Terrorist Offenders (Restriction of Early Release) Bill

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 24th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I refer to my police and security interests in the register.

I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord for his introduction to the Bill. He has assured the House that this measure does not breach Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights and does not impose retrospective punishment on the prisoners affected. I am a non-lawyer, so I have listened with great interest to the points made by a number of noble and learned Lords, noble Lords who are QCs and, in particular, to my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton. To my simplistic, non-legal mind, it seems fairly clear: if a prisoner has been sentenced to a particular term of imprisonment, with the clear expectation, backed by statute, that he or she will be released automatically after half that time, under the Bill it will seem to the prisoner as though, retrospectively, that position has been changed. However, the Minister is a law officer, and I was always taught that we should accept the advice of law officers. It will no doubt be tested in the courts and we will then see how valid it is.

The Minister has told us why the passage of the Bill is urgent: that there are prisoners who, if it does not pass, will be released in a matter of days and present a real and present danger to the public. The urgency has led to the Bill being considered in the House of Commons in a single day and the expectation that your Lordships’ House will do the same. Such procedures are rare and exceptional, and I do not doubt that there is an urgency to today’s proceedings, but that urgency, and indeed the need for these emergency procedures, is entirely the fault of the Government. We are in this position today as a consequence of irresponsible recklessness over the last few years.

Automatic release has been in place throughout the lifetime of this Government. It was known that terrorist offenders were covered by such automatic release, yet nothing was done. The Government have known the numbers of those involved, and when they were due to be released, but despite that knowledge they waited until now to do something about it. The first duty of any Government is to seek to protect their citizens from harm, so why have they waited until this month to do so? Had they acted even a few weeks earlier, the events in Streatham would not have occurred. This was a foreseeable issue, yet nothing was done.

What is more, the Government have presided over an increasingly failing prison service, which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, referred to. The prison service actually fosters alienation and radicalisation; the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, referred to an instance of that. It is so overcrowded and understaffed that effective rehabilitation programmes are, in most cases, no more than a fantasy. Prisons and the probation service are in crisis. A RUSI commentary earlier this month found self-harm was at a record level, that the service struggles

“to provide adequate rehabilitation and community supervision services to offenders post-release”,

and that staff shortages mean weekly case-load targets cannot be met.

The Prison Reform Trust reminds us how overcrowded our prisons are. The prison population already exceeds the number of available decent cell spaces by around 8,000. In practice, the Government do not have a prison policy. The numbers do not add up, and our jails are in chaos. In the final days of the last Parliament, the House of Commons Justice Committee noted that since 2016, just three years ago, the Government had made 378 separate and largely unmet promises on prisons. As the committee put it, the Government’s approach is “policy by press release.”

In 2014, the then Prisons Minister—I think there have been five since then, but I may have missed one or two along the way—asked me to review the self-inflicted deaths of young people in prison custody. My report was published the following year and concluded that, because of staff shortages and the physical condition of the estate, the prison environment was grim, bleak and demoralising to the spirit. Operational staffing levels were so inadequate that prisoners could not be sufficiently engaged in purposeful activity and that time was not spent in a constructive and valuable way. Planned core day activities that might help rehabilitation were cancelled. Even medical and mental health appointments were being missed because there were insufficient staff to escort prisoners to those appointments within the prison.

This has not got significantly better in the last four years. In fact, the situation is worse. The Bill is urgent only because nothing was done to address the underlying situation much earlier. The Government have known that some terrorist prisoners were subject to automatic release. This is not something the Minister and his colleagues have suddenly discovered, yet nothing was done until now. The Government have presided over a rapid deterioration in our Prison Service, which has faced budget cuts substantially above those in other departments.

My report in 2015 and successive reports from the Chief Inspector of Prisons have highlighted the appalling conditions in our jails. Peter Clarke in his most recent report says that

“far too many of our jails have been plagued by drugs, violence, appalling living conditions and a lack of access to meaningful rehabilitative activity.”

