Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Wednesday 15th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gould of Potternewton]

My Lords, 19 years ago I was proud to make my maiden speech on women in the criminal justice system. In that speech I highlighted the disproportionate and discriminatory response of our justice system to women offenders. I spoke of the complex needs of women offenders and the fact that many women are locked up on short sentences for petty crime, causing untold destruction to their families. I spoke about how the prison system does not do what it should for women offenders, and how we must look at more effective ways of tackling women’s offending behaviour in the community.

Since I made that speech, a number of high-profile reviews of women in the criminal justice system have been published and recommendations have been taken on board by successive Governments. Still, though, the problem of women in prison pervades; 15 years ago there were some 1,800 women in custody but today there are over 4,000. In 2007 my noble friend Lady Corston—at this point I must give her apologies; she has had to leave for family reasons at this late hour—produced a compelling review of women with particular vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system. The Corston report highlighted the specialised and specific needs of women offenders that are being wholly neglected in a justice system designed for men, even though the complex and multiple needs of women offenders and women at risk of offending are well documented. Domestic and sexual violence, poverty, mental illness, problematic substance misuse and homelessness are just some of the issues facing many women offenders. Often when they go into jail there are dire consequences.

I remember listening to the male governor of Styal women’s prison, who had spent his career in men's prisons, talking about his experience of arriving at Styal. He spoke of how shocked he was at the levels of self-harm. He described how in a male prison there was an average of six prisoners on special observation for self-harm each day, while in Styal it was an average of 50. He described the high levels of mental health problems and the fact most women were there on short sentences, some women for eight days or even less. I remember his words: “I’ve never seen such a concentration of damaged, fragile people”. In this weekend’s Sunday papers, he reiterated that statement, which he made a few months ago.

When women are sentenced to custody, that has a profound effect on family life. Many women have children or elderly or disabled dependants. Each year, 18,000 children are separated from their mothers by imprisonment, and just 5 per cent of those children will get to stay in their homes when their mother goes to jail. In 2006, the Social Exclusion Unit found that only half the women in prison who lived with or had contact with their children prior to imprisonment had received a visit from their children since going to prison. Sending women to prison is also, for the most part, ineffective. Two-thirds of women serving sentences of 12 months or less are reconvicted within a year of release. The impact on the children of those women cannot truly be imagined, but we know that it is dramatic.

We conclude, as I concluded in my speech 19 years ago, that our current approach to women in the criminal justice system is not working. At this point, I declare an interest as patron of the women’s centre in Brighton and Hove, which provides an excellent example of cost-effective treatment of women offenders in the community that works. The Inspire project is a partnership between five women’s organisations, all of which play a part in delivering a holistic service to women offenders that addresses their complex needs. It helps women with accommodation, employment, health and well-being, and drug and alcohol problems, debt and financial issues, children and families, and experience of domestic and sexual violence. Women engage well with the services and the project’s success in reducing reoffending is to be commended.

The Inspire project is one of a number of innovative projects that work with women offenders across the community. These projects are not only effective in reducing women’s offending but very cost-effective. The cost of a women’s centre placement is less than £15,000 a year, compared with the £56,000 it costs to keep a woman in custody. The cost-saving arguments are clear and will, I am sure, be of interest to the Government.

The Bill represents an opportunity to bring about the radical change that is needed to reform the criminal justice system into one that works for women. That is why I and others were so disappointed to see that women had not been properly considered in the Bill, which was my motivation for tabling this amendment. Amendment 182A calls on the Government to establish a cross-departmental commission with responsibility for maintaining effective governance and the oversight of women’s justice. This is much needed to ensure that women are given the support they need to stop their offending behaviour and to become active members of the community. The amendment offers an effective way of ensuring that the needs of women in the criminal justice system are considered at the highest level of decision-making within government.

The commission would draw together representatives from government departments and public bodies whose responsibilities are relevant to the needs of women in the criminal justice system. It would include representatives from justice, health, social services, housing, education and employment. These key agencies would come together to develop, implement and monitor a cross-departmental strategy to reduce offending by women, and to ensure that the right services for women offenders are provided at the right time. It would also provide a report to Parliament each year, documenting progress through measurement, monitoring and accountability.

Amendment 182B, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, on women in the criminal justice system, also calls on the Secretary of State to establish a women’s justice commission, although it also asks for the commission to remain independent of government. However, I wonder whether there is not a case for exploring how we could bring the two concepts together.

