Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Imbert Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

My Lords, I am very pleased to add my support to the excellent response that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has prepared to the points that arose in Committee. I was one of those who met Professor Keith Humphreys, who is the senior adviser to President Obama on drug and alcohol abuse, who gave us a very helpful presentation indeed on what they are doing in the States. They have made very good progress and are intending to roll out the programme over a much wider front, given the success that they have encountered.

On the point of different cultures, the one thing that those involved in drink and drug issues know is that they are widespread throughout countries in varying degrees. Some places have bigger problems than others, but those who have problems with drink and drugs have a common problem of approach. It behoves us that wherever we see people trying a new approach, if it is producing success and the kind of results that we have heard that this scheme is running, we should spend some time looking to see whether it can be applied in our home country.

The Americans are very progressive in many areas. They try schemes; yes, some of them fail, but they abandon those and move on. The problem I find from my experience of dealing with these issues in this country is that when we get an idea, we believe that it is going to work and research it very well indeed. We then start pouring a lot of money into it, which continues to go in regardless of what is happening with the scheme, yet we continue defending the status quo when others come to suggest trying to look for something a little different.

I hope that the Government will be prepared to think again on this and to be bold. The major issues which were troubling them have, I think, been answered by the noble Baroness in her response but I would underline the two points that I made previously. First, this will not work on a voluntary basis. It will work successfully on that basis in one or two areas, but then you will find that the probation officers move on and the police change. A different culture then occurs in the area where it has been successful, so it is not maintained and it disappears. This is all that we find happens when it is run purely voluntarily on an experimental basis. It needs instead to be in the Bill and to be a compulsory operation—again, on an experimental basis.

Secondly, there is a concern expressed that we might end up with more people going into jail at the end of the day. Well, some of those people will be going to jail in any event and will be costing the taxpayer an awful lot of money in the first instance. If this alternative runs, there is a chance that there will be significantly less cost to the taxpayer and to the public at large. I suggest to the Minister one way around this difficulty. Civil servants hate sunset clauses because they are seen as a mark of failure. We should be much more flexible in our approach to sunset clauses. If they are right that this will end up with more people going to jail—I do not believe that it will, and I think that most people around the House who attended these briefings do not think that—why do the Government not consider making these amendments subject to a sunset clause and bring that back at Third Reading? We can then find a way forward which would answer that problem.

I am sorry to think that my Front Bench is not going to give its full support to this venture. The Labour Party ought to be backing this. From a number of standpoints, it is a very helpful development indeed and even though our Front Bench may not be exalting my colleagues to join us in the Division Lobbies, I personally appeal very strongly indeed to the people on the Labour Benches to vote for this amendment, if we are pushed to a vote. However, I hope that is avoided and that we get a more positive response from the Minister than we have had before.

[Lord Imbert]

My Lords, I must declare an interest before I begin in that 50 years ago, when on night duty as a new constable on the streets of London, I found that the following morning, for weeks on end, one was standing in court with a defendant who was accused of a crime that turned out to be alcohol-related. As the Committee would expect, I have conferred with my former colleagues and, yesterday morning, I spoke to the territorial operations department of the Metropolitan Police to seek its view on this amendment. It is supportive, with one caveat: that this must be a magistrate’s decision. Police must not be expected to say, “This individual committed the crime because they were drunk”. That must be a decision of the magistrate but, with that one caveat, I know that my former colleagues support this amendment as indeed do I.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Imbert, who is a great deal more experienced in these matters than I am. I am also at one remove in following my namesake, who spoke earlier, and who alluded to the presentation which a number of us received on Monday morning. Reference has been made to the experience of the American professor from Stanford who gave a presentation to us about his White House experience. I would add the footnote that he also holds an honorary degree from King’s College London, so he is not without form on this side of the Atlantic.

Brevity is at a premium, so I shall not cover the ground that other speakers have covered. When the Minister spoke on the previous occasion in Committee, she indicated familiarity with the South Dakota experiment. I have a brief addition to make to that. Monday’s presentation emphasised the experience of the three states where the problem was most severe—North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana—and did so graphically with a parallel line high on the page representing North Dakota. A line at the bottom of the page indicated the average experience in the individual states in the US. A diagonal line from the top of the left-hand corner to the bottom right showed the way that South Dakota’s experience had so dramatically improved.

At the end of the presentation, I asked the professor what had been happening in the states that lay between the average figure at the bottom of the page and the experience in the Dakotas and Montana. He said that a series of them which fell in their own performance between the top and bottom lines had already also adopted the South Dakota experience, North Dakota and Montana having already done so. The most notable example of a state that had, as a result of the South Dakota experience, advanced to putting it on the statute book was California.