Prisons and Courts Bill

Kate Green Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 20th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

It will be enforceable through the inspectorate, which will be given specific powers to ensure that that happens.

The Bill will place the prisons and probation ombudsman on a statutory footing, giving him greater authority and statutory powers to investigate deaths in custody. The Bill supports our efforts to stop drug use and crime enabled by illegal mobile phones. It enables phone network operators to disrupt unlawful use of mobile phones in custody.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I just want to ask the Lord Chancellor, if she could answer very simply, who is accountable in the event of a prisoner’s escape?

[Elizabeth Truss]

The governor is accountable for what happens in their prison, but there is a line management structure through to the head of the Prison Service and, ultimately, the Secretary of State.

The Bill supports swifter responses to the devastating effect of psychoactive substances. There have been very serious cases on our prison estate. They fuel debt and violence and can have a serious impact on prisoners’ health. We rolled out new tests for psychoactive substances in September last year—we were the first jurisdiction in the world to do so. The Bill strengthens our ability to keep up with the speed at which substances evolve. It allows quicker testing for all newly identified psychoactive substances based on the generic definition of those substances set out in the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016.

We face challenges in our prisons that will not be solved in weeks or months, but I am absolutely determined to turn the situation around. We now have the resources to do so: we are investing an additional £100 million a year and we have a clear plan. The measures in the Bill provide a structure under which accountability and scrutiny can take place, so we will be able to see how our prisons improve over time.

The Bill introduces major reforms to the court and justice system, which I announced in my joint memorandum with the Lord Chief Justice and Senior President of Tribunals in September. It will introduce more virtual and online hearings, put in place greater protection for victims and witnesses, and provide greater support for our excellent judges and magistrates.

I want to take a moment to pay tribute to the Lord Chief Justice, John Thomas, a great reformer who has spearheaded these reforms and who will retire later this year. I also want to thank the Senior President of Tribunals. Their vision for a courts and tribunals system that is just, proportionate and accessible lies at the very heart of the reforms set out in the Bill. The reforms are a tribute to their tireless work, alongside other senior members of the judiciary.

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[Richard Burgon]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. Unfortunately, the Government have provided no cast-iron assurances that this saving will be passed on to drivers—if it exists at all.

[Kate Green]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is wrong to penalise people who have valid personal injury claims because of a possible rise in the number of claims that is driven by cowboy claims management companies cold calling people to suggest that they should make claims that have no basis in reality? The Bill does nothing to address that.

[Richard Burgon]

I agree with the point that my hon. Friend so eloquently makes. Injured people should not be made to pay the price of the behaviour of the unscrupulous minority—the companies that engage in the practices she describes.

The Secretary of State started her speech by explaining how the Bill introduces a statutory purpose for prisons to

“protect the public…reform and rehabilitate offenders…prepare prisoners for life outside prison; and…maintain an environment that is safe and secure.”

Of course we agree with those aims, but most people believe that they are what prisons are meant to be doing already. It is crystal clear that those things are not happening today. The main problems in prisons cannot be disputed: violence, drugs, overcrowding and understaffing. To combat those threats effectively, we need a plan for order—a plan to reduce the demand for and supply of drugs, to manage the prison population, and to recruit and retain prison officers. Where is any of that in the Bill? Where are the practical measures to realise those goals? We will be returning to those issues in Committee.

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[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I, too, welcome much of the Bill. I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara), and I particularly endorse his comments about judicial diversity. This is a far-reaching Bill, although we have to infer quite a lot of the detail from the White Paper, particularly in relation to prison reform. As others have said, the Bill is relatively thin on detail.

I welcome the establishment of a new statutory purpose for prisons, but I also hope that there will be opportunities to strengthen and extend it as we take the Bill through this House and the other place. The Prison Reform Trust has suggested that the statutory purpose should make exclusive reference to standards of fairness and decency. Given the problems in our prisons today, including the exceptional amount of time that prisoners are spending in cells and not engaged in purposeful activity, the disturbances that have put prisoner and staff safety at risk, and the appalling mental health of many of those in our prisons, I strongly endorse the need for a purpose that captures those elements of fairness and decency.

