that we can get them trained and into our prisons. We have, however, lost a lot of experienced trained staff as a result of the cuts. As a consequence, I believe that our prisons are now not only less safe, but are not fulfilling the role of rehabilitation that we want them to fulfil. Thus, for now and the future, lessons need to be learned from the staffing cuts that we have seen. I am convinced that we will have a constructive response from the Minister to the idea of having a meeting and working on these issues together to resolve what I find to be an extremely worrying situation.

[Mr Llwyd]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

I gather that the right hon. Gentleman has the agreement of the Minister.

[Mr Llwyd]

Perhaps I could ask the Minister whether I have his agreement.

[Mr Speaker]

It is the normal convention. The Minister is a very agreeable and agreeing sort of fellow, and so is the right hon. Gentleman. I therefore think that we can probably proceed in a harmonious manner, subject only to the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) being content. I anticipate that he will agree, because he is a caring, sharing Member.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker, and, given the number of years that I have been in the House, I am amazed. One learns something new every day, and I am obliged to you for having taught me something extra today.

Over the years, in my capacity as a lawyer, I have visited many prisons. When prisons are overcrowded, the atmosphere can almost be cut with a knife. Some years ago, I visited someone who was on remand in Bedford prison. In those days, Bedford was as overcrowded as some of our prisons typically are today. It was not a very comfortable place to be in, even for an hour’s conference with an accused person, and I wonder what it was like for prison staff, and for the prisoners themselves, when there was lockdown for 15 or 16 hours a day. Lockdown is one of the facets of overcrowding. It means no rehabilitation, and it means that there is little likelihood of someone coming out of a prison in a better frame of mind than the one in which he or she went in.

I applaud the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) for seeking time for discussion of this matter. I was also at the launch of the report to which he referred, and I think that it is a valuable document. We are always talking about the need for evidence-based policy, and this report is evidence-based if ever anything was. Three academics, specialists in their field, were commissioned to prepare it, and I am sure that the Minister will not in any way seek to impugn their integrity by suggesting that because it was commissioned by the Prison Officers Association, they might have reached a view before the evidence had been collated. That would be unfair and unjustified, and I can see no basis for it.

I shall truncate my speech, because the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington has made all the points that needed to be made, but I shall make one or two brief observations. As the Minister will know, overcrowding increases the risk of violence. Unfortunately, the risk of violence is very high at present. I know that there is a difference of opinion between the Ministry of Justice and the Justice Committee, of which the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington and I are members, but something that could well be described as a potential crisis is now on our doorstep.

Prison officers are, by and large, rough, tough individuals. They are not shrinking violets by any means; if they were, they would not be in the job in the first place. However, in the report, one prison officer said:

“I feel…let down. I signed up with the prison service at 21 to work until I was 60. 1 am now 48, and my health and stamina are starting to weaken. I do not feel strong enough to cope with the young prisoners who are more violent than ever before and have more freedom to attack staff and get away with it. Being told I have to work till 68 is the last straw—I will be burned out or dead before I get to retire”.

Another said:

“When involved in restraining prisoners I find I pick up little niggling injuries a lot more than I did 10 years ago. I know I will not physically be able to deal with this part of the job when I am over 60.”

And another gentleman said:

“No matter how fit you are, at 68 you are not going to be able to fight or roll round the floor doing C and R with a 20-25 year old who goes to the gym every day and pumps iron.”

I do not think that we need to stress those points. Suffice it to say that prison officers feel greatly under threat. As the Minister knows, there is now a higher incidence of lockdown, which is never a happy position for prisoners, staff or anyone to be in. It creates a bad atmosphere, and it sets any thought of rehabilitation backward. That, in my view, is fairly obvious.

The report is excellent, and it provides good evidence. If the Minister thinks that other reports should be prepared, so be it, but I echo what was said by the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington in asking him to meet members of the justice unions’ parliamentary group, of which the hon. Gentleman and I are officers. We want to discuss this matter not to make any political points, but to ensure that we have a healthy and safe environment for prisoners and prison staff in order to maximise rehabilitation and, above all, safety. One of the ways forward is to reconsider the definition of uniformed agencies. That point has been made and brings to mind Lord Hutton’s view. I urge the Minister to take heed of both what has been said in this debate and the need for an urgent meeting so that we can discuss these matters fully—not, as I said, to make political points and for point scoring, but because they are urgent issues and we as parliamentarians and Ministers need to address them in the best way we possibly can.

I thank the Minister for agreeing, in that rather strange way across the Chamber, for me to have my tuppence-worth, and you, Mr Speaker, for your forbearance in this matter.

Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Elfyn Llwyd Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

My hon. Friend is right. It is important to say that the Bill will not stop organisations being judicially reviewed where they are at fault. It does not stop organisations being judicially reviewed for constant or serious underperformance or failure to fulfil their duties. What it stops is judicial review on technicalities. It stops the system being used for purposes for which it should not be used.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Does the Lord Chancellor view as a technicality the recent consultation on changes to legal aid ignoring the Welsh language aspect altogether and allowing half the time for the consultation to go into the Welsh language issue, as opposed to the whole time? Is that something that we should just ignore?

[Chris Grayling]

In that particular case, we fulfilled the orders of the court after the first judicial review hearing. I did not agree with the judge in that initial ruling. I considered an appeal, but looking at the detail of the ruling, I decided that it was more in the interests of the system that we were trying to protect and develop to move ahead with a further period of consultation. That is what we did, and we have published our responses arising from that consultation. We took the opportunity to revisit our original decisions and to look at whether any further changes needed to be made. That was embodied in the document that we published last week.

There are three simple principles in the areas of debate covered by these motions. I challenge the Opposition to explain why they so strongly disagree with those principles. First, parties should not be able to use minor technicalities in process as an excuse to bring a judicial review in order to delay an essential decision when there is very little likelihood that the outcome would be affected by that technicality. It is a simple principle. There is an exceptional circumstances clause which still allows judicial discretion in cases where there is a particularly distinctive characteristic, but this is designed to stop organisations judicially reviewing a process on the basis of a minor flaw in process, only to have the effect of delaying a difficult change—delaying for financial reasons and trying to push a change back a few months so that the financial impact is not felt as soon.

That is the reality of what is happening, and this proviso seems a perfectly sensible means of ensuring that the Government can take decisions in a timely and necessary way. In the unhappy event that the shadow Secretary of State finds himself in my chair or his colleagues find themselves in other Ministers’ chairs, they will think that it is sensible and logical way to make sure that the wheels of government move at an appropriate pace.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Cox]

I hear the Secretary of State, but the Bill does not refer to “minor technicalities”; as the Bill reads, the default position would be that any abuse of due process or power could be justified and defended on the basis that the decision would in any event probably have been taken. It is difficult to make “exceptional circumstances” clauses work, because the courts say, “Well, ‘exceptional circumstances’ cannot mean a lack of fairness or an abuse of power.” I have spent many years examining these kinds of clauses and arguing them in the courts, and I know that “exceptional circumstances” clauses are rarely invoked, because courts are reluctant to acknowledge them as a standard resort in such circumstances. It would take something extreme indeed for a court to be persuaded it was exceptional. On the other hand, abuses of power happen quite often, I am afraid, and the clause is likely to condone those abuses of power, whereas often where there is an abuse, it is right that the decision be taken again.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Lords amendments 97 to 102 were carried in the other place to ensure that courts maintained their discretion in determining whether to grant a judicial review by making use of the “highly likely” test. Groups such as Justice have rightly concluded that if these amendments are defeated, it will change the role of judges by inviting them to second-guess how decisions might otherwise have been taken. From his experience, the hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox) has detailed some very potent arguments why the amendments should be upheld. Parliament should never seek to undermine the courts’ discretion; courts should be free to determine whether to apply the “no difference” test, and to legislate otherwise would impede the integrity of our legal system. I therefore support these amendments.

Lords amendments 105 and 106 would allow the courts to consider the circumstances of individual cases in determining whether to grant an application for judicial review, even in cases where third-party information is not readily available. In clause 66, the Government have tried to find yet another means of limiting the circumstances where applications for judicial review can be heard. The amendments seek to ensure that applications can be heard in cases where third-party information is not easily available.

Judicial review is often the only means by which individuals can hold the Executive responsible for wrong -doing, yet the Government are trying to shut down that avenue for redress. The Joint Committee on Human Rights has said it sees no evidence to support the Government’s reforms, and neither does Justice, Liberty, JustRights, Human Rights Watch, the Howard League, Redress, Inquest, Mencap, Amnesty International—the list goes on. Can anyone report which groups actually support the Government in these changes? [Hon. Members: “The Whips.”] Yes, the Whips.

On clause 67, Lords amendment 107 would maintain courts’ discretion over whether to order an intervener to pay the costs of relevant parties and vice versa. As drafted, the Bill would compel the court to order interveners to pay such costs, other than in exceptional circumstances, as we have heard from the hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon. The provisions in clause 67 are among the most disturbing in the Bill. Unamended, the clause would ensure that charitable organisations and individuals with expertise could no longer enrich the opinion of the courts by intervening in cases where their expertise would be of use because they could not justify the risk to their trustees, funders or members of supporting litigation. As the noble Lord Carlile asked in the other place:

“How could trustees reasonably agree to support an intervention when it could result in losing tens of thousands of pounds or more in costs, jeopardising, in some cases, the existence of small charities?”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 30 June 2014; Vol. 754, c. 1607.]

Yet the plans would still allow Departments and corporations with huge funds to intervene and hence play a pivotal part in the development of public law.

I ask the House to reconsider the Government’s proposals in the context of the various and—I am trying to avoid vitriol—crippling reforms to access to justice in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. As a result of the significant cuts in that Act, more individuals will be looking to charitable organisations for support in getting justice. It seems to me that clause 67 will take away this last resort. I am afraid the Government seem intent on restricting access to justice so that only those with the least to lose can gain redress. Why do they think it necessary to pursue this agenda, which will throw the baby out with the bathwater, despite the perceived misuses of the law relating to judicial review? The hon. and learned Gentleman, a far more experienced lawyer than me, has referred to the time-honoured practice of judicial review—the Wednesbury principles and so on—and the practices in place to ensure that Departments act reasonably in all circumstances. Why should we not uphold the individual’s rights to ensure that Departments act reasonably?

In conclusion, Justice said:

“Punitive and disproportionate, these measures are designed to deter any organisation with limited funds acting as an intervener. In practice, this means that – even in important cases with a constitutional impact which reaches far beyond the immediate interests of the parties - the court will no longer benefit from expert advice and information provided from cash-poor and experience rich charities and NGOs.”

I think that says it all. As we heard earlier, senior judges themselves are on the record as saying that the courts are enriched by the interventions of these people, who know exactly what they are talking about.

[Robert Neill]

I commend to this House the words of the former Lord Chancellor, the noble Lord Mackay of Clashfern, in the other House. He supported the Bill and set out a sensible balance, as did the Minister, Lord Faulks, himself no slouch as a Minister. It is right that those who come to the Queen’s courts in a public hearing should not shield their true identity or who truly funds them. The Government are right to insist on that point.

It is legitimate for Parliament to set the parameters within which the undoubtedly important system of judicial review works. That is what the Bill seeks to do: it strives to strike a fair balance. I hope the House will support the proposals of my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor. It is absolutely critical that we have a comprehensible and credible system of judicial review. I want to see that as much as anyone else, but the mission creep of some areas of judicial review, very often for politically motivated purposes, undermines the true purpose of judicial review as a legitimate and important remedy for the individual. I believe that the Government’s proposal, despite the rather hyperbolic—

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Selous]

As the hon. Lady may know, we are going to run a competition, which I will describe shortly, to find an education provider. But we are committed to increasing the amount of time in education and we want innovative responses to raise standards further because, as she will know, the results at the moment are simply not good enough.