Finally, it is essential that appropriate arrangements such as these are in place to maintain the effective governance and oversight of women’s justice. Without them, I fear that the needs of women offenders will continue to be marginalised and go unmet. I will then have to make another speech about women in prison in years to come—although certainly not in 19 years. I sincerely hope that that will not be necessary. I beg to move.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, said, it is a great pity that the position of women in the criminal justice system was neither included in the Bill nor debated when it was being processed through the other place.

I was very glad that so many recommendations from the excellent report of the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, were accepted by the previous Government and supported by the coalition. Many repeated what I recommended in two earlier thematic reviews on women in prison in 1997 and 2001; that the Prison Reform Trust recommended in a report chaired by Professor Dorothy Wedderburn in 1999; and that the Fawcett Society recommended in three reports published between 2002 and 2006. Like the noble Baroness, we all appreciated that too many women who should not be there were in prison and that, while there, their treatment and conditions were not fit for purpose. I was motivated by my shock at finding, among other things, that women were being chained while in labour and having any injuries recorded on diagrams of male bodies because no diagrams of female bodies were issued. Therefore, while warmly welcoming the report of the noble Baroness, I must admit to my disappointment that it was not until they appeared in a report which the previous Government themselves commissioned that they either noted or took action on the recommendations for essential improvements that had been made earlier.

Several times during the passage of the Bill, the Minister has told us that such and such an amendment is not necessary because a group has been appointed in the Ministry of Justice or NOMS to look at what is being put forward. I have to admit that every time he does I clench my fists and groan inwardly. Policy-making groups inside ministries are neither capable of designing and overseeing, nor designed to direct and oversee, the implementation of strategy—a word that is frequently misused because it is so imperfectly understood. A strategy is an overarching direction that binds everyone and everything involved in achieving a particular purpose. I have quoted previously the senior civil servant in the Home Office who berated me, saying that she wished I would stop talking about strategy because it was not a strategy that was needed but strategic direction. When I asked her what she meant, she replied, “Top-down, of course”, implying that every ministerial utterance was to be regarded as strategic direction. No wonder offender management is in a muddle.

Strategies require implementation, not just verbiage, and verbiage does not become strategy just because it comes from the top. I plead guilty as charged by any noble Lord who may accuse me of allowing my military background to influence my understanding of strategy, as well as my appreciation that nothing involving people will succeed unless they are overseen and led. That background fuelled my appreciation that all was not well with offender management in general, and with the treatment of and conditions for women in particular, when I saw what was and was not happening during my first inspection of Holloway more than 16 years ago. I admit to my astonishment when the then director-general of the Prison Service told me that there was no such person when I asked to see the director of women’s prisons, who I presumed was responsible and accountable for their custody. The Prison Service, he told me, thought that a civil servant in the policy branch was quite sufficient. When I asked him who the governor of a women’s prison could go to for help and advice, he said the area manager, who was responsible for the budget but might or might not have worked in a women’s prison. In my report on that never to be forgotten inspection, I included a recommendation that a director of women’s prisons be appointed.

Since then, I have watched a series of expensive changes to the bureaucracy of offender management predictably fail to bring about the desired improvements on the ground because they did not include the appointment of individuals responsible and accountable for overseeing implementation in different types of prison and with different groups of prisoners. This, too, surprises me because Ministers and their officials are ignoring evidence that is before their eyes every day. My Army contemporary, General Sir John Learmont, came to exactly the same conclusion for exactly the same reasons when invited by the then Home Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne, to inquire into the escape of high-security prisoners from Parkhurst in 1994. However, his recommendation—that a responsible and accountable director of high-security prisons should be appointed—was accepted. As a result, they remain the only properly managed part of the prison system, in which good practice somewhere is turned into common practice everywhere, and incoming governors are required to carry on from where their predecessors left off. Why on earth has that success not been repeated with and for other groups?

I repeated my recommendation in every other inspection report and the thematic reviews of women in prison that I mentioned earlier. Those reviews were only about prisons, but I was immediately attracted by Professor Wedderburn’s recommendation that there should be a women’s justice board, on the lines of the Youth Justice Board, that was responsible and accountable for women everywhere in the criminal justice system. I warmly supported the proposed wider responsibilities of the chairman seeing my hoped for director of women’s prisons as an essential, responsible and accountable subordinate. I also saw the chairman sitting alongside the director-general of the Prison Service, the director of the National Probation Service and the chairman of the Youth Justice Board on an executive board in which each was responsible and accountable to Ministers for their part of the offender management system.

