Farmer Review

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 11th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to be here for the discussion on the work of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer. I find it really interesting because, in all the discussions that I have heard over the years around how to keep people out of prison, a very small amount of effort has gone into thinking about the family, although there have always been things around education, literacy and getting people a job. We must thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for creating an innovation; he is adding another leg to the stool, as he describes it.

I have a problem because, when we look at the family, we often see the reasons why somebody ends up committing a crime. In a sense, the family may not have always been with the person who ends up being the criminal. We could say that the wrongdoer is, in some strange way, demonstrating the failure of the family. They go ahead, because the family does not create and hold the elements that make somebody not want to wrong-do. I am very interested in taking the argument around family and asking what can we do to make the family work better, so that its members—its fathers, its sons—do not end up going ahead of the broken family and becoming an expression of it. I am glad that we are starting the debate around the family, because it does not really matter what form the family takes. It does not matter if it is mum and dad in the old way or whether it is made up in a new way. What is important is that we give the young of this world all the encouragement and opportunity which means that they then do not break down, kick over the traces and go on to commit crimes. I am interested in how we as a society can support families not to break down, or not to have that breakdown being expressed in somebody ending up in prison—whether it is a son or daughter, or a father himself.

We also have to look at the fact that, since the time that I was using the prison system—obviously for good use, because I am here—the prison population has gone through the roof. Our officers do not have enough time. We have begun to warehouse people. If people are warehoused, it does not matter to some extent what kind of family they have, because the warehousing will rot their souls and ambitions and destroy them. We have to stop treating our prisons as warehouses and start using them as universities, as they tried to do with me when I was a young man. God bless Her Majesty’s Prison Service; I am really glad that I went through that experience.

We then have another big issue—sorry, I was not plugging anything—which is drugs. The fact that you can get any drug in most of our prisons more easily than if you walked around Soho is a terrible thing which will undo all the work around the family. We need to find a way to support the family in the first instance and to address the really philistine way in which we warehouse our children and, instead of turning them to prospective university-type learning and all the skills that will enable them to move on, we just hold fast. Treading water is not good for the human soul. I am really glad the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, has introduced us to the other leg of that beautiful stool.