Offender Management: Checkpoint Programme

Lord Beith Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, this is a short and compressed debate, but I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bates, on introducing such an important topic. I thank Durham Constabulary for having been a pioneer in this field. It is not one of our largest police forces but it has really achieved something. As the current chief constable Jo Farrell said, we are talking about a cohort of people for whom this cycle—the cycle of repetitive convictions and, in many cases, repetitive trips to prison—will never end unless we do something different. Prison does not work for these people. It consumes massive resources; every decision to send someone to prison commits massive resources that could be used in more effective ways.

The Checkpoint programme is a managed form of out-of-court disposal that is contract-based. As the academic literature says, all the indications and evidence are that it works. I think that we should continue this process of evaluation and then learn from it what we can do with schemes of this kind, such as those that some other forces are pursuing.

Mention has been made of victims. My experience when talking to victims is that what they want most of all is for what happened never to happen to them—or anybody else—again. If they can be engaged in a situation where they see some prospect of the offender changing, so that he recognises what he has done and does not do anything like that again, they are very much attracted to that. I have observed this kind of restorative justice in practice in Durham jail, indicating that quite a lot of experimentation in this field takes place in Durham.

On wider public perceptions, we hear a lot from leading figures in some parties about prison working and locking more people up for longer, as well as all the newspaper headlines that follow that kind of rhetoric. But when you confront people with the facts of what led people to commit offences, which methods of dealing with them had any chance of success and which very little chance, the public are much shrewder about these things than we give them credit for.

This project has been properly conducted and is being properly evaluated. It is, as the noble Lord, Lord Blair, pointed out, an example of evidence-based policing and evidence-based policy. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, said, when something is evaluated as being successful, it should be embedded and used more widely. We on these Benches would like to hear less of the empty rhetoric and more about practical schemes such as this.