As I have said, at this stage the Government have plans only for a single secure college pathfinder that will open in 2017, and it has been designed so that it is capable of housing about 300 young offenders aged 12 to 17. It is true that the majority of the young people in this first secure college will be boys aged 15 to 17, but that does not mean that girls and under-15s could not be safely accommodated on the same site and provided with the tailored services required to rehabilitate and educate them. Girls and boys aged 12 to 17 are already safely accommodated together in secure training centres, as well as in secure children’s homes.

Our designs for the secure college pathfinder have been specifically developed to ensure that if girls and under-15s were to be placed there, they would be accommodated in separate and smaller living units, entirely distinct from the accommodation for the majority of older boys. In our consultation on our plans for secure college rules, we also proposed a rule that girls must be separately accommodated from boys.

[Mr Llwyd]

The Minister has more or less taken my speech away from me, because to a large extent my concerns have been allayed and it is good that he is running a pilot for boys to see how that works. But how long does he think an individual youngster has to spend in that set-up in order to gain education. In other words: is there a minimum time?

[Andrew Selous]

Obviously, how long children spend in these institutions is not up to us but up to the courts. What I say to the right hon. Gentleman is that significant improvements can be made in a short period. I have seen huge advances in a child’s reading within an eight-week period, so significant advances in education can be made in relatively short periods and, of course, many children are sentenced for considerably longer than that, as he will well know.

Oral Answers to Questions

Elfyn Llwyd Excerpts

Tuesday 9th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mike Penning]

I will be more than happy to meet the hon. Lady and her constituent. I have been very closely involved with this area for many years, not least because my constituent Billy Dove was murdered right outside my constituency office, and the family set up a charity straight after that. I have had the honour of chairing the victims panel. I will be more than happy to meet the hon. Lady and see the work that is being done brilliantly, I am sure, in her constituency.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

May I add my condolences to the family of the late Mr Jim Dobbin? He will be sorely missed.

As the Minister will be aware, victims are often secondarily victimised by poor treatment within the justice system. It seems that whereas perpetrators have rights, victims have only codes and charters. What plans does he have to improve the treatment of victims of domestic violence, including those who suffer from coercive control, which I hope—I am still campaigning—will become subject to a law in the coming months?

Oral Answers to Questions

Elfyn Llwyd Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hughes]

That is very easy rhetoric from the hon. Gentleman, but the evidence does not support it. The evidence is that there were always litigants in person in the family courts, and the time it is taking for cases outside the public system to be dealt with has not fundamentally changed. They take on average between 16 and 18 weeks now, as they did before. In addition, legal aid has been retained for most of the important issues. In particular, legal aid is available for people to be assessed for mediation, and for mediation. For those who go to mediation, seven out of 10 have a successful outcome, which means that they do not need to contest their matrimonial matters in the court.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

The single court is a good idea, and I am pleased that the Government are taking it forward, but a considerable body of evidence from solicitors who specialise in family law suggests that judges are under huge pressure to allow contact too early in cases, even in those with safeguarding issues such as alcohol abuse and violence. How will the Minister make sure that family courts are closely monitored to ensure that vulnerable children are not put at unnecessary risk?

[Simon Hughes]

I respect the right hon. Gentleman’s expertise in this area. I was speaking to the court in Cardiff about these issues only on Thursday last week. One protection is that the 26-week norm can be extended in the interests of justice in every case. Secondly, from the president downwards, there is a regular review of exactly what is happening. There will be report backs, as well as a public report back to Parliament on a regular basis, and regular reviews to make sure that vulnerable children in the sort of families he describes are not put at risk. The whole purpose is to ensure that fewer children are at risk and more children are protected and cared for better.

Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Elfyn Llwyd Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I am pleased to have an opportunity to take part in this debate, although several provisions in the Bill worry me intensely. The Bill has more to do with posturing on the part of the Government than with any real policy initiative. The Justice Secretary has presented it at a time when two other crime-related Bills are still awaiting Royal Assent. Indeed, some of its provisions seem to undermine those set out in the Offender Rehabilitation Bill, which is yet to reach the statute book.

Similarly, the Bill’s proposed reforms to judicial review, as set out in part 4, cut across provisions contained in the Immigration Bill—a point ably made by the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee. Most people would agree that there is a need to introduce a more robust process to weed out the unmeritorious cases, but we must be very careful not in effect to deny individuals who really rely on it. Furthermore, everybody accepts that the review process is a vital component of a healthy democracy: the individual’s right to challenge the over-mighty and to secure justice in properly decided administrative law cases. We limit those rights at our peril.

I will quote from a very interesting article that appeared in last Thursday’s edition of The Times, penned by a Member of the other place, a very experienced Queen’s counsel who has taken judicial review cases on many occasions and defended Governments in such cases as well. He wrote:

“Clause 50 provides that courts and tribunals must refuse to allow a judicial review application to proceed to a full hearing if the defendant shows that it is ‘highly likely’ that the outcome for the applicant ‘would not have been substantially different if the conduct complained of had not occurred’. If the case does not proceed to a full hearing, the court must refuse any remedy to the applicant if that same test is satisfied.

The proposal is objectionable for constitutional reasons. The clause will instruct judges to ignore unlawful conduct and to do so in a context where the government itself is the main defendant.

All governments come to resent the power of the judiciary to identify and remedy unlawful conduct. But until now they have, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, recognised the value of what is central to the rule of law. After all, they will not be in power indefinitely…It tells the Government, and the world, that what has been done is unlawful. Ministers and civil servants know that they must change their conduct for the future, and they do so.”

He concludes the article by stating:

“Over the past 40 years, judicial review has helped to prevent abuse of power by governments of all complexions. It is ironic that judicial review now needs protection from a politician whose reforms would neuter its force by the use of political slogans that have no factual basis and are ignorant of legal and constitutional principle.”

Those are strong words from an expert in the field. I think that we would do well to take them on board and consider their purport.

The timetabling of the Bill is also a little confusing. Although it is having its Second Reading today, we must assume that its introduction has been orchestrated so that it will be carried over at the end of the Session, no doubt to make the Government appear proactive and to mask the fact that so few significant pieces of Government legislation remain.

[Dr Huppert]

The right hon. Gentleman, as ever, is making some interesting points, but is he really saying that the test of a Government is the number of pieces of legislation they pass? I would have thought that he, like me, thinks that Parliament has much more to do than simply pass legislation.

[Mr Llwyd]

No, I am not saying that. In fact, I was a long-time critic of the Blair Administration, who introduced criminal Bills almost every teatime. That is not a test at all. Also, several measures that the Justice Secretary referred to in his opening speech today are rehashes of various things we have seen in the press over the past few months. All I am saying is that when a Government run out of steam, the benchmark is not how many pieces of legislation they pass—otherwise, heaven knows where we would end up.

I am mindful that other Members wish to speak and so will try not to detain the House for long. Part 1 of the Bill creates a number of offences, many of which are considered unnecessary at best and, at worst, vindictive provisions that are likely to increase the prison population considerably. Clause 4 introduces a drastic change to release arrangements for offenders serving extended determinate sentences, who are currently entitled to automatic release after they have served two thirds of their sentence. Instead, they will now be required to appear before the Parole Board so that it can assess whether they are fit to be released on licence.

It is important to note that extended determinate sentences were enacted by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, a very recent piece of legislation. That is not the only example in the Bill of the Government seeking to amend provisions introduced by their own justice Bills. Extended determinate sentences from the outset increased the minimum tariff a person was required to spend in custody from half of their sentence to two thirds. By stipulating that offenders will also have to satisfy the Parole Board before being considered for release, the amount of time that is available for supervision and rehabilitation back into the community is further decreased.

Furthermore, the Government appear to have drastically underestimated the impact those changes will have on the Parole Board’s resources and the size of the prison population. In their impact assessment, the Government predict that the changes introduced in clauses 1 to 5 will result in an increase of 1,000 prison places and an increase of 1,100 Parole Board hearings per year between implementation and 2030. The Prison Reform Trust has written to Members of Parliament urging us to seek clarification from the Government on how they calculate these figures. After all, the Government of the time underestimated the impact that IPP sentences—indeterminate sentences for public protection—would have on the prison population. When those sentences were first debated in Parliament—I recall the debates—the Government were insistent that the new sentence would increase the prison population by 900 places. By June 2013, 5,620 offenders were still in custody serving the now-abolished IPP sentences, 3,549 of whom were being held beyond their tariff date. The impact on the operation of the Parole Board has been nothing short of overwhelming. In August 2013, the backlog of cases still awaiting hearings by the Parole Board was 1,352, with IPP offenders accounting for 61% of indeterminate review cases. Yet the Government think it apposite to increase the workload of the Parole Board yet again by introducing changes to the automatic release of offenders—and this at a time when Parole Board staff numbers have been reduced by nearly one in five.

The release test for recalled prisoners provided for in clauses 7 and 8 will similarly place an extra burden on the beleaguered Parole Board. At present, recalled offenders serving determinate sentences undergo a fixed-term recall whereby they serve 28 days in custody and are then automatically released. Under clauses 7 and 8, however, these offenders will serve the remainder of their sentence in custody if the Secretary of State determines that an offender is likely to breach a condition of their licence. The Parole Board would need to conduct a release test before certifying that the offender can in fact be released. The Prison Reform Trust has drawn attention to the fact that this pays scant regard to the peculiar circumstances of offenders with learning disabilities and mental health problems, many of whom find it difficult to understand the terms of their licence.

Once again, the Government’s estimate of how many offenders will be affected by this change seems worryingly off the mark. The impact assessment calculates that the change will result in 75 offenders per year being affected and an extra 50 prison places being required. However, this blatantly fails to take into account the likely impact of the changes being introduced concurrently by the Government’s Offender Rehabilitation Bill, still being considered by the other place, which will result in mandatory supervision being given to all offenders serving sentences of 12 months or less. The impact assessment for that Bill estimates that 13,000 extra offenders will be recalled or committed to custody each year, with an increase of 1,600 places in the prison population. I would be grateful if the Minister clarified how the Ministry of Justice has calculated that so few offenders will be affected by the combined impact of this Bill and the Offender Rehabilitation Bill.

Clause 8 gives the Secretary of State the power to use the affirmative resolution procedure in order to change the release test for recalled prisoners serving determinate sentences. I am worried that the Government are proposing to use secondary legislation to implement such a significant change, and I hope that they will reconsider this provision ahead of the Bill’s Committee stage.

Clauses 10 and 11 introduce a new statutory offence of being unlawfully at large following a recall to custody. This would be triable either way and could result in a convicted offender being imprisoned for up to two years. Once again, the Government seem to have omitted any safeguard for vulnerable offenders with learning disabilities or mental health problems that would impair their ability to understand the full terms of their release. It would be beneficial if the Government inserted such a safeguard ahead of the Bill’s later stages. For example, it would be useful if the Bill made a distinction between offenders who abscond wilfully and those who do not report as a result of a misunderstanding or a miscommunication. According to research conducted by the Prison Reform Trust in 2007, between 20% and 30% of offenders were estimated to have a learning disability that affected their ability to cope with the complexities of the criminal justice system and the co-operation expected of them. During debates on the Offender Rehabilitation Bill in the other place, the Government pledged to produce special versions of licence conditions for individuals with learning difficulties. I would welcome the Minister’s assurance that they intend to keep true to that pledge, and indeed any other provisions that they will be making for vulnerable offenders so that they can understand what actions are strictly required of them.

