Sentencing

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)]

I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “House” to the end of the Question and add:

“deplores the previous Government’s failure to tackle the national scandal of reoffending and its mismanagement of the justice system; notes that discounts for guilty pleas have been an established principle of common law for decades, and that they can speed up justice and spare victims and witnesses the ordeal of waiting and preparing to give evidence at trial; and welcomes the Government’s intention to overhaul sentencing to deliver more effective punishment for offenders and increased reparation for victims and to reform offenders to cut crime.”

I welcome the shadow Secretary of State’s coming to the Dispatch Box and moving the motion, which took me rather by surprise when it was tabled at the last minute last week. At one point, he gave a clear exposition of the opinions of the Leader of the Opposition on the encouragement that is given for an early guilty plea. No doubt we will discover at some stage how many days ago the Leader of the Opposition came to that conclusion, but I think it is rather more the right hon. Gentleman’s than his leader’s.

The shadow Secretary of State also, quite fairly sometimes when giving way to interventions, said that there were substantial parts of the proposed reforms with which he was in broad agreement with the Government, and he offered to work with my colleagues and me in that regard. However, he tried to get away from that by saying that he would support me if it were not for the reductions in public expenditure in my Department to which I am submitting. I regard it as being in the national interest to make reductions in public expenditure in most Departments. If the right hon. Gentleman believes that my Department should be totally exempt from any reductions in public expenditure at all, perhaps he would indicate in which other part of the public service he would volunteer reductions. With respect—I do not normally tender such advice—the weakness of the Labour party is that it does not have the first idea when it is going to stop denying the need for any reductions in public expenditure. There are some perfectly reasonable reductions to be made in the criminal justice system, but that is not the principle motive for reform. The principle motive is to make the criminal justice system better and to tackle some of the problems we have inherited, as my right hon. and hon. Friends have touched on.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Mr Clarke]

The right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) was very generous in giving way and we all appreciated that, but there will be no Back-Bench speeches if I give way too frequently. I will give way in a second.

Let me get one thing out of the way first. I have always believed, along with every sensible person, that Britain needs a criminal justice system that is effective in properly punishing offenders for their wrongdoing and in protecting the public from further crime. When I took office as Justice Secretary it seemed to me perfectly obvious that that had to be the first priority for all my policies. That is self-obvious; it is a platitude. The Government’s policy, and my first duty, is to punish crime and have an effective system for protecting the public from further crime. The problem that I face, which causes the reforms, is the fact that I inherited a system that was not effective in protecting against offenders’ committing further crime or even in punishing offenders. So that is at the forefront of where we are going.

Without going over all the exchanges that we have just had, let me explain briefly what we have taken over, which causes the need for the proposed reform. Our prisons are pretty nasty, unpleasant places, far from the holiday camps they are sometimes made out to be. The people in most of them pass their days in a state of enforced idleness, quite a few of them making some tougher friends than they have had in the past, and not facing up to what they have done. That is not what I think of as a satisfactory and effective punishment. But a bigger scandal still is our system’s failure to protect the public from future crime committed by offenders after completion of their time inside. Reoffending rates in this country, as we have taken over the system now, are straightforwardly dreadful.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Clarke]

Let me finish describing the legacy of the previous Government, then we will move to the more constructive matter of my reforms and I will give way to my hon. Friend.

I have not forgotten, and I am sure the public have not forgotten either, what 13 years of Labour government was like in this field, despite the attempts of the right hon. Member for Tooting to skate over some of it. We had 13 years of eye-catching initiatives, schemes, meddling and prescription that made a complete Horlicks of the criminal justice system. We had more than 20 Criminal Justice Acts. Thousands of new criminal offences were created. Senior judges complained that

“Hell is a fair description of the problem of statutory interpretation”

when talking of this stream of legislation. We had a 39% increase in the number of prisoners in our jails—it was not planned and it was not policy—with the cost to taxpayers rising by two thirds in real terms.

And what for? That was meant to be the embodiment of the policy of being tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime—an attempt to give reality to an admittedly rather catchy slogan. What we got was a sentencing policy so chaotic and badly managed that, as my hon. Friends quite rightly keep emphasising, the previous Government had to let out early 80,000 criminals, who promptly went on to commit more than 1,000 crimes, including alleged murders and one rape. We had a system under which more than 1,000 foreign national offenders were released without being considered for deportation—the total number of foreign prisoners in our jails doubled during Labour’s period in office. We had a system under which offenders serving community sentences in practice usually completed only one or two days of unpaid work each week. Above all, as I keep emphasising, there was the national scandal throughout Labour’s period in office—not a new problem—that the exorbitantly high reoffending rates went completely ignored.

