Queen’s Speech

Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2019 Lords Chamber

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

My Lords, I shall concentrate in winding up primarily on justice issues. As an example, I welcome the Government’s commitment to addressing violent crime. Increasing violent crime, particularly knife crime, threatens public safety and confidence, but changes in the criminal justice system can only ever be part of the answer. Youth services in particular have been severely cut over recent years, when they needed to be increased and improved.

The promises in the Queen’s Speech include commitments to locking people up for longer. I am afraid this populist approach reflects the Prime Minister’s tone, yet it is more directed to the readership of the Daily Mail than to responding to serious evidence. Many of us, along with noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, remember the debate of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, on 3 October. Members there demonstrated to a very high standard that long prison sentences do not reduce crime. They stressed our need for better, more humane and more effective prisons with better physical conditions; prisons that are less overcrowded and better staffed, with more opportunity for education, training, sport and employment; and in which violence is brought back under control and health issues and drug and alcohol addiction are addressed.

Rehabilitation must be the central purpose of imprisonment: during custodial sentences, in preparation for release and during supervision following release. These points were well made in the debate by my noble friend Lord Dholakia, the noble and learned Lords, Lord Hope of Craighead and Lord Woolf, the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and the noble Lords, Lord Hastings, Lord Carlile, Lord Hogan-Howe and Lord Farmer. My noble friend Lord Beith added that prison is not only ineffective but extremely expensive.

The proposed Sentencing Bill will commit to strengthening community orders, addressing offenders’ behaviour, mental health and alcohol or drug misuse needs, but achieving this will require better and properly resourced community sentences when the contracts of the disastrous “community rehabilitation companies” are replaced. It is right that victims should receive more support, but the Government should start with the proposals in my noble friend Lady Brinton’s Bill to improve and strengthen the rights in the victims’ code.

The proposals for no-fault divorce are important. The time has long gone when a precondition for divorce should be the attribution of blame to the other party. Divorce should be a conciliatory process managed for the benefit of the parties, but still more for their innocent children.

We welcome back the Domestic Abuse Bill, initially a casualty of the unlawful Prorogation attempt. It will strengthen support for victims and define domestic abuse more broadly. It benefited greatly from pre-legislative scrutiny, and it is important that the changes proposed by the committee should not be watered down and be properly resourced.

The proposed new points-based immigration system was considered by my noble friends Lord Paddick and Lady Smith and the noble Lords, Lord Horam and Lord Green. I would add two warnings. First, a points system can be sclerotic in failing to respond to rapid changes in the labour market’s need for different skills. Secondly, a system that relates the right to come and work here to earnings risks excluding many of those on lower earnings whom we really need.

Had my noble friend Lady Hamwee been able to be here, she would have raised the issue of rendition. The chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee has said that the UK,

“tolerated actions, and took others, that we regard as inexcusable”.

There remains a cohort of individuals subjected to rendition and torture in which the UK Government were complicit. They have suffered reputational damage, immigration problems and stops at international ports, with no means of defending themselves or their families, who are of course also affected. Will the Government implement a durable solution to their immigration status and direct a new judge-led inquiry into the UK’s actions?

We note that the police are to be,

“awarded the power to arrest individuals who are wanted by trusted international partners”,

in an extradition and provisional arrest Bill. As the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, pointed out, it is ironic that this coincides with our possible loss of the very successful European arrest warrant. It is principally directed to mitigating its loss.

I regard the measures to,

“improve the justice system’s response to foreign national offenders”,

as largely a red herring. Deportation is already available in respect of serious offenders, but the Home Office’s record of deporting offenders is abysmal. It is far more important to implement existing deportation orders effectively than to rely on new measures to deter the return of those who have been deported.

We are promised a new regulator to scrutinise environmental policy and law, investigate complaints and take enforcement action. That would ring less hollow if the Government had not been repeatedly found in breach of the Aarhus convention for failing to comply with our commitments on environmental justice.

Strangely, we are offered a Bill on the implementation of agreements in private international law, to produce an agreed international mechanism for co-operation in justice matters. The Government hope to retain or replicate the advantages we currently enjoy in the civil justice system from a network of regulations and conventions between EU countries, at present monitored and overseen by the Court of Justice of the European Union.

However, it is pie in the sky to suggest that this can be achieved by domestic legislation, as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, hinted at. These are international agreements: the Brussels I Regulation on jurisdiction, registration and enforcement of judgments; Brussels II, on family law issues; Rome I, on governing law in contract; Rome II, on conflicts of law in non-contractual obligations; and the Hague conventions, including on child abduction. They are additional to the benefits of European co-operation in criminal justice matters, which were discussed by my noble friend Lord Paddick and go far beyond the benefits achieved from the European arrest warrant, substantial as those are. We have Europol, which is a massive improvement over Interpol in terms of efficient co-operation and speed; Eurojust, which allows co-operation between judges and courts; and access to the Schengen database of information to protect national security, border control and law enforcement.

The answer the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, gave to the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, on these points was wholly inadequate. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, amplified the point in his speech, but even he did not meet the point that all these benefits depend on multilateral agreement between nations. They are a major benefit of EU membership—a binding system monitored by the CJEU. It was an absurd red line that we should lose so much in international co-operation in order to reject the involvement of a court to which no one can identify a single, solid, practical objection; to which United Kingdom judges have contributed so much; and in which we could negotiate continued involvement in areas of continuing co-operation.

We should all remember the speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, on the operation of the constitution and his warning that,

“if you mess about with the constitution it will bite back”.

The House heard impressive speeches on devolution to the nations and regions of the United Kingdom. My noble friends Lady Humphreys and Lord Scriven, the noble Lords, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth and Lord Heseltine, and many others contributed to that debate. There is, however, a hollowness that positively rattles in the Government’s protestation:

“The integrity and prosperity of the union that binds the four nations of the United Kingdom is of the utmost importance”,


to the Government. Brexit poses a massive threat to the union, yet the Government ignore the threat of Scottish independence and the fact that the form of Brexit that might be implemented could be the most inimical possible to Scotland’s economic interests.

The Government seem prepared to threaten the union with Northern Ireland in their desperation to get Brexit done against an artificial and politically imposed deadline, seeking to reconcile the clearly conflicting goals of leaving the customs union, honouring the Good Friday agreement with no border between the Republic and Northern Ireland, and treating Northern Ireland as an intrinsic part of the UK. Yet the benefits of leaving the customs union are illusory, largely based on a view of President Trump that is unrealistic to the point of being fantastical.

Finally, I support my noble friend Lord Tyler’s call for transparency and reform of election and referendum expenditure, and for greater accuracy and completeness of our electoral registers, and the call from the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, for protection from interference and abuse. Our democracy is under real threat from injustices, anomalies—including the one raised by the noble Lord, Lord Low, in the gap—inefficiencies and the risks inherent in our present electoral arrangements. We on these Benches will seek to uphold the integrity of our democracy, whatever the outcome of present conflicts.