My final point on part 1 concerns the new offence introduced in clause 16 that criminalises the possession of pornographic materials depicting rape and non-consensual sexual penetration. I truly applaud the Government’s efforts in this regard to minimise the use and dissemination of extreme pornographic materials, and particularly the work they are doing to minimise the opportunities for children to come into contact with this filth. In my view, however, there can be no benefit to society or to the individuals involved if persons convicted of sex offences are left languishing in prison without treatment or, worse, released into the community without treatment. I welcome what the Government are doing, but ask them to go one step further in ensuring that these perpetrators are dealt with positively, if that is the right word.

Although the internet sex offender treatment programme is available for offenders on supervision in the community, it is, rather perplexingly, not available in prisons. In relation to the availability of the sex offender treatment programmes which, conversely, are available in custody, I understand that as of July 2012, 21 prisons offered these programmes, despite the fact that offenders are serving time in relation to sex offences in over 100 prisons. This means that a person convicted of a sex offence has roughly only a one-in-six chance of being able to access treatment that would address his or her offending behaviour. I urge the Government to improve their provision of treatment programmes for these offenders before incarcerating yet more for similar offences.

In summary, the changes in part 1 will result in greater overcrowding of the prison estate and a greater burden being placed on the Parole Board, despite no mention being made, at least as yet, of any extra resources being allocated to deal with this increase. The proposals appear to be rushed and ill thought out, and I hope they do not end up being shambolic, but I would not be surprised. I urge the Government to reconsider the motivation behind these new offences before the Bill reaches its later stages.

I wish to make a few remarks about the changes to youth custody introduced in part 2. The proposal to introduce new secure colleges for children aged 12 to 17, which would be implemented by the passing of clauses 17 to 19, was first published in a recent consultation entitled “Transforming Youth Custody”. I agree with the views posited by the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Prison Reform Trust that the introduction of secure colleges may result in an increase in custodial sentencing for young offenders and longer sentences being handed out. I am particularly concerned that clause 18 would allow for these secure colleges to be contracted out to private companies, and that under the terms of schedule 4 those companies will be granted the opportunity to use reasonable force and restraint to enforce “good order and discipline”.

[Chris Grayling]

The right hon. Gentleman refers to contracting out to private companies. It is worth putting on record that the expertise we want to see in those running secure colleges is educational expertise. That skill does not exist within the public sector, and we need to bring it in from those who have real expertise in education and training. I would not want the door to be closed on that for ideological reasons.

[Mr Llwyd]

I hear what the Secretary of State says. He also said earlier that this will basically be a college, but with a fence around it. I accept that and hope that that is what will happen. That is fine, but I will mention in passing that the director of the Howard League for Penal Reform has said that she is concerned that

“restraining children for not doing what they are told is dangerous and gives the erroneous lesson that might is right.”

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child posited in 2007:

“Restraint or force can be used only when the child poses an imminent threat of injury to him or herself or others, and only when all other means of control have been exhausted.”

I will accept at face value what the Secretary of State has said and I hope this will result in a benign regime that will be useful to the individuals concerned in turning them away from further misbehaviour and criminal behaviour.

Will the Government make clear what inspection arrangements will be made for the proposed secure colleges? The Magistrates Association has argued that if the running of secure colleges is to be contracted out to private companies, they must be given specific targets and must be rigorously inspected. I would also point out that, at present, neither the Bill nor the explanatory notes make any mention of what provision will be made for girls in the secure colleges—a point that has already been raised by other Members. I am sure that the Minister, in closing, will be able to tell the House what the inspection regime will be. Will it partly involve the Education Department, and what provision will be made for young women and girls under the new set-up?

Finally, I wish to make a few remarks about the proposals in part 3, which would impose court charges on defendants in criminal cases. Clauses 29 and 30 stipulate that, in setting charges, the Lord Chancellor should have regard to a number of factors, including whether a defendant pleaded guilty and thus whether they proceeded to trial. As Justice has pointed out, the imposition of such a charge may perversely incentivise defendants to plead guilty so as to avoid paying higher charges, and so undermine the presumption of innocence. That is certainly not fanciful, because defendants I have come across in my professional career were more keen on finding out what the cost would be at the end of the day than anything else. That may seem strange, but it is true.

It is also possible that further charges will be brought against an individual if he or she pursues an appeal, which would place another barrier to fair and equal access to justice. As Justice points out, restricting an individual’s access to a court or tribunal could well be incompatible with article 6(1) of the European convention on human rights. A thorough impact assessment should also be made of the impact of bringing the proposed charges against any defendant, to ensure that it is reasonable and just to do so in all the circumstances.

The Magistrates Association has argued that courts should be given discretion in deciding whether to impose the fees, so as to ensure that it is both appropriate and reasonable in all the circumstances. After all, the Government should not ignore the fact that prisoners—and defendants, in fact—are far more likely to be in financial difficulty than members of the general public. According to figures recorded in the “Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile” of August 2013, 68% of prisoners were unemployed in the four weeks prior to custody and 13% have never had a job, compared with 3.9% of the general population.

In summary, the Bill introduces changes that will increase the already stretched prison population and place undoubted further burdens on the Parole Board. It is highly disappointing that instead of working to encourage rehabilitation, the Government have chosen to introduce new criminal offences and to curtail the release of prisoners. They have also chosen to use this justice Bill as a vehicle for implementing ill-considered changes to youth custody, but I accept what the Secretary of State has said and await further detail. The priority surely must be that people are dealt with and rehabilitated properly and that the public are protected.

It is my belief that nothing is being done in this Bill to tackle the root causes of crime or to help victims, which should be the driving force of any criminal Bill. The problem, of course, is that the larger parties, as always, are dancing to the tabloid drumbeat. It is virtually impossible to have a sensible discussion in this place about penal policy, because of our friends at the tabloids. That is regrettable, but I am afraid it is a fact. All in all, there are many things in this Bill that need to be put right in Committee and I hope that hon. Members from all parties will consider it their duty to do so over the coming weeks.

Oral Answers to Questions

Elfyn Llwyd Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call Mr Bob Blackman. Not here. Oh dear.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

The Justice Secretary’s plan A of dismantling the independent legal Bar seems to be going very well. Will he tell us about his plan B and the public defender service?

[Chris Grayling]

I am having to take difficult decisions on the fees that we pay for the independent Bar, but I have absolutely no intention of dismantling it. It is an important part of our justice system and will continue to be so.

Women Offenders and Older Prisoners

Elfyn Llwyd Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Beith]

I chose my words carefully. I said not that women were put in prison for offences that were not serious—courts would normally regard either the offence or the fact that they are repeat offences as a serious matter, underlining their decision to give a custodial sentence—but that many of the women, if they were not in prison and were otherwise effectively supervised, would not constitute a danger to the public. That is not true of them all, which is why there will always be some women in prison, some for very long periods, but those numbers will be relatively small.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

In support of what the right hon. Gentleman says, in the 12 months to June 2012, 81% of women entering custody and starting a sentence had committed non-violent offences, compared with 71% of men.

[Sir Alan Beith]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a very good point and gives highly relevant figures.

In 2012, we decided to undertake an inquiry to review progress since the Corston report and to examine current strategy and practice. We held five oral evidence sessions. We visited prisons and women’s centres. We received more than 60 pieces of written evidence. We reported in July 2013, and the Government published their response in October. We visited HMP Styal, where the six deaths that prompted the Corston report had occurred, but in the inspection report on the prison published two years ago, Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons commented that it was

“disappointing to find, and to be told of by the governor, too many cases of women, some of whom were clearly mentally ill, serving very short prison sentences which served little purpose except to further disrupt sometimes already chaotic lives.”

During our visit, we saw a new unit that has been created in an effort better to meet the needs of these women, but questions were raised by our witnesses about why women with such complex needs continue to be sentenced to custody. However, those of us who visited Styal saw some genuinely good work going on there. Styal has featured so much in this history that I would not want the impression to be given that there is not some very good work indeed taking place there.

The fact that we were holding an inquiry at all seemed to stimulate the Government to take a number of positive steps to prioritise the requirements of female offenders. After we had announced the inquiry, the Government allocated ministerial responsibility for female offenders to the then Minister in the Department and former member of our Committee, the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant). They announced a review of the female custodial estate, published a statement of four high-level strategic priorities, and created an advisory board to oversee the work streams stemming from those priorities.

Our report was very wide ranging, and I cannot pick up all the threads, but let me start with the overall governance of these issues. We said in the report:

“It is regrettable that the Coalition Government appears not to have learnt from the experience of its predecessor that strong ministerial leadership across departmental boundaries is essential to continue to make progress, with the result that in its first two years there was a hiatus in efforts to make headway on implementing the important recommendations made by Baroness Corston”.

We in the Committee were particularly struck by Baroness Corston’s own evidence that under the previous Government it was not until a group of women Ministers worked together to take issues forward that that Government made significant progress in this area. We welcome the fact that the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald was appointed, but of course she has now moved to another ministerial position. I hope that this Minister will clarify, when he responds to the debate, just how overall leadership will be achieved in this area.

We say in our report:

“We welcome the production of a set of strategic priorities for women offenders but they need to be given substance”.

In the Government response, we were told that there would be further progress towards meeting the strategic objectives, and that there would be a report to Parliament on that in March this year, so we are getting quite close to that.

We say in our report:

“We do not consider that substantive changes to the…sentencing framework would be helpful…and recommend that emphasis is placed on ensuring a greater consistency of provision to the courts to enable them to sentence from a range of options specifically appropriate to women, including robust alternatives to custody.”

We say:

“We welcome the Sentencing Council’s inclusion of primary child caring responsibilities as a mitigating factor in sentencing guidelines”.

However, more than half the women sentenced to custody still receive short sentences. There appear to be several explanations for that: the absence of adequate and available community provision, the court perhaps not knowing whether there was adequate provision locally, or the court not being confident that the community provision was appropriate or acceptable to wider public opinion by being sufficiently robust. We were concerned that the agenda on that had not progressed sufficiently quickly.

We questioned women offenders and ex-offenders—they came before the Committee—who made it clear to us that they had preferred prison to community sentences. In at least one case, they had committed further offences because prison was easier than a community sentence that challenged them to change their life and also, of course, offered some support to enable them to do so.

Our report says:

“Women’s community projects are central to providing a distinct approach to the treatment of women offenders. They offer a challenging environment for women to serve their sentence as well as a broad range of practical and emotional support”.

Those projects, often delivered through women’s centres, offer a range of services and courses of the kind that Corston recommended: a punishment element; probation; community payback; addressing offending behaviour; anger management; domestic violence; drug awareness; supporting women who have offended, including in relation to housing and issues with children; parenting courses; social services; and a crèche.

A woman who attended Eden House in Bristol said to us in evidence:

“The sort of women coming here, if they went to prison they would only get a couple of weeks, or a six month sentence and serve half. That’s not enough time to make a difference. They just carry on as they did before. But with Eden House, you get structure, a variety of things to do, and the help and support of staff. These are all things you don’t get inside”.

We found evidence such as that very persuasive.

A lot of data have been collected by the National Offender Management Service in the past year about women who have been referred to women’s community services. Those data will be analysed, I think, this summer, and we look forward to seeing the results.

We say in our report:

“We are unconvinced about the extent to which the approach set out in the Government’s strategic priorities for women offenders is…integrated”

across Government and across Departments. We wanted the advisory board to

“map the confusing array of Government initiatives that”,

if brought together,

“have the potential to benefit vulnerable women and girls at risk of offending and specify how these should integrate with the strategy for women offenders.”

We drew attention to the fact that successful women’s centres were ensuring that some women on the periphery of the criminal justice system were being diverted away from crime, to the benefit of the community.

We note the inclusion in the Offender Rehabilitation Bill of the requirement for arrangements for supervision or rehabilitation to identify how they meet the needs of female offenders. The Government say in their response to us that they have produced guidance for new providers on gender-specific services, and that contractual arrangements are in place to ensure that those needs are met. We very much welcome that.