Like many hon. Members who have spoken today, I want to talk about the need for good mental healthcare in prisons. According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, at least 3% to 4% of prisoners have a psychotic illness; 10% to 14% have a major depressive illness; and up to two thirds have a personality disorder. Many prisoners are so unwell that prison is utterly the wrong place to treat them. This has been starkly brought home to me when handling a constituency case over the past few months. That case has really shown that the system is not working to ensure that prisoners’ mental health is paramount. It involves a young man accused of very serious offences who has been on remand in Manchester prison since before Christmas. He is seriously psychotic, and prison is not the right place for him to have been sent to, yet still, four months on, no secure hospital bed has been found where he can be securely and appropriately cared for. I therefore strongly endorse the call by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) for statutory time limits in the Bill for the length of time that someone who is so unwell can be kept in prison. We need to take that important measure to ensure that parity of esteem between mental health and physical health exists in our prisons as it does in the wider healthcare system.

We also know that women in custody have a high incidence of mental health problems. This year, we mark the 10th anniversary of Baroness Corston’s seminal report on women in custody, and this is a real opportunity for us to make a step change in the way in which we deal with women in the penal system. The Justice Secretary has said that she intends to bring forward a strategy in relation to women in the next few weeks, and I very much look forward to debating it with the Government. I hope that Ministers will take this opportunity, and not simply build more new women’s prisons that are far from home and too large to provide the right regime for their particular needs. Baroness Corston identified the need for small, local, secure units—not prisons—that specifically cater for the needs of women. This is a once-in-a-generation chance for Ministers to transform the nature of the women’s prison estate, and I really hope that they will not miss the opportunity.

I am also concerned that the Government seem intent on building new large male prisons, such as Berwyn, which I understand is to have a population of 2,000 prisoners. However, there is a lot of evidence of smaller prisons doing better, according to the Centre for Social Justice, the Prison Reform Trust—which found that prisons with fewer than 400 prisoners were more likely to perform well than those with more than 800—and the National Audit Office, whose 2013 report showed that the smaller prisons achieved better internal performance ratings. We do not know whether there is a difference in reoffending rates for small and larger prisons, and I would be grateful if anyone in the House enlightened me on that. If we do not have the information, however, I strongly urge Ministers to conduct a programme of research to help us to understand that.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) went into some detail about the importance of family contact, which incarceration a long way from home naturally makes more difficult. According to a 2008 study for the Ministry of Justice, family contact reduces recidivism by 39%, which is a substantial reduction. A joint report by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons and the Youth Justice Board found that boys who suffered from emotional or mental health problems were less likely usually to have a visit at least once a week from family or friends than those without mental health problems, yet half of women and a quarter of men on remand receive no family visits. Concentrating prisoners in larger prisons, further from home and covering large geographical areas, is going to work against the family contact that can make such a difference.

[Mrs Moon]

I totally endorse everything that my hon. Friend says. She sets out the tragedy of the difficulties that women in prison face in maintaining family contact. Their children often end up in care or being farmed out to family members who cannot travel long distances. In particular, for Welsh women, children have to travel to England to see their mum in prison. This damages the family cohesion that is so vital to rehabilitation.

[Kate Green]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Women are usually the main carers of children, and the consequences of their being in custody can be devastating not only for the women but for the children, who ought to be our paramount consideration. I support the calls from the Prison Advice and Care Trust, among others, for a requirement on sentencers specifically to ask about the provision for the children of parents who are about to be given a custodial sentence, and particularly to know where they will spend that first night as their parent faces incarceration.

If we are serious about prison reform, we have to face the fact that our fundamental problem is sentencing policy. We incarcerate too many people who do not need to be there, which costs a great deal of money, and too many of them resume offending on release. I could not agree more with the Lord Chief Justice, who told the Justice Committee last November that the focus needs to be on rigorous, demanding and effective community penalties. However, that requires those penalties to be available and it requires sentencers to have knowledge of and confidence in them. This cuts to magistrates’ training budgets, the lack of full pre-sentence reports because of pressures on the National Probation Service, and problems with community rehabilitation companies.

