Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 31st January 2024 Lords Chamber

Debate on Amendment 13 resumed.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the chance to participate—I thought I was going to be cut off at the knees at the end of the last session when the Committee was adjourned promptly. I also apologise to the Committee because I did not participate in the Second Reading debate. I intervene this afternoon to support Amendment 14 tabled by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and supported by my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the other amendments concerned with restorative justice or RJ.

I have quite a personal reason for this because when I came into your Lordships’ House some years ago, my best friend rang me to say that his best friend from school had just been made a chief constable and was very interested in this thing called restorative justice, and would I be prepared to go and meet him? I said I would, of course. I knew virtually nothing about RJ at that time. I went to meet the chief constable and he explained to me how he thought we were missing a trick in not using RJ more widely to deal with what he described as our lamentable record in reoffending.

He arranged for me to go and get involved in some cases, hear the facts and even, with the permission of the participants, sit in as a facilitator on one or two cases. I got a great deal of first-hand experience of how RJ might or might not work. All he said when I finished was, “Will you just repay me by raising RJ and speaking about it in the House of Lords in the future?”. So here I am this afternoon, keeping faith with my friend, the chief constable. From my great experience, then, the key issue—this important point was made by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries—was that it works only if each participant, on the two sides of the argument or the case, is prepared to get inside the head of the other. That was an important part of what I learned while I was there.

I will not talk at length about what I learned specifically, but it is worth briefly recounting one case. A confirmed drug user with a charge-sheet as long as your arm saw an empty house and thought he would break in, find a piece of electrical equipment, take it, flog it and use the proceeds to feed his habit. Unfortunately for him, the house was not empty. The owner of the house, a designer, had a small studio upstairs on the second floor. He came downstairs to find this man in the hall and asked, “What are you doing?”. The man said, “I’ve come to read the gas meter”. The owner said, “Bad idea, because there’s no gas in this house. We don’t have gas”. A struggle ensued, during which the owner of the house hit the man over the head with a flowerpot. There are pictures of the person with blood streaming down his face when the police arrived and arrested him.

From this unprepossessing, unlikely beginning, a case of RJ was introduced. The men met a few times then, as was inevitably right, the burglar got a custodial sentence. The men corresponded while he was in prison and a degree of agreement and understanding—the ability of both sides to put the past behind them and do better in future, from the point of view of the perpetrator —was arrived at. When I talked to the perpetrator, I asked, “What was it?”. He said, “You can see my charge-sheet. All I saw on it were names but, this time, when I met the owner of the house, he said, ‘Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve terrified my family. My two teenage daughters will no longer sleep in separate bedrooms upstairs; they share a room next door to me and my wife. My wife has every single door and window locked—everything locked. You have completely wrecked our security as a family. What do you think about that?’”. Although he did not put it this way, it was a bit of a lightbulb moment for him.

On the other side, when I talked to the owner of the house, he said, “When we began to talk to the chap, he had had a hopeless start. He had a single mum—not much of a single mum, really—and was in and out of care, with little to no educational achievement. Inevitably, his life was largely devoted to crime”. From these two understandings came an ability to work together; it put them, in particular the perpetrator, to an important and life-affirming task to live better and have a worthwhile lifetime.

That is a great, moving story but I said to the chief constable, “There must be a but”. He said, “Of course there’s a but”. He was anxious then, as I think I would be anxious today, not to put too much weight on restorative justice. He said, “There are two things you can do to make sure that RJ does better”. The first is that you need—these are the words from the briefing, not the chief constable—“voluntary and honest participation” by both sides. That is straightforward.

Not in the briefing is the second point that he made: you need expert, trained facilitators. Being expert and trained means, first, that you move the conversation forward but not so that you avoid tackling the awful, painful issues that lie at the heart of the problem; and, secondly, that you are tough enough to blow the whistle when you believe that somebody is not trying. This is not always easy to do because, sometimes, a bit of effort has been invested and people are reluctant to let the case go, but someone has to realise that there are cases in which people will, in the famous phrase, swing the lead in the hope of a reduced sentence. The facilitator needs to be well trained. As the chief constable would say, “A facilitator cannot take on too many cases because they’re quite emotionally exhausting if you get really stuck into these people’s lives”.

The chief constable, if he were standing here, would say, “I certainly would not want RJ to be presented as a silver bullet”—the point made by my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier. “Above all,” he would say, “I don’t want it to be presented as a cheap silver bullet because it isn’t—at least, not in the short run. However, if you can turn a number of cases round, the long-term savings and benefits to society are incalculable.

Our re-offending rates remain too high—the same situation as when I met the chief constable. We surely have an opportunity now to be imaginative in our thinking about how to reduce offending rates. We need new tools in our toolbox, and restorative justice would be an important one. I hope my noble and learned friend the Minister will react sympathetically to Amendment 14. That would give me great pleasure, because it would mean that I have kept faith with my friend the chief constable.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that his faith will be even better kept if he keeps on advocating RJ? Does he also agree that it has its limitations, one of which is that there is a need, in the case he has described, for drug addiction treatment to go alongside it in some way? One must look at the underlying causes, as he has well indicated.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

I could not disagree with that. I suspect that there are a whole host of issues behind habitual offending which we need to think about, of which drug addiction is one. People involved in this policy area are clearly more experienced than I am.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, this is the first group of amendments which really gets into victims’ rights—not just what is expressed in the victims’ code, but ensuring that they can access it. The noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, started the group with the important issue of a victim’s right to challenge decisions, including but not only relating to multiple perpetrators. I thank her for that, because that and some of the cultural issues she raised are important in ensuring that victims’ services are tailored to victims’ needs and are not a tick-box exercise.

