Better Prisons: Less Crime (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)
Lord McNally Excerpts(6 days, 3 hours ago)
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Lord McNally (LD)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester. I commend the work of the chaplaincy service in prisons. I also welcome this debate, inspired as it is by the report of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee.
The noble Lord, Lord Timpson, must have been feeling a little battered about two-thirds of the way through the speech by my noble friend Lord Foster. He probably had a note from his office saying that my noble friend is a Liberal Democrat and is sympathetic to his aims. This is what makes my noble friend such a formidable politician: he does not pull his punches, but he does not mean any harm.
Noble Lords
Lord McNally (LD)
That came out wrong. When he referred to the Government’s response to the White Paper, he also reminded me of my old friend, Fred Peart. Fred was Leader of the House a long time ago. He had an absolutely fail-safe way of answering questions, however hostile. When there was a request for action, he would stand up, repeat it and then say, “I have to tell the noble Lord that it will not be next week”. I thought that the Government’s response was, as my noble friend Lord Foster delicately implied, a “not next week” reply. There are so many times when they adopt the suggestion but do not make any practical advance. This is one of the problems.
When the Government were elected some 18 months ago, one of the most welcome appointments was that of the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, as Minister for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending. I served at the Ministry of Justice from 2010 to 2013 as Minister of State under the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, and from 2014 to 2017 as chair of the Youth Justice Board. My delight at the appointment of the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, was because, during those seven years as a Minister and then as YJB chair, I had worked closely with the noble Lord, his brother and their late father in the pioneering work that the Timpson family has done in helping and assisting the rehabilitation of offenders.
I was further encouraged by the fact that the noble Lord would be joined in the battle for prison reform by my successor as YJB chair, Charlie Taylor. Since 2020, he has been His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons. My only fear is that the sheer scale and multifaceted nature of the crisis in our prisons would break their spirits because of the magnitude of the task faced.
I will raise a couple of points on which the Minister may want to comment. I am genuinely worried about the retreat on education. I know the budgetary problems that are faced and I commend the work done by David Gauke on the sentencing review. But, as has been said by a number of speakers, the education of prisoners is one of the key ways to rehabilitation. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, raised the problem of drugs. The general public just do not understand why drugs should be so effectively and proficiently available in our prisons. The man in the street wants to know how they got in there and how this is such a factor in our prisons.
I see that I shall get a commending smile from the Whip by sitting down. Good luck.
Prison Capacities
Lord McNally Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Lord McNally (LD)
My Lords, by this time, the Minister must be thinking that this is going to be an easy job. I am afraid he has to learn, if he has not learned already, that the House of Lords is not the best place to assess either public opinion or opinion in the other place about penal policy. Nevertheless, the contributions that he has heard today should give him confidence that if, as most of us are hoping, he will lead the charge in genuine prison reform, he will not be without support.
Fourteen years ago I arrived at the Ministry of Justice with the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, as Secretary of State. One of the first things we did was to send a memorandum to No. 10 suggesting that we manage down the prison population to under 80,000 during the course of the Parliament. The message came back from No. 10: “Not politically deliverable”. The truth is that today it is not politically deliverable to continue longer sentences, with more and more people in prison and a criminal justice system at the point of collapse.
In some ways, the Minister has come to office at just the right moment to press the arguments that he has heard from all parts of the House: there is another way, a better way, a more civilised way of treating offenders. That is not to move away from the need for them to take responsibility for their crimes, but in many of the suggestions that he has heard today there are real and positive ways that we could cut prison numbers, make the public safer and do a really good job in our criminal justice system.