We made recommendations about the custodial estate. We are to conduct a more general inquiry into the prison estate, and we will look further at the provision for women offenders when we do that.

NOMS’ stocktake of women’s community provision was very positive in tone and concluded that

“services for female offenders for 2013-14 have been strengthened and that there will be greater access to gender specific services across the country.”

I am not sure that the picture painted by our witnesses was quite as positive as that. In any case, a stocktake looks at what is there, not at what is missing and still needed. A further analysis may be required to establish an evidence-based approach to the issue.

In general, the Government’s response to our report was thorough and constructive and set out clearly how our concerns could be addressed. The key question remains how real leadership will be provided—across Government, not just in the Ministry of Justice—to maintain momentum and put in place a range of services and interventions that can change the lives of women and girls who offend. Our constituents will benefit if, instead of paying the bills for the punishment of offences committed by women, we greatly reduce the number of those offences and offenders.

I want to talk about older prisoners, because this group is growing in the prison population and seems likely to continue to grow. It was no part of our report to argue that these are not people who should be in prison. It is very obvious, from what we know about the reasons for that growth, that for very many if not all of these people, there are very strong reasons to keep them in custody. I am referring to people with a record of violent offences.

However, older prisoners are and will continue to be a growing group. This population is added to, of course, by prosecutions in relation to historical sex offences. Older prisoners present a real challenge to the Prison Service. Some prisons are making substantial efforts to adapt their facilities to meet the needs of older prisoners, but of course for some prisons that is almost impossible because of the nature of their buildings. They may be multi-storey buildings. There may be a cell in which two beds cannot be put, but there are two prisoners, neither of whom can climb into an upper bunk. Physically, the facilities may not be suitable.

We thought that NOMS needed to ensure that all prisons have a policy that provides age-specific regimes. More prisons should establish day centres and regimes that provide for the needs of older prisoners, without necessarily segregating them entirely. We found problems with older prisoners’ access to health care services. We found, as in other areas of prison life, a large unmet need in relation to mental health and that there should be more consistent awareness training for prison officers about that.

We wanted prison and community health care IT systems to be better connected to minimise disruption. There was one really serious problem, which the Government have tried to address: the lack of provision for essential social care for older prisoners, and confusion about who should be providing it. We had a situation in which it was not clear whether a prisoner with acute social care needs was the responsibility of the authority from which they came, if that could be identified, or the authority in which the prison was located. The Government have dealt with that in clause 75 of the Care Bill, but we still need clarification on what happens to local authorities with a large prison population, because meeting that requirement will place considerable demands on their social work provision. Some places, such as the Isle of Wight, have gone some way to recognising that, but they will have total responsibility in this area under the new legislation.

We want good liaison with local authority social care teams. In the Isle of Wight, we saw that there had been good experiences as a result of placing social workers in prisons. That is not a luxury; serious problems can result from prisoners with serious personal care needs and limitations becoming excessively dependent on either prison officers—who have other responsibilities to carry out—or other prisoners. That is a dangerous situation in a prison.

We also looked at issues that arise when prisoners are terminally ill. We found that perhaps too little discretion had been given to experienced officers over when handcuffs might reasonably be removed from a terminally ill prisoner in a hospital bed, or when a governor, with the Minister’s approval, might grant release to a palliative care unit when no such facility existed in a prison.

We found problems with resettlement. Many long-term prisoners will be released at some point, and by the time they are released, they may have no contact with their home at all. The nature of their offence may have led to a complete break with their family. Where should they be placed if they are not to be at risk of committing further offences? We have asked the Government to do further work on a number of aspects of that problem. It was alarming to find that older prisoners were still being released to no fixed abode, which is neither acceptable nor in the interests of public safety and the community. The growth of the older prisoner population suggests to us that there ought to be a national strategy, but the Government did not accept that recommendation.

The Government response generally engages seriously with each of our recommendations, however. The Government agree that a formal analysis should be undertaken of prison accommodation to assess its suitability, and they have committed to doing that by the end of the year. They have committed to adapt prison regimes, and serious consideration is being given to improving health care. There is an acceptance of minimum social care needs and the care passport system. However, the response does not address the real concern about how local authorities will deal with large numbers of older prisoners for whom they acquire social work responsibility. The statement:

“It will be for each local authority to consider how best to meet need within a prison, and the role that social workers will play”

does not really tell us anything at all. In relation to the use of restraints, the response states:

“NOMS’ escorts policy is currently under review”.

The response on meeting accommodation needs on release does not promise a lot either. The outright rejection of the recommendation to introduce a national strategy on the grounds that it is “not possible to generalise” about the needs of older prisoners ignores the fact that there are common problem factors among most groups of older prisoners, as we saw when we visited several prisons. A strategy that worked its way through the prison system might be of considerable benefit, not only in managing prisoners more effectively but in making the prison system work more effectively. I commend our report to the House, and recommend that for both reports, hon. Members look carefully also at the Government response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

The first report to which the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) comprehensively referred surveyed the provision for female offenders within the system in England and Wales, with the particular aim of finding out what had happened since the landmark report by Baroness Corston in March 2007. By and large, the Justice Committee was disappointed to learn that the Government were still not investing enough resources in tackling the causes of female offending, as opposed to helping women already involved in the system. The Government have made progress in several areas, but the Committee warned that

“there is little to signal a radical shift in thinking”

about what generating a whole-system approach actually meant for tackling female offending.

As the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed has said, since the inquiry was announced the Government have appointed a ministerial champion for women in the criminal justice system, announced a review of the female custodial estate and published their priorities for women offenders. That is all to the good, except that we are now suffering a hiatus because the former member of our Committee who held that post of ministerial champion has moved on. I have no doubt that the current Minister will respond in due course to the points that the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed has made. I say in passing that the Minister must have been a very bad man in a past life, considering all the briefs that he has had to deal with this week. I am pleased to see him in his place.

There is a fear that progress may be undermined by the reforms—here we go again—to offender management and rehabilitation in the Offender Rehabilitation Bill, which is currently passing through Parliament. In the debate on Report on Tuesday evening, we had a short debate about Government amendment 7, which introduced the need to comply with the Equality Act 2010 and the need for the Secretary of State to identify anything in the arrangements that was intended to meet the particular needs of female offenders. As I said on Tuesday evening, I think that is all to the good. That triggered a response from the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) that stunned the Chamber into complete silence. He said, in effect, that he thought women were treated more leniently in the system than men.

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will make his own speech, and we will listen intently to what he has to say, but I have to tell him that there is little support for what he says. He seems to have missed an important point, namely, that sentencing a woman to custody has profound consequences that may not arise in cases involving men. There are questions about housing and care for children; there is the possibility of children being taken into care; and, overall, a huge wave of anguish surrounds such families. It should be noted that those additional and serious consequences will present even when a woman is given a very short sentence. As the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed has said, often that is the case, but the damage is still done.

I believe that we must treat women differently for those and other reasons. That was the basic ratonale for our research and report. We are seeking not necessarily the soft option but the appropriate option, which I for one would like to see implemented. I am sure that there are ways of doing it, and if we concentrate on the special problems that arise when women are sentenced to custody, I am sure that we will be able to improve the situation drastically.

I am not going to deal with the whole report, obviously, but I would like to highlight one or two issues arising from it. On trends in women’s offending and sentencing, the Committee agreed that women required a distinct approach from those who engaged with them in the criminal justice system. As I have said, we found that women tended to be the subject of shorter community orders and were less likely to be sentenced to custody than men. In 2011, 3% of females were sentenced to immediate custody, compared to 10% of males. That is partly to do with the types of offence commonly committed by women. Our report states:

“In the 12 months to June 2012, 81% of women entering custody under sentence had committed non-violent offences, compared with 71% of men.”

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I have here figures from the Ministry of Justice that were provided in a written answer to a parliamentary question I asked, so I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will accept them. Does he accept that for every single category of offence, a man is more likely than a women to be sent to prison? The figures on that point are laid out starkly by the Ministry of Justice.

[Mr Llwyd]

If the official figures show that, I am not in a position to argue with the hon. Gentleman, but does he accept that 81% of women entering custody under sentence have committed non-violent offences and are therefore not a danger to the community? Perhaps he will address that when he makes his speech.

[Philip Davies]

I will.

[Mr Llwyd]

Okay. Our report goes on to state that

“over half (52%) of women sentenced had committed petty offences”—

relatively petty—

“related to theft and the handling of stolen goods, compared with one-third (33%) of men. In addition, over a quarter (26%) of women sentenced to imprisonment had no previous convictions, more than double the figure for men (12%).”

The Select Committee agreed that the majority of women offenders posed very little risk to public safety and that imprisonment was usually an ineffective response. After all, women have a very different experience of custody from men. Unfortunately, in their response to our report, the Government said:

“there should be one justice system for all offenders who commit crimes.”

The Government would do well to recognise that one size does not fit all when it comes to tackling offending.

Since 2008, the gender-specific standards in custody have provided gender-specific programmes, recognising the fact that female offenders’ needs are usually very different from male offenders’ needs. For example, female offenders are more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to suffer from anxiety and depression and are more likely to report having used class A drugs in the four weeks prior to custody. Female offenders are also more likely to have suffered abuse in childhood or in their adult lives.

Our inquiry found that the Government’s gender equality duty had not been implemented robustly enough and was not persuading enough commissioners to provide gender-specific services for women offenders. In their response to the report, the Government conceded that there were problems with the public sector equality duty.

The Government also refer to female offenders in their document, “Transforming Rehabilitation.” I was glad that they amended the Offender Rehabilitation Bill on Tuesday, but, as a member of the Justice Committee and a barrister of some years’ experience, I still have serious concerns about the potential effect of the proposals on provisions for female offenders, or the lack of them in future. I believe it is more likely than not that the private companies that win the contracts for supervising the under-12-month cohort will have little interest in investing time and resources in rehabilitative programmes, but we will wait and see, as no one has a definitive answer on that yet.

[Sir Alan Beith]

The right hon. Gentleman is making an important point. Does he agree that in some of the women’s centres we saw really innovative work by the voluntary sector? If companies and consortia want to succeed in reducing reoffending, they must make good use of the kind of skill and level of care that we saw working to such effect in Liverpool, Birmingham and Belfast.

[Mr Llwyd]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct. Quite honestly, the work in some of the centres was so good that it was astonishing. I well remember the visit to Liverpool—I have had some contact with the manager since then, as it happens—as well as the experience of Belfast and other places. What is vital, of course, is that whatever the structure for the immediate future, such centres are brought into the core of the delivery of services. They make it possible not to send young women away, to keep them with their family units and to turn them around in the most remarkable way. The problem we have—I probably speak for all members of the Select Committee on this—is that there are so few of them to rely on. Alas, at this stage, some centres are suffering from financial pressure. However, there is no doubt at all that if the new landscape is to work, those centres must be major players in providing such vital services, whether on their own or in concert with others. I agree entirely with what the right hon. Gentleman said.

The Committee drew attention to the perverse incentives that will be given to private companies not to provide appropriate services for women under the new reforms, since such services are not always presented as measures to reduce reoffending but rather as more holistic and costly care. In their response, the Government did not exactly contradict that point. However, they did claim that there would be

“advantages for providers of offering sustained support to all offenders within a cohort…including those with more complex needs.”

Once again, we will have to wait and see how that plays out in practice. I have doubts, but I hope that I am wrong.

One of the principal things that the Committee wanted to point out was that the transforming rehabilitation agenda has clearly been designed with male offenders in mind. Women offenders are possibly an afterthought. We said:

“Funding arrangements for provision for women appear to be being shoehorned into the payment by results programme”.

