Oral Answers to Questions

Robert Neill Excerpts

Tuesday 9th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gauke]

“Shortly” means “shortly”. [Laughter.] I am not going to elaborate on that, but I will say that in considering sentencing reform it is necessary also to look more broadly at the probation system. That is why I recently announced proposals to reform probation that will inform offender management and strengthen confidence in probation. However, I advise the hon. Gentleman to watch this space.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I welcome the link that my right hon. Friend has made between sentencing and probation. Does he agree that one of the compelling arguments in favour of reform is that the vast majority of people who are given short sentences tend to be repeat petty offenders whose behaviour is often driven by a number of factors such as drug addiction, debt, alcoholism and mental health issues—which are not and cannot best be treated in a custodial setting—and that we ought to invest far more in treating those people effectively outside, in the interests of public protection as much as anything else?

[Mr Gauke]

I entirely agree with the Chairman of the Justice Committee. If we put people inside for a short time—for instance, prolific shoplifters—we want to address that criminality, but all that we actually do is make them more likely to reoffend and continue to be prolific criminals. Evidence shows that when it comes to reoffending rates, community sentences work better, but we need to do everything we can to ensure that they can be improved.

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[Mr Gauke]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind words. Let me look at that particular issue and, if I may, I will write to him.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

In his speech at the Mansion House last week, the Secretary of State rightly and powerfully paid tribute to the integrity and value of an independent judiciary to this country. Will he make it possible for that speech to be disseminated to all Members of this House, so that everyone here recognises the responsibility that sits upon us to treat the judiciary with respect and support its independence from political or other attacks at all times?

[Mr Gauke]

I thank my hon. Friend for those remarks. I believe it is very important to this country that we respect the independence of the judiciary, and the rule of law is at the heart of what we are about as a country. I can tell him that my speech is available on the gov.uk website—I hope that this announcement will not result in that website crashing, but I assure the House that it can be found there.

Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Bill

Robert Neill Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Tuesday 25th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gauke]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point, and it is worth bearing in mind that, where children are involved, it is all the more important that we minimise the conflict. The current requirement incentivises that sense of attribution of fault, which does nothing to ensure that the relationship between the two parents can be as strong as possible, and it is the children who lose out in those circumstances.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I have thought about this with care. Obviously, to practising Christians and those of other faiths, the end of a marriage is not to be taken lightly, but I am glad the Secretary of State has accepted the proposition put by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) that causing more conflict at the end does not help.

Will the Secretary of State confirm that in no other respects any of the protections for often the more vulnerable party to a marriage, the woman, will be affected by this measure, particularly in relation to financial arrangements and the custody of children, and that it simply removes the evidentiary requirement for a fault to be attributed to one side or the other?

[Mr Gauke]

My hon. Friend, the Chair of the Select Committee on Justice, is right. This is about the attribution of blame and fault, and no more than that. Indeed, the protections in place for the vulnerable party remain just as they are. It is often the vulnerable party who suffers most from the need to attribute blame, because that can be difficult. In the context of domestic abuse, for example, it is striking how the likes of Women’s Aid have been very supportive of these measures because of their concern that there might be women trapped in marriages who do not want to attribute blame because they feel that may result in a further deterioration in the relationship.

The truth is that when a marriage or indeed a civil partnership has sadly broken down and is beyond repair, it stops benefiting society and the people involved. At worst, continuing in a legal relationship that is no longer functioning can be destructive to families, and the law ought to deal with the reality of marriage breakdown as constructively as possible. The current law does not do that. The requirements of the divorce process at present can often give rise to a confrontational position, even if the decision to divorce is mutual. The incentive to make allegations at the outset, to avoid otherwise waiting for two years’ separation, becomes ingrained. Divorce is traumatic, and children are inevitably affected when their parents separate—that goes without saying. I agree that marriage has long proved its worth for bringing up children, but the reality is that not all marriages last. The law should deal with that reality as sensibly as it can. When a marriage has failed, we have to take a serious look at how to reduce conflict for everyone involved, not least for children. Research shows that it is conflict between the parents that has been linked to greater social and behavioural problems among children, rather than necessarily the separation and divorce itself.

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[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker—Mr Deputy Speaker. That was, perhaps, a Freudian slip.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

Move on!

[Robert Neill]

It is a pleasure, as always, to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce). She made a heartfelt speech. I know that this is a matter on which she feels very strongly. It is an issue to which I myself have given considerable thought. It is sensitive and important, particularly for those who have a faith and regard marriage as a sacrament as well as a legal contract.

I look at this issue from the point of view of someone who happens to be a practising Anglican, as someone who has for 25 or 30 years been a practising lawyer—not predominantly in the field of family law, although I did practise family law to some degree in my earlier days—as someone who served as a councillor in a local authority, and as someone who has the honour of serving as Chair of the Justice Committee. I have had the chance to see the issue from a number of points of view and I have come to a different conclusion from my hon. Friend. I do not say that with any disrespect for the strength or genuineness of her feeling; I am just persuaded, on balance, that the Secretary of State is right and that the evidence points quite clearly to this being an appropriate and necessary reform.

As Chair of the Justice Committee, I have had the opportunity to engage with leading members of the judiciary, particularly, in this context, with those of the family division. It is the overwhelming view of family practitioners, including solicitors, barristers and senior judges, that the current arrangements, which require fault to be used as a proof of irretrievable breakdown, do not work satisfactorily and do not achieve what is ultimately the necessary objective of enabling people whose marriage has sadly broken down irretrievably—I suspect that none of us want that to happen when we embark on a marriage, but it does happen in some cases—to leave their marriage with a measure of dignity and to do so in a way that enables the important issue of financial fairness to be resolved, and, in the case of children, to enable civilised and caring arrangements to be made for them and their children. That, ultimately, must be the chief and principal objective.

[Julian Knight]

My hon. Friend gets to the heart of the matter: the fault aspect. What persuades me is that the requirement to assign fault can itself be a polluting element within the divorce or separation process. It may actually make what could be a more amicable separation more poisonous and more difficult when it comes to discussing other matters such as finance.

[Robert Neill]

I agree and that was certainly my experience as a lawyer. That is the experience of the majority of practitioners and the majority of the judiciary to whom I have spoken. When I started my practice at the Bar, the Divorce Reform Act 1969 was comparatively recent and the law was developing. There was an issue then and it has remained a constant. There is an underlying risk of tension and antagonism in the course of family proceedings, which spill on from the divorce itself into the proceedings thereafter, which, for the future, are very often much more important. I very much take on board the point my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton makes about the value to society of stable marriages—indeed, the value to society of stable relationships of any kind. If I thought that the Bill would seriously harm that, I would take a different view towards it, but I do not think that and the evidence does not suggest that that is the case either.

[Ian C. Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)]

I strongly support the thrust of the hon. Gentleman’s argument and I strongly support the Bill. I am very sorry I was not here for the earlier speeches. All the representations I have received from the legal profession support the Bill. I was a practising solicitor, but I did not do matrimonial law. My daughter does and she strongly supports the Bill. I think it is overdue and I will be strongly supporting it today.

[Robert Neill]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I have to say that from my own limited experience and from speaking to those who continue to practise, no area of law is perhaps more sensitive or more emotionally draining—not just for the parties, but for the practitioners who seek to advise them and the judiciary who sit on these cases—than family work. It is inevitably stressful and we ought to have a system that reduces stress, rather than makes it greater.

The evidence from other comparators also shows that the Bill is an advantage to the overall social objective and that some concerns are not justified. It is suggested that the Bill imports into law a concept of unilateral no-fault divorce. That is not strictly correct. It is currently the case that after two years of separation with consent or five years without consent, divorce can be granted without any allegation of misconduct. The truth is, as I will refer to later and as Sir Paul Coleridge, the chairman of the Marriage Foundation and a former High Court judge of the family division himself observed, that that does not keep up to date with the way people now change and move on with their lives. It certainly does not reflect my experience, and the experience of most people, that the divorce petition comes at the end of the breakdown of a relationship, not the beginning. Time and again, I have seen that with people who come to my surgery, with court cases I have been involved in or observed, and, as most of us have, with friends and acquaintances—people we know—where it has been the end of a sad and painful process that ultimately leads to the conclusion that the marriage is no longer sustainable and they want to move on. We ought to help them to be able to do that. My experience has certainly been that divorce is not undertaken lightly and I think the Secretary of State is right to recognise that.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman feel that the sacrament of marriage is made stronger or weaker by the passing of the Bill?

[Robert Neill]

As an Anglo-Catholic, I take the hon. Gentleman’s point about the sacrament strongly, but I do not believe, in societal terms, that it makes very much difference. In truth, many marriages are not in entered into in a religious context. The weight that is placed on the sacrament, even with those of faith, may vary. Perhaps it should not, but I think that is the reality. For those for whom it is important, it will be a difficult personal decision, as it has been for friends of mine for whom the end of their marriage was very difficult indeed. None the less, they thought it was appropriate to recognise what had happened and to make a break. It is a profound point for those of faith, but I do not think it is an argument against the Bill, as I think the hon. Gentleman agrees.

We also have to bear in mind the suggestion that there might be manipulation of a vulnerable party. I take that seriously and it has been raised by a couple of constituents of mine who think carefully and closely about these matters. However, my experience and all the evidence seem to suggest that the greatest risk of manipulation and pressure being put on a vulnerable party is during the period when the marriage has broken down and people have to wait perhaps for two or five years, especially if, as hon. Members have observed, they are obliged for financial or childcare reasons—or a mixture of both—to continue to live under the same roof. That is the point at which the vulnerable party is often most at risk.

It is perhaps significant that the study, “Finding Fault?”, points out that, at the moment, the system is to some degree “manipulated” by fault being used as a ground to speed up divorce. It is not that the marriage has not broken down, but that it is quicker for someone to get divorced if they allege fault than if they wait two or five years. That can have perverse consequences: people have to say hurtful things against the party with whom they are still living and attempting to bring up their children, so that they can speed up the divorce that they both know is inevitable. I cannot see how that benefits society or, for those of us to whom this is important, a Christian ethos for that family.

[Julian Knight]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct and makes another persuasive point, because it means that a divorce is based on a lie. Frankly, we should not have any lies in a legal process. Years ago, I remember reading Evelyn Waugh’s “A Handful of Dust”, in which a character has to abscond to Brighton, seemingly with a woman, to provide the grounds for a divorce. This stuff is from 40 or 50 years ago and is nonsense. We need a bit more honesty in the process.

[Robert Neill]

I take my hon. Friend’s point. My pupil master, when I started at the Bar, had practised in divorce work under precisely those arrangements prior to the 1969 Act. They used to get what was called “ordinary hotel evidence”, which was an affidavit from the chambermaid or the waiter, who happened to have taken breakfast in bed to a couple. That was a pretty demeaning way of having to go through a legal process and it was rightly got rid of, but at the time, people genuinely thought that that might undermine marriage. It did not, of course, but that is the sort of thing that we have all recognised we need to move on from, and this is just a further adjustment.

There is another serious point about the inability of a party who feels aggrieved by the behaviour of their husband or spouse, who might have left them, to have the ground on the record. With respect, that misunderstands the legal test, which has always been, and continues to be, that the marriage has irretrievably broken down. That is not changed by the Bill. The question of behaviour and conduct is relevant only as one of the facts that is relied upon to support the ground for divorce, which is the irretrievable breakdown of the marriage. Moving to a single approach to that—the service of the petition, or the application—simplifies that and does not change the legal test.

