Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I must admit that when I saw the streamlined proposal, as the Minister described it, contained in the 200 pages of the Bill, I groaned at the thought of yet another dog’s breakfast of unconnected legislation that we would have to slog through.

When I read Part 1, I was immediately reminded of the words of Winston Churchill on 20 July 1910 that the way in which it treats its crime and criminals is a true test of the civilisation of any country. I say that because I was struck by the immediate reference in Part 1 to the fact that we were dealing with 10 year-olds under the Bill. I was therefore struck today by the brief sent to us by Justice, which many noble Lords have no doubt read, which states:

“The overall restriction of a person’s liberty should be proportionate to the seriousness of the illegality that the order seeks to restrain and to the status of the order as a civil preventative measure”.

I read on, but immediately had two thoughts.

First, I spent nearly 41 years in the Army trying to ensure civilised conditions in which all our children could grow up. I little thought that, 20 years later, I should be standing in this House feeling that I was fighting for the same. I was then tempted to suggest that I might take out an injunction against Part 1 to prevent a nuisance or annoyance.

I then reflected on two other things. One was an extraordinary conversation I once had in Belfast with a Republican woman called Kitty O’Kane who used to encourage small boys to throw stones at soldiers. We were able to include her in a picture of an incident, which I gave her; we knew her well enough to describe her to the artist. Asked why, when she knew that we were there to try to restore law and order, she put those boys into danger and at risk of being shot, she said to me, “Have you got a map?”. I said yes, and she said, “Take it out”. I took it out of my pocket. She said, “There are no football fields”. She was absolutely right. Where was there in all that part of West Belfast a place for young people to let off the inevitable steam of growing up?

I then thought of the infamous phrase of Mr Tony Blair when, as shadow Home Secretary, he promised to be,

“tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”.

Somewhere along the route, he found an “r” and became tough on the causers of crime rather than the causes. It is the causes that we need to tackle and which have been avoided. The trouble with being tough on causers is that he cranked up that toughness over and over again, and we now have a tough Minister of Justice who announced that he wants to be tough on mentally disordered offenders but failed to tell us how he intends to do that. Parts of this Bill, although it is welcome, follow that cranking and have taken some things to a new level of toughness which, to my mind, stand starkly against the civilisation of which Winston Churchill talked.

Many noble Lords will mention—some have already mentioned—some of the areas which I find very difficult in Part 1. There is the injunction to prevent nuisance and the low burden of proof that a person,

“has engaged or threatens to engage in conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person”.

For heaven’s sake, just think. We have all been parents or grandparents of 10 year-olds. Can we think that there has never been an occasion when they gave us an opportunity to say, “You are causing an annoyance, or you look as if you are likely to cause an annoyance”? Now we are threatening them with detention for three months or imprisonment for two years and eviction from their houses. What are we doing as a civilised society? No wonder that the Home Affairs Select Committee said that the power was far too broad and that the Joint Committee on Human Rights said that this part ought to be removed.

There are already terrible problems with breach. Fifty-seven per cent of those on anti-social behaviour orders breached between 2000 and 2012, and 53% were given an immediate prison sentence, cranking up the prison population. Thirty-eight percent were under-18s—who are said to be rarely likely to be given an ASBO. I am always suspicious when I hear “rarely used”. That applied to under-18s on ASBO and to people on indeterminate prison sentences. Look what has happened. What are we going to do? Are these people, having been sent into prison for breaching, to be given the supervision orders that are part of the transforming rehabilitation programme coming from the Ministry of Justice? Are they to be subject to supervision for a year? Who is going to provide it? Where is it going to come from? Has this been worked out?

I come to naming and shaming. Why should, suddenly, Section 49 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 not apply? I am very worried about evictions and this riot-related possession because I do not think that this thing has been thought through enough. Again, the Joint Commission on Human Rights and the Law Society say remove it. I believe therefore that there is a great deal to be gone through in Part 1.

There is no time to go through all the various measures, but I have one other thing to say to the Minister. I am very disappointed that there is one omission in another clause of the Bill, which is to do with extradition. This issue falls much wider across the criminal justice system and the system involving the employment of private sector companies to conduct public services. I refer to the regulation of the individuals employed to carry out services. The Minister will remember the case of Jimmy Mubenga, the Angolan killed by G4S guards while under restraint on his way back to Angola. The Crown Prosecution Service will have to go back and reconsider their decision not to prosecute because the coroner in the case recently found that this was unlawful killing.

In inquiries—one that I led and one that the Home Affairs Select Committee led—we discovered that there is no supervision at all of these individuals employed from private security companies by the Security Industry Authority. What I hoped for and expected in the extradition part of this Bill was that the mechanisms for enforced removal would receive supervision, and that that would include the regulation of individuals employed by the Government to carry out that extradition on their behalf. That, of course, leads me to worry about the supervision or regulation of those supervisors who will be employed in community rehabilitation companies by the Ministry of Justice to replace the functions of the probation service. Time does not allow me to expand on that, but why has this been excluded and what is the Home Office to do about this regulation? The position of the Security Industry Authority needs looking into.