We also warned of the danger of

“sentencers using short prison sentences as a gateway to support”,

which would completely undermine

“the post-Corston direction of travel”.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman is right to draw attention to the fact that the Committee took evidence that suggested that the system had been designed with only men in mind. However, I would draw his attention to the fact that, under the transforming rehabilitation proposals, the use of innovative small providers might bring innovation and be a good influence on dealing with women offenders. I am not sure that the whole Committee shared the right hon. Gentleman’s view, but I accept that it was expressed strongly in evidence.

[Mr Llwyd]

The hon. Gentleman is an assiduous member of the Justice Committee. He and I do not share views on this particular agenda, but I accept what he says. The problem we have, however, is that the small providers to which he referred are currently withering on the vine. I can think of very few in north Wales that would actually be able to deliver. In some areas I am sure that what he said is right, but after all is said and done, the Bill is meant to cover the whole of England and Wales. I take his point. Yes, there is a role—for sure—for small providers. The problem is that there are too few of them.

[Nick de Bois]

I will use this opportunity to stress a point that I have repeatedly made in the Select Committee, for the Minister’s benefit. One of the ingredients for success of the new proposals will be that procurement allows for innovation and small providers. Some of those small providers who are struggling now may benefit if they are engaged on contracts that help to deliver the responses that the right hon. Gentleman wants.

[Mr Llwyd]

The hon. Gentleman’s point is very timely. The Minister has heard it, and I accept that it is an important point.

The Government have not agreed with our analysis of the post-Corston direction of travel. However, they have assured us that after contracts have been awarded, account managers within the Ministry of Justice will monitor the provision for female offenders. Hopefully, from time to time there will be reports, both to the Committee and to the House, on how these reforms play out.

Speaking of short-term sentences, one of the principal recommendations of Baroness Corston’s original report was that, because short-term prison sentences were doing more harm than good for most female offenders, community sentences should be awarded where appropriate. The Committee found that some improvement was being seen, albeit slow, but more than half of women sentenced to custody still received short sentences, during which it is virtually impossible to do anything with them. I was glad to see from the Government’s response that they are addressing that issue under the enhanced community provision workstream of its advisory board. The Government expect to

“establish an early adopter region”

where they can pilot

“the outcomes of early intervention with female offenders”.

The Government also noted that they would be producing

“awareness raising materials for decision-makers in the criminal justice system on the…needs of female offenders.”

Again, that is welcome. It is timely that we should be having this debate the day after the Report stage of the Offender Rehabilitation Bill. The efficacy, or otherwise, of many of the recommendations that our report makes will hinge on how those proposals are put into practice.

The Committee’s second report is on older prisoners. One of our main concerns was the extent to which much of the prison estate and its regimes were unadapted to the needs of older prisoners. On the visit to Dartmoor, for example, we found that a considerable amount of the Dartmoor estate was totally inaccessible to wheelchair users because the doors were too narrow. We found that absolutely unacceptable. However, we understand that Dartmoor is a listed building and, to be honest, there is very little that can be done. Nevertheless, it greatly concerned me and other members of the Committee that that should be the case.

We noted that the National Offender Management Service’s responsibility to provide for the physical adaptation of prisons to suit older prisoners’ needs is not being met universally; I have already given the example of Dartmoor. Our report said:

“We recommend that NOMS should conduct a comprehensive analysis of prisons’ physical compliance with disability discrimination and age equality laws.”

We also recommended that

“NOMS should determine which prisons simply are not able…to hold older prisoners and it should then no longer hold older or disabled prisoners in these institutions.”

I was glad to see that the Government agreed that such an analysis needed to take place and that they have committed to conducting an assessment of the current accommodation needs across the prison estate and of its suitability for prisoners with specific needs, reporting by the end of this year.

In principle, the Government have also agreed to keep the time spent by prisoners in unsuitable accommodation to an absolute minimum, which is clearly welcome. The Committee recommended that older prisoners should be assessed before entering prison, to ensure that their needs were met. In their response, the Government said that

“social care needs assessments will be the responsibility of local authorities”

after the provisions of the Care Bill come into force in 2015. I am not particularly satisfied with the lukewarm assertion that

“NOMS will work with NHS England to consider ways in which prisoners’ initial health assessments could lead to a referral”

and that the Government will

“explore whether age could reasonably mean that such a referral is automatic”.

These prisoners cannot be allowed to fall between two stools, and it is surely the Government’s responsibility to ensure that they do not do so.

I would also like some clarification about what the situation will be for older prisoners in the prison estate in Wales, who will rely on NHS Wales, and for older prisoners from Wales who are incarcerated in England and who will consequently use the NHS in England.

One thing that has not emerged hitherto is that the largest increase in the prison population is in the over-55 cohort. For various reasons—historical sex abuse is a prominent one, but there are many others—that is the growth area in terms of prison numbers. Therefore, the treatment of older prisoners is an urgent issue, which should be addressed with due priority.

We wanted to stress that older prisoners should be able to use their time in prison as productively as younger prisoners, if they so wish, and that NOMS should put in place older prisoner policies in every prison, to provide for age-specific regimes for this cohort. The Government refused to concede that latter point, and I am afraid that I do not agree with their assertion that

“A requirement for every prison to have an older prisoner policy detailing age specific regimes would reduce the ability of prison governors to provide regimes which reflect the actual and specific needs of prisoners.”

I do not think that promising that

“NOMS will explore opportunities to adapt regimes in prisons where the needs of the population require it”

goes far enough to address this problem. Prisoners will fall through the cracks if a uniform policy is not adopted across the prisons estate.

I was glad that the Government accepted in principle the Committee’s recommendation that there should be enhanced training of staff in the mental health care needs of older prisoners. Once again, however, the Government have said that

“NOMS will look to work with NHS England developing training packages”,

and I would be grateful to know what discussions the Government will have with the Welsh Government to ensure that work is co-ordinated, so that no older prisoners miss out on this provision.

I shall make a few comments about how our recommendations about the resettlement of older prisoners were received. In our report, we praised the resettlement services in HMP Dartmoor and Isle of Wight, mainly because they provided comprehensive resettlement and care plans for older prisoners. We suggested that NOMS should roll out such services in all prisons where there is an existing population of older prisoners. The Government again said that, in light of the passing of the Care Bill, local authorities would have a responsibility to provide a care plan in those circumstances and that NOMS would work with local authorities to support that process. Again, I would like clarification about how that will work with regard to Welsh older prisoners, whether they are incarcerated in England or in Wales.

Finally, we said that it was imperative that older prisoners were registered with a community GP after release into the community to ensure continuity of care. It is vital that services are linked up in that fashion. In their response, the Government once again referred only to NHS England, and I seek further information about what discussions the Government will have with the Welsh Government to ensure that adequate information is given to GPs in Wales about older prisoners when they are released, whether—as I have already said—they are incarcerated in Wales or in England.

I am sure that the Minister will respond in his usual assiduous manner to the various questions that I have put today. However, I need to place on record my apology, as I will not be here for the wind-ups; I have a televisual appointment later on this evening. I am grateful to you, Mr Bone, for allowing me to make this speech at this stage.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I suspect that I have already had it as bedtime reading, because I seem to have read almost every report going on these matters. We can have an argument on the effectiveness of prison per se at another time. I am a big fan of sending more criminals to prison: for example, each year some 3,000 burglars with 15 or more previous convictions are not sent to prison, which is a national scandal, and I suspect that most of my constituents think so too. We can discuss that on a different occasion, and perhaps the Select Committee might want to consider why so few persistent burglars are sent to prison. My constituents would welcome that.

One point that crops up time and again is the idea that women offenders are, by definition, more vulnerable than male offenders and therefore need special protection. I want to address that first because I believe that much has been made of the special case of women offenders, but next to nothing has been said about the problems that men face. I have been interested to discover that some of the facts show that much of what is being said could apply equally to men. The House of Commons Library, for example, says that almost the same proportion of sentenced male prisoners as of sentenced female prisoners ran away from home as a child—47% compared with 50%. The Library also states that, although a third of female prisoners were excluded from school, a larger half of male prisoners were excluded from school. A quarter of both male and female prisoners are thought to have been in care when they were growing up. Although about one third of female prisoners admit to hazardous drinking, it seems that the figure for men is more like two thirds.

When we talk about those figures, we have to bear in mind the overall prison population figures. For the record, as of last Friday, 10 January, there were 3,845 women in prison and 80,413 men. Clearly half of the male prison population is a very large figure and half of the female prison population is a relatively low figure, so if campaigners are really concerned about the personal circumstances and vulnerabilities of individuals, they perhaps ought to be clear that far more men than women are in the position they describe of being vulnerable prisoners. On sheer numbers alone, one would therefore think male prisoners would be given far more attention than women prisoners.

Of course, the favourite subject among some campaigners is mental health, which is also mentioned prominently in recommendations 1 and 2 of the Select Committee report, and it is addressed in the Government response. Of course the figures in the report are only for women offenders, so in the interest of ensuring that we have the real picture, and not the one that some would like us to be left with, I will compare female offenders with such problems with male offenders in the same position.

In 2011, two women committed suicide in prison. I do not know the circumstances of those cases, but one might conclude that they were clearly vulnerable individuals. In the same period, 55 men took their own life. That is a stark example of the most serious end of the argument and it shows why it is unbelievable that so much time is spent compiling reports about vulnerable women, yet so little time is spent considering the hard facts about the deaths of male prisoners.

Even more recent figures show an alarming trend of which I hear little mention. Although the number of female self-harmers decreased from 1,429 in 2005 to 1,065 in 2013, the number of male self-harmers increased in that period from 5,692 to 6,823. Perhaps more starkly, over the same period the number of female self-harm incidents decreased by half, from 12,014 to 6,236, while the number of male self-harm incidents increased from 10,109 to 16,741. Again, according to the Ministry of Justice, 145 female offenders who self-harmed in 2013 required hospital treatment, whereas 10 times as many male offenders who self-harmed had to be taken to hospital. If people are concerned—and it may well be a legitimate concern—that women are vulnerable in those circumstances, surely men in such situations must be of equal concern. If that is the case, why do we have Select Committee reports simply on female offenders? Why do we not have the same reports on male prisoners, which we never seem to get?

[Mr Llwyd]

The hon. Gentleman is an intelligent man, but his last point is rather stupid. In our report we were considering the circumstances of female offenders. As the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) told him, there have been other reports on the male occupants of the prison estate. Saying that because we are considering the situation of women, we could not care less about men, is absolutely ridiculous.

[Philip Davies]

I am afraid we hear that time and again in the main Chamber. Questions focus on female offenders, female offenders, female offenders; there is never the same focus on either offenders overall or male offenders. All I am trying to do is introduce some balance to the debate. Actually, all of the things that people mention also apply to male offenders and, just because of the sheer numbers, in many more cases. I would like to see the same focus—arguably, a greater focus—on all of those issues in relation to male offenders.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. Later, I will discuss whether it is justified for special circumstances to apply when deciding whether to send women to prison.

[Mr Llwyd]

For clarification, I said in my speech that women are less likely to be sentenced to custody than men. In 2011, 3% of females were sentenced to custody, compared with 10% of males. I know that the hon. Gentleman is obsessed with his own argument and does not want to listen to the other side of the argument, but that was said, and it is on the record.

[Philip Davies]

If the right hon. Gentleman is listening to my speech, he will have heard me say at the start that I thought I was making some headway because this debate is the first time that I had heard him acknowledge that fact. It is not that I am not listening to him; it is a question of him not listening to me.