Although it is tempting to think that an aggrieved party can get their hurt and concern on the record, it is not relevant as a matter of law because there is no causal connection between the conduct and the ground for the dissolution of marriage, and there never has been since the 1969 Act came into force. It also has the detrimental effect of creating a much more antagonistic attitude, because, first, there is good evidence that people game the system and will exaggerate behaviour to speed up the divorce, and secondly, this clouds the subsequent relationship as parties work out the consequences of the breakdown for finance and families.

It is important that the financial protections for a vulnerable party are specifically preserved under paragraph 10 of the schedule to the Bill, which maintains the existing arrangements. For those concerned about this, it is worth noting that in making a determination on financial arrangements,

“the court must consider all the circumstances including…the age, health, conduct, earning capacity, financial resources and financial obligations of each of the parties to the marriage”.

The suggestion that the change in any way undermines the protection for a vulnerable spouse during a divorce is simply not borne out by that measure, which preserves in the Bill exactly the same test that we have in the current law. I hope that that reassures people who are understandably concerned about that point.

That leads me to my final point, which my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) rightly raised: we cannot really justify a legal process that encourages people to be untruthful. That is what is happening and what has been attested to by the judiciary at the highest level. The late, much missed Sir Nicholas Wall, the former president of the family division, spoke on this during his tenure in office. His successor, Sir James Munby, one of the most experienced family division judges of his time, has spoken very bluntly about a system that involved hypocrisy and a “lack of intellectual honesty”. To go back to my hon. Friend’s point, Sir James referred to the “‘hotel divorce’ charades” that had been played out in the past. If there is collusion, it is the collusion that is sometimes needed by parties to invent conduct to speed up the divorce rather than waiting two or five years. Somebody may, for whatever reason—because the marriage has been breaking down for a long time—already have a new partner and there may be a new family on the way. One may or may not approve of that, but it is a reality of the world, and we have to have a justice system that recognises it and enables the best outcomes for that world rather than creating an obstacle.

Lady Hale, the president of the Supreme Court, said that the system is misleading because, as she put it, the

“fact used as the peg on which to hang the divorce petition may not bear any relationship to the real reason why the marriage broke down”.

If we are going to tackle marriage breakdown, as I believe we should, we should put the emphasis and resource into intervening much earlier to prevent the breakdown and not to involve a charade, in some cases, at the end of the divorce arrangements. I agree very much with the observations on that from my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris), who is not in her place. I would also make the case that if there is an area where funding can be made available to restore elements of legal aid, compelling evidence to the Justice Committee has suggested that early advice on family matters should perhaps be the highest priority for its use. I know that the Secretary of State is someone who will be driven by the evidence when he considers those matters.

The person who perhaps clinches it for me—this is important because of his background—is Sir Paul Coleridge, to whom I have already referred. For many years, he was a family division judge, who practised throughout his professional career in family division work. He is also a practising Christian. Against that dual background, he has come to the view that the law requires reform and that the removal of the fault requirement would be a positive benefit and an advantage. He supports the change on that basis. He said that nowadays, most regard the delays under the current system as

“an intolerable block on their ability to move on with their lives. So to get around the delay they invent allegations to satisfy the court and enable it to turn a blind eye to what is really going on.”

Sir Paul also tackles the issue of divorce rates. He says:

“Since 1970 the divorce rate has fluctuated”—

he practised for a great deal of that time—

“For some periods it has gone up and for other periods, including now, it has dropped. There is simply no discernible connection between the type of divorce process and the rate of family breakdown. The two are unconnected.”

I have been driven by the evidence to agree with him. I hope that we make much more effort to deal with family breakdown, but changing the process is not going alter that situation.

Sir Paul also says:

“We now have a system that drives people to lie to the court if they are not prepared to wait for two years or longer. That is wrong.”

That must be right. He ended what I think was a very thoughtful piece with the following remark:

“An intelligent process to end unsustainable marriage is good for the reinvigoration of the most important social arrangement yet devised for mankind.”

That is a broad and Christian view of the matter, and a socially and legally informed one, and I commend it to the House. It is the reason I support the Bill.

Court Closures: Access to Justice

Robert Neill Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Bambos Charalambous]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Many people do not obtain the legal advice that they need to make such informed decisions, and that, too, is part of the problem.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman made a wrong career move at some point. [Laughter.] At the risk of attempting to cross-examine him, may I suggest that the answer to that point might be that, while it is perfectly true that the acquitted defendants will be entitled to apply for the return of their costs, there is a broader public interest in bringing the guilty defendants to court so that they can be convicted and justice can thereby be done?

[Bambos Charalambous]

The hon. Gentleman has made an excellent point. He is quite right: that is indeed the case.

Women’s Aid has highlighted that fact that, in rural areas in particular, survivors of domestic abuse must travel long distances to reach family courts. Apart from the question of childcare arrangements and the cost of travel, there is a serious safety concern, as the perpetrators of the abuse may be travelling on the same route at the same time, owing to the infrequency of public transport services in those areas. That has the potential to make an already stressful and harrowing experience even worse. I note that Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service has confirmed that it is considering whether to pay for taxis to ferry defendants and witnesses from the most remote parts of the country to hearings. This just goes to demonstrate that little or no consideration has been given to the impact of court closures on court users.

As alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), there is a court modernisation programme and most people are broadly supportive of this £1.2 billion programme and making best use of technology to help alleviate the pressures on courts and tribunals, but this is not the panacea for court closures. There are those who will be digitally excluded due to difficulty in reading or writing, but even those who can navigate their way through the technology will still need proper advice.

Many litigants in person do not understand the legalities in their case. This can lead to unintended consequences such as pleading guilty to something they have a defence to, or choosing a path that may lead to them being penalised with costs. The cuts to legal aid funding and the lack of access to legal advice leads to a raw deal for some. They should be getting justice. The Public Accounts Committee said in its report “Transforming courts and tribunals” that

“without sufficient access to legal advice, people could make uninformed and inappropriate decisions about how to plead, and that the roll-out of virtual hearings could introduce bias and lead to unfair outcomes.”

Video hearings are not suitable for all cases because the informality of giving evidence by video could result in adverse inferences being taken about a person’s demeanour, which would not be the case if that evidence was being given face to face.

Some courts are not even ready to deal with court modernisation. Court No. 1 in Taunton only has one plug socket on the lawyers’ bench, making it impossible for all lawyers present to charge their laptops. Wi-fi is also poor or non-existent in some courts.

The reality is that HMCTS has no overarching vision of what it expects courts and tribunals to look like in the future. Unless it provides data to make it possible to make a robust assessment of the equality impacts of current court closures, it should cease closing courts.

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[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous), my fellow Justice Committee member, and I congratulate him on securing this debate on a very important topic. I was happy to have been a supporter of his application for the debate, and I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for giving us this opportunity.

Access to justice is a fundamental issue. It is not just a transaction issue between the parties to a case; it is fundamental to the running of a civilised society. It ought to be regarded as not just a transactional matter between individuals either, but as something that is the warp and woof of the checks and balances that make our society work. Therefore, the right to have access to justice is a fundamental civic right of every individual and it is important that we aim to produce a system that achieves that without unreasonable obstacles.

Of course, we are obliged to garner public funds with care and make sure they are spent wisely, but it is equally important that the state has an obligation to provide an accessible justice system as part of its duties to protect its citizens. Therefore, we perhaps need to take a step back and look at what we do in relation to courts and other justice issues in the context of that overarching principle.

The issue of court closures has been of real concern to Members in all parts of the House, and for legitimate reasons. I do not say that every court closure is an unreasonable step, and I do not say that every court that was in existence when I started at the Bar is viable now. I appeared in some pretty unsatisfactory old magistrates courts and county courts up and down the country, where there was no means of separating witnesses from defendants for example. In some cases there might have been victims of crime present, and the facilities for having a conference with a client in any sort of confidentiality were non-existent. I actually had a conference in a lavatory once in an old magistrates court in East Anglia because there was nowhere else where we could not be heard by either the prosecutor or prosecution witnesses. It was pouring with rain outside so that seemed to be the easiest way to do it—I did not charge any extra, not even a penny. Courts like that should not be in use.

So there are good examples of where it was right to have got rid of old and inappropriate stock, because people who go to court as witnesses and as parties to civil proceedings are entitled to a basic level of service. Therefore, some rationalisation is legitimate and sensible but it must be balanced against the need for proper accessibility and to maintain, particularly in criminal, but also in family and civil, proceedings, a sense of local justice. I will return to that.

The courts rationalisation programme is often seen as part of a broader programme of court modernisation and rationalisation. As I have said, I do not have a problem with the overall thrust of that programme, which was endorsed by the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice and the Senior President of Tribunals. It is based upon sound principles. It stems from two significant reports by distinguished judges: Lord Briggs’s report into civil procedure, and the report of Lord Justice Leveson—Sir Brian Leveson—in relation to criminal procedure. May I say in passing that both of those judges have given very great service to our judiciary? Lord Briggs later went to the Supreme Court and Sir Brian Leveson retires tomorrow as president of the Queen’s Bench Division. I pay tribute to the work he did; he has been one of the exceptional criminal jurists and criminal judges and practitioners of our generation, and the country as a whole owes Sir Brian a very great debt for his public service.

So these were well-founded principles and they had good judicial input into their design. The problem is that, as many witnesses have told the Justice Committee in the course of inquiries into the programme and related topics, there is concern that the outworking of that programme places more emphasis than it should on costs and savings rather than on improving services for parties to the hearing and the court user.

The chairman of the Magistrates Association, Mr John Bache, gave evidence to our Committee only a few weeks ago to the effect that, of course, there is always a balance to be struck—we want both fairness and efficiency in a justice system; nobody wants only one or the other. However, he and his members are concerned that in some cases at present the balance tips too far towards efficiency at the cost of fairness, and that cannot be the right way around.

[Alex Chalk]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. In the course of this debate we have talked about convenience for defendants and witnesses, but ought we not also to consider convenience for magistrates? Magistrates give of their time to help in the community and perform an invaluable role, but if they have to travel huge distances that will inevitably provide a disincentive. The Government should be very alive to that in making these changes.

[Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and as he will know the Committee, of which he was for a time a distinguished member and for whose work I am very grateful, recently published a report into the magistracy that deals with a number of challenges facing the magistracy. It is convenient that I refer to this point, given that 90-odd% of criminal cases are dealt with by magistrates, who, as he says, are unpaid—they are volunteers; they are the bedrock of the criminal justice system. The point of a magistrates system is that they are lay people—mini juries, in effect—delivering local justice. Defendants are thereby judged by one’s peers, not only in the sense of one’s status in society, but in the sense that they come broadly from the community from which they themselves come.

That has always been fundamental to our system in criminal work. The difficulty has been the number of pressures on the recruitment of magistrates, and one, which was identified to us by the Magistrates Association and other witnesses, is the effect of court closures. Where they become as drastic as they have in some cases, they act as a disincentive to magistrates to continue on the bench, as travel times are much longer than they were. They can also skewer recruitment patterns for new magistrates. A number of studies indicate that the drop-out rate for magistrates in rural areas, where courts often sit only in the county town, is more marked and that there is a tendency in areas where the court has moved to an urban centre for magistrates to be recruited predominantly from the surrounding town areas rather than the rural areas.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

I wonder if my hon. Friend remembers, as I do, the very powerful evidence we heard from Welsh magistrates in our work on the Justice Select Committee about the difficulties they are having recruiting magistrates in rural parts of Wales.

[Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The evidence from the Welsh magistrates was particularly marked. They have the additional issue that they often need to recruit magistrates who are bilingual, since the Welsh language is usable in court proceedings. Rural areas of Wales suffer greatly from the dearth of magistrates, we are told, as well as from the difficulty of defendants, witnesses, police officers and lawyers having to travel long distances to get to court. The balance there has to be kept permanently under review.

There are other challenges as well. I know that the Minister will respond in full to a magistrates report, and I hope he will take that on board. One of the things we say is that we should have a holistic approach to the recruitment of magistrates—a workforce strategy—and that must include looking at what is reasonable in terms of the travel times that they are expected to undergo.

Other unintended consequences can stem from that. The hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate referred to the closure of four youth courts in London and the amalgamation in Bromley magistrates court, which, as he says, creates difficulties. Even though the geographic distances within London—some of us here are London MPs—might not be great, travel is not necessarily easy, particularly if one is using public transport, and even more so if defendants or other parties to proceedings have chaotic lifestyles. In civil and family cases, they may be people undergoing real stress—because of relationship breakdown, debt problems in civil proceedings, and so on—and the greater the travel burden put on them, the greater the risk that they do not attend and the hearing is ineffective or that those with a legitimate claim in such proceedings are deterred from taking their case forward.

Much progress has been made to make it easier to initiate things such as money claims and divorce proceedings online, which is welcome, but as the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, observed wisely in the other place recently, there is a difference between an online process to deal with transactional matters and online proceedings. As the president of the family division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, observed that video or virtual evidence is unlikely to be as appropriate in family cases as in other cases. For example, it can be easier to resolve things such as straightforward claims for damages—money claims—online. It seems important to us that we find that balance and ensure greater nuance and sensitivity in where we reduce our court facilities.

There is also the issue of travel times. The suggestion seems to be that it is reasonable for someone to leave home at 7.30 am to get to a court hearing and then to get home two hours after it finishes, which might be at 5.30 pm. I did a lot of that when I was practising at the Bar, but I understood that, having chosen that job. It is not the same for someone who is a witness in proceedings or who has been summoned to assist the public good by giving evidence about an incident they witnessed. It does not seem reasonable to expect those people to put up with long journey times. Legal aid lawyers are not well remunerated, and their having to travel long hours on modest fees while also preparing their cases properly does not always ensure that justice is fully served.

I hope that we will be cautious in how far we go. It is perfectly fair to point out that the volume of work going through courts—magistrates, Crown and county—has declined and that that fact will obviously be reflected in the court estate to some extent, but I would be happier if I thought that the money being saved was being immediately spent on the upkeep of the retained estate. I regret to say, however, that that is manifestly not the case. The Criminal Bar Association recently posted online a photograph of the wall in the robing room at Southwark Crown court. As well as various stains and cracks—it is a 1970s building—a number of phone numbers had been written on the wall next to the telephone. The phone numbers were so old they predated the 0207 and 0208 numbers, which shows how long it has been since the place was painted. In Snaresbrook Crown court, I have seen buckets in the judge’s corridor and so on. We are not recycling the money even to maintain the estate we have. We have to get that right somehow.

[Victoria Prentis]

I wonder if I could draw my hon. Friend’s attention, and perhaps by proxy the Minister’s attention, to the excellent and important evidence given by Ian Burnett to the House of Lords Constitution Committee about the quality of repairs to court buildings and the effect it has on judicial morale.

[Robert Neill]

The evidence of Lord Burnett of Maldon, the Lord Chief Justice, was most compelling, and I know that the Minister, who is a diligent Minister and who I welcome to his place in the Ministry of Justice, will want to take that heavily on board. We pride ourselves on having a Rolls-Royce system of justice in this country, and in terms of the intellect and integrity of our judiciary, that is absolutely right, but sometimes the buildings in which they operate—

[Victoria Prentis]

They are more like a Škoda.

[Robert Neill]

As my hon. Friend says, they are much more like a Škoda.

Having drawn those matters to the House’s attention, as well as my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which I should have done at the beginning, I hope that the Minister will take the opportunity to reflect on the voluminous evidence that our Committee and others have amassed not about how we should abandon the reform program—absolutely not—but about how we can take it forward efficiently and effectively. We must strike that balance. We must achieve efficiency but never at the expense of justice and fairness in what is a fundamental civic right.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) on securing it. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), the Chair of the Justice Committee. The £1 billion pound modernisation programme undertaken by Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service was designed to move cases online and to increase the use of digital methods to improve the speed and efficiency of our court system. However, as the Public Accounts Committee’s report into transforming courts and tribunals made clear, the pressure to deliver quickly and make savings is limiting HMCTS’s ability to consult meaningfully with stakeholders and risks it driving forward changes before it fully understands their impact on users and on the justice system more widely, particularly in regard to access to justice.

As a member of the Justice Committee, I am pleased that we are currently undertaking an inquiry into the courts and tribunal reforms. It is clear that the implications are going to be significant. As we have seen in countless other examples from welfare to healthcare, the digitisation and modernisation of Government systems invariably leads to delays and operational issues. Sufficient time is never committed for proper testing and evaluation to ensure that the technology and methods implemented are actually fit for purpose.

On current predictions, HMCTS expects 2.4 million cases a year to be dealt with outside physical courtrooms by 2023, leading it to employ 5,000 fewer staff. While many organisations, including the Law Society and the Magistrates Association have welcomed the increased use of technology, they continue to express concern that the Government’s desire to increase efficiency is coming at the cost of accessibility. I have concerns that by switching to a “digital by default” approach, we are in danger of excluding many people from being able to fully interact with the justice system, given that vulnerable people such as those with learning difficulties, mental health conditions, addictions, disabilities and English as a second language are often disproportionately represented among court users. By assuming that everyone is able to adjust to digital-only platforms, we risk denying people the ability to seek and access justice. The Government’s desire to save money by moving to digital solutions while failing to recognise the impact of their introduction may cost more in the long run, not just financially but by reducing access to justice for many.

While the Government have accelerated the roll-out of digital portals, they have also presided over the dismantling of our court system. Between 2010 and 2019, we have seen 295 court facilities close their doors for good, including more than 50% of the magistrates courts in England and Wales. The combination of this and increased digital-only processes is another example of trying to do too much too quickly, and the results will always have negative consequences on access to justice.

Resolution, the family law group, recently ran a survey of its members following the roll-out of some of the reforms. On access to justice, 87% strongly disagree or disagree that a more accessible service is being delivered, and 94% disagree or strongly disagree that faster processing times are being delivered. Not only is access to justice being denied but the reform agenda is making an already difficult process harder still. Many cases that end up going through the court system will involve vulnerable people in difficult circumstances, such as cases involving children going into care. By limiting the processes by which people interact with the court system, along with the continued closure of the estate, we are setting up barriers that will in turn prevent full access to justice, and particularly the ability of many to access their nearest court.

Following the Lord Chancellor’s recent response to the “Fit for the future: transforming the court and tribunal estate” consultation, I share the concerns of groups such as the Law Society that have drawn specific attention to the accessibility of our future court system. I am disappointed that the response categorised a reasonable journey as one that allowed court attendees to leave home no earlier than 7.30 am to attend a hearing and return home by 7.30 pm the same day, using public transport where necessary. For those who have caring responsibilities, family or childcare arrangements and for disabled people and the elderly, a 12-hour window is far from accessible. Some may have access to a car, but those who rely on public transport could have numerous legs to their journey and, given that thousands of bus routes have faced being cut under this Government, it is inevitable that there will be a detrimental impact on the ability of many to get to court in a reasonable time. This could affect their ability to access justice.

[Robert Neill]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful case. Does she agree that there is another issue that can arise as a result of court closures? She and I know that the four youth courts that have been amalgamated now sit at Bromley, and that many of the youngsters who appear in front of those courts are involved in gang culture. This creates real listing difficulties for the court staff, who have to try to ensure that they do not list cases involving rival gangs from different areas of that part of south London at the same time, given the potential for disorder that can genuinely occur. This is a matter of concern for the police in our shared borough.

[Ellie Reeves]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. I, too, know the difficulties that this is creating for the police and the court service locally. These complex considerations have to be taken into account, but they are sometimes not thought about when introducing these sorts of reforms.

The current outline for a reasonable journey assumes that everything in court that day runs to time and to plan. Court listings are usually oversubscribed under the current set-up, so many people often make their way to court, which often takes several hours, in anticipation of a hearing that never takes place. Not only does that have negative consequences for victims, witnesses and defendants and inevitably cost more, given that solicitors’ fees must still be paid, but it is quite possible that the combination of more difficult journeys and the continued floating or warned-list system will lead to the unintended consequence of people just not turning up at all. Research has shown that those effects, combined with court closures, have led to an increase in no-shows and an increase in warrants of arrest for defendants in locations where magistrates courts have closed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I declare my interests as a non-practising barrister and the fifth member of the Justice Committee to speak in the debate, albeit the most junior and recently elevated to that position.

I am sure it is a coincidence, but like me other Members will have found in their inboxes this morning a press release from the Ministry of Justice telling them that £15 million of extra Government funding will be spent to improve more than 200 courts. I am sure the fact that that came out on the morning of this debate is just happenstance. When I read it in more detail and found that revolutionary things are being done such as a new roof on Chester Crown court, a new lift at Swansea civil justice centre and plumbing upgrades in Newton Abbot, I wondered whether it was really something that needs to feature in the popular press at the moment. Is it really so revolutionary that these things are happening? It is £15 million for what is actually basic maintenance.

Perhaps I can contrast all that with the £43 million that the Department made from the sale of Hammersmith magistrates court last year—that is three times the entire budget that the Department has committed to the repairs. If the tales of toilets and buckets from the Chair of the Justice Committee are to be believed, it may be that even that £15 million will be inadequate for the task. The sad thing is that at the time Hammersmith court was closed, it was a fully functioning, well-used, fully accessible building in a convenient location. It had the first ever domestic violence court in the country. Sadly, as nothing has yet happened to it, it is now used only for the filming of crime dramas. The most recent time I was there, I was down in a cell with an entire film crew.

I do not want to share private grief, but I shall briefly outline our experience in west London, because it is emblematic of what is happening across the board. The modern court in Hammersmith was built around 20 years ago, and our old, lovely but ageing Victorian magistrates court later moved into it, followed later by our lovely but ageing Edwardian county court. So be it. Over the past 10 years, the county court work was moved over to Wandsworth to allow work from other closed magistrates courts in London to move into the building. We were then told that all the magistrates court work would go to places as convenient to my constituents as Hendon. Then, last year, we were told that Wandsworth county court was to close and that the county court work would go across London to Clerkenwell. It is difficult to keep up with this: there have been four changes in respect of county court work over a period of around 10 years.

The farce then turns to tragedy. This information has been given to me by court users, and not just users of our own courts. My hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) referred to what is happening at Clerkenwell and Shoreditch county court. I am told that files are being lost there, hearings have not taken place more than a year after work was transferred, telephones are not answered, paperwork has been lost, and bailiffs warrants are being executed despite warrants being suspended. My source says:

“The court is essentially in chaos”,

with 70% of staff being agency workers. This is the court, right on the other side of London, that my constituents are being directed to.