I thank Restorative Justice for All for its briefing, and all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. I will not repeat it all, but we know that restorative justice is a well-established and evidence-based alternative that certainly does not let offenders off the hook; it is as difficult for offenders as it often is for the victims. Restorative Justice for All wrote to us because it is concerned about how long it has been since issues about the right to restorative justice were addressed. It goes back to an EU directive of 2012, yet there is still no absolute right available. That needs to be remedied.

Unfortunately, under this Bill there is no obligation for criminal justice agencies to inform harmed parties about restorative justice systems. When we come to later amendments, we will be fighting hard to ensure that that does become a requirement, because victims deserve no less. The other part of this group also talks about signposting of services. I am grateful to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harris of Pentregarth, who believes that the perpetrators need restorative justice as much. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester said that being told there is a code is a start, but much more is needed. I suspect that the Minister will try to say that having such a system would be expensive. However, we know that not having the alternative is even more expensive not just in terms of the consequences for victims’ lives, but for the criminal justice system, parole and stopping recidivism. Without restorative justice, all those costs will continue to pile on.

I do hope that the Minister will bring us some good news. I gently remind him that in the costings for this Bill we were reminded that Part 4, on prisoners, will cost around £0.5 billion, but only a very token amount is allocated for victims’ services. Perhaps that balance is not yet quite right.

Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 12th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, I too support this array of amendments on IPP, both the current amendments and the ones that will follow. As the Committee will know, I am a regular visitor—twice a month—to prisons across the UK, and I will visit another one tomorrow morning. On a regular basis—two a month—I meet many incarcerated men and sometimes women, and many who have left prison over the last 10 years, and I have found relentless IPP tragedies around every corner.

I shall refer to one story from a meeting in December, when a man came up to me and said that he had been released from an IPP sentence 14 years ago but was recalled back to prison in September after he forgot to inform his then probation officer that he had gone on holiday with his wife in August for two weeks to Spain. This is just sheer stupidity, let alone the fact that this system is organising to persecute people compared with recognising their renewal. In his case, and not just because I have now met him twice, he does not deserve the taxpayer to spend nearly £50,000 for an extended period to make sure that he is further detained and punished.

I hope the Minister will gather up all his strength and either accept this array of amendments in one gulp or go back to the Lord Chancellor and determine to bring back an effective set of government amendments that will allow us to end this appalling stain of injustice and unfairness. Another man I met eight years ago from a prison in Kent had been recalled three times. From an initial sentence of seven years, he had done over 24. The persecution of this man’s mental abilities was blatantly obvious; he was no risk to anyone. I can tell noble Lords that since we campaigned for his release, and he has been released, he is an honourable citizen paying his taxes. That is how we should treat many of these men—they are largely men—to see that they are given the opportunity to prove their new life.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I wonder whether I could detain the Committee for one minute on Amendments 156 and 157. The background to this is my time as chairman of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, when, with my noble friend Lord Blencathra, we drew attention to the creeping growth in the power of the Executive at the expense of the legislature in our reports Government by Diktat and Democracy Denied?. Therefore, when amendments present changes to be effected or not effected by secondary legislation, my ears prick up.

First, we have to recognise that there has to be secondary legislation. The SLSC looks at between 600 and 800 regulations per year. To think that those can be put through by primary legislation is fanciful. The Government’s system would be completely gummed up, so something has to be done.

Secondly, we all know that the system for scrutinising secondary legislation is weak, to say the least. There is no chance to amend, even if the House were to agree that one particular provision in a regulation was inadequate or wrong; it is all or nothing. There is no room for ping- pong or other things we see in primary legislation. All those things are important. This House has decided to stand in the way of secondary legislation only six times since 1968. The last time, in 2015, led to a full-scale constitutional crisis, the Strathclyde review, et cetera.

With great respect to my noble friend Lord Attlee, it seems that Amendment 156 would lock us into the structure we currently have. He says that a criminal justice Bill will be along in no time at all; maybe, but we would be locked into the structure we have because the Secretary of State has no power at all. By contrast, Amendment 157, in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, would give the Secretary of State some powers, but only to loosen, not to tighten. It seems to me that, in so far as we are seeking a balance between the Executive and the legislature, between moving too quickly and not moving at all, Amendment 157 is to be preferred, and I hope the Committee would not accept Amendment 156.

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been an interesting and relatively short debate. We have four groups of amendments covering IPP sentences, and this first group is perhaps the easiest and most benign to agree with. I say to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, that we in the Opposition have no problem with this group. I acknowledge the interesting point that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, just made regarding the differences between Amendments 156 and 157. Nevertheless, we have no problem agreeing with the generality of amendments in this group. I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, for his crystal-clear description, quoting my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti, when he introduced the amendments.

We agree with the general thrust of these amendments and, if it comes to it at a later stage, will support any amendments that may be pushed further. I would like to do the Minister’s job and say what the problems might be. I acknowledge that, with a reducing cohort of IPP prisoners in prison, you are dealing with very difficult and potentially dangerous people. As this number reduces, the problem gets greater. I think that is a fair point to make. It is a point the Minister usually makes, but I want to make it from this side of the Chamber.

We will come to more ambitious proposals in subsequent groups, but here we are just dealing with various amendments to licence conditions and fairly imaginative ways of reducing them overall. We support them in the generality.