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[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, in a debate. I can only say that if the initial speech she made was 19 years ago, she must have started very young. I am sorry that circumstances prevent the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, being with us but, as I have said before in this House, the Government—and I personally—have tried to continue the road map that she set out for the treatment of women prisoners.

I am not sure that I am going to be entirely helpful to the Committee this evening, partly because, although I was certainly very happy that the YJB survived, I sometimes get a little worried that this House becomes obsessed with the solution to a problem being a commission, a committee, a tsar or some structure outside the problem. I am old fashioned enough to believe that the report to Parliament should come from the Minister and that the Minister should have responsibility. I also profoundly disagree with the disdain that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, frequently shows for the capacity of public servants to carry out responsible roles.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

I—

[Lord McNally]

I knew that the noble Lord would get to his feet but it is true.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

I do not in any way disparage civil servants in what they are required to do. I simply point out that it is wrong to use civil servants for things that they are neither trained nor competent to do. That has been my concern all along. They have their place and I absolutely support them and welcome what they do in their own job.

[Lord McNally]

I am delighted to have that on the record. Their own job includes some of the issues that we are discussing tonight.

I go back to the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Gould. I understand that my colleague—my noble friend Lady Northover—has visited the Brighton project to which the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, referred and that she firmly endorses the opinion that was expressed about its success. This point also goes back to the position and role of public servants—the people doing this tough job—and the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, gave some graphic illustrations. I was also pleased that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, mentioned that the people working in our Prison Service do an amazing job in difficult circumstances. Good care and support from staff saves many lives, and many such instances go unreported. In any given month, prisons successfully keep safe approximately 1,500 prisoners who are assessed to be at particular risk of suicide or self-harm.

When people say, “You don’t have a women’s strategy”, I dispute that. I think that we do and perhaps we should shout louder about it. As has been mentioned, my honourable friend Crispin Blunt in the other place is the Minister with responsibility in this area. On 24 January he made a speech to the Corston funders, setting out a report on progress in this area. He set out the Government’s strategy for women offenders, which ensures that women will benefit in key areas such as mental health, drug recovery, tackling violence against women, troubled families, employment and women’s community services, reflecting the good work by the National Offender Management Service to implement many of the recommendations in the Corston report.

In that context, I am afraid that we do not believe that the amendment seeking a published women’s strategy is necessary. We also believe that, as I said, accountability for a women’s strategy should remain with Ministers. Perhaps they are better placed to influence policy across Government and we will ensure that other departments play their part too in supporting vulnerable women in the criminal justice system.

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[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

I congratulate the Government on the amendments that they are introducing into the Bill, which are the culmination of years of campaigning by my noble friend Lord Dholakia—within, and with the support of, the Liberal Democrats—to modernise the law.

Amendment 185FAA, in my name, was suggested by the Howard League, of which my noble friend Lord Carlile is president—unhappily, he cannot be with us tonight. Its purpose is to recognise that children may change in a shorter time than adults, something that the Minister has already recognised in his remarks today. The amendment affects a significant proportion of children with the opportunity to wipe the slate clean upon reaching 18 years of age. It refers to the question raised in the Green Paper that has been referred to: that the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 be amended so that children convicted of non-serious offences have a clean slate on reaching their majority. Paragraph 117 of the Green Paper says:

“We would welcome views on how we might do more for young offenders as we are aware that some people are, for example, finding their path to higher education blocked on the basis of juvenile convictions. ‘Wiping the slate clean’ once the offender reaches adulthood is a possible approach for all but the most serious offences”.

There is no reference to this suggestion in the Government’s response to the consultation, and I do not know whether any of the respondees actually dealt with the question that was asked.

Wiping the slate clean would have a big impact on the future employment prospects of young offenders. It is obviously intended to apply only to non-serious offences and the public will not be at risk of any harm. Clearly, the usual suite of public protection arrangements will continue to apply to jobs that involve working with children and vulnerable people. If this provision were adopted, it would be a powerful incentive for young people to rehabilitate as responsible adults in their communities. Such an incentive is important at a time when youth unemployment is at a record high and there is a risk of both crime and detention rates spiralling further.