Possession work now forms a substantial part of county courts’ work, because without early legal advice people can often end up homeless when they should have received it at an earlier stage. Most cases relate to benefit problems and defects in the benefits system and therefore involve very poor people. Lots of people now walk to court. My excellent law centre, under director Sue James, co-locates its advice services with food banks and will now have to travel across London to provide those emergency services. This is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs, particularly as nearby Brentford county court has five courtrooms, only two of which are used because only two judges sit there. That in turn makes me suspicious about the utilisation figures that we are given.

[Robert Neill]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. He will have heard, as I have, the concerning reports on a number of occasions from the Criminal Bar Association about under-utilisation sometimes being caused by courtrooms left sitting empty while recorders—part-time judges who classically could be used to fill out the slack—are not offered enough slots in which to sit by the Ministry of Justice. It seems a completely false economy.

[Andy Slaughter]

That is absolutely right. It is the combination of cuts in service that is causing the problems, and one problem is being referenced to another. Under-utilisation is a problem of not having judges to sit in court rather than a problem of not having the cases to refer to that court, as in the example that I have given. That makes me suspicious about the longer hours—the 7.30 to 7.30 window and the flexibility, with warned lists, that means that advocates and clients could be there all day. If there are not enough judges to sit in the courts in the first place, what is the point of courts sitting from early in the morning until late at night? To put it mildly, this has not been very well thought through.

To turn from the particular to the general, it has been mentioned that half the magistrates courts in the country have closed since 2010. One of the first things I did when I was appointed shadow Justice Minister back in 2010 was to respond to that first statement. Little did I know where we were going—that there would be perhaps one cull a year of courts across the country from then onwards. There must come a point when matters have gone too far. One reason for the wholesale, untrammelled closure of courts was obviously austerity. We are not just talking about capital receipts for closed buildings; we are also talking about thousands of staff going—I think another 5,000 staff are due to go over the next two years.

There is no denying that, but the justification given was the now more than £1 billion digitisation programme that was being introduced. The Association of Her Majesty’s District Judges says that half the money has been spent but only a limited benefit has yet been seen or realised. We have seen the sale and closure of courts and the restriction of access to justice before any of the benefits. We are taking a leap in the dark and being asked to trust that the Government have got it right. Frankly, judging by most Governments’ IT programmes and success, I always think we ought to be very sceptical about whether they have got it right. The only consistent thing is the amount spent on management consultants—I see that about £61 million has been spent on them as part of this programme. None of this bodes well.

Some people will say that we can get too attached to our local courts, but local justice is important. It is a cumulative process. The cuts to legal aid, the introduction of fees and the closure of courts are having a detrimental effect on people’s rights to access justice, and to do so speedily, conveniently and fairly. It therefore seems entirely reasonable to ask, as the Labour party does, for a moratorium on closures. It is also reasonable to ask for more evidence of the justifications for any closures and of the benefits that are allegedly going to be gained from the money released by those closures. There is a new Minister in post, who I am sure is looking at the issue with a fresh pair of eyes. I hope we are going to hear very shortly that he will look at these matters again and perhaps come to some different conclusions from those of his predecessors.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Paul Maynard)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate, or should I call it a Justice Committee reunion? I feel rather inadequate in never having been part of this fantastic Committee, with such wonderful people. However, this debate also brings together at least three people in the Chamber who have seen their courts close in the last round of cuts: my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis); you, Mr Deputy Speaker, have seen Chorley go; and me. I have seen Fleetwood close, which was just outside my boundary but served many of my constituents, so I have seen this issue from both sides of the fence.

The ability to access justice is a fundamental right in our society. That is why the Government are investing £1 billion in the most ambitious programme of its kind in the world. It will create a system that works better for those who need it. It will be easier to run and it will provide better value for taxpayers. Access to justice matters because everyone should have a stake in our legal system. None of our plans replaces the need for traditional courts or for people to travel to those buildings. It will not exclude people who do not have access to a computer or the internet. However, it will transform the way people use our courts and tribunals, opening up new ways to access justice.

To undertake a radical modernisation of the operation of our courts and tribunals with the same estate that was in place in the era of carbon paper, manual typewriters and fax machines—yes, there are still some fax machines left in our court estate—would be wasteful and dilute the benefits of reform. As we modernise, it would be inappropriate to define access to justice merely in terms of proximity to our nearest court building.

However, no one should deny the challenges we have in our court estate. Many of our buildings have been underused. In the financial year ending in 2017, 41% of courts and tribunals were used for less than half their available time. Keeping these buildings open costs us money that we could spend on making justice more accessible in other ways. As it stands, the court and tribunal estate is a patchwork that has developed over time and a legacy from many predecessor organisations. This has meant a concentration of buildings in some locations. Of the 337 operational court and tribunal buildings, 245 are within five miles of another court or tribunal, so this should be kept under review. We should test whether buildings are really needed or suitable for the uses to which we put them.

The closure of a court is not a decision taken lightly, and we consult widely and think carefully about the responses we receive before making a final decision. We have changed our minds following a consultation, and retained courts because of the responses received—Northallerton magistrates court being one example. Only when convinced that effective access to justice can be maintained has the Lord Chancellor agreed to the closure of a court. In some cases, we have moderated the impact of a closure by continuing to provide local access through a supplementary provision, such as a video link, or by holding hearings in a different public building.

I take great interest in the potential that so-called “supplementary provision” can offer, although I have a certain nervousness about pubs. I know that inquests were once held in pubs, and witnesses gathered in them back in the Victorian era. I am not sure, however, that current concern for the dignity and gravitas of the court can be met by our local Wetherspoons, but I look forward to hearing what my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury proposes for her home town.

I do not accept the characterisation of this programme as being just about cutting costs without any regard for those who use our courts, and neither do I recognise the stories of inconsistency and chaos set out by the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous). At the start of last year we engaged widely on our future strategy, and many Members have referred to the document, “Fit for the future: transforming the court and tribunal estate”, which underpins much of our decision making. I urge a further reading of paragraph 2.5, which lists the issues that must be considered. Those include the length of a journey, and the timeframe of between 7.30 am and 7.30 pm,

“the difficulty of the journey, including frequency of public transport and the number of changes required; the cost of potential journeys; the type of cases heard at the court or tribunal; the opening hours of the court or tribunal; the needs of vulnerable users; and whether there are available mitigations to reduce the impact on users with longer journey times, if the numbers of such users are small.”

We also consider supplementary provision where that is appropriate to the nature of the case, the court’s workload, and the agreement of the judiciary. Our assessment therefore goes much deeper than whether to tick off two particular times of the day.

I heard about the study that has taken place in Suffolk, and I look forward to meeting my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill), who has been particularly affected by that issue. We have set out a clearer definition of what we consider to be a reasonable journey, but in my view the issue has not affected the failure to attend rate. Indeed, since about 2013, studies show the numbers of those affected by this issue to be in the low to mid 90,000s, which has declined since 2010. We wish to take into account a range of factors. Compared with December 2010, the proportion of the population now within the stated distance for reaching a magistrates’ court has declined by just 1.6%, so people are not being affected to the extent that many are concerned about.

I urge anyone with an interest in the future of our courts and tribunals to read our response to the consultation, and our new “Court and Tribunal Design guide”, which I fear has not received the same level of attention, despite being just as interesting. It sets out how we will make our courtrooms more flexible, enhance security standards, and provide for the needs of vulnerable victims and witnesses. Those things are just as important for access to justice as the other issues raised today.

As a former Minister for transport accessibility, who is also sitting next to the current Minister responsible for that, I am all too aware of the importance of inclusive public transport. I tried to introduce the idea of the inclusive court to my Department, and the work done by my hon. Friend and I focuses particularly on the needs of those with hidden disabilities. Accessibility is not just about the wheelchair ramp into court; it is about understanding those who have speech, language and communication difficulties, so that when they are in court they understand what is occurring.

I referred to the “Fit for the Future” document, but there is no Government document that cannot be refreshed when evidence changes. We are working hard to improve the quality of the court and tribunal estate. Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service was formed from a diverse range of earlier organisations. No one wants to see buckets in the court, or ripped seats, soggy walls, and chipped paintwork. Since 2016 we have invested more than £148 million in capital improvements, including the £15 million from the Treasury that so underwhelmed the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) at the start of his speech. I agree that that would not solve every problem in the estate, but I think of it as a down payment in our initial efforts to make a difference. If anyone wishes to visit Blackpool court just outside my constituency boundary they will see another court that is in serious need of investment, although we are hoping to move site very shortly. I am all too familiar with the need to ensure that we have a dignified court network and I recognise the role it plays in maintaining judicial morale.

The hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) mentioned digital services. The principal aim is not to close off routes to justice, but to open new ones. We will continue to support paper processes for those who need them. For some, that will still be the best route into our courts and tribunals, but for those who want to use digital services but have trouble doing so, we are providing a range of support to help to ensure the process is accessible to all through telephone support, webchat, or, when required, face-to-face support. We have seen an improvement with online applications for divorce. When it was paper-based, 40% of forms were being returned and that is now down to 2%. That makes life easier for those engaging with the process. Online pleas are possible for traffic offences and a significant number of online civil money claims are now taking place with significant support for those participating in them. However, as she mentioned, evaluation does matter. Merely because we can do something online does not mean that we should do it in each and every case, so it is right to interrogate the overall reform programme.

Court reform is just one way to deliver the inclusive court that I personally want to see. There is no location in the public realm where the vulnerability of the individual can place their liberty at greater risk than in our justice system. If justice is truly to be done, it is vital that all sides, whether as a defendant or as someone bringing a case, understand how justice is being done to them.

[Robert Neill]

Will the Minister give way?

[Paul Maynard]

I will always give way to the Chairman of the Select Committee.

[Robert Neill]

I am grateful to the Minister and I appreciate what he says. He raises a specific point about the justice system being seen to be available. One concern arising in evidence given to the Justice Committee about the use of online procedure is that we must be careful that it does not develop into a situation where justice is not done in public and is therefore not seen to be done. This is another case where it could be a good idea, but we have to be careful to get the balance right.

[Paul Maynard]

I have heard many of those concerns, not least from judges themselves, about the role of video hearings. I recognise that there is a particular sensitivity here, which I am exploring carefully.

I was going to mention the Select Committee’s report on magistracy—that is a complicated word for me to get out—which I thought was fantastic and chimed with much I have encountered already in my short time in the role. I met a young magistrate called Luke Rigg a couple of weeks ago. He is a shining example of those we wish to see taking up the role of magistrate. Magistrates are the glue that holds our justice system together and they often go unrecognised. I urge anyone watching this debate to seriously consider becoming a magistrate. It is a fantastic way to get under the skin of a local community and I hope that far more people will do it.

On that note, I thank all Members for their participation. They have given me plenty of food for thought in my early days. I look forward to being grilled more heavily when the Select Committee drags me before it.

Imprisonment for Public Protection

Robert Neill Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

As always, Sir Edward, it is a pleasure to see you in the Chair. I congratulate the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) on securing an important debate on an important subject.

