Queen’s Speech

Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, others on these Benches have spoken on the many topics covered in this debate, but in winding up I will concentrate on the centrepiece legislation proposing prison reform and on the proposed British Bill of Rights. In so doing I shall respond to the challenge posed to me by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, in opening.

The Prime Minister has made a welcome commitment that prisons will no longer be warehouses for criminals but instead be incubators of reformed and changed lives. This matches our central ambition of opportunity for all, in this case a second chance for prisoners to lead productive and fulfilling lives against the depressing background described by many in the debate, including by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, a moment ago. More than a quarter of prisoners have been in care and more than 40% permanently excluded from school.

This ambition cannot be realised by legislation alone. Our prison system now shames us as a nation. It is failing in its central purpose of reform and rehabilitation. It traps offenders and their families and communities with them in a cycle of crime and deprivation. Replacing old and inefficient prisons with new institutions will be a good start, but only a start. Of itself, giving governors greater autonomy will not improve anything, nor will making prisons independent legal entities. What will be important is the approach that more autonomous governors take. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester raised important points on this issue. Moreover, it will be the resources they are afforded that will count if they are to civilise our prisons, to transform them from the squalid, unsafe and drug-ridden academies of crime which many, but not all, are today into places of genuine rehabilitation and opportunity.

The challenges are clear. We must reduce prison violence, improve education, increase purposeful activity and treat mental ill-health, drug addiction and alcohol abuse effectively and sympathetically. We can meet those challenges only if we address overcrowding and understaffing, just as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and many others said. The figures on overcrowding are stark. My noble friend Lord Palmer of Childs Hill gave some of them. Last month, 84 out of 121 prisons were over their certified normal accommodation, which is their uncrowded capacity defined as representing a good and decent standard of accommodation the service aspires to provide for all prisoners. Seven prisons were over by more than 50%, including Wandsworth by 69% and Brixton by 48%.

We use prison too much. Our prison population of 85,000 is the highest in Europe. Ministers plead that it is for judges to sentence, but judges act in accordance with law and guidance, and increasing sentences ratchets up other services. Too many ineffective short prison sentences and the injustice of more than 3,300 IPP prisoners who have completed their tariffs compound the problem, yet the gracious Speech had no proposals to cut prison numbers. Overcrowding and understaffing, with cuts of a third of officers in six years, mean that many prisoners are locked into overoccupied cells for 23 hours a day with little purposeful activity. This is the toxic mix that has led to the explosion of prison violence. The Government say that body cameras and improved action on psychoactive substances will reduce violence, and they may, but they only scratch the surface.

With other noble Lords, I welcome Dame Sally Coates’s proposals on education in prisons. Personal learning plans and the availability of IT to prisoners for learning will be central, and if we cut overcrowding we will need to move prisoners less often, improving continuity in education and work. Part-time and earlier release, with tagging when needed, would also cut overcrowding and help prisoners make an assisted transition to productive lives on release. There is a virtuous circle to which we should aspire: improving prisons, leading to less crime; substantial financial savings; and better lives. It is against that aspiration that we will measure the proposed Bill. I ask the Minister to give commitments to the House: on reducing the numbers in all prisons to their CNAs, on reversing the falls in staffing levels and on fully resourcing the Coates proposals for education.

I turn to human rights. Last year’s Queen’s Speech contained exactly the same commitment to proposals for a British Bill of Rights as this year’s, as many have said. Yet the Government still cannot say what is intended, save that the rights in the Bill will be the ECHR rights and that the Government’s concern is with the interpretation of convention rights by the Strasbourg court. I suspect that few in this House would shed any tears if by next year’s Queen’s Speech this project had been abandoned. But as for a possible Liberal Democrat torpedo, we neither claim nor have the arsenal to torpedo legislation. There are defenders of the Human Rights Act on all sides of the House of Commons and, while we have greater representation in this House than we do there, we cannot win any vote without support from around the House. However, our position is clear. Just as in government we prevented our coalition colleagues from weakening human rights, so now in opposition we will in both Houses oppose any provision that weakens the protection of the human rights guaranteed to British citizens by the convention.

I therefore ask the Minister again to confirm that the Government will not withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, as he clearly implied in opening. As for the Government’s concern, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, pointed out that the sovereignty of Parliament is preserved by the Human Rights Act. Nor does the obligation under Section 2 of the Act to take account of Strasbourg jurisprudence require slavish adherence to Strasbourg decisions by the domestic courts, as the Supreme Court has made clear. However, we are bound by Article 46(1) of the convention to comply with final decisions of the Strasbourg court and it is a violation of international law and a repudiation of the rule of law when we fail to do so—on prisoners’ voting or anything else. Any such failures weaken our reputation as they weaken the rule of international law.

Noble Lords have referred to the position of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. In a recent letter to Michael Gove, the Irish Justice Secretary warned:

“The Good Friday Agreement is clear that the European Convention on Human Rights must be incorporated into law. It is my government’s view that, while a domestic bill of rights could complement incorporation, it could not replace it.”

How do the Government respond to that?

None of this means that there can be no Bill, but along with other noble Lords I am entirely unsure what any Bill is likely to achieve. If a Bill does get as far as this House, we would wish to protect and strengthen human rights in the UK. We will also seek to extend human rights, both as my noble friend Lord Carlile suggested and by seeking to incorporate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into UK law, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley sought to do with her Children’s Rights Bill some time ago. However, the Government should be sure of this. We will resist any provisions in the Bill which restrict the rights of British citizens under the convention and we will vote to ensure that our convention rights continue to be justiciable in UK courts. My party will at no stage sit back and abandon its core commitment to the legal protection of human rights.