[Mr David Amess in the Chair]

I am grateful, however, because we are starting to make some progress. Everyone appears to be falling over themselves to say that men are more likely to be sent to prison than women. When I made that comment the other day and in previous debates, I have been told that that clearly is not true. Now, everyone is falling over themselves to say that what I am saying is right, and that they were there first. I do not want to be precious about this, and do not want it to seem that I was there first; if people want to claim the credit, I am happy for them to do so. I am just pleased that we are making some headway, and that the facts are for once beginning to rear their ugly heads.

The Ministry of Justice answered a question that I asked in September about pre-sentence reports and its recommendations for sentences in court. It was confirmed that probation staff are twice as likely to recommend custody for male offenders due to be sentenced in Crown court cases than for female offenders. For men, the figure is 24%, while it is just 11% for women. Even repeat offenders are more likely to fare better if they are women. For those who have committed more than 15 offences, pre-sentence reports recommend custody for 39% of men, compared with 29% of women. All that shows that it is wrong to say that women are more likely to be sent to prison than men. We seem to have agreed among ourselves that men are more likely than women to be sent to prison for committing exactly the same offence. That is the reality.

It is also true, however, that men will be sent to prison for longer than women. I refer again to the Ministry of Justice’s published figures, which state that women given an immediate custodial sentence for indictable offences receive shorter average sentence lengths than men. It is 11.6 months for women, compared with 17.7 months for men. That is not a minor difference. That figure shows that the average male prison sentence is over 50% longer than the average female sentence. That is something that those who allege that they are keen on equality may want to think about.

Not only are women less likely to be sent to prison and more likely to be given a shorter sentence, but they are more likely to serve less of the sentence in prison than men. The Ministry of Justice helpfully points that out in its offender management statistics:

“Those discharged from determinate sentences…had served 53 per cent of their sentence in custody… On average, males served a greater proportion of their sentence in custody—53 per cent compared to 48 per cent for females”

in the same period. It continues:

“This gender difference is consistent over time, and partly reflects the higher proportion of females who are released on Home Detention Curfew.”

Other published Ministry of Justice figures confirm that. In fact, there is quite a disparity. In the past few years for which figures have been published, women have had 50% more of a chance than men of being released from prison early on home detention curfew. I hope that we have finally nailed the idea that women are treated more harshly by the courts than men. Men are clearly treated more severely by the courts when it comes to being sent to prison.

The other myth that we hear—the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd hinted at it earlier—is that most women in prison are serving short sentences for petty, non-violent offences, and that they would be better off being dealt with elsewhere. Let us take a snapshot of the sentenced female prison population at a moment in time and look at the detail of all these “poor women” who are serving prison sentences and who should—apparently—be out and about in the local community. Which women prisoners do those who advocate reducing the female prison sentence want to let out? I asked that question of the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon), who has been good enough to come back again today, for which I am grateful. The right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd gave the impression—although he perhaps would not want to subscribe to this—that as much as 80% of women prisoners should not be in prison. That was the impression that he wanted to leave us with when he made his comments.

I have the latest Ministry of Justice figures on the female prison population, and I want to know which of these people the right hon. Gentleman and others think should not be in prison. Is it the 231 who are in there for murder? Is it the 61 who are in there for manslaughter? Perhaps it is the 73 who are in there for other and attempted homicides. Is it the 391 who are in for wounding? Is it the 52 in for assault? Perhaps it is the 56 who are in prison for cruelty to children, or the 85 who are in for other violence against the person. Maybe the 83 who are in there for sexual offences should not be in prison. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman has in mind the 328 who are in prison for robbery. Is it the 208 who were unlucky enough to be sent to prison for burglary? They must have been persistent burglars to have been sent to prison.

The right hon. Gentleman probably does have in mind the 508 women who are in prison for theft and handling stolen goods, but maybe it is the 574 who are in for drug offences; perhaps they are the ones who he thinks should not have been sent to prison. Maybe it is the 86 women who are in prison for arson, the 24 for criminal damage, the 12 for blackmail or the 37 for kidnapping. Maybe the right hon. Gentleman has those people in mind when he says that these women, who apparently pose no danger to the public, should not be in prison. When those numbers are added up, they make up far more than half of the female prison population. Let us hear which ones should not be in prison. I would like to know.

Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Elfyn Llwyd Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Commons Chamber

On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that staff are demoralised and unconvinced. We do not need to be persuaded of that; it is the case. Plenty of evidence from previous restructurings in the NHS shows that wholesale restructuring absorbs time and resources, and reduces efficiency, and that there are still lingering communications systems issues to address—we have mentioned the IT system, too. Enough evidence is available to make an ideologue—though not perhaps a Minister—think that a smart move in this case would be to have a pilot, because we are talking about a precious asset, the probation service of this country, and we need to handle it carefully. One way of doing that is to pilot things first and then, when we are totally satisfied that everything is working, to put it in place nationally, if need be.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I wish to speak briefly to new clauses 1 and 4, both of which I have co-signed with Her Majesty’s official Opposition. The Government do not want new clause 1 in the Bill because they are concerned that, in due course, they will not win the vote in either House of Parliament because, frankly, what they are proposing does not add up to much. At the end of last year, the official Opposition held a debate on the Government’s plans to restructure probation work and, until that point, the Justice Secretary had refused to answer for his plans on the Floor of the House. During that debate, many of us outlined why we thought it baffling that the Government should want to target the probation service, a service that is so high performing and where the numbers speak for themselves.

The Ministry of Justice’s own figures show that none of the 35 probation trusts is currently showing cause for “serious concern” and none “require development”; and that 31 of the trusts are “showing good performance” and four are “performing exceptionally”. In 2011-12, victim feedback was positive in 98% of cases; 80% of orders or licences were completed successfully; and 49% of offenders were in employment at the end of their orders and 89% were in accommodation. Reoffending rates were better than predicted in both England and Wales, and the probation service met all its targets in 2012. The service achieved a successful completion rate of 81% for participants of sex offender treatment programmes and exceeded its completion targets on domestic violence interventions. In October 2011, the probation service became the only public sector organisation to be awarded the British Quality Foundation award. The board said that the service was

“on the right path to achieving and sustaining excellence and essentially to being the best providers of these essential services.”

The reoffending rate among those sentenced to more than 12 months but less than four years is 36.2%, while among those serving between four and 10 years it is 30.7%. As we know, the reoffending rate for individuals sentenced to less than 12 months—the cohort that currently, by and large, receives no supervision, despite some probation trusts asking for the authority to take control of them—stands much higher, at 58.5%. That takes us to the crux of the argument. Everybody in this Chamber agrees that something has to be done, but we disagree about how it should be done, because what the Government have proposed is untried, untested and downright dangerous.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

I endorse everything the right hon. Gentleman is saying about the excellent service that the current probation service provides. Is not part of the problem that the Government are failing to address a major problem, which is the reoffending by people with mental health conditions? If we tackled mental health and mental health services rather than imprisoned people, we could cut some of that reoffending more dramatically than we could by privatising the service.

[Mr Llwyd]

The hon. Lady, who has taken an interest in this subject for many years, as have I, is absolutely correct. I would go a bit further and say that if we dealt with mental health problems and drug addiction, we could empty about 40% of prisoners from prisons tomorrow without any danger—had we got the safety net out in the community.

The Government are taking a drastic step without having any proven record of any possible success. Unlike with some services that are privatised, there is an inherent danger to the public in all this. I agree fully with the Opposition when they say that we want the thing tried and tested. That is not a political scam to try to stop it. I would like it stopped, but let us also be honest and say that we are where we are and we should at least see whether these plans will work. That surely is a common-sense thing to do, but time and time again, in the Public Bill Committee and in all the other debates, we have been unable to persuade the Government to pause and to think carefully about why they initiated their two pilots previously. Why did they do that if they were that unconcerned and the pilots were bound to succeed?

The Secretary of State, who drifted in and out here today, in typical fashion, has said in some debates, “You do things sometimes because they are right.” I am sure that is right, but it is a bit risky to have a messianic view of life and say, “Because they are new and are being tried now, they have got to be right. What’s right is right.” That is absolute balderdash and I am afraid he will eat those words in the next two or three years. I hope not, but there will be a danger in this system.

As we are all aware, what will be left of the public sector probation service will work with victims, hostels and offenders who pose a high risk of harm. The remaining 70% of cases—the low-risk and medium-risk offenders—will be managed by the private sector under the model that we are talking about. The point has already been made that such risks vary—they can vary from day to day or from week to week. I do not know how the system will be managed, but co-location has been mentioned. I am not sure whether that will work, but, again, it is a matter of crossing one’s fingers and hoping for the best.

There are serious concerns about the payment-by-results model, most of which I will briefly outline with regard to another amendment that would compel the Government to pilot the plans before implementing them across the board. To some relief, we find that G4S and Serco will not be coming in on this, although they do know a lot about criminality.

Under the proposals, private companies will be responsible for the majority of cases involving domestic violence, sexual offences, burglary, robbery, violence against the person and gang-related crimes. That is highly sensitive work, which clearly requires trained professionals with experience of how to deal with victims and perpetrators of such complex crimes. It is highly unlikely that the private sector will prioritise holistic initiatives such as work with victims of crime. I am afraid that it will be driven by profit rather than levels of care. Many individuals who come into contact with the probation service have one or more mental health problems. They may have suffered abuse, have substance misuse issues, literacy problems and poor educational attainment. Such people need to be signposted to the proper avenues for care and support. They are highly damaged individuals and require special attention.

The proposals will compromise public protection and provide a perverse incentive for private companies not to put resources into decreasing offending behaviour. There are also numerous possibilities for conflicts of interest, the tackling of which is the aim of another amendment that I have co-signed.

The Social Market Foundation has argued that payment by results incentivises an increase in offending. To understand that, it is important to note that the Government have decided that a private company will neither be penalised nor rewarded for an increase or decrease in offending of 3% either way. Ostensibly, that is to take account of the fact that external factors can have an impact on offending rates. In practice, however, it would mean that private companies would have to achieve a 4% decrease in offending before being rewarded. They will simply not invest that amount of money when there is no guarantee of a return on their investment. Unfortunately, it is far more likely that the companies will make a profit by delivering court orders in the cheapest way possible by opening call centres. Understandably, the National Association of Probation Officers—the experts on this—is worried, and legitimately I would say.

The hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) referred to the GMB union. It is a question not of union versus anybody else but of what works and what does not work. NAPO has had experience over many years, and I have already referred to its successes.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

rose—

[Mr Llwyd]

Yes, of course I shall give way, but let me make this point. Time and again, I have heard NAPO say, “If it is inevitable that we have to go down this path, let us see whether it works.” Let us pilot this system. Let it come before Parliament before the changes are effected, because, although NAPO refers to its jobs, its main concern is the safety of the public it serves.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

The right hon. Gentleman and I have many mutual friends who are members of NAPO. Harry Fletcher is a former assistant general-secretary whom we both know and respect. My point was quietly to tease the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) who happened to say in a parliamentary reference book that she was a member of the GMB, but she tells me that that is not the case. I was not making a substantive point but—

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[Mr Llwyd]

I agree entirely with the hon. and learned Gentleman on that. We all agree that we need to deal with these prisoners. If the model works, that is fine, but if it does not, it will be a disaster. Pausing a bit would have been a good idea. There were two pilots that were cancelled halfway through. If they had carried on, we would have had some evidence to consider. Even people like me who need some persuasion about the system would see that it works and that there is no danger to the public. Instead, we rush headlong into the dark.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that there has been too much social experimentation between the private sector and some public sector organisations, such as the probation service? In industry, for example, if a company were bringing in an innovation, it would have a pilot scheme either to silence the doubters or to answer them. I agree that we should have a pilot scheme on this. It is far too dangerous to deal with it in the abstract.