Why was that? A recent quote from the right hon. Member for Tooting is worth repeating, as he gave an extremely good description of what went wrong and what was driving Labour’s policy. Speaking to the Fabian Society about New Labour’s record on this subject just two months ago, he said that

“playing tough in order not to look soft made it harder to focus on what is effective”.

He gets a murmur of approval from the Conservative Back Benches, and certainly from those of us who had to witness the effect of that policy.

Let me move on to our proposed reforms, including the one to which the Opposition’s motion refers. What are the problems that we are now tackling and that our large package of reforms seeks to address? First, criminal trials are needlessly long, drawn out and expensive. The court experience is often deeply unpleasant and almost always uncomfortable for victims, witnesses, jurors and most people who have anything to do with it. As I have said, at least half of all crimes are committed by people who have already been through the criminal justice system. More than one in 10 adults in prison have never been in paid employment, almost a fifth of prisoners who have used heroin did so for the first time while in prison, and one in five appears to have mental health problems. If we wish to take this subject seriously and really want to protect society and the victims of crime, we must recognise that that is the context of today’s debate.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman for giving way at last. He is talking about practical studies on how to deal with prisoners with mental health problems, such as the work done by the Bradley review. I will go along with him on those issues, but I do not understand what studies he has done on the precise issue that we are debating today and on the effectiveness of early guilty pleas. It is clear that already two thirds of Crown court cases that result in a conviction involve people who have pleaded guilty. More than 10,000 of those cases in 2008-09 were at the door of the court but could easily have been dealt with in a magistrates court. Why is he not acting to ensure that those guilty pleas happen in a magistrates court, rather than having this widespread policy that will lead to violent criminals being let off?

[Mr Clarke]

On Lord Bradley’s report and the problem of mentally ill people in prison, it seems plain from the hon. Lady’s intervention that she agrees with me. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and I are working on ways to divert people from prisons, in proper cases and with proper protection of the public, to places where they can be more sensibly and suitably treated. In that respect the hon. Lady and I are in total rapport.

What I am suggesting about the system of guilty pleas, and the reason I have described the unpleasantness of going to court for most people who unwillingly go there as victims and witnesses, is that although most cases wind up with guilty pleas, more should do so and far too many such pleas are made ages after the event and at the last possible moment. I shall explain in a moment how we are addressing that problem, because the long-standing system we have at the moment is not working well enough.

--- Later in debate ---

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

I want to talk about this Government’s record on crime where women are victims or offenders, and to show that the latest attempt to propose a 50% discount for early guilty pleas—which was offered up by the Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt), as doing women rape victims a favour—is a desperate ploy that could only be the product of a men-only Department which, to be frank, just does not get it when it comes to women and crime.

It is not just Ministers’ fault, however: when I was a Home Office Minister working with the National Offender Management Service, I discovered that officials believed that women offenders in prisons were basically exactly the same as men and were to be treated the same. The consequence was an appalling deluge of women self-harming and killing themselves in jail. I realised that we needed a comprehensive rethink of the issue, and helped to commission Baroness Corston to look at it. She came up with an excellent report that showed many of the ways that prisons dealt ineffectually and unfairly with women, who are more likely to be jailed for non-violent offences than men, more likely to be remanded when they are later found innocent, and very likely to have been victims of violence themselves before committing any offence.

It seems that we are getting the same kind of cloth-eared view on how women as victims are treated. We need to approach them in the same way that Baroness Corston approached women offenders: by really looking at how to reduce future crime, by ensuring that the children of offending women are less likely to become offenders themselves, by listening to victims and those in the system, and by doing a careful study rather than what I believe we are facing, which is a back-of-the-envelope calculation—“This’ll get me off the hook with the Treasury.”

Let us look briefly at Labour’s record, which Government Members have mentioned extensively. The most striking thing in relation to rape is the increase of sentences served between 2005 and 2009, the period for which we have the most recent figures. Sentences served increased by 14 months over that period because of determined work by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) and Baroness Scotland, who worked together to start taking unduly lenient sentences back to court and ensure that dangerous rapists were not released early. We then realised that we were not doing enough, so we commissioned Baroness Stern to look at how rape was treated in the criminal justice system. She was impressed by a number of the changes that we had made, including introducing specialist police units—which are now due to be cut by the Home Office—increasing by 15% the number of rapists convicted, improving the way cases were dealt with in court, and introducing specialist prosecutors in all 42 Crown Prosecution Service areas. Of course, the number of CPS areas has now been cut, so although every area might claim to have specialist prosecutors, I doubt whether there will be as many as there were.