I want to comment briefly on the Bill’s extensive court reform proposals, and in that regard I declare my interest as a life member of the Magistrates Association. While I recognise the opportunities that modern technology can offer to an efficient court system, I echo the concerns about how vulnerable users will fare in a virtual system. The virtual courts pilot of several years ago offers little reassurance and this Bill’s impact assessment frankly tells us nearly nothing. However, there are concerns, as highlighted by Transform Justice and others, about the lack of access to legal advice, the impact on lawyer-client relationships, the impact on sentencing—the virtual courts pilot suggested that there may be some inflationary impact—the fairness of the process, public perception, and the cost to the public purse, about which the impact assessment is quite vague. I share the concerns of the Magistrates Association and others about the use of online courts in relation to pleas, remand, sentencing and vulnerable young people. Significant numbers of prisoners have low levels of literacy and numeracy or suffer from learning disabilities and may struggle to present their case in the best possible light. They may agree to their case being dealt with in writing or online because it is quicker, it gets things over with, or because it is suggested to them by a police officer in a police station, but that does not necessarily serve the best interests of justice.

I understand the argument made by the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) about the loss of the local justice area being an opportunity for a unified magistracy and judiciary, but there are advantages to local justice. As the Justice Committee identified in its report on the magistracy last year, the loss of local justice must not mean losing the leadership and peer support that helps a bench to function collectively more effectively and efficiently. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us on that.

On the other proposed reforms to civil justice, I endorse the concerns expressed about the proposals on whiplash and the small claims route, and I regret that the Government have not taken the opportunity to be more assertive in their tackling of the aggressive marketing practices of some claims management companies. I also endorse the concerns of my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn about the rise in the small claims limit and the impact that that may have. Workers in relatively low-paid employment with modest claims for accidents at work may find themselves unable to access the legal advice that enables them to make claims successfully. USDAW, a trade union of which I am a member, offers several examples of where relatively minor accidents that are significant to those in minimum wage jobs would not have secured compensation under the Government’s proposed changes due to the lack of access to legal help for workers to pursue their cases.

Finally, I am also concerned about one aspect of the proposal to move responsibility for employment tribunals to the Ministry of Justice. In doing so, I hope that we will not lose the real value that comes from having expert tribunals made up of representatives of both employers and trade unions, employees and the trained judiciary.

Like others, I welcome the Bill, much of which I look forward to seeing develop, but I hope that Ministers will take seriously the concerns that are being expressed and ensure that the justice system, of which this country is so proud, remains the best and most modern in the world as result of the reforms.

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[Andrew Selous]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. I have met Jim Davidson on a number of occasions, and I thoroughly commend the work of Care after Combat throughout the Prison Service.

Family work, which brings prisoners face to face with their enduring responsibilities to their families who are left in the community, is indispensable to the rehabilitation culture that we urgently need to develop in our penal system. I welcome the commitment by the Ministry of Justice to measuring the quality of prisoners’ relationships. At a very practical level, we know that enduring family relationships lead to many prisoners being able to access on release family accommodation that would be unavailable to them if those relationships had broken down.

[Kate Green]

There is a huge amount of consensus this evening about maintaining prisoners’ family relationships. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that a corollary of that is that family contact should not be removed as a penalty where other forms of sanction are available? It is unfair to the family members and it defeats the object, which he and others have talked about, of maintaining prisoners’ contact with their families.

[Andrew Selous]

I share the sentiments expressed by the hon. Lady, and my instincts are with hers. I have talked extensively to prison officers about the issue, and on occasions they have a relatively limited number of levers that they can use. I am with the hon. Lady, however. Family relationships are really important, and they are often powerful forces for good that can help prison officers to achieve what they are trying to achieve.

Accommodation is the base camp of rehabilitation, and we are unlikely to make any progress without it. It is concerning that some local authorities are, frankly, discriminatory towards ex-offenders. Ex-offenders should not be given preferential treatment, but neither should they be treated worse than others who seek accommodation.

I hope that Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, as it will be called from 1 April, will look at the cost of prisoners phoning home. Many prisoners have mobile phones so that they can speak to their wives, husbands, partners and children. We need to make sure that prisoners have good access, for legitimate use, to affordable prison telephones. I am also a fan of the prison voicemail initiative, which is spreading in our prisons. A daughter managed to leave a message of her first violin piece for her father to hear on a prison voicemail, for example.