Queen’s Speech

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I shall confine my remarks to the prisons part of the prison and courts reform Bill announced in the gracious Speech, the aim of which has already been explained by the Minister. I was very glad that Her Majesty’s script did not include the claim, made in the Government’s notes, that the Bill would bring about the biggest reform of our prisons since Victorian times, of which I am both cynical, in view of past history, and suspicious, because we know so little about what it means. I also agree with the powerful analysis made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, of what needs reformation, and the remarks of my noble and learned friend Lord Woolf about overcrowding.

All we know about the Bill, other than a trailer from the Prime Minister, is what the Justice Secretary told the Justice Committee in the other place on 16 March—namely, that, inter alia, he intended to give governors greater autonomy and to reconfigure the prison estate, to enable prisoners to “stay put” as far as possible throughout their sentence, and to involve local communities and agencies with them throughout their sentence and through the gate back into the community.

There is no doubt that our overcrowded, grossly understaffed prisons are failing in their duty to protect the public—witness their woeful reoffending rate. The former chief inspector’s characterisation of them as,

“places of violence, squalor and idleness”,

acknowledged as correct by Michael Gove, is coupled with levels of drug-taking and self-harm that should, as the Prime Minister has said, “shame us all”.

What I find even more shaming is that for over 25 years successive Ministers and officials have refused to implement “stay put” recommendations made by my noble and learned friend Lord Woolf in his seminal report on the riots in Strangeways and 23 other prisons in 1990, repeated in the only White Paper on prisons, Custody, Care and Justice, published in 1991, and autonomy recommendations made by Sir Raymond Lygo, then chief executive of British Aerospace, brought in by the then Home Secretary, now the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, to review the managerial effectiveness and structures of the Prison Service. Both could have mitigated, if not prevented, the current situation. After so many years of determined resistance, is Michael Gove confident that his stay-put policy will be implemented?

In his letter to the Home Secretary of 12 December 1991, forwarding his report, Sir Raymond Lygo wrote that it is very clear that unless,

“there is a preparedness on the part of the Home Office to take its hands off the management of the prison service in its day to day business and allow itself to be constrained by policy”,

it will not be possible to,

“effect the changes which you deem desirable, and which have become very clear to me as being necessary”.

His report contained two other pointers that Michael Gove should consider. First:

“The critical factor, in the success or failure of any new arrangement, will be the ability of Ministers to allow the Prison Service to operate in an almost autonomous mode, while retaining their responsibility to Parliament for overall policy and conduct. To do so they will need confidence in the management structure and reassurance that the organisation is managing itself properly and in accordance with the objectives set out”.

Secondly, the reorganisation does not seem to have addressed a,

“problem to which the Woolf report referred, of the confetti of instructions descending from Headquarters”.

I am 100% behind Michael Gove in his desire to do something about the current situation and his analysis of what needs to be put right. But I warn him that until and unless he accepts such expert advice given by two such distinguished people following their detailed examination of an even worse situation than exists today, nothing will happen because, like every other attempt at reform that I have seen over the past 21 years, it will be stifled by two layers of risk-averse, micromanagement-obsessed, bureaucratic porridge consistently poured on the prison system by the Ministry of Justice and the so-called National Offender Management Service.

There is a degree of urgency to Mr Gove doing so, because the inertia inherent in the current management structure puts two other excellent initiatives at risk—namely his reviews of the youth justice system, due out soon, and of prison education, published last week. The author of the latter review, Dame Sally Coates, said:

“Governors must be autonomous and accountable, but they cannot operate unilaterally. There will need to be some practices that are centrally mandated to ensure consistency”.

This brings me to my final point. I have lost count of the number of times over the past 21 years that I have despaired, to successive Secretaries of State and publicly, that unlike every business, hospital or school, the Prison Service has no one responsible or accountable for any particular function—namely type of prison or prisoner—except for high-security prisons from which an escape would be a political embarrassment. Michael Gove launched his reform prison project last week, with two of the new governors telling me that they are to report directly to the chief executive of NOMS and no one else. When I hinted to an official that with his responsibilities for both prison and probation, he was far too busy to have time for the inevitable minutiae of a trial, I was told that, as I feared, they also came under a NOMS commissioner who was an official and not a member of the Prison Service.

I know that this is a pilot scheme, but is it really sensible to legally separate six of the 117 prisons in this country from the others, in which the bulk of the prison population will be held, without having a competent overall management structure in place? I wonder whether anyone, in either NOMS or the Ministry of Justice, has thought through the practical implications of autonomy.

Like Dame Sally Coates, I plead for a central mandate to ensure consistency, which has been noticeably absent from the post-Strangeways Prison Service. Like Sir Raymond, I fear that without a functional management structure and style, Michael Gove will find it impossible to effect the changes that he, and many others, deem desirable.