King’s Speech

Lord Beith Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, the gracious Speech makes only limited reference to the criminal justice system and none to the crisis within it, but, even as it was being prepared, delivered and debated, the Government were making some significant steps. One that we have heard more detail on this afternoon is the release of 5,500 prisoners, not as part of a developing policy on the effective use of custody but as a crisis response to the fact that the prisons are full. This is clearly a disgraceful inheritance from the Tory Government and one that the Government have tackled with difficulty. However, the current Government cannot escape all blame for the situation: Labour ramped up the rhetoric on locking people up some years ago, which set a trend that has continued since and needs to be reversed.

One positive thing that the new Government have done is to appoint a Prisons Minister with knowledge, commitment and practical experience in rehabilitating offenders, the noble Lord, Lord Timpson. I congratulate him on his Maiden speech. I also welcome the appointment of our respected colleague the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, to the department, and the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, with whom I worked on these issues when we were both in the Commons. These Ministers will need firm backing at Cabinet level for the steps they will need to take to end the chaos and redesign the system with the objective of reducing crime, not of winning headlines for talking tough.

I draw the Minister’s attention to the report on community sentences from our Home Affairs and Justice Committee, and I apologise that I cannot be at Friday’s debate, when he will hear more about it from my noble friend Lady Hamwee. I also commend the House of Commons Justice Committee’s report, Public Opinion and Understanding of Sentencing. That is the issue I want to touch on now.

Parliament proposes, the Sentencing Council interprets, and judges and magistrates impose sentences, which may include custody. Custody is a massively expensive and huge commitment of resources, in a criminal justice system that is desperately short of resources, but it has often been the most readily available option. In a particular court area, there may not be a combination of measures that could be effective in dealing with an offender, so custody becomes the alternative.

Why does our system put and keep in prison more people than any other system in a western European democracy? There are several reasons for imprisonment. The first reason is the protection of the public from dangerous and violent offenders, but that protection is necessarily limited by the fact that most offenders will eventually be released, and therefore need the prison system to provide—the second reason—rehabilitation by means of courses, training and other activity that can reduce reoffending. An overcrowded and understaffed prison system cannot do this. The third reason for custody is the belief that the risk of a prison sentence is a deterrent. There are some crimes for which that may be true, but some of the crimes we are most anxious to deal with do not fall into that category: domestic violence is not cured or prevented by the fear of a prison sentence, nor is much alcohol or drug-related violence.

We need to recognise that there is a fourth factor—a powerful one—promoting the inappropriate use of custody: prison sentence and its length is used by the public and the media as a yardstick by which to measure the relative seriousness with which we take any particular offence. Custody and its length are used as a proxy for disapproval and for indicating how seriously we take a crime. That distorts the effective use of the remedies that are available. Relying on a community sentence, however effective, is seen as not taking a crime seriously enough.

This is compounded by newspapers. I refer to an article in a newspaper that takes all these issues seriously and is working on them: the Times, which has a commission on justice. Last Thursday, we had the headline:

“Asylum seekers who snatched Rolex watch walk free”.


It is that “walk free” that so distorts the debate. In fact, they were given five-year criminal behaviour orders, subjected to six-month curfews, required to live in Home Office accommodation, required to complete 150 hours of unpaid work and 40 hours of rehabilitation, and banned from the City of Westminster. That does not sound like walking free to me.

This makes me reflect on the other side: I am not convinced that four-year or five-year prison sentences for disruptive but non-violent environmental protesters is a very good use of scarce resources. We need to develop the understanding that the way to take crime seriously is to make sure that the sentence is likely to reduce reoffending. That is the measure. I hope that the new Ministers can encourage rational debate on this issue so that we can start to use custody where it needs to be used and not abuse it when other things would work better.