I am delighted to see the Minister in his place. He has had a long and distinguished career at the criminal Bar, so he will know, as well as any of us who have seen this type of sentencing in practice, that this is an unconscionable situation, which is the result of a policy in the past that was well intended but, frankly, an error. That error was corrected, but not corrected retrospectively, hence the decision reached by the High Court and the Supreme Court that they could not interfere with sentences that, at the time they were issued, had been lawfully given, as the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, said. However, that does not remove the political and moral conundrum that faces us.

The right hon. Member for Delyn (David Hanson), a fellow member of the Select Committee, very fairly points out, as we accept in our Select Committee report, “Prison population 2022”, that there will indeed be a number—perhaps a significant number, but I suspect not a majority—of IPP prisoners who are unlikely to be safe to be released in any significant period of time and perhaps never. I suspect they are a minority, but there will be some. Nobody has an issue with that, but certainty is important for them and for the victims of their grave crimes, so that they know that that will be the case.

[Alex Chalk]

In those circumstances, the defendants probably ought not to have been sentenced to an IPP in the first place, but to a life sentence. If that is the case, the correct thing is to put that right rather than continue with the fiction that they are on an IPP with a tariff that they have long since superseded.

[Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. His experience at the criminal Bar leads him to the same conclusion as mine leads me to. Given that the situation is unacceptable for the reasons that have been highlighted by the right hon. Member for Delyn, and highlighted in detail by my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), my fellow Select Committee member, it is unacceptable that we should leave a situation in which some people are in limbo.

One such case was illustrated in our Select Committee report in evidence from the sister of an IPP prisoner who died after a self-harm incident in prison. That individual

“often found himself in prisons that did not offer the specific type of rehabilitation he needed with no support or guidance on how to move to a prison that offered them. If there ever was a ray of hope with regards to this it was often lost owing to the lack of feedback on progress, the resource being changed or even closed down.”

That leads me to conclude, first, that we need to ensure that the prison regime offers proper rehabilitative and therapeutic offender management courses to those in a position to benefit from them. That requires a steady and stable regime within the prisons, which is not yet always the case in many institutions. Secondly, it implies a greater degree of monitoring of the specific needs of IPP prisoners to make sure that they are moved to establishments where courses are available. Thirdly, it means moving away from the current practice whereby IPP prisoners are very often not allowed to seek transfer to open institutions, which gives the Parole Board the difficulty of not having been able to test their behaviour and therefore the risk of reoffending in open conditions. The board has to take the difficult risk, in public perception terms, of either keeping those prisoners locked up perhaps needlessly or releasing them immediately without their having experienced open conditions. All that needs to be addressed.

The Parole Board gave evidence to us that certain mechanisms currently available to it could be made more use of. I urge the Minister to speak urgently to the chair of the Parole Board about speeding up, for example, the ability to prevent needless recall for technical reasons by, as has been pointed out, suspending the period of supervision after four years of good behaviour on licence—a specific and sensible proposal—and removing the cancellation of the licence after 10 years on licence. In many cases, that would be significantly more than the minimum term that they were sentenced to by quite a multiple. Those are sensible things that could be done.

Also, we have to grasp the nettle that, as Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd rightly said, Parliament needs to grasp. We must either make resources available so that proper rehabilitation can take place or change the test for release. That would certainly need to be consulted upon, but it is something we need to set out because it has been very highly set at the moment. And/or we could change the statutory provision, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) said, so that people can be re-sentenced under the current sentencing practice and procedures to a determinate sentence. In the worst cases, that will no doubt be life, or sometimes significant and at other times less significant determinate sentences, but the IPP prisoners, their families and the victims of the offenders will know precisely what the regime is and what the rules are that relate to the release.

That ought not to be too difficult to achieve. I cannot think for one moment that there would be opposition to that in any quarter of this House, were the Government to seek to find a legislative opportunity to introduce that. I earnestly urge my hon. and learned Friend the Minister—I know he is a reformer at heart and recognises the need to move these matters on—to make the case as strongly as he can within Government to find the time to take the fairly modest steps that would rectify an injustice that is a needless blot upon our system.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Buckland]

My hon. Friend has considerable experience of criminal practice, and he has dealt with many cases of great seriousness. He is right to draw to my attention the specific case of his constituent. We can deal with this problem in other ways, and I will outline those to the House as I develop my remarks. Indeed, I hope specifically to answer the queries that have properly been raised by right hon. and hon. Members.

[Robert Neill]

May I supplement the intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk)? The Minister refers to the difficulties of putting oneself in the position of the sentencing judge, but no one is likely to have been better placed to understand those difficulties than the former Lord Chief Justice, when he made his observations in the course of a judgment in the Court of Appeal. We know that there are circumstances—for example, when a sentence is reviewed for other reasons—when the court will, for reasons of good public policy, embark on that difficult exercise. Although this issue must be borne in mind, there is precedent for demonstrating that it is not an insuperable obstacle.

[Robert Buckland]

I agree that in the appellant procedure there will often be that check and balance, but this is slightly different. This would be a change in the law and legal framework to alter the position from the one that applied when the offender was sentenced, to the position now. Whether we like it or not that is a departure, and we must be careful to avoid setting inadvertent precedents.

We must be able fully to reflect on the assessment of risk that was made by the learned judge at the time of sentencing. In other words, how does a court properly assess the length of a determinate sentence—that, presumably, is the aim of right hon. and hon. Members—and decide whether or not to take the further step of imposing a life sentence, which might be appropriate in some very serious cases? I do not pretend that these issues are easy, but neither is it a matter that the Government should do nothing about. Other measures we are taking are already yielding significant results, not just in reducing the number of prisoners held under this regime, but by ensuring that more eligible prisoners can be considered as quickly as possible.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), Chair of the Justice Committee, mentioned the remarks of the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, who spoke not just about changing the statutory provision, but about changing the test for release, which is important. I think he would concede that the test for the release of prisoners held under this sort of regime must be as consistent as possible, bearing in mind the different classes of prisoners who are held in custody either on minimum terms or subject to parole.

We must take great care not to create too many different tests that could mean that one group of prisoners could be treated in a different or more favourable way than another group. I do not say that the argument has no merit, but there are difficulties in creating potential inconsistencies. It is beholden on me, both as a lawyer and now in this position of great responsibility, to ensure that the unforeseen consequences that occurred with this policy making do not repeat themselves thanks to any change we may make.

Let me develop the point about the ways we can best support prisoners to show that they can safely be released—that is the solution that stares us in the face regarding so many people in that position. As the hon. Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero) laid out well, ensuring public protection from violent and sexual crime must be paramount, and our continuing efforts to rehabilitate prisoners subject to this regime are bearing fruit. We have seen a dramatic fall in the IPP prison population over the past years, and the figures cited by the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves), and others, are correct. It is a dramatic fall, although I accept that there is still a significant cohort, and we must also not forget that a number of IPP prisoners have been recalled—I will come to that in a moment. However, progress is being made in the right direction.

In January 2016, more than three years ago, a joint HM Prison and Probation Service and Parole Board action plan was drawn up to deal with IPPs. Initially it was primarily focused on improving the efficiency of the parole process, because at that time there was a significant backlog in listing oral hearings for IPP and life-sentence prisoners. As a result of receiving additional resources and changing some of its processes, the Parole Board and the public protection casework section of the Ministry of Justice made progress, and their combined effect was to eliminate that backlog. Simply having a more efficient system resulted in a significant improvement to the pace with which IPP prisoners were released. Following those improvements, the plan was expanded to include a greater focus on those prisoners who, even with a much more efficient parole system, needed additional support to reduce their own risk and secure a release decision from the board.

What was done? A central case file review, by senior psychologists, of IPP prisoners who had not made the anticipated progress achieved considerable success. Out of 1,365 completed reviews, 233 prisoners in these most challenging cases achieved release, with a further 401 achieving a progressive move to open conditions. We have put in place enhanced case management for the most complex cases, so that a multidisciplinary team can work together to remove barriers to progression.

The joint IPP action plan has also overseen further improvements to the process and, perhaps most significantly, we have opened three new progression regimes, building on the success and the outstanding reputation of the first such regime, which was established at Warren Hill. Those sites operate a staged regime of increasing freedom and responsibility, allowing evidence to build on offenders’ ability to manage their own risks. The rate of release from a progression regime is higher than the average release rate across all Parole Board hearings, which is something that, I think, all right hon. and hon. Members will welcome.

As comprehensive as the plan and the opportunities it provides to IPP prisoners is, the decision actively to engage with efforts that promote rehabilitation, and so demonstrate that there can be safe release back into the community, must ultimately be for each individual prisoner. In my view, that is why Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service change programme, in delivering a new offender management model, is fundamental, not only for IPP prisoners but for all offenders. With increased staffing, and the introduction of the key worker role in all prisons, staff will be better equipped, and given more time, to work with individuals who may not be engaging in the way they need to do to reduce their risk.

We are aware that some prisoners may well have become demoralised, with no fixed date of release and the prospect of a further parole hearing currently not holding much hope for them. Here, the key worker will need to get alongside the prisoner and build hope from the foundation of a strong relationship, encouraging them to grasp the opportunities that are available.

Rehabilitation of Offenders

Robert Neill Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Robert Buckland)]

I beg to move,

That the draft Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2019, which was laid before this House on 1 April, be approved.

The purpose of this draft instrument is to include inquiries established under the Inquiries Act 2005 as “excepted proceedings” in the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975. That will enable those types of inquiry to consider the spent convictions of individuals. This legislative change was requested initially by Sir John Mitting, chair of the undercover policing inquiry, and I will pause now to pay tribute to his predecessor as chair, the late Sir Christopher Pitchford. Sir Christopher was a distinguished member of the Bar, a High Court judge and Lord Justice of Appeal, who sadly died in the middle of this inquiry. He is much missed by all of us who knew and respected him as an outstanding lawyer of his generation.

Sir John stepped into the breach and is conducting this lengthy and serious inquiry. The reason for the request he has made is that information on individuals’ spent convictions is important for the purposes of the terms of reference of the inquiry.

The inquiry is examining undercover police operations conducted by English and Welsh police forces from 1968 onwards, including whether the police were justified in launching undercover operations against a group. To give full consideration to this, the inquiry needs to be able to consider the convictions of members of the groups; however, given the historical nature of the inquiry, many of these convictions will be spent, and therefore not disclosable under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.

The statutory instrument will give Sir John’s inquiry the ability to consider spent convictions. The change is vital for the inquiry to successfully fulfil its remit, and hon. Members will be aware that there is a high and appropriate level of public interest in this inquiry. Although the undercover policing inquiry is a particularly clear case of an inquiry where spent convictions are relevant, the amendment will allow any inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 to admit evidence of spent convictions and cautions, but—this is important—limited only to where that is necessary to fulfil the terms of reference of that inquiry. It is likely that other inquiries may in future need to consider spent criminal records.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way, and I appreciate his reassurance that the test is of necessity. Can he assure me that the same approach is intended to be taken by the chairman of the inquiry, as, for example, will be taken by a judge in determining the test of necessity and also relevance to the topic matter of an inquiry? Relevance is the normal test in court. Can he assure us that necessity will include that as well?

