Terrorist Offenders (Restriction of Early Release) Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 24th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I am not a lawyer, but I have listened with great interest to those lawyers who have spoken today. I start from the position that many people in Britain do not understand why this law is necessary, because the common belief is that if people are sentenced to a prison sentence, they serve it. It is only here that we learn of all the nuances and the way in which sentences are two-thirds, one-third or a quarter or dependent on the Parole Board. The fundamental belief of people in Britain is that, if you are sentenced to a term in prison, you should serve it. There may be a reason for having an early release, supervised by the Parole Board, on clear grounds of good behaviour or by being eligible for release for other reasons, but the idea among most of the general public is that, when people are sentenced to a period such as in the headline “X gets five years”, that should mean five years.

My starting point is that I strongly support what the Government are doing, and I am sorry that it was necessary in the first place. I spent two and a half years as chair of the Council of Europe committee on the implementation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. In Britain, we had the matter of prisoners voting, and we got ourselves into a dreadful mess. The court came down with a fairly reasoned decision that was totally misunderstood by the Government, and it was David Lidington—who I still think was the best Justice Minister we had—who went to Strasbourg and unravelled the thing and sorted it out.

However, the point that I want to make goes a bit further than that. I am not well known on these Benches for asking the Government to spend money, but I reflect on the remarks of my noble friend Lord Howard, when he spoke about locking up the prisoners and throwing away the key. He says that he did not say that, but that was how it was reported, and it certainly had a great degree of public support. However, what has not had a great degree of public support is the deplorable state of the prisons themselves; we have heard about Whitemoor, and we have heard from my noble friend Lady Buscombe and the noble Lords, Lord Beith and Lord Carlile, about the conditions in prisons.

I would like to draw attention to a problem frequently brought to the fore by the Prison Officers’ Association, which is the trade union that represents prison officers. It is on the front line in prisons; it is its members who are assaulted. One of its members in Whitemoor was threatened with beheading. The fact of the matter is that, if there is one area in which privatisation has not worked, it is the Prison and Probation Service. It is a lot worse off now than in the past, and in the past it was not fit for purpose.

The problem we have is that politicians of all parties have been chronically unwilling to stand up to the press. The fact of the matter is that it is a cheap and easy headline to talk about prisoners living in luxury. I have been to Whitemoor prison at the invitation of the Prison Officers’ Association; it is not a nice place to be. It is overcrowded and dirty. The crucial thing about our Prison Service is that it is hidden; it is underground. People never look at it. They do not look at the prison officers and they regard a person put in prison as out of sight, out of mind. But they are still human beings, and the way in which our prison estate works can only encourage more recidivism. It is not in any way fit for purpose.

We not only need to look carefully at ways in which we can improve the Prison Service; we need more prisons. We cannot keep cramming people into the space we have. The population is expanding. The desire for prison sentences is expanding. In a democracy you have to reflect what the people want, but you cannot do it unless you have a proper service to do it. That means we have to up the status of the prison officers and the probation service. We have to talk to the unions—the Prison Officers’ Association and the probation unions—and take them into our confidence in building a Prison and Probation Service, and a deradicalisation service, that actually works.

We spend a lot of time talking about what happened in Streatham. Incidentally, my son has a bike shop in Streatham, not far from where this incident took place. It is a very ordinary suburb of London. We have to look at ways in which we can improve the Prison and Probation Service and make it fit for purpose, because recidivism is encouraged by these bad conditions. Bad conditions in prisons, and in particular the feeling among prison officers that they are unwanted, unloved and basically just kicked around and used for public relations purposes, are not the way forward. We have to value the prison officers and the probation service if we want to make the Prison Service work in the interests of what we have set forward as its tasks.