Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Requisite and Minimum Custodial Periods) Order 2024

Debate between Lord Beith and Lord Hope of Craighead

Monday 29th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

We have all welcomed the Minister in three debates on three successive sitting days, so he has been thrown in at the deep end of parliamentary accountability. However, he has received some pretty sound advice from all the preceding speeches, including in the well-directed questions from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan.

Today what we are faced with from a parliamentary accountability point of view is not satisfactory. We know that the Government are caught in a difficulty whereby they have had to deploy a statutory instrument without it having gone to the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, on which I have served. That is a shame, because that committee and its excellent team of advisers go through statutory instruments in great detail and sometimes find mistakes. They occasionally find mistakes that throw into question the validity of the instrument and the ability to enforce it, so I hope that extreme and extra care has gone into the drafting of this instrument, which is quite complicated. For example, there are 54 excluded offences, and many other complications affecting various categories of prisoner. So we hope that it is looked at very carefully—and, in a defect is found, we hope that the Government will come back at a later stage with a revised instrument.

What we have today is not a policy but a response. The Minister gave some indications of how policy might be developed, but we are not there—we are not at that point. We are simply observing a government response to a desperate crisis, which any incoming Government would dread—well, it is happening. It is the result of underinvestment and delayed investment in prison building over a long period and the constant rise in the number and length of custodial sentences, as well as the large rise, to which the Minister referred, in the number of remand prisoners, which itself is largely the result of the huge backlog in serious cases coming to court, as part of the wider chaos that we find in our criminal justice system. I ask the Minister: is it in fact the case, as alleged in the press, that sentencing hearings for prisoners on bail have been deliberately delayed to avoid further sentences sending people into our already overcrowded jails?

We have a prison population that is three times the level it was when I became a Member of Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, has referred to how that contrasts with other European countries, and I share his concern about the fact that it has happened and that it is so out of line with how most countries view the same problems of crime that we face. The announced prison building programme cannot solve the problem, although it is needed. We have to remember that, when the prison building programme that we have now was announced, much of it was intended to replace unsuitable and inadequate prison accommodation—not to add to the total stock but to replace accommodation that should not continue to be used.

We have a prison system that cannot house its prisoners and cannot rehabilitate them, and we have as a result a completely unacceptable level of violence against prison staff as well as prisoner-on-prisoner violence.

Nothing we are doing today will change this. We have to review the trend of the ever-increasing use of custody. For that to happen—here I repeat what I said last week—we need to strengthen community sentencing and the services necessary to make it effective. We also need to establish a measure of crime and its seriousness which does not make custody the only means by which society can assert its abhorrence of serious and persistent crime. That is fundamental to the problem we have at the moment: the only way society knows how to recognise and deal with crime, as is reflected in the media and in ordinary conversation, is to say that we are not going to put up with these dreadful crimes and so we should put people in jail for longer, even if it is not relevant to the rehabilitation of the offender when they are eventually released. We have to face up to that problem, and that is going to require real leadership, rather than party-political leadership. The Minister has a background that makes him well suited for this; I hope he is given the scope to carry out that kind of leadership.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I am intervening just to ask a question. The Minister used the word “stabilised” twice, I think, during his presentation of this instrument—he is looking forward to a stage when the Government can feel that the prison crisis has stabilised. Can the Minister explain a little more of what he means by the word “stabilised”? The point is this, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, made clear: we are sending too many people to prison, and therefore one of the ways of stabilising the problem is by addressing rigorously the overuse of prison as a means of punishing crime. I am sure the Minister is well-equipped to carry out that campaign.

The other feature of our present treatment of offenders, particularly serious offenders, is the length of the prison term. I was Lord Justice General in Scotland some years ago, when I had the task of reviewing the tariffs to be imposed on discretionary life prisoners. These are people who, unlike murderers, were sentenced to life imprisonment because of the gravity of the crime they had committed. The average tariff I was imposing in line with what was the current practice then—this was about 20 or 30 years ago—was something like 11 years; now, it is way above that, at 17 or 18 years, or more, and lengths of sentences are going up into the 30s. In my time as Lord Justice General, such lengths of sentences were quite unimaginable, and I am not sure it is doing any good except to keep people in prison longer than ever before. That is why the crisis has grown. There is a fundamental problem that has to be addressed, and I urge the Minister to explain what he means by “stabilise”. Perhaps the Minister could also address more closely—not today, and not even in writing to me, but later, in discussion with officials—how the problem can be corrected, so that we do not find ourselves in two years’ time facing the same crisis we are facing today.

Beyond that, I commend the drafting of the regulation. I think a great deal of thought has gone into the measure. It has been carefully thought through and, as a means of dealing with the crisis, it is exemplary. However, it is the underlying problem that must be addressed, not the particular crisis itself.