The Government’s response has been too little and too slow. Ian Acheson, whose report has been referred to several times, in his review for the Government on Islamist extremism in prisons highlighted issues affecting precisely the prisoners whom this Bill is concerned with. The Government’s response to his recommendations has at best been patchy.

The Government have no excuse. They knew what was happening: prisoners were coming up to the time of automatic release and would present a danger to the public. All this Bill does is postpone the problem: prisoners will still come up for release, maybe a few months later or maybe a year or so later, but it will still happen. The key question is whether the Prison and Probation Service and the Parole Board will have sufficient experienced and suitable expert staff available to ensure that individual prisoners of concern are receiving a proper level of supervision, proper assessment and appropriate support and that deradicalisation and rehabilitation are delivered. As an aside, could the Government assure us that they actually know what works in deradicalisation?

We on this side of the House do not question the need for the right measures to be put in place to protect the public. Automatic release is not appropriate and it is right that there be a proper assessment of the risk that individuals may pose before they are released. However, the Government have been silent on the resources needed and, without proper assurances on that, the Bill is no more than a sticking plaster that will do no more than provide a late temporary fix to a problem that is of the Government’s own making.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Keen of Elie]

My Lords, clearly these are grave matters worthy of serious debate, and I am obliged to all Members of the House for contributing to that debate.

Let us be clear at the outset. This Bill is not a complete answer to the challenges we face with regard to terrorism, the ability to counter terrorism, radicalisation and the ability to deradicalise individuals. There will be a great deal more to do, and the Government have made it clear that they intend to follow through and do a great deal more in this area, including the proposal for a counterterrorism Bill that has already been referred to. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, suggested that such a Bill may or may not emerge, but at present we are not anticipating a dissolution of Parliament. Therefore, I believe with a degree of confidence that we will be bringing that forward.

Over and above that, noble Lords will recollect that last month, following the terrorist attack at Fishmongers’ Hall, the Government announced a major overhaul of counterterrorism, prison and probation, a proposal to double the number of specialist probation officers working with terrorists, the introduction of further legislation, such as the counterterrorism Bill, and the creation of a new counterterrorism programme and intervention centre. I note what the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, observed: we also have to delve into the efficacy and effectiveness of many of these programmes in order to determine our direction of travel. We anticipate that the new centre will represent a major shift in our capability to intervene with terrorist offenders to try to identify the risk they pose, and to bring to bear the correct specialists to work with them to reduce such risks while they are in custody.

Of course, turning a terrorist away from the mindset they have is no easy task. It requires not only expertise and application but eventually a willingness on the part of the offender to engage with such programmes, and to do so genuinely. Noble Lords have pointed out that there have been instances when it is apparent that some individuals have embraced these programmes, but in a wholly superficial, indeed false, way. That is a further challenge that we face.

There is clearly more that can be done. Indeed, the proposed centre will prioritise three things. The first is the need to build the evidence base for what works for terrorist offenders, using the best evaluation approaches we can identify, not just in the UK but in other jurisdictions. Secondly, the centre will have capacity to respond to new threats and challenges with regard to terrorist offending, because those will almost certainly emerge. Thirdly, it will try to bring to bear highly trained staff to deliver intervention programmes, which will include bolstering the cohort of counterterrorism specialists, psychologists and trained chaplains who deliver theological and ideological interventions.

This is not entirely novel. Since 2010, significant work has taken place to try to develop and improve counterterrorism interventions. The primary intervention, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has been the Healthy Identity intervention, which is a one-to-one programme that supports desistance and disengagement from extremism by targeting the social and psychological drivers of such offending. Again, I do not seek to minimise the challenges that will be faced in developing and applying these programmes, and, indeed, learning from these programmes, because that will be part of the process.

