Prisons (Interference with Wireless Telegraphy) Bill

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 26th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I warmly support this Bill, so ably introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidding. As the Prisons Minister, Rory Stewart, said during the passage of the Bill through the other place:

“Tapping the almost 10,000 mobile phones that were seized in a single year and interfering with their ability to communicate is not a silver bullet, but it should help to make prisons a safer and more orderly place in which we can begin to address some of the underlying drivers of violence and crime”.—[Official Report, Commons, Prisons (Interference with Wireless Telegraphy) Bill Committee, 9/5/18; col. 6.]


I want to set my support in context of the current crisis in our overcrowded and understaffed prisons and—what I have always regretted—the failure of successive Home and Justice Secretaries to implement any of the 12 ways ahead for the Prison Service set out by the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, then Home Secretary, in his White Paper, Custody, Care and Justice, in 1991, following the seminal report on the causes of the riots in Strangeways and 23 other prisons in 1990 by my noble and learned friend Lord Woolf.

My noble and learned friend identified the three things most likely to prevent reoffending as being a home, a job and a stable, preferably family, relationship, all of which were put at risk by the way that imprisonment was conducted. He recommended that prisons be grouped into what he called community regional clusters, so that, with the exception of high-security prisoners, of whom there were not enough to justify an expensive high-security prison in each region, prisoners were always held in their home areas. Had the 12 ways ahead been implemented, I do not believe that the present crisis would have arisen, but that is another matter.

The maintenance of stable relationships depends on visits, letters and occasional telephone calls, which is where many people believe that mobile phones have a role to play. Unfortunately, mobile phones are used by too many for nefarious purposes, such as controlling drug deliveries by drone, organising crimes or arranging intimidation of families, with the result that they are, quite rightly, currently banned. Life for prison staff is made no easier by the fact that advancing technology has now produced mobiles no bigger than a finger joint, meaning that a phone can be smuggled in in a Mars bar.

However, in the context of maintaining stable relationships, I deplore the current high charges made by BT for the use of legitimate land lines from prison—which I note have been reduced by 50% for in-cell telephones now being installed in 20 prisons. Of course, prisoners should be expected to pay for any call, but not exorbitantly. I ask the Minister to pursue this matter with BT, stressing the important contribution that maintaining stable relationships makes to the protection of the public by contributing to the prevention of reoffending.

Current arrangements for blocking mobile phones used by prisoners are exceedingly cumbersome and bureaucratic, requiring individual governors to deal with individual providers to have specified SIM cards blocked. Nobody needs to carry a mobile phone in prison: prisoners are banned from doing so; visitors have to hand them in at the gate; and staff do not need to use them. Therefore, rather than interfering with their use, I am in favour of an electronic ban in every prison, on the lines of the electronic fence that the governor of HMP Guernsey has erected to prevent drones from being flown into the prison. Currently, Guernsey is the only prison in Europe to have such a fence. It cost a mere £60,000, which I would have thought was cheap at the price, making prisons safer and more orderly places.

Not least for the sake of the overstretched staff in our prisons, I hope that the Bill will be enacted swiftly.