[Robert Buckland]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is the Chair of the Justice Committee and a barrister of long standing at the criminal Bar. He is absolutely right to talk about the test of relevance. It is not the purport of any inquiry ambit or the function of any inquiry chair to adopt a floodgates approach to the disclosure and use of spent convictions. In the other place, the noble Baroness Barran put it very well when she set out to their lordships a flowchart of the way in which a particular decision about the use of spent convictions would be taken. She said:

“The first question is: does the individual have spent convictions, yes or no? If the answer is yes, are they relevant? Will they be treated anonymously? If they apply for anonymity, will that be agreed to? Further, even if it is not anonymous, is the hearing held in private or in public? If it is held in private, could the information then be published?”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 May 2019; Vol. 797, c. 1792.]

I thought that that was a clear exposition of the framework within which a decision maker would carry out their function when it comes to spent convictions. In other words, that is the sort of filter that I think meets the concerns not only of Members in the other place but of Members in this House.

I was talking about future inquiries, and was saying it is likely that other inquiries may need to consider spent criminal records, as these can be key to determining whether authorities have acted reasonably in assessing and responding to risk. The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 affords offenders protection from having to disclose their convictions and cautions, once those convictions and cautions have become what is termed “spent” under the Act. That is the point at which the offender has become rehabilitated. The exceptions order to that Act lists activities or categories of jobs where those protections are lifted so that offenders, if asked, need to disclose their spent convictions.

The primary rationale behind the exceptions order is that there are certain jobs—positions of public trust, for example, or those involving unsupervised work with children—where more complete or relevant disclosure of an individual’s criminal record may be appropriate to mitigate risks to public safety. The exceptions order is not limited to employment purposes, although that is its primary use. The amendment proposed here is not employment-related, but related only to the consideration of evidence of spent convictions and cautions in inquiries that are caused to be held under the Inquiries Act 2005.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Buckland]

I am looking again at paragraph 7.6, and I think its purpose is to illustrate other examples of inquiries that have been set up pursuant to the Inquiries Act 2005. I will go on to explain that, because that does not cover every public inquiry. I will give the House a few examples as I develop my argument. In this case, the ongoing independent inquiry into child sexual abuse is used as an example of a 2005 Act statutory inquiry that may need to consider criminal records in the course of its deliberations. It is therefore a useful illustration of another inquiry that was set up because there was a strong public interest to be served and one would benefit from not having to undergo what would otherwise be a rather cumbersome and lengthy process of looking at the admission of evidence on a case-by-case basis.

As we know, the independent inquiry is taking considerable time, and it would be in the wider public interest for its work to be sped up in this way.

The hon. Member for Stroud (Dr Drew) talked about the register; as he knows, sex offenders are required to sign that on conviction. That public document is recorded and kept just as a conviction would be. From memory, how long an offender has to stay on the register will depend on the seriousness of the offence. Some very serious child sexual offences will, of course, rightly require life registration, so the matter will remain on public record.

The hon. Gentleman was a Member when that Act was passed; he might have a better institutional memory than mine when it comes to the debates that led up to that. My experience of it was as a practitioner and recorder, having to make sure that defendants complied with the requirement. The sex offenders register is not a court order but a statutory obligation that follows automatically on conviction.

I come back to the exceptions order, whose primary use is for employment purposes. The amendment that we are discussing is not, of course, employment related: it relates only to the consideration of evidence of spent convictions in inquiries caused to be held under the Inquiries Act 2005. Although a number of judicial proceedings are exempt from the protections of disclosure—in those proceedings, there is no restriction on considering or basing conclusions on spent conviction information—inquiries made under the 2005 Act are not currently exempt.

Examples of proceedings that are exempt include circumstances ranging from solicitor and police disciplinary proceedings, to proceedings relating to taxi driver and security licences. We feel that the work of inquiries set up under the 2005 Act is necessarily of such public interest and importance that they must have the ability to consider all the evidence relevant to their work. To extend that ability to these inquiries, we must amend the exceptions order.

The draft instrument is necessary to amend the order to enable inquiries caused to be held under the 2005 Act to admit and consider evidence of convictions and cautions that have become spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, where it is necessary to fulfil the terms of reference of that inquiry; the word “relevance” again comes very much into play.

We recognise the importance of the 1974 Act, which offers vital protections to people with convictions. We improved those protections in 2014, reducing the amount of time that most people with convictions had to wait before their convictions became spent. As I mentioned in responding to the intervention made by the right hon. Member for Delyn (David Hanson), we are considering proposals for further reform to the 1974 Act following the recommendations made by various reviews in recent years, including those carried out by the Justice Committee, on which the right hon. Gentleman serves.

There are demanding criteria for inclusion on the exceptions order. Our proposed inclusion would be the first addition to the order in three years. As I said, the amendment proposed here is not about employment; it relates only to the consideration of evidence of spent convictions and cautions in judicial proceedings—namely, before inquiries caused to be held under the Inquiries Act 2005.

Understandably, their lordships raised concerns in the other place about granting all inquiries the right to consider spent convictions and the effect that would have on individual rights. I want to make it crystal clear that we have proposed to extend this power only to a limited number of inquiries; as I said, we are talking only about inquiries set up under the 2005 Act, so non-statutory inquiries, such as both the Butler and Chilcot inquiries on the Iraq war, would not be covered by this legislation.

This legislation applies only to inquiries where considering spent convictions is necessary to fulfil their terms of reference. An inquiry’s terms of reference are set by the Minister, in consultation with the chairman of the inquiry. That provides an element of individual consideration of whether the exception should apply to each inquiry that ensures that this will not apply indiscriminately. Frankly, considering spent convictions will not be necessary for the vast majority of inquiries. In other words, the measure already has a limited application.

Our view is that sufficient safeguards are in place to ensure that individual rights—the issue that concerned their lordships—are preserved as far as is necessary. Under section 1 of the Inquiries Act 2005, inquiries are caused to be held by a Minister when particular events have caused, or are capable of causing, public concern, or there is public concern that particular events have occurred. As such, inquiries by design are held only where they are in the public interest, so any limited interference with an offender’s article 8 right to private life under the European convention on human rights would be necessary and proportionate.

Article 8 enshrines the right to respect for private life, but that is a qualified right. Subsection (2) provides that there shall be no interference with that right except such as is in accordance with the law and necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety, or the economic wellbeing of the country, or else for the prevention of disorder or crime, the protection of health or morals or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. Section 19 of the 2005 Act has specific regard to these rights, in as far as they ought be protected, but it does so in a way that enables the inquiry to fulfil its terms of reference and consider matters necessary in the public interest. In that way, the 2005 Act directly reflects the qualified nature of the right to privacy.

[Robert Neill]

The Minister is being most generous, but will he help me? He asserts, in terms, that if the inquiry is set up under the Act, it automatically triggers some of the exemptions to article 8. What is the remedy, however, if a person who is to be called as a witness by the inquiry is aggrieved and wishes to challenge the finding of the inquiry chair to admit the evidence of a spent conviction? Would there be a judicial review in the ordinary way?

[Robert Buckland]

There would be a judicial review. That point was considered carefully in the other place. I readily accept and deal full on with the potentially onerous nature of having to bring a judicial review to challenge proceedings. But as I have said, the filter system that any chair would have to operate is considerable. There are safeguards and guarantees in respect of anonymity and publication that provide the sort of safeguard that, if misapplied, would quickly and obviously attract criticism when a higher court came to scrutinise the decision process.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I am always wary of extending powers that can trespass upon the convention rights of citizens and generally wary of giving blanket powers to organs of the state. I am very much in favour of the rehabilitation of offenders legislation and spent convictions. As the right hon. Member for Delyn (David Hanson) observed, the Justice Committee recently published a report that urges the Government to consider reducing the amount of disclosure that is required, particularly in relation to spent convictions that occurred when the person concerned was a child or young person. There is no doubt that that is a desirable course of action, because the inappropriate and unnecessary disclosure of spent convictions can be a serious bar to rehabilitation—I think we would all be as one on that.

That is why I looked twice when I saw this statutory instrument; I looked at it with some care and at what was said about it in the other place. On balance, having listened to the Minister’s careful and thoughtful explanation, and with all respect to the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), who spoke from the Opposition Front Bench and for whom I have great regard, I find that the objection to it is ill-founded. This is enabling legislation, in the sense that, I understand, it makes provision for spent convictions to be admitted in particular classes of statutory inquiry where they are relevant—it is not general legislation insisting that this should happen. As the Minister rightly said, the relevance test has to be met in any event.

One or two questions are raised that we could helpfully think about. First, it is asserted that there may be a risk of people being dissuaded from becoming witnesses at an inquiry if the provision is in force. With respect to the Opposition Front Bencher, I am not convinced by that, because the same would happen under the ad hocery arrangement that is suggested. If someone were likely to be a witness in a particular inquiry, they would be put off as much by ad hoc secondary legislation as by the generally enabling provision before the House.

[Victoria Prentis]

Does my hon. Friend agree that as statutory inquiries have the ability to summons witnesses, as much as many courts do, that would deal with the issue?

[Robert Neill]

That is precisely right. Someone summoned to give evidence to a statutory inquiry would be obliged to come forward. With all due respect, it seems to me that it is a false point that should not weigh on us.

The second point is that even when people are summoned there is still a safeguard. It seems to me that the safeguard of the application of the test of relevance, in what is after all an inquisitorial process, as opposed to the criminal, adversarial one, is proper and appropriate. I am concerned about the potential cost of somebody having to seek a judicial review, because that process is lengthy and difficult.

[Robert Buckland]

One of the great functions of this debate is to tease out some of the issues. Before public inquiries are published, is there not a Maxwellisation process whereby individuals who might be referred to in a way that is potentially adverse to their interests are notified? Is that not another safeguard?

[Robert Neill]

It is indeed; my hon. and learned Friend anticipates the point I was about to move on to. A series of steps and procedures have to be gone through in relation to a statutory inquiry, and that puts the person concerned on clear notice that the issue may become relevant and may be raised. They then have the opportunity to make representations before the chair of the inquiry. Should the ruling go against them, there is then the fall-back position of a judicial review.

Out of a sense of fairness, and taking an approach of equality of arms, if someone is summoned to give evidence before a statutory inquiry and it is likely that a spent conviction is going to be considered as being admissible and argument is going to take place on those grounds, that person, if they are not otherwise legally represented already, ought to have the ability to be legally represented. I urge my hon. and learned Friend to consider, where appropriate, with those in his Department who deal with matters of legal aid, that that person, if they are not represented either as part of a class or group or because of their own means, should have access to legal aid to argue before the inquiry whether the spent conviction should be admitted. It involves a very small sum of money because in practice it is likely to happen only on a limited number of occasions.

That would be an appropriate additional safeguard from the point of view of equality of arms. I hope that my hon. and learned Friend will take that point away. Subject to that request, it seems to me that the safeguards are met. It is better to deal with this matter with one piece of legislation rather than to come back on an ad hoc basis.

I hope that this discussion also reminds us all of the advantage of having legally qualified inquiry chairs. Non-statutory inquiries that do not have legally qualified chairs have sometimes spiralled out of control because the chairs are not adept at dealing with, for example, the admissibility of evidence or case management generally, in the same way as a judge is able to. Perhaps that lesson can be taken away, too, but that should not stand in the way of our supporting a useful and proportionate statutory instrument, having weighed up all the pros and cons, as we have in this debate.

Oral Answers to Questions

Robert Neill Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

The hon. Gentleman raises a very important and sensitive point. I should add that the prison chaplaincy service provides invaluable support for many prison officers who are struggling. I will meet him about this issue. The current figures record deaths in service. Clearly, the issue of mental health and people taking their own lives has to be addressed.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

May I start by welcoming my hon. and learned Friend to his post? I think this is the first question time that he has taken in his new role.

Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that it is important that we not only pay the highest tribute to the dedication and professionalism of the men and women of our Prison Service, but recognise that the pressures that they face come in no small measure from the difficulty of establishing secure regimes and stability within our prisons? Will he take on board the recommendations of the Justice Committee—in particular, our suggestion for a workforce strategy across the whole of the Prison Service?

[Robert Buckland]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. I pay tribute to the work of his Committee. We have seen welcome increases in the number of prison officers, and that will help with stability. Retention rates are very important. I will certainly study very carefully the recommendations of his Committee, and work with him and other Members to make sure that we achieve our common goal.

--- Later in debate ---

[Edward Argar]

As I mentioned in response to a previous question, I have increased by 10% the funding available to rape and sexual violence support services. The hon. Gentleman highlights a specific case, and I would be delighted to meet him to discuss it.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

Both as a constituency MP and when I look at the media, I am concerned by increasing reports of cases being adjourned, often at the last minute, for the lack of a judge being available, particularly in the Crown and county courts. At the same time, courtrooms sit empty and Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service is not advertising vacancies for recorders—part-time judges who are willing and able to fill those vacancies. Will the Minister urgently investigate what appears to be a lack of joined-up government by HMCTS?

[Paul Maynard]

I am very aware of this issue, which I have been discussing with various people at the top end of HMCTS. It is important that we recruit sufficient judges, on which we need to do better. I will happily discuss it with my hon. Friend and provide a fuller answer when I appear before his Select Committee next week.

Probation Reform

Robert Neill Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. This is an important statement and I am keen to accommodate all would-be questioners on it, but I remind the House that there are two debates to follow, the protection of time for which is also a priority for the Chair. Therefore, notwithstanding the insatiable enthusiasm of colleagues for putting full inquiries on this matter, I appeal for brevity.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I will do my best, Mr Speaker.

I welcome this statement and I hope that anyone who cares about the criminal justice system will also welcome it. It is a good thing for Governments to reflect on experience and adjust policy and that is what the Secretary of State should be commended for doing. Does he agree that a critical part of the new arrangements must be to ensure sentencer confidence and that, therefore, not only must there be continuity of supervision, but an assurance to sentencers of the quality of supervision? Will he perhaps look at means by which the judiciary can be better involved in the follow-up to sentencing to ensure that that is the case?

[Mr Gauke]

That is a very interesting point and certainly something that I am keen to explore. The Chairman of the Justice Committee has hit the nail on the head: sentencer confidence is key. It is well known that there is support across the House for trying to move away from short custodial sentences that appear to be ineffective when it comes to rehabilitation. If we are to move away from that, we need to ensure that we have robust alternatives—robust community sentences—available, and we need to build the confidence for that and this plays a part in achieving exactly that.

Prisons and Probation

Robert Neill Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Delyn (David Hanson), my very well respected colleague on the Justice Committee. I am always immensely grateful for the contribution that he and other Members make to the work of our Committee. There might be the odd difference in nuance and tone, but there is broad agreement between us in the factual conclusions of our Select Committee reports. They are cross-party reports, and they are based on evidence, so I am with him on many of the points that he made.

In fairness, it is right to say that the Secretary of State has struck exactly the right tone. I congratulate him on doing so. It is not the first time in recent weeks that he has made an important speech on prisons policy and on other matters. The tone he struck in looking at the evidence has all too often been missing from the debate on prisons and on justice policy more generally on both sides of the political divide. I therefore welcome his tone and approach, and I broadly agree with where he is coming from.

There is not, to my mind, a need for a rigid, ideological division. There are differences on the evidence on prisons and probation. I think that the evidence of a mixed prisons economy makes it clear that good work is done in a number of private sector prisons. There are failures in those prisons, as there are failures in public sector prisons—the evidence provided by the chief inspector demonstrates that clearly. The issue is not who manages prison contracts—perhaps with the exception of facilities management failures, a specific area—but what we expect prisons and their staff to do on behalf of society and to achieve with the people sent there by the courts on behalf of the state. It is what we do to help them to ensure that prisoners are kept safely and decently, protecting the public, deterring reoffending and turning around the lives of those who go to prison so that they are less likely to reoffend and there are fewer victims of crime as a result.

Under Governments of all parties, we have not managed to achieve that satisfactorily for the past few decades—it is not a short-term thing—and investment is needed in some cases. I welcome the additional prison officers, but greater thought is needed, not just in the House but by society as a whole, about what we expect prison and the justice system to do. Ultimately, we can never make prisons places of rehabilitation and reform unless they are safe—when my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) was Prisons Minister he got that absolutely right—but, realistically, we cannot do that unless we continue to put in the number of people that we currently do. To achieve that in a safe fashion that has public confidence, it is critical that we spend much more time and energy in our debate finding robust and viable alternatives that punish people in the community, rather than simply warehousing them in prison institutions, which is counterproductive for everyone. I very much welcome the Government’s willingness to look again at the presumption against shorter sentences, as has happened elsewhere.

There are important things in the prisons debate, but I, too, am not going to dwell on them as much as other matters. My hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) is going to speak about prisons in particular, but I want to return, as the right hon. Member for Delyn did, to transforming rehabilitation and the probation system.

This morning, the Justice Committee heard from Dame Glenys Stacey, the chief inspector of probation, for the last time, as she is coming the end of her three-year tenure. She has done an excellent job. She has been robust and frank, and she has spoken truth to power, as an inspector should. She has not pulled her punches when necessary. The evidence that she has found is entirely consistent with evidence that the Select Committee found in a number of its reports, particularly one that we have recently published. It is entirely consistent, too, with the findings of the National Audit Office and those of the Public Accounts Committee. When, separately, four bodies produce reports based on essentially the same evidence and come to the same conclusions, the Secretary of the State and the Prisons Minister—I warmly welcome him to his post—who have been brought up professionally to work on evidence, know that it is time for change.

I submit urgently to the Secretary of State that, whatever the good intentions behind the transforming rehabilitation programme, partly because of the pace at which it was undertaken, and partly because of the intrinsic nature of the probation service as a social service, which is different from the Prison Service in many ways, it has failed to achieve many of the laudable objectives set for it. It has not created greater diversity of provision and, above all, it has not succeeded in bringing the voluntary sector into probation work in the way that had been hoped. Most importantly, it has—like it or lump it—lost the confidence of many sentencers. If we are to achieve the objective I mentioned of developing robust alternatives to custody so that we do not overcrowd our prisons, it is critical that we have a system of supervision in the community, either as an alternative to custody or on release from custody, that commands the confidence of the sentencer—the judge and the magistrate —as well as of the public. It is very clear that that has not been achieved under the current arrangements.

The point about risk is an important one, as our report stressed. On all the evidence that we heard, the division of risk at the point of sentence and on the basis of the offence is, in reality, arbitrary. It is a snapshot in time that is then frozen for the rest of the offender’s supervision, whereas in reality the evidence is clear that risk will change. If the supervision goes well, it will decrease, but in certain circumstances it may increase. This is not an efficient division of risk to have. It is interesting that a different approach has been taken in Wales. One of the reasons that is worth looking at is that it could enable us not to have that arbitrary division of risk. I hope that my right hon. and learned Friends will look at the practicality of how that works out, because this is a critical issue.

Another significant thing that Dame Glenys stressed to us is the way in which the contracts were written. The problem is that probation work—which is, of its nature, dealing with people with complex circumstances in quite often changing and difficult environments—cannot easily be distilled into a set of contractual requirements, which might be easier to do, in some circumstances, within a closed institution.

The current contractual systems model does not succeed in achieving either innovation or the sharing of good practice, because there is no reward for either of those things. The Secretary of State’s review and consultation now gives us an opportunity to look at that. He was right to terminate the CRC contracts early, because they were simply not delivering what had been sought and intended. It is clear, on the evidence, that just recreating them would not be the answer. It would be more sensible to look at alternatives that, on the evidence, address the systemic problems that we now know are there but were perhaps not foreseen at the time.

There are areas that need to be looked at in relation to people with particular vulnerabilities—for example, the particularly high number of young offenders with black and minority ethnic characteristics going through our probation system, and the particular difficulties of female offenders, many of whom, of course, have themselves been victims of abuse or other types of offence in the past. There is the real problem that we have with through-the-gate services, where clearly not enough is being done to discharge people from prison into circumstances where they will not be tempted to fall back into reoffending. I hope, in particular, that when the Secretary of State looks at new models for dealing with probation services, he will look specifically at the need to secure accommodation for people on release. Indeed, securing accommodation for people who are being supervised in the community as an alternative is central to the probation process. All the evidence clearly says that the best means of keeping out of trouble are a home, a job, and a family or support system relationship.

[Victoria Prentis]

My hon. Friend is making a fabulous speech. Will he comment specifically on the evidence we heard this morning showing that one in five prisoners have nowhere to sleep on the night they are released?

[Robert Neill]

That was very shocking evidence indeed. Frankly, it is an indictment of every one of us that we are releasing people under those circumstances. I have here a piece of evidence from, I think, a visit to a CRC premises in south-east London, not far from my constituency, that was trying to supervise people who were sleeping in church halls, or sleeping rough in a graveyard or on the night bus. It is an obscenity, frankly, if we are releasing people from prison, with the objective of trying to get them to turn their lives around, and they are trying to live under those conditions. It makes rehabilitation work impossible. Getting those things right is actually much more important than the argument about who owns, manages and runs the service; they are fundamental issues. I believe that the Secretary of State has the opportunity, the willingness and the determination to do that.

Both the Secretary of State and the new Minister of State, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Robert Buckland), are used to working on the basis of the evidence. Both they and I are also proud to hail from the one nation tradition within our party. That tradition reminds us that Conservative Members have always had a long-standing belief in social reform, as Members of other parties do, too. No one party has a monopoly on that. Getting prison and our criminal justice system right is a great cause of social reform, and I believe that the Secretary of State and the Minister get that and understand it. Equally, though, if all the evidence points one way, then that is the decision that the tribunal comes to. If they put those two things together, we have an opportunity to make progress in the coming weeks—I hope—and months.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the powerful speech by the hon. Member for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock) and friends from across the House who broadly take the same view on the progress we need to make with the probation system. I am not going to focus on that. My views are carefully set out in the report of the Justice Committee and have been well rehearsed by my colleagues from the Committee on both sides of the House. However, I noted carefully what the Secretary of State had to say, and I am extremely hopeful that we will have an announcement or statement from him in the very near future. I hope the result will be one that we all applaud.

As ever, I would like to talk about prisons. It always shocks me how empty the Chamber is when we discuss prisons. If we are serious about helping the lowest strata of society, we surely have a fairly obvious place to look to find them. I for one was very grateful that the Opposition chose this subject for today’s debate.

I am fortunate to represent one of the biggest constituencies in the country. The number of my electors is broadly the same as the number of adult men in prison. The point I am making is that there are a lot of people in prison, a lot of families affected and, perhaps more importantly, a lot of future victims who are affected by our failure to treat people and by the breeding of future criminals in prisons as they are run at the moment. We must accept that about a fifth of prisoners are sex offenders and that nearly all of them will be released into our communities. Members know that I spend a lot of my time here arguing in favour of prison reform, but the most compelling reason for me to do that is that we must save future victims from crimes that will ruin their lives.