[Mr Llwyd]

I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman. That feeling is held widely across the House, and not just on these Benches. The hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh) referred to ideology. The Bill is a victory for ideology over common sense. That by itself is ridiculous enough, but the inherent dangers of it make it even more insidious.

To avoid treading over old ground, I will not talk about the risk register. None the less, it still alarms me that the risks were seen as so high at the commencement of this exercise, and I have no reason to believe that they have changed for the better since.

Briefly, let me refer to new clause 4. The impetus behind it is to ensure that we do not rush headlong into implementing these reforms without first having a pilot, which would be independently evaluated and reported on to both Houses of Parliament. I notice that the esteemed Chair of the Justice Committee, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), is in his place, so I must be careful about what I say. Over the past few weeks, we have taken evidence from many sectors involved in probation and rehabilitation. A considerable amount of it was from people who had been involved in previous Government privatisations. Surprisingly, they were saying, “Don’t do it. Don’t rush in. It is not proven. It may not be cost-effective and it could cause huge problems.” Such people are surely aware of the risks involved and they came before the Committee to give their opinion. It is not simply a matter of one political divide against the other. Some of those people presented as being more in sympathy with the Government than with anybody else, but they said not to do it because it is unproven and could be dangerous.

The probation service has prior experience of the damage that can result from privatisation. Building management, for example, has been contracted out to the private sector, which has resulted in a great deal of waste and inefficiency. I have heard of an engineer being sent from Liverpool to Cardiff to fit a carpet tile even though, ironically, there is a carpet shop opposite the Cardiff probation office—you could not make it up.

In 2007, the running of bail beds was outsourced to a company called ClearSprings, which had no experience in the criminal justice sector. Numerous complaints were made about antisocial behaviour and drunkenness and the contract had to be removed. We know about Serco and G4S, so I will not go there again. Clearly, there is a significant prospect of disorder and possible dangers if the plans do not prove to be sensible. As for the Government’s risk assessment, time is short so I will not go there.

The restructuring will mean that there will have to be an entirely new operating model with 21 new government companies; that staff will have to be allocated to new roles in community rehabilitation companies and the national probation service; that no fewer than 18,000 staff members will be transferred to new employers; and that up to 250,000 offender cases will be reallocated. It would be foolhardy indeed to proceed without some guarantee of success.

It would not be unheard of for new measures being introduced to the justice system to be piloted nationally. Recently, pilots on payment by results have been held at HMP Peterborough and Doncaster, albeit voluntarily, while in recent years Governments have held pilots on satellite tracking, the domestic violence 28-day prevention order and drug reduction schemes. Piloting is not unheard of.

This is not a question of reputational risk for the MOJ. We are all concerned about the safety of the public more than anything else. A further risk register produced by the probation employers last November of last year warned of a high risk of

“a failure of the programme to be delivered either in scope or within the timescale set by ministers”.

At this eleventh hour, I plead with the Minister and his colleagues to give the scheme a chance and to give us all a chance to evaluate it. We might come back one day saying, “Yes, it was right,” or, “No, it was not.” If the answer is no, many people will suffer. Those members of the public are the people whom it is our duty to protect.

[John McDonnell]

I apologise to the House for the fact that I will leave after my brief remarks, because at 3 o’clock I have a meeting, which I have been seeking for a couple of months, with the Secretary of State for Education, about a school in my constituency. I hope that I will be back in time for the Minister’s response.

Let me pick up on the point made by the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier). We have all been pressing for some time, under the previous Government and this Government, for the supervision of offenders with sentences of less than 12 months, but we all expected that to proceed normally—that is, with a proposal being made with a budgetary paper attached that the existing system would be challenged to meet—so that we could plan the development of the probation service. If there were to be additional funds, some of us would have lobbied the Treasury while others would have argued that the service should swallow its own smoke and keep the budget within its existing budgets. That was what we expected.

I think that clause 1 was inserted in the Bill in the other place because none of us expected the use of the previous legislation to introduce proposals for the wholesale privatisation of the probation service—that is what this means for 70% of the service going forward. When that legislation was going through, I opposed it and I warned those on my Front Bench that it could be abused in such a way. I was assured that the legislation, which was supported on both sides of the House if I remember rightly, would ensure that the third sector, voluntary sector organisations and others could participate in rehabilitation, and that it would introduce flexibility to the system. A number of organisations lobbied for that, particularly in the drugs rehabilitation field. That is why I think that this is an abuse of process. It is an abuse of the previous legislation, which was never intended to be used in this way, and I think that is why the other place inserted the clause.

I have been angry and have shouted about the subject in this House, and it is not good for my health. This is, however, a leap in the dark, and I am fearful for my constituents. As with other privatisations, there is a financial risk, but that is nothing in comparison with the risk to life and limb. As a result of this leap in the dark, there could be safety problems that will bear down on Ministers in the future.

I warn the House that if we allow this Bill to go through and any of our constituents suffer and are harmed in some way as a result of an offender not being properly supervised, we will, quite properly, be held responsible. The hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh), my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) have made exactly this point: why not ensure that the alternatives proposed by the Government are properly tested? Setting up pilots and then ending them without taking any account of them seems extraordinary and completely illogical.

In previous debates, we seized on the risk register because advisers to the Government were saying that there were risks. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd has said, there is an 80% risk of failure in some instances. The Secretary of State argued that the risk registers are only there at the beginning to point out a range of issues that will then be addressed, so we asked, “Why not publish the risk register and make it completely public, and why not publish those mechanisms you have put in place to address the specific risks? At least then we could be assured that they have been properly addressed and, perhaps, overcome.” As my right hon. Friend has said, we are walking into the dark and putting our constituents at risk as a result.

As other Members have explained, the experience of privatisation in the justice service has given us sufficient warnings that we need to tread very carefully. I do not want to go over those again, but many of us have had experience of the justice system over the years and I have never seen the system so vulnerable as a result of private interventions. There are riots almost monthly, and concerns expressed within our prison system. The introduction of the Serious Fraud Office into investigations of companies that provide services within the justice system is ironic, to say the least.

I support the amendments tabled by my hon. Friends on the Front Bench, which are supported by the chair of the justice unions parliamentary group and by the group overall. We have also tabled a number of other proposals that are somewhat bureaucratic but, I think, important: new clauses 10, 9, 11 and 13, which are all in my name. They are simple suggestions. First, if the Government are going down this path let us have full and open transparency. The new clauses suggest that the contracts should be fully published. The Minister has said that the draft contracts should be published, but I think that it is important that the full contract should be published so that we can all see it, in particular the elements of the contract that include the requirements and expectations of the providers’ performance. It is important that in future the National Audit Office can investigate and assess the effectiveness, economy and efficiency of the implementation of the contracts.

One change that I have suggested is just common sense: no company that has been investigated for fraud should be able to bid for the contract. I do not wish to see sleight of hand, with the suggestion that such companies will not be the primary providers but can be part of a consortium. They will play a key role within those consortia because of the resources they have.

New clause 9 suggests that companies that are the prime contractors for the Work programme in an area should not be able to bid, and I say that because there is a potential conflict of interest. If one company is implementing the Work programme at the same time as the new probation system for those with sentences of less than 12 months and there is a sanction, the Work programme will lose out. That introduces a conflict of interest within the system. What worries me is that a number of companies will bid for a range of contracts in an area, across the piece, with the result that mini-monopolies will be built up in particular geographical areas.

My new clauses are simply administrative amendments. New clause 13 says that we need an annual report to Parliament and I know that that is a standard amendment that we table for a range of legislation, but in this instance it is vital. I want to know from an annual report from the Government exactly how the contracts are being performed against, how safe my constituents are, how safe the offenders are and how successful the implementation of the new system is.

I do not want to go over everything I have said before. I am extremely worried and I will hold Ministers to account if any of my constituents are injured as a result of the Bill. I have said that twice before. In fact, the late Paul Goggins advised me that I was threatening Ministers and I said, “Yes, I am actually, because they are threatening my constituents with this legislation.” I hope that today we will be able to defeat it or at least pass some amendments that will stabilise the system and enable us to gain some accountability. If not, I hope that the other place will say no and introduce an element of common sense to the debate.

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[Jeremy Wright]

The hon. Lady keeps asking the same question and she is going to keep getting the same answer: that is called consistency. Let me tell her once again that she will have to wait until she sees the documentation on the invitation to negotiate. What she will see from it is that we are very interested not just in the initial figure, but in how those bidding for this work will develop the amount they are prepared to put at risk over time. That will assist precisely the type of organisations that Labour Members claim they are interesting in helping—voluntary sector organisations that might not be able to put a great deal at risk to start with, but might be able to build on it in the future. We think that is important, and I very much hope that the hon. Lady will support it.

Let me deal with the Peterborough pilot and what it does. It is worth making the point that the interim figures from the pilot—we have been told often this afternoon that there is no evidence for the changes we are making, so let me offer some up—show an 8% fall in reconvictions among offenders released from Peterborough between September 2010 and June 2012 as compared with the preceding period. Similarly in the Doncaster pilot, the sixth-month reoffending rate fell 5.7 percentage points compared with the preceding period. That clearly demonstrates that with targeted support and help aimed at the right people at the right time, we can divert more offenders from a return to crime.

We have built into our plans a set of our own business and system readiness tests, which will be carried out throughout the implementation process. There are therefore a number of things that we are doing to test these reforms—completely contrary to the characterisation of Opposition Members—and we are determined to implement them in a measured and orderly way to ensure that public safety is in no way impacted. That is why we are taking a structured approach to implementation, as I have set out.

[Mr Llwyd]

There is no clear read-across from Doncaster and Peterborough because those are voluntary schemes and what the Minister proposes is not voluntary. Those who know better than I do—and, with great respect, as much as he does—will tell him that the figures do not correlate precisely.

[Jeremy Wright]

I would say two things to the right hon. Gentleman on that. First, he and his colleagues have busily argued that we should have had more pilots, while some of the pilots we cancelled were less comparable to our reforms than were Peterborough and Doncaster, so he needs to be careful what he is arguing for. Secondly, he is absolutely right to say that the Peterborough and Doncaster pilots were conducted on a voluntary basis. That is because the law does not allow us to impose them on a compulsory basis. That is the law I am inviting the right hon. Gentleman to vote in favour of today, and I very much hope he will do so. Unless we have that law, we will never be able to impose those kinds of provisions on a compulsory basis.

Finally, on the issue of the pace of the reforms—an issue of which others have made much—I want to say two things. First, it is important that those who are employed by probation trusts—my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) made this point—understand where they stand. It does not benefit them for us to drag our feet at this point. We need to get on with it so that those people can understand what their own futures hold. Secondly, to reiterate a point made by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier), I make no apologies for the urgency of these reforms: as long as we wait, there will be further cases of reoffending and further victims created. Some 600,000 offences are committed every year by those who are reoffending. That is the problem that everyone here has identified correctly and everyone says they want to do something about. The difference between the Government and Opposition Members is that we know how we are going to do it and they do not have the faintest idea. They do not know how they would pay for it, either. We know that the last Government set out to achieve this, but could not afford to do it within existing budgets. That option is out. We know how we will pay for this; they do not. They have not told us; they should certainly support what we propose.

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[Jenny Chapman]

It is difficult to develop policy sensibly without having the information to inform decisions. One thing we want to achieve in this debate is a commitment to gather the data that we need to make those decisions in a more structured fashion. The specific issue of rehabilitative services for veterans was first raised in debate on this Bill last summer by Members in another place. Noble Lords had taken inspiration from the United States, from which we have a lot to learn on this issue, and laid down amendments calling on the Government to establish a pilot of a so-called veterans court. Veterans courts are now quite well known in the United States, but, as yet, we have not used them here.

