Criminal Records Bill [HL]

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 23rd February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, as ever it is a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, particularly given his remarkable and creditable record on the issues we are discussing today.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham on presenting the Bill to the House. It deals with a very important issue. The noble Lord has a remarkable record and a huge fund of knowledge of the way in which imprisonment and other sentences of the court affect the lives of those who have been sentenced, not only when they are in custody but, importantly, when they leave custody. We tend to focus a great deal, though not always very effectively, on what happens to people when they are inside a custodial establishment. Much more difficult to pin down is what happens to them when they leave and in the years that follow, which can sometimes be the wreckage of their lives.

I would like to focus particularly on those who are under 18 years old when they are sentenced. I do so with some trepidation, knowing that the immediate past chairman of the Youth Justice Board will speak after me in this debate. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, did great service in this area and I am delighted that he is participating today.

In June 2014, a parliamentarians’ inquiry sponsored by the Michael Sieff Foundation and the National Children’s Bureau reported on its investigation of the youth justice system. Page 56 of the report of the inquiry, which I chaired, states:

“The panel recommends that, in the longer term, children who have offended be given a ‘clean sheet’ at 18, meaning that previous offences would be expunged from their record rather than only filtered. This would only be available if a specified period of time had elapsed in which there had been no further convictions. This would not be available for homicide, serial sexual offences and other violent crimes … A similar recommendation to this was notably made by the Home Office in its 2002 report ‘Breaking the Circle’”.


This issue, along with the views that are being expressed in the debate, has been around for a long time and I would simply remind the Minister, who I think comes fairly new to these matters, that five Members of your Lordships’ House were on that panel, and of the three Members of the other place, one was Robert Buckland, who is currently the Solicitor-General with a wealth of knowledge of the criminal law process, and that our report was unanimous.

In dealing with the issue of children—for they are children—who are sentenced, I want to tell your Lordships about one small episode that I experienced while doing a piece of work some years earlier for the Howard League for Penal Reform. I went into a youth custody centre and as I was walking along the corridor with officers, a boy of about 17 said, “Will you come into my room, sir?” All over the walls of his room were certificates, all of them for maths, including one for an A* pass at GCSE. I said something really stupid to him, “You like maths, do you?” to which he replied, “I love it, sir. I want to be a maths teacher when I get out”. I do not know what has happened to him since, but he would certainly have been able to obtain the qualifications to become a maths teacher. I asked him whether he had enjoyed maths when he was at school, and he replied, “I never went to school, sir”. That is an example of someone who, while he was in custody, through the work of the education part of that establishment, discovered a real aptitude which he could offer to others later. However, I know, because I was an MP for 14 years and I have seen these problems in constituency surgeries, that someone like that young man applying for a teaching job at 23 or 24 years of age would not have a chance of obtaining it because his criminal record would be deployed against him. His sentence had been one of medium length.

We really have to deal with this problem. We can do any analysis you like, one of which I would call a social benefit analysis. Taking the example I have given, what would the social benefit be of that young man becoming a maths teacher or using his skills in some other productive way in employment that he obtained because his record did not have to go before prospective employers? The other one we could do is a cost-benefit analysis for society, to which the answer is perfectly obvious.

I regard this Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, as an important and necessary provision. I would expect further focus in Committee on the issues I have raised about the under-18s and I would happily undertake part of that role. I know that we have the broad support of the excellent successor to the noble Lord, Lord McNally, as chair of the Youth Justice Board—Charlie Taylor. I and many others have spoken to him about these issues on numerous occasions because he keeps an open door and is interested in our views. I know what recommendations he would make to Ministers both privately and more publicly. The time has come to get to grips with changing the law so that convictions, whether for children or adults, do not wreck or at least badly dog their lives as they continue.

After all, the purpose of justice—certainly the purpose of youth justice—should not include wrecking the later lives of the people who have been through the custodial system, sometimes only to small measure as a result of their own fault and often because of the circumstances in which they found themselves. Those of us who have spent long periods in and out of criminal court rooms know that there is an underlying truth to what I and others are saying in this debate. Society must not simply say that they are responsible for their own actions. Of course they bear responsibility for their actions, but we bear responsibility for what happens to them afterwards.

My noble friend Lord Ramsbotham referred to current litigation that remains unconcluded. Ongoing litigation has never been a justification for the Government doing nothing. If there is merit in doing something, the Government can do something and save us the costs of the litigation. That sounds like a pretty good litigation tactic.