The difference between that and what we see now is carefully thinking through what will make a difference. I am genuinely shocked by the Minister, who I do not think is a bad man. I share his desire to reduce reoffending, and I recognise his point that short sentences—those under four years—are ineffectual. That is one of the reasons why I want to ensure that no rapist is in jail for less than four years. He said that there was no loud opposition to the proposal. What that means is that he has not bothered to read the representations that women’s organisations made in response to his Green Paper. I am afraid that we are seeing a cloth-eared, don’t-get-the-women approach from this Department. I want Ministers to think again. We were told that victims’ organisations would really welcome the proposal because victims would not have to go through the horror of a trial. Yes, rape trials are horrible—they are very degrading for the victim—but if the trial does not go ahead, then although the judge hears the plea in mitigation, he never hears how the victim’s life has been destroyed.

[Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

I wonder whether the hon. Lady has actually read the Green Paper. One of the things that it addresses is the right of victims—a right that they never really had under the Government whom she supported—to give a proper impact statement on how the crime has affected them. If she cares to read the Green Paper, we will not have these silly points made.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I was one of those Home Office Ministers who introduced the concept of victim impact statements, so I am well aware of that, but the problem is that with early guilty pleas, that has not usually been the case in practice. From my reading of the Green Paper it is not clear to me what will happen: will Ministers automatically ensure that the victim impact statement can fully outline what has happened to the victim?

I do not believe therefore that what is proposed is being done to make the victim’s experience better. There is no evidence of that, because there is no evidence of careful listening to victims’ organisations, which is what I would have expected had that been the case. I would have expected real engagement with women’s organisations that deal regularly with the victims of rape and other sexual violence. According to the British crime survey, one in 250 women were victims of sexual assault in the last year. This is a widespread offence, and we are not taking it sufficiently seriously when the Secretary of State for Justice can say, “Well, there’s rape and then there’s rape.” We need to change the way we deal with this issue. We need to be really serious about these issues. Although there is a case for discounts for early guilty pleas, they should not be universally applied to people who have been responsible for some of the most violent and degrading crimes, and his Green Paper does not stop that—

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anna Soubry]

I am happy to answer the hon. Gentleman’s questions. The reply to the first is yes. Being a lawyer himself, he will know two things. First, there is a good argument that in lengthy, tedious, multi-handed fraud cases, allowing a judge to give a 50% discount will do what everyone wants and crack heads together, and that it will work. Secondly, it is dishonest of Labour Members to criticise this Government for proposing a 50% increase when the present law allows it¸ as the hon. Gentleman well knows—or, at least, should know, as he is meant to be a lawyer. At present a judge has discretion, if he or she so chooses, to allow a discount of more than 50%, depending on the circumstances of the case.

My complaint, which I have expressed in public before, is about those who are excessively prescriptive and tie our judges’ hands. One of the big failings of the Labour party was that in all aspects of policy, it consistently failed to trust professionals: our teachers, our nurses and our doctors. It also failed to trust our judges. If we freed their hands and enabled them to decide the appropriate sentence given all the circumstances of a case, there would be greater honesty in our sentencing policy, and there would undoubtedly be better sentencing.

There are many issues that I would have liked to discuss, but I shall mention only two more. The first relates to events that took place last week. I say this as a woman: I find it offensive when the issue of rape is turned into a women’s issue, taken up by people and used as a political football. As I have said in this place before, some victims of rape are male, and a considerable number of victims of rape are children. It is not a women’s issue, and some of the hysteria that we heard last week did no one any favours.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I suspect that the hon. Lady may be partly referring to me. Yes, there are male victims of rape—although there are fewer than one in 10—and of course there are child victims of rape. However, the issue affects women much more than men. That is the point I was making.

[Anna Soubry]

I was not referring to the hon. Lady, whom I congratulate on the work that she did in enabling not just women but children to come forward and give evidence, and indeed improving sentencing. On the issue of men, she gave the statistic of 1%. I am always a bit cynical about statistics. [Hon. Members: “It was 10%.”] Forgive me: it was 10%. I strongly suspect that, because of the stigma attached to rape, many more men are raped than come forward, but let us hope we can debate that on another occasion.

My next point highlights why many Members, certainly on the Government Benches, feel somewhat cynical when the issue of rape is raised. Can the shadow Justice Secretary explain why in this place last week the Leader of the Opposition was for the first time flanked by two women—the deputy leader of the Labour party and the shadow Home Secretary, but not the shadow Justice Secretary—when he questioned the Prime Minister about the various comments made by the Lord Chancellor? Was that a deliberate ploy? Did the Leader of the Opposition surround himself with women to make some point? I ask that question because rape is not a women’s issue; it concerns everybody, and many of us are particularly concerned about the effect it has on children.

I am greatly in favour of the Government’s sentencing proposals. Their document on the matter is radical and brave, and I agree with the many comments made by Government Members about short sentencing.