A veterans court is staffed entirely by ex-servicemen and women, and deals with veterans charged with non-serious offences. As it was explained in the other place, a veteran who has committed an offence can be referred from the trial court to the veterans court. Under the system, the court assigns a fellow veteran as a mentor and systematic efforts are made to help the offender deal with a range of problems with which they are struggling to cope, such as substance misuse, mental health issues, lack of housing, anger management, skills, jobs and family breakdown. Other problems can be addressed in that way. The veteran is expected to attend monthly hearings so that progress can be assessed. Failure to co-operate leads to recall by the trial court and the possibility of a custodial sentence being imposed. The reported results of the courts are extremely impressive. The state supreme court in Pennsylvania reports an average reoffending rate for courts in its counties of just 1%. In other reports, rates vary from 10% to 30%, which is substantially lower than rates for custodial sentences.

[Mr Llwyd]

I am interested in what the hon. Lady has to say. In 2008, I went out, as an adviser to the Howard League, to see the courts in action. The first such court in the United States was in Buffalo, New York state. Currently, eight years down the road, it still has a 0% reoffending rate, which is absolutely incredible.

[Jenny Chapman]

The right hon. Gentleman clearly has a great deal of experience and expertise in this area. I am heartened by what he has said, which makes the idea of veterans courts all the more compelling. Since the first court was opened, the programme has been replicated across the country, and a number of states have passed legislation providing for the state-wide establishment of such courts. One has introduced changes to allow veterans to be diverted, where appropriate, into treatment rather than prison. That is the mark of simple, systematic support that can make a life-changing difference to an individual.

New clauses 2 and 3 are the starting steps. They aim to start our catch-up with the US and other nations. New clause 3 provides for a pilot of a variation of the veterans court to be trialled in the UK. New clause 2 requires a wide-ranging consultation on the issue as a whole. Both new clauses are reasonably small asks and, if passed, would offer the chance to learn more about the particular needs of veterans and how best we can support individuals to prevent future offences.

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[Philip Davies]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend is making my point for me. Some 95% of people in prison are men. If 95% of either men or women were treated in what we might call a harsh manner in any other walk of life one would think there would be uproar on behalf of the 95%, but, would you believe it, all the uproar is that 5% is too many women prisoners. It is a nonsensical argument to suggest that women are treated more harshly than men. My hon. Friend is quite right that a lot more men are in prison for those same offences. My point is that men and women should be treated the same, irrespective of their offence. For the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) to suggest that they are non-violent, non-serious offences is utterly disgraceful. Perhaps she would like to go to each of those victims of crime and tell them that they are the victims of non-violent and non-serious offences.

In conclusion, clause 10 is unnecessary because the facts are already stark: women are treated more favourably than men when it comes to sentencing. Men are more likely to be sent to prison, more likely to be given a longer sentence and more likely to serve more of that sentence in prison than women for every single category of crime. For every single category of crime, men are also more likely to be given a serious community order and a longer community order, and are more likely to have more requirements made. Why is it, then, that the Government are not satisfied with that and want to go further to make the criminal justice system even more imbalanced and even more in favour of female offenders?

[Mr Llwyd]

The previous speaker should not read anything into the silence in the Chamber. It was not acquiescence; we were stunned into silence.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) on being the driving force in bringing forward new clauses 2 and 3 on veterans to which I would like to speak briefly. I also welcome Government amendment 5 on the extension of restorative justice, which is a positive step. We had a debate on that in Committee. The Minister said that he would go away and consider the matter and he obviously has done so. I am sure we are very grateful for that.

I was glad to read in the papers over the weekend that there will be a Government review of how to improve the rehabilitation of ex-service personnel who are in prison, and that it will be led by the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart). I wish him well in that work. I have a feeling that it will be done consensually and that we will all be able to muck in, as it were, and do our best to come up with some good answers for the Government, because the work is long overdue.

As the House may be aware, I have campaigned for a number of years for greater recognition of the welfare needs of veterans of the armed forces, and I have raised the issue in this place and elsewhere since 2008. In January 2010, I published a paper that contained detailed recommendations for increasing the support available to veterans, in particular to those who come into contact with the criminal justice system. I have also had the privilege since 2010 of chairing the veterans in the criminal justice system parliamentary group, which meets under the auspices of the justice unions parliamentary group. The group comprises parliamentarians and representatives from criminal justice trade unions and charities, including the National Association of Probation Officers, the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Prison Officers Association, the Royal British Legion and several military charities. The group is able to disseminate good practice to ensure that it is available throughout the British isles, and I think that that is coming together and is working. I hope that at some point the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border might care to attend, to contribute and to perhaps pick up on a few points.

[Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)]

May I draw attention to what is happening in Midlothian, where Police Scotland has been giving out leaflets to local pubs, clubs and voluntary organisations? When an arrest takes place, the police now ask directly whether the person arrested is an ex-member of the armed forces, which helps quite a bit. We should replicate such things and learn from each other.

[Mr Llwyd]

That is precisely the point of the joint group, and I am proud to say that the police force where I live, north Wales, have been doing that for more than 12 months, as have others. It is difficult, though, because some ex-military personnel are not prepared to admit to having been in the forces; they feel they would be letting the regiment down. Then there are others—we have all met them; they always seem to be former leading members of the SAS—who have not served a day any more than I have. It is not simple—we need to be doing a complex set of things—but I am pleased that we now have something to concentrate our energies upon.

I first became aware of the disproportionate number of veterans in the system when appearing as a barrister in Chester and north Wales Crown courts one particular week some years ago. I noticed that increasing numbers of people who were appearing in court for serious crimes professed to have a military background, and often the distinguishing feature was that their crimes were inexplicable, or at least difficult for a person who had not served in theatre to explain. I remember one case vividly of a young man who had come back from Iraq and was standing in a fish and chip queue when the lad behind him who had had too much to drink bumped into him. He knocked the hell out of the young lad in no time at all. He was trained to look after himself—almost by reflex he would do it—and he ended up doing three years for assault.

When people come back from theatre, they need to be decompressed and brought back into society. Heaven knows how I would be affected, had I been out with the forces in theatre. It is natural to presume that many people will suffer mental scars as a result of service, and we owe it to them to do something about it.

[Rory Stewart]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that there is a particular issue with the reserves? For those in the regular forces, there is more of a framework for returning from operational theatre to battalion, whereas for the reserves we have a very specific challenge.

[Mr Llwyd]

Yes, and actually, as one who follows these things, I know that, interestingly, an increasing number of reservists are appearing in court, having left their work for a period and gone into the eye of the storm. On coming out again, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says, they are expected to go back to civvy street as normal, but it is clearly extremely difficult. That is a big problem, and the amendments would be a step forward.

Almost by instinct, as a lawyer I have something at the back of my mind saying, “Why should any class of society have a court set up especially for them?” In this case, the answer is simple: because these people have been through extraordinary situations that we cannot even imagine. Of those who would wish to argue along the lines I previously argued, I would ask: why do we have specialist drug courts in the UK? They have worked well. The Liverpool drug court was a great success when it was in full swing, as these courts, or disposals, could be—we are talking about disposals for veterans, to begin with, which is perfectly sensible.

[Mr Anderson]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the American experience shows not only that such courts are effective, but that they are economically viable? People are not going to prison, so there are not the problems of family breakdown, and the huge array of things put in place when people keep going back to crime are no longer there, so there is an economic as well as a social case.

[Mr Llwyd]

Yes, there is. In addition, ex-service personnel are not used to paying regular bills and so on, and sometimes they do not balance their monthly income and outgoings, they end up in debt and everything spirals from there. I remember speaking with SSAFA in south Wales some time ago, and it told me that about 60% of its work was to do with debt, the handling of money and so on. That is another issue that has rightly been identified.

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[Mr Llwyd]

I hope I do not suffer a sex change, which with this moustache would be awful to see!

When we enter the legislative processes, we usually start with a lot of unanswered questions. What distinguishes the process for this Bill is that we have almost as many such questions now as we had at the very beginning. The Justice Committee took evidence very recently, and experts in the field are asking some fundamental questions about how the procedure will work and how safe it will be. I do not know; obviously, I do not profess to know all the answers.

We have had an interesting debate or two during the Bill’s passage so far. I pay particular tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright)—he is the man steering the Bill through the House—for attempting to engage constructively with the process at all times. I am sure that, on occasion, that has been as difficult for him, as it has been for Opposition Members.

Let me also associate myself, warmly and sincerely, with the tributes that have been paid to our friend and colleague Paul Goggins. He played a large part in the Bill’s progress, speaking as he did with great knowledge.

I welcome the provisions for the rehabilitation of female offenders and for the extension of restorative justice. I also welcome the parallel process—if I may call it that—of over the weekend appointing the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) to prepare a report on veterans. That is all to the good. Overall, however, I still feel uneasy, because there are a great many unanswered questions. I do not pose the following question in expectation of an answer today, but I should be pleased if the Lord Chancellor could respond to it in due course.

During our debates, including those that have taken place today, the Government have prayed in aid the Peterborough social impact bond pilot. The original published figure for crime reduction was 6%. The Under-Secretary of State said on Radio 5 Live that it was 12%. In Committee, the Justice Secretary said that it was 20%, and today, in the Chamber, the Under-Secretary of State said that it was 8%. All four figures cannot be right. It would not be a bad idea for us to be given a single figure, because that disparity underlines my unease about some of the facts and figures that have been cited. I do not think that we should be prodding around in the dark when it comes to such a potentially dangerous area of law.

[Chris Grayling]

I hope that I can help the right hon. Gentleman. Two sets of statistics have been published. The comparators are between the absolutely numerical reduction at Peterborough and the reduction among a comparable group at a prison elsewhere in the country. The 20% figure, which is the highest, refers to the number of further crimes committed by the cohort, while the lower figures show the overall reduction in the absolute rate of reoffending—the binary rate. I should be happy to write to the right hon. Gentleman and set out the figures in detail, but I can tell him now that the experience of mentoring at Peterborough has been very encouraging indeed.

[Mr Llwyd]

I thank the Justice Secretary for his response, and I am sure that he is right about mentoring. I think he will find in due course, when the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border reports to him, that it is key to any improvement in dealing with the rehabilitation of ex-service people, and I am sure that that experience will translate into other forms of rehabilitation.

I do not want to elaborate on the position that I have taken, or, indeed, on the position that anyone else has taken. We have had a good-natured tussle over the past few weeks; I only hope that some of our worst fears are misplaced, for the sake of the British people.

[Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. With the leave of the House. [Laughter.]

I am given to understand that I recently made a speech. Even more unusually, I cannot remember what I said. I know that that happens to all of us sometimes, but what concerns me is that, as far as I am aware, it is a very rare occurrence.

I wanted to give my full support to the speech that was given in my name by my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt), but also to suggest that, if anything unfortunate was said, you might refer it to my hologram, who may have been speaking instead of me at the time. I am grateful for the opportunity to set the record straight, and to make clear it that I was somewhere else at the time. That excuse is given commonly enough in politics, but on this occasion it is actually true.

Oral Answers to Questions

Elfyn Llwyd Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright]

I agree with my hon. Friend. He does not need to take my word for it as the previous Government tried to do that as part and parcel of the public sector budgets and failed to do so because they determined that it was unaffordable.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

A few days ago, the Minister and the Secretary of State appeared before the Justice Committee, during which the Secretary of State said that his door is always open to meet the leaders of the National Association of Probation Officers. When will that meeting take place?

[Jeremy Wright]

I cannot give a date to the right hon. Gentleman. Both my right hon. Friend and I have met NAPO leaders before and are happy to do so again. What we will not do is pause the process in which we are engaged because the members of those trade unions would like some certainty over their own futures, and we think that is important, which is why we must get on with this process.