Queen’s Speech

Lord Dholakia Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dholakia (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the sense of humour displayed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, but it is now time to become serious on this particular legislation set out in the gracious Speech. I say straightaway that we particularly welcome the reform of prisons and courts. It will put education at the heart of the rehabilitation process. There is hope that old and inefficient prisons will be closed.

I intend to concentrate my remarks on the prospects for reforming the prison system in the light of the Government’s proposal for a prisons and courts reform Bill and other recent announcements by the Secretary of State for Justice, Michael Gove. He has a tough task ahead of him. The background to the Secretary of State’s proposal is a prison system suffering from chronic problems. Around 70 of the 117 prisons in England and Wales are overcrowded. The number of public sector prison staff is now around 30% lower than five years ago. Even after taking into account the recent small and welcome increase in staff numbers, there are still around 13,000 fewer staff looking after 1,200 more prisoners than five years ago. The numbers of assaults and deaths in custody, mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, are both at record levels. Rates of self-harm among male prisoners have risen by a third over the last five years. Purposeful activity in prisons is currently at the lowest level the prisons inspectorate has recorded.

As a result, all too many prisoners rapidly reoffend after leaving prison. Some 45% of adult prisoners, 58% of short-term prisoners and 68% of juvenile prisoners are reconvicted within a year of leaving prison. The total cost of reoffending to the nation has been estimated at somewhere between £9.5 billion and £13 billion a year. Against this background I welcome the central thrust of the Government’s plan to give prison governors greater autonomy in how they organise regimes and contract for services, while making governors accountable for outcomes relating to security and the rehabilitation of prisoners.

A good example of where this approach could lead to improvement is prison education. The deficiencies of the current system of prison education, again pointed out by the noble and learned Lord, were very much confirmed by the review undertaken by Dame Sally Coates, entitled Unlocking Potential. In the last academic year, 2014-15, Ofsted inspected 45 prisons. In these 45 inspections, 34 prisons’ educational provision was rated as inadequate or as requiring improvement, compared with only 11 rated good or outstanding. In her report, Dame Sally Coates recommended a new approach that gives governors greater freedom to determine educational arrangements and contracts; provides personal learning plans for all prisoners; gives greater opportunity for prisoners to develop IT skills; and enables prisoners to have greater access to the internet, to higher education and to industry-standard vocational qualifications. I am pleased that the Government have reacted positively to her recommendations.

The Government have also announced plans to publish comparable statistics for each prison, covering such areas as reoffending rates, assaults, rates of self-harm and the number of prisoners who leave prison for employment. In using these statistics, it will obviously be important to compare like with like because different types of prison often hold very different types of prisoner. However, the publication of such figures will be an important way of monitoring whether the performance of individual prisons is improving or deteriorating.

I particularly welcome the Secretary of State’s emphasis on enabling more prisoners to experience temporary release for purposes such as employment, education, securing accommodation and rebuilding links with their families. These areas are all closely related to reoffending rates, yet the number of prisoners released on temporary licence has fallen by 40% in the last five years. This is largely a result of the last Secretary of State’s misguided policy of restricting opportunities for temporary release. The current plans to reverse this trend will help to improve rehabilitation and reduce the stubbornly high rate of reoffending.

I hope that the Secretary of State will also reverse his predecessor’s unfortunate decision to ban the transfer of anyone who has previously absconded from an open prison. This means that an inadequate offender who absconds after receiving distressing news from his family but then thinks better of it and hands himself in the following day cannot be transferred back to an open prison later in his sentence. Yet a period in open prison can increase the chances of prisoners’ successful resettlement by enabling them to reintegrate gradually into the community rather than face the sudden shock of release after spending years in closed conditions. Reversing the previous Secretary of State’s policy would help the Government’s aim of reducing reoffending.

The time is long overdue for the Government to implement the recommendation made in 2013 by the Joint Committee on the Draft Voting Eligibility (Prisoners) Bill. I am pleased to have been a member of that committee. The Bill would enable prisoners to vote if they are serving sentences of under 12 months or are in the last six months of their sentences. It is now 12 years since the European Court of Human Rights judged that our blanket ban on voting by convicted prisoners violates the European Convention on Human Rights. The longer we continue to ignore our obligations under international law, the longer we are adopting a position that sits badly with our insistence that prisoners and other offenders should respect the rule of law. My noble friend Lady Hamwee will have more to say on this subject but respect for the rule of law involves an obligation for states as well as individuals to abide by binding legal rulings and not to pick and choose by abiding only by decisions which they choose to accept. We should waste no further time in making this relatively limited change for which there are strong arguments based on considerations of citizenship and rehabilitation.

The success of the Secretary of State’s proposals will be hampered unless the Government take determined steps to reduce the number of people in prisons. Overcrowding severely restricts prisons’ ability to provide the constructive activities and regimes which can rehabilitate prisoners effectively. This country has the highest rate of imprisonment in western Europe. We currently have 148 people in prison for every 100,000 people in the general population, compared with 100 in France and 78 in Germany. We are not twice as criminal as the German population so why do we find it necessary to jail nearly twice as many people? There is an overwhelming case for using prison more sparingly, particularly as community sentences have lower reconviction rates than prison sentences for comparable offenders. We should legislate to require sentencing guidelines to take account of the capacity of the prison system. Sentencing guidelines should scale down the number and length of prison sentences except for the most serious crimes. They should remove prison as an option for low-level non-violent crimes.

We should prohibit courts using prison—except for dangerous offenders—unless they have first tried an intensive community supervision programme. We should also convert the sentences of existing IPP prisoners into determinate sentences once they have served a period equivalent to double their tariff.

I make no apology for arguing yet again that the Government should grasp the nettle and raise this country’s unusually low age of criminal responsibility, which is currently the lowest in Europe, from 10 to 12. The current position is incompatible with our obligations under international standards of juvenile justice and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Dealing with children of this age through non-criminal processes would hold out more hope of diverting them away from offending than subjecting them to punishment through the criminal justice system. I hope that the Secretary of State and his colleagues will follow up this promising start with a root-and-branch reform of this country’s sentencing practices, which have made it harder for prisons to reduce reoffending rates and rehabilitate prisoners.

In conclusion, law is not the only instrument by which we deal with those who offend. We must resist the insatiable appetite to promote more legislation. This must be the starting point before future legislation is contemplated.