Rehabilitation and Sentencing

Lord Bach Excerpts

Tuesday 7th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bach]

My Lords, I start by thanking the Minister for repeating the Statement of his right honourable friend. In its four-year plan, the Ministry of Justice states:

“We will provide a clear sentencing framework. It will punish those who break the law, and help reduce re-offending”.

We do not disagree with that. It is a reasonable vision for sentencing policy, entirely in keeping with the emphasis on punishment and reform that we followed in government, which helped to cut crime by 43 per cent between 1997 and 2010, in times both of growth and recession. We were the only Administration since the Second World War who could boast such an enviable record. I will first ask the Minister to confirm that the crime rate significantly declined under the Labour Administration.

On the core principles we are in agreement. Where the Government propose sensible measures to punish and reform offenders, we will support them. However, the Statement that we have just heard gives rise to a number of questions and concerns. The Minister is probably quietly pleased that the entirety of the Conservative Party's manifesto on law and order at the last election has been abandoned. Some of the people who were persuaded to vote Conservative on that basis may be less pleased. Perhaps manifesto commitments do not matter much when the noble Lord's party is prepared to tear up personal pledges. Both on knife crime and increasing prison capacity, the Conservatives have dumped their previous policies.

Like so many heavily trailed announcements in the past six months, the sentencing review could be a wasted opportunity. Sentencing policy should be about dealing with offenders in the right way, in order to protect the public and, in particular, the victims of crime. However, this review has been about trying to reduce the prison population in order to cut costs. The Lord Chancellor outlined his principal aim in the comprehensive spending review, which was to reduce the total daily prison population by 3,000 by 2014. It is about 85,000 today, so that would mean it would be 82,000 in four years’ time. However, in practice, because many people serve less than a year in prison, meeting the target would mean sending 10,000 fewer offenders to jail each year than we do now. Unfortunately, this is what the sentencing review is all about: not protecting the public or victims, but saving money. Will the Minister confirm that his department will publish the detailed assumptions that his officials and the Home Office have made about crime trends to justify the target of 82,000?

We do not subscribe to the view that there is a direct link between prison and crime, but we do not share the Government’s view that there is no link at all. Of course there is a link; it is entirely irrational to think otherwise. During the past couple of years of the previous Conservative Government and under the Labour Government, more serious and persistent criminals went to prison for longer, and—guess what—crime fell. The relationship between those two things may not have been simple or straightforward; other factors were at play, including of course—something that the Government may want to take notice of—an increase in police numbers, but there was a relationship. To justify the view that there is no link, the Government say that crime rates also declined internationally in that time but that prison rates in many countries went down. That view is wrong. The figures for OECD countries show that prison populations rose almost everywhere.

We accept, of course, that prison is not always the best place for offenders and that community sentences can be a better alternative in cutting reoffending. Does the Minister accept that, as a result of changes that we introduced following the Corston report, the number of women in custody has gone down? Furthermore, does he accept that reoffending rates for women, young men and first-time offenders have gone down too in recent years?

Of course, further action on drug addiction is clearly to be welcomed, and I do welcome it. The steps outlined to deal more effectively with offenders with mental health problems are also to be welcomed. That is one of our society’s most pressing issues and it is a vindication of the decision to set up and begin to implement the important Bradley review. However, what assurances can the Minister give the House that those with mental health problems who are liable to commit offences—particularly violent offences—will be treated in secure establishments?

In our view, the Justice Secretary’s eagerness to please the Treasury by cutting the Ministry of Justice’s budget by 23 per cent is going to make it both difficult and risky to turn these fine aspirations into reality. In particular, I ask the Minister to explain to the House what assessments are being made of the likelihood that prisoners on indeterminate sentences, whom the Justice Secretary wants to release, will no longer be a risk to the public. What procedures will be put in place to monitor such people in the community? We would also like the Minister to confirm whether it is intended to relax the rules on the recall of offenders. If that is the intention, I ask why, and how will he ensure that it will not result in higher rates of reoffending?

Our probation service does a good job. Cutting the service so deeply, as the Government intend to do, seems like a massive gamble. Why are the Government doing this if they truly believe in rehabilitation? Every time the Justice Secretary is asked about resources, he falls back on the payment-by-results model being piloted in Peterborough and started by the previous Government in March this year. It is an interesting model, which we agree should be expanded.

Finally, the Justice Secretary was recently asked on “Newsnight” how he would judge the success of his penal policy. His first response was that he “hadn’t the first idea”. That really is not good enough. Let us offer him a better idea for judging the success of his policy: will it make communities up and down the country more or less safe, and will it result in crime going up or down? That is what matters to people who live in the real world.