Rehabilitation of Offenders (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Friday 21st January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, at the end of a week when the customs and courtesies of this House appear to have been honoured in the breach as much as in the practice, it is a great pleasure and privilege to be given the opportunity to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, on her most impressive and interesting maiden speech. I am not a citizen of Richmond but I have many friends who live in her constituency, and the affection that she records for it is recorded by them for her. Many of my friends said how sorry they were that she was no longer their Member of Parliament.

The noble Baroness brings to this House wide experience. She mentioned banking but she was also the shadow Trade and Industry Secretary, shadow International Development Secretary, her party’s spokeswoman on work and pensions, and shadow Transport Secretary in the House of Commons, so I am quite certain that in future years we can look forward to her contributions on many subjects that are of interest to us.

When I was given this opportunity to speak, I was particularly interested to see whether there were any connections between the noble Baroness and me. She triggered a story about Latchmere House which perhaps I may share with your Lordships. One of the people from Latchmere House was working with a bus company during his resettlement, and one day the bus company owner rang up the governor and said, “What crime did this man commit? He’s very good and we want to give him a job but we’re worried about the crime”. The governor said, “Sorry, I’m not going to declare that. That’s up to him”. The response was, “Well, it must be very serious because he had a 15-year sentence and presumably violence was involved”. The governor sent for the prisoner and asked, “Why have you not declared that your crime was violent?”. The prisoner said, “It wasn’t violent”. However, the governor said, “But you did kill your wife, chop her into little bits and distribute them around the country”, to which he replied, “That wasn’t violent because I drugged her first”.

The three things that the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, and I share in common are that, like her, my mother and two aunts were all at St Paul’s. My mother never ceased to tell me throughout my life how far superior St Paul’s was to Haileybury, where she sent me. She never disguised what was almost her contempt at the fact that I had chosen a career in the Army. One day after the Falklands war, the headmistress of St Paul’s invited me to talk to the school about the way in which we worked with the media during a war. Afterwards, I wrote to my mother saying, “I’ve just been to a school called St Paul’s and the only reason I got there was because I was in the Army”.

The second thing that the noble Baroness and I have in common is a view about the replacement of Trident, which I have no doubt we shall be discussing in future. Thirdly, we share an interest in a wonderful organisation called HomeStart, which works particularly with new mothers. I first became associated with it in a garrison in Germany. While congratulating the noble Baroness on her maiden speech, perhaps I may say that she has made a marvellous start in her new home.

I turn to the Bill before us. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, on, once again, bringing this Bill forward. This is not the first time that we have had a Second Reading on his Bill and I am very glad to see it being brought forward now. However, I like to think that today we are in a slightly better context than we were on the previous occasion, because, as has already been mentioned, the Government have declared in the Green Paper, Breaking the Cycle, their intent to do something about the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, and indeed we are requested to ask specific questions about which parts of the Act need to be reformed.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, mentioned that the Act is out of date. I submit that it is more than that: it is a positive inhibitor to making the sort of progress that we all want in achieving a rehabilitation revolution. Here, I must declare an interest as president of UNLOCK, formerly the National Association of Ex-Offenders and now the National Association of Reformed Offenders. In the spirit of the Bill, I must share with the House my delight that in the New Year Honours List the chairman of UNLOCK, Bobby Cummines, himself an ex-offender, was awarded the OBE. The ripples of pleasure that that has sent around the whole sector is very marked. If ever there were a mark that offenders can be rehabilitated, Mr Cummines getting an OBE is, I think, it. It is absolutely splendid in view of the enormous amount of dedicated work that he has put into the whole process.

I do not propose to comment on all the statistics and facts that the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, has given the House, except to agree with them 100 per cent and to pay tribute to Nacro for the work that it has done, and continues to do, in this area. I think that Nacro is making the most significant contribution to the whole debate, and I know that all Members of this House have benefited from the information that has been given.

I absolutely accept the need to review all the provisions for adult offenders but, as other noble Lords have said—the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, concentrated on this— it is young offenders more than any others in the sector who most need the effects of the reform of the Act. I once went to a sixth-form college and was shown around by two of the pupils. I asked one of them, “What is the best thing about this place?”. She immediately replied, “The fact that none of the staff remembers me when I was 12”. That is very significant, because you grow up and move on. I was fascinated when inspecting the young offender prison in Barbados to find that at the age of 18 a young offender’s criminal record was automatically looked at and only the very serious crimes were carried forward. Everything else was eliminated on the grounds that the offenders were children and it was not fair to inhibit people in adult life with crimes committed at that time and of that kind. That is something I have always felt that we could do with advantage.

I said that the Act was an inhibitor. Yesterday, in this House, a number of us launched the Young Offenders Academy, which is a new idea for youth justice. It is based on two understandings of the current situation. One is that too many young offenders or people who come into contact with the criminal justice system come there having been denied long-term contact with a responsible adult. If you look at how the criminal justice system for young offenders operates, the one thing that it does is deny long-term contact with a responsible adult.

The second thing that has been shown over and over again is that if local people are involved in the care, rehabilitation, resettlement or whatever you like to call it of young offenders, they will contribute much more than if they are working with someone else. London feels that perhaps more than anywhere else because there is only one young offender institution in London at Feltham. I found boys from Feltham as far away as Northumberland. What interest in the resettlement of a boy in London will a voluntary organisation in Northumberland take? There could be nothing other than pure humanity; nothing practical.

The Young Offenders Academy will have on one site, within a radius of one hour by public transport, workshops, education centres, activity centres, mental health and drug treatment centres and so forth. At the heart of the idea is the opportunity, which has been welcomed by the chambers of commerce, to give aptitude tests to everyone there and see whether they can fit that aptitude to a job. At the same time, they will identify what special skills might fit future jobs and start the training for them.

However, the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act is an inhibitor to all that process. The fact that it sits there as a block to so many initiatives in this area should encourage the Government—I hope it will encourage the Government and I am delighted in thinking that it will—to do something about it. In doing so, they must listen not just to the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, but to all the good things that were in that report Breaking the Circle, which gave us so much hope nine years ago and which I hope today marks the move forward to something that has long been needed.