I shall turn for a moment to one issue that has driven the regret Motion and some of the amendments: whether, or to what extent, the Bill’s proposals have retrospective effect, and whether they are consistent and lawful pursuant to Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights. On the Article 7 point, let me say clearly that I concur entirely with the view expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, that the provisions of this Bill are entirely consistent and allowable under Article 7 of the convention. Any doubts raised by reference to the Del Río Prada v Spain case, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Marks, have, in my view, been dispelled by the recent decision in Abedin v the United Kingdom. It is for that reason that a certificate has been signed, pursuant to Section 19 of the Human Rights Act, to confirm that the provisions of the Bill are consistent with convention obligations.

There is the further issue of common law. As was observed, there is no common-law prohibition on retrospective legislation. There is a presumption against it, and it is a presumption that has to be addressed. But before we address it, we have to understand what is meant in this context by the retrospective element in the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Marks, complained that the common-law principle, as he put it, against retrospection was being intruded upon because of the Bill’s intention to increase the length of prison sentences. With respect, that is not what the Bill does—but, of course, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, also referred to increasing the length of sentences retrospectively. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Harris, suggested that this was Executive interference with judicial sentencing.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

If any prisoner had understood that his sentence was four years but that automatically, because the Secretary of State had a duty to do so, it was reduced to two years, he would feel that retrospectively his situation had changed. I said nothing in that context about the Executive. What I did say is that the Executive have been wilfully failing in not bringing forward proposals much earlier to address some of these problems.

[Lord Keen of Elie]

I misheard the noble Lord, and I apologise to him for that. I had understood him to refer to the issue of the sentence being retrospectively changed, as reflected in the observations of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, and the noble Lord, Lord Marks.

The point I wish to make has already been touched upon by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. The position is simply this. There is an established line of case law up to the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal that a court should pass a sentence that is commensurate to the offending behaviour in relation to the offence committed, without any consideration of any possible early release. In other words, early release under licence and the various ramifications of that are an irrelevant consideration to the courts on sentencing. That is reflected by the Court of Appeal decisions in Round in 2009 and Bright in 2008. So it is not a case of retrospective change to sentence. Somebody is sentenced to a period of, say, four years. There is then a statutory provision whereby the Secretary of State comes under a duty to release at a certain point in the sentence. The current position with regard to the type of sentence we are dealing with is release at the halfway stage. In response to an observation by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, I say that the Secretary of State has a duty to obtemper that statutory obligation and, I suspect, would be faced with a writ of habeas corpus if he did not. There is a clear duty there, and there is no way around that.

The true retrospective nature of this legislation, insofar as it is at all retrospective, comes from the application of the provisions with regard to the Parole Board, with which everyone appears to be in agreement. Under the present statute, a prisoner is entitled to automatic release at the halfway stage. We now propose—and everyone appears to agree—that this should not be the case and that they should have to satisfy the requirements of the Parole Board before they are released. So a prisoner who anticipated automatic release will no longer be able to do so, because the provision with regard to the Parole Board is that it must be satisfied that it is no longer necessary for the protection of the public that the prisoner should be confined. That is the retrospective element in all this.

The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, then asked: why apply that at the two-thirds point in the sentence rather than at the halfway point? There are a number of reasons behind the provision in the Bill extending the period of imprisonment from half to two-thirds of the sentence. The most immediate was reflected in an observation from noble Lords that this Bill gave a breathing space. That is certainly required at present, because we face a situation in which we are placing a quite considerable obligation on the Parole Board to bring forward expertise and examination of individual prisoners, in circumstances in which a number of these offenders are due for release at the halfway point in a matter of days. In the interim period, therefore, it is necessary that we are able to accommodate that very real risk.

In addition, it brings the sentence into a position that is consistent with other sentences, where the period is two-thirds. We suggest that it allows for a further period of incapacitation of terrorist offenders—it may seem limited in some instances, but not in all—and confers a degree of public confidence on those concerned about recent behaviour and recent events.