Release of Prisoners (Alteration of Relevant Proportion of Sentence) Order 2019

Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2020 Lords Chamber

It is utterly feeble for this Government to make dog-whistle gestures with SIs such as these. Their proper function is to administer effectively and efficiently. The history of Berwyn to date indicates that the Ministry of Justice is failing in this basic duty. Do not waste the resources, time and energy warehousing more people for longer in large prisons. Fund the programmes and prevention, recruit the staff and use the resources in such a way that the outcomes are positive, so that offenders are given not a drug-fuelled holiday but a rigorous training leading to real rehabilitation. That is how public safety will be maintained.

[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)]

My Lords, I will make one brief point. It is clear from what has been said, both in the impact statement and from the many points made by noble Lords, that what will be required is a very significant amount of further money for the prisons. My noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford has described Berwyn; it is clear that much more money is needed, but that is one example.

The question I ask the Minister is: where is this money coming from? This is a critical question. The rule of law depends upon the proper provision of courts and of legal aid—legal aid not merely in criminal matters but in family matters, where it is denied to a huge number of people; in civil matters; and for really important things such as disputes relating to social services entitlements and to employment. It is not generally available there at all. Can the Minister assure us that what happens will be through new Treasury money and not, as has happened over the last few years, through gradually denuding the other parts of the Ministry of Justice, particularly the courts and legal aid, to prop up the Prison and Probation Service? The two are plainly interlinked because there is emerging evidence to show that if you do not deal with people’s legal problems, you often set them off on the road to criminality. I hope the Minister can assure us that this is new money, because that is not what has happened in the past.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps I may follow the noble and learned Lord on the resources point. Prison is an extremely heavy user of resources. It is not possible to have a political argument about the stance a party wants to take on the use of prison while ignoring those substantial resource implications. Those resources are denied to other things which will stop people committing crimes or make it less likely. Here, we are confronted with one piece of a quite large jigsaw puzzle. It is one measure which will go alongside the sentencing Bill and the rhetoric which effectively urges judges and magistrates to pass longer sentences. All these things act together to create sentence inflation. Not merely will we then have the 2,000 extra places by 2030, which the Government’s own impact assessment says is the central estimate of the effect of this statutory instrument; we will have all those other increases as well. All of that claims money which is effectively denied to probation and to local authority services, which are necessary if we are to steer young people away from crime. Therefore, it is money diverted contrary to the interests of public safety.

The impact assessment refers to “crowding”. This is Ministry of Justice code for what the rest of us call overcrowding, but we are apparently not allowed to use “over” any more. Overcrowding is not simply prisoners living in uncomfortable conditions because there are three to a cell; it is having more prisoners than one has the staff or facilities to rehabilitate. That is the consequence of prisons having more people in them than they are supposed to have. You do not rehabilitate your prisoners because you cannot do the courses, and you do not have the custodial staff to take people to the courses they are supposed to be taking. You even sometimes have instructors unable to do their job because the prisoners cannot safely be brought to carry out the courses. We will increase overcrowding by this series of measures.

There is no claim in the impact assessment that there will be a valuable deterrent effect. We all know that there will no such effect; people carrying out the offences that we are talking about do not calculate whether they will be released at half or two-thirds of the custodial part of their sentence, so that is not even claimed. However, there is of course the admission that shorter periods on licence could affect reintegration. The points that a number of noble Lords have made add up to a pretty strong case against a measure for which a serious positive case is difficult to put forward.