The amendment has been crafted to ensure that rehabilitation periods are not spent before a young person completes their sentence. That does not mean that those who would otherwise be required to wait a long time before their conviction is spent would suddenly find themselves without any rehabilitation period at all, simply due to having committed an offence close to their 18th birthday. It would exempt those still serving their sentence at 18, including the licence period of that sentence, from the “wipe the slate clean” provision. In other words, if a young person committed a theft aged 17 and is sentenced to three years in detention, he would attract a rehabilitation period of three and a half years, commencing on the completion of his sentence at the age of 20. Therefore, the conviction would not be spent until he reached 23 years of age. However, if he committed a theft at the age of 14 and was sentenced to three years’ detention, instead of waiting until the age of 21 for the conviction to be spent his sentence would expire when he was 17 and his conviction would automatically become spent on his 18th birthday. This provision deals with the possible criticism that a person who commits an offence aged 17 years and 11 months would have his conviction wiped clean on his 18th birthday. That would clearly be unacceptable and is most certainly not the intention of this amendment.

The Government raised the question in the Green Paper but we have not had an answer. I would welcome a response from my noble friend.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, briefly, I support the government amendments that have been tabled and echo the many warm things that have been said about the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, for his persistence in pursuing this matter.

I merely mention that in 2001 I was invited to inspect the young offender institutions in the Caribbean. In Barbados, I found a system in which, at the age of 18, every child automatically had their convictions looked at and the slate wiped clean of all except those that it was deemed in a schedule should be carried forward. I brought that information back and fed it into the team studying Breaking the Circle at that time. Given all the points that have been made by the noble Lords, Lord Dholakia and Lord Thomas, it seemed particularly important that this should apply to young offenders so that they were not hampered, particularly in their further education, by crimes that they had committed as children.

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, in introducing this series of amendments, I covered our responses to the questions. Perhaps I should repeat that politics is the art of the possible. My noble friend Lord Dholakia prayed in aid the 2002 report Breaking the Circle. The difference between that and this Government’s consultation, Breaking the Cycle, is that Breaking the Circle did nothing, while we brought in Breaking the Cycle through an amendment. I have tried to find out from my researchers whether it was the Labour Government of 1974 or Ted Heath’s Government, who went out of office that year, who brought in the original Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. Perhaps that shows what has happened to the attitude towards penal reform in that it has taken 37 years to reform that Act. Successive Governments have ducked this issue. I am proud that this Government have taken the decision to amend that Act. We will monitor the effectiveness of the Act and the impact these changes have on offenders and their ability to secure employment.

As I said in my opening remarks, I have no objections to campaigners continuing to campaign but when a Government tackle an issue that has been ducked for 37 years, they are entitled to a little of the credit.

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Moved by

[Lord Ramsbotham]

196A: Clause 137, page 114, line 21, leave out “Punishment” and insert “Rehabilitation”

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I shall be as brief as I can at this time of night. I begin with two wishes and a disappointment. I wish that I had been able to raise this amendment at the start of the Bill, but it is the custom of the House that amendments to the Title are taken at the end rather than the beginning. I also wish that he wording of my Amendment 196A had appeared also for Amendment 197, since they are actually both the same.

The disappointment is one that I declared at Second Reading: I was told that the Bill left the Ministry of Justice entitled the “Legal Aid, Sentencing and Rehabilitation of Offenders Bill” but emerged from No. 10 with the word “punishment” in the Title instead of “rehabilitation”. I knew that I was not alone when I read in the House Magazine what the Minister himself said about this to the Liberal Democrat annual party conference. I also note his inclusion of the word “rehabilitation” in Amendment 198.

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[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I was going to say how pleased I was that the noble Lord had recognised that I commended him on Amendment 198, which appeared last night. I am sorry that he has completely misunderstood what I have been saying throughout the Bill, because I have been arguing against committees, not for them, and for people to lead what happens rather than committees.

This is not about the form but about the Title. I was saddened to hear the Minister say that punishment represents what it is all about rather than rehabilitation, because that is not what I take away from what has happened during Committee. That is not what I take away from the intent expressed by the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State in his rehabilitation revolution. I hope very much that that reflected the lateness of the hour rather than the real motivation behind what is going on inside the Ministry of Justice.

I shall reflect on the wise thoughts of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, who, with his usual mixture of passion and compassion, hit several nails well on the head. However, at this late hour, and bearing in mind that I preserve the right to bring this matter back on Report, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 196A, in substitution for Amendment 196, withdrawn.