The Justice Committee has written not only a marvellous report about transforming rehabilitation, but a big report on the prison population—for me, it is our magnum opus—which I hope the new Minister, the hon. and learned Member for South Swindon (Robert Buckland), has read and digested and will return to many times during his tenure. I will whizz through the main recommendations of that report and then give him some jobs for the rest of the week.

Our report’s first recommendation is that:

“The prison population has become increasingly challenging in nature, with prisoners often having complex health and social needs. Many have learning disabilities or mental health conditions”,

and that the Ministry of Justice needs to

“acknowledge the challenge it faces and demonstrate that it has a long-term strategy”.

Secondly, the prison population is projected to grow, and the existing approach “limits the scope” for the Ministry thinking more laterally about planning for that growth. The report states that the “more challenging mix” of those sentenced to custody is likely to be partly attributable to the impact of wider social factors over which the Ministry has no control, but the Ministry and prison officers have to pick up the pieces.

The third recommendation is that

“Trends in ethnicity and the social drivers of complex and challenging behaviour should be more explicitly identified”.

Fourthly:

“To close the large gap between the money allocated to prisons by the Treasury and the current costs of running and maintaining them, the Ministry of Justice has estimated that it would have to reduce the prison population by 20,000 places. By the Ministry’s own admission this is not achievable under existing strategies and funding arrangements.”

How will the Minister possibly close that gap?

We have got to take prison reform seriously. This is my fourth Prisons Minister. There have been six Secretaries of State for Justice since 2010. All of them—certainly the Prisons Ministers—have been one nation, compassionate Conservatives. I stalk their every movement, as this Minister will find out, and I count them among my closest friends in this place; I hope it is mutual. It is really important that the current Minister can stay in place for long enough to make substantive change.

[Robert Neill]

Unless he is in the Cabinet.

[Victoria Prentis]

Oh no, he is not going anywhere—this is a long-term sentence! I have the highest regard for the current Minister. He has done more than his fair share of heavy lifting in the impasse on Brexit. I offer him the following suggestions with affection, but they are urgent, and I wish him to do them immediately.

No. 1, we must accept that diversion from custody is the only answer for sentences shorter than 12 months. To do that, we need robust alternatives, not a “get out of jail free” card. Once we have those in place, we need to re-educate judges, who in my experience—as the Minister knows, I know at least one extremely well—are kind, well-motivated and have seen it all before. We need legislation to reduce the number of short sentences. We have to stop churn through the prison gates.

No. 2, we need a full review of categorisation. It strikes me that several Members here today are well placed to lead that review; I am not looking too hard at any Member on either side of the Chamber. We know from Lord Farmer’s review that being close to family reduces reoffending. Current categorisation is holding us back. We have new evidence about the age of maturity, particularly in boys, which needs to be fed into decisions on where we place people.

No. 3, the Minister needs to have on his desk—in my view, every morning, but possibly every week—figures on the regime, by which I mean hours outside cells and numbers of people in segregation, for every prison in the country. Only then can he truly evaluate what is going on. I would be grateful if he shared those figures with the Justice Committee. While he is at it, could he ask for monthly figures on imprisonment for public protection and share them with us? That would be really helpful.

No. 4, we need to end Friday releases immediately. There is no excuse for releasing people at the end of the week, when services are simply not available to help them.

No. 5, we need to evaluate why and when we make children and young people disclose their criminal records. We know that it ruins their lives. A diverse group of MPs are championing that, from my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) to the right hon. Members for Warley (John Spellar) and for Tottenham (Mr Lammy). The Home Office and the MOJ need to decide who is responsible for that policy and act as soon as possible. It is not right for any child’s life to be ruined by an early misdemeanour.

No. 6, for years we described—and I described in court—our sex offender training programmes as the gold standard. A substantial amount was spent on producing those programmes, but they have conclusively been proved to have failed. Can we evaluate the programmes we have put in their place? The number of sex offenders is growing.

No. 7, we need to block mobile phone reception in prisons now—why on earth not?

No. 8, we need to provide a £37,000 scanner for every prison to stop drugs getting in. Everybody from the Minister down needs to go through them. There was a major stabbing of a prison officer in Bullingdon Prison in my constituency last week.

No. 9, prisons are places of radicalisation. We need to grasp that and not lock people of similar views together simply because it makes control easier. A categorisation review might give us evidence to help with that.

No. 10 is on race. We need to be honest. It is not right that a black woman is more than twice as likely to be arrested as a white woman. I am pleased that the all-party parliamentary group on women in the penal system will look into the arrest of women. More than half the inmates held in prisons for young people in England and Wales at the moment are from a black and minority ethnic background. That is an extraordinary figure and not one to be proud of, and real change is needed. In short, I fear there will come a point when the Minister wishes he was back with the withdrawal agreement Bill.

Oral Answers to Questions

Robert Neill Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gauke]

We are very clear that the best way forward is to reach a deal. That is what the Government are endeavouring to achieve and support from across the House would be quite helpful in delivering that.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

The Solicitor General’s evidence to the Justice Committee was indeed crystal clear. Does my right hon. Friend also agree that it is critical for civil justice co-operation that there should be a deal? None of the ambitious objectives for future collaboration would work if there is no deal. For example, mutual recognition and enforceability of judgments in civil and family law cases would fall away immediately in the event of no deal.

[Mr Gauke]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight these issues. We have made progress in our negotiations, particularly in the context of family law. It is to the advantage of citizens in the UK and the EU that a deal is reached, which will enable us to enforce judgments in this area. Our ambitions are to go further and, in terms of the future framework, to make further progress on civil judicial co-operation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Edward Argar]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her question. I know that she has a sustained interest in this area. She will be aware that we increased funding for specialist rape and sexual abuse support services, including for child sexual abuse, from April this year. That means a 10% increase in funding, a move to three-year rather than annual settlements, and support for 96 centres across England and Wales—the highest number that the MOJ has ever funded—ensuring that support services are available in each of the police and crime commissioner areas.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

The law regarding the sentencing of offenders has grown piecemeal and become ever more complex, even for experienced judges and practitioners. Bearing that in mind and noting that comparatively uncontroversial legislation is being sought for a future Queen’s Speech, would not paving legislation for the Law Commission’s sentencing code consolidation Bill absolutely fit the bill?

[Mr Gauke]

The Chair of the Justice Committee makes a good point. There is cross-party support on the matter, and I hope that we can make progress in the not-too-distant future.

Disclosure of Youth Criminal Records

Robert Neill Excerpts

Thursday 28th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the First Report of the Justice Committee, Disclosure of youth criminal records, HC 416, and the Government response, Cm 9559.

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I thank the House for giving us the opportunity to debate the report, and my friends and colleagues on the Select Committee on Justice who contributed to it. I am glad to see such a good turnout when other things are happening today as well.

This is an important issue, and not merely a technical one. Although some of the law and regulations around it are complex, we have concluded that it directly affects people’s lives and that the current state of our arrangements is frankly unsatisfactory and unfit for purpose. The gist of what we say is that change is needed, and so far we detect a lack of urgency in addressing that. As a consequence, injustice and, frankly, social harm are being done by the failure to modernise a system that has not kept pace with developments in a number of areas.

I will first address the background to our report. In October 2016, the Justice Committee in the previous Parliament decided to launch an inquiry into disclosure of youth criminal records, partly as a follow-up to the inquiry that we had conducted on the treatment of young adults in the criminal justice system, a substantial report in itself, and partly because of a number of representations that we had received from the non-governmental organisation sector. I refer particularly to the evidence that has been given to us by Unlock and the Standing Committee for Youth Justice, and pay tribute to the work that those organisations do in this field.

In consequence, we had an inquiry in which we took oral and written evidence, but we also held a private seminar with individuals who had been personally affected by this problem. I think many policy makers would benefit from seeing and hearing from those people face to face about the real effects of the system upon them. They were able to talk about the effect on them of their childhood offences—that is the point, as we are often not talking about recent offences, but offences committed when people were children—being disclosed when they were adults, often some time down the track.

One of the many unforeseen consequences of the dissolution of Parliament in May 2017 was that the Committee was unable to produce its report, so one of our first decisions in this Parliament was to revisit it and produce an updated report on what we regard as an important issue, basing it on the evidence that our predecessor Committee had already heard. We published a report on 27 October 2017.

Having set out the chronology, let me give an overview of the background to the system. The criminal records disclosure regime, as I am sure many hon. Members know, is operated by the Disclosure and Barring Service, or DBS. For certain professional jobs, and certainly for work involving contact with children or vulnerable adults, the DBS has, for perfectly good reasons, to provide a standard or enhanced disclosure certificate, which can disclose all criminal records. That includes criminal records that otherwise would be regarded as spent.

There is a so-called filtering system, which allows some spent criminal records to be filtered out of disclosure so that they will not be revealed on the standard or enhanced DBS certificates. The idea behind the filtering system was that it was supposed to allow the disclosure regime to operate in a more proportionate manner, but the evidence that we have heard drives us to the conclusion that, in practice, the filtering system incorporates some significant exceptions, meaning that many offences are not filterable throughout the lifetime of an offender.

[Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that the UK system for disclosure of childhood criminal records is among the harshest in the world when compared with equivalent developed countries? Although I am a believer in a firm justice system that punishes crimes appropriately, I do not think it is fair for people to have to live for the rest of their lives with the consequences of terrible mistakes they may have made in childhood.

[Robert Neill]

I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend; that is precisely the problem. The disclosure system is an immensely blunt instrument and forgets that, as well as being a punishment, any sensible criminal justice system must encourage reform and rehabilitation. Whatever the no doubt good intentions behind it, the way the system operates is counterproductive in that regard.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

For people who perhaps did not have the most advantaged background, let us suppose there is a fight in a school playground that leads to the police being called. That might lead to a conviction for actual bodily harm that is non-filterable. Yet, if they had been born in more affluent circumstances, I am quite sure the police would never have been called and that person would never have gone on to have their life blighted in the same way. Does my hon. Friend agree that we must ensure that this fact is not an impediment to social mobility?

[Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend makes a characteristically significant and thoughtful point. I can think of instances both from my constituency casebook and from childhood friends of mine who got into exactly that situation. That is not what the system was intended for. He is right that it is without doubt discriminatory in a number of regards.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is recalling childhood friends of his own, but will he also reflect on childhood today? There is a whole suite of crimes and temptations resulting from social media—let us think of sexting, where someone might get a criminal offence aged 15 or 16 for inappropriate behaviour with a girlfriend or whoever. Can it really be right that an employer, years later when the person is into their early 30s, should need or want that information? If the employer gets that information, what exactly are they expected to do about it? I am thinking of us, employing young people; do we really want to know that that happened 10 years ago?

[Robert Neill]

That is, again, an entirely fair and perceptive point, and it is quite true. One of the other issues that we have not yet touched on, but that I hope we will in the course of the debate, is the way that the system no longer reflects modern technology and the ability to Google to find out other things about people. None of that was there when this scheme was set in place. Surely the objective is to be proportionate and to be relevant, but that is not the case at the moment.

[Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for this impactful debate. He has mentioned the impact of new technology, particularly Google, and it is a matter for great concern that everything that has happened in an individual’s past is stored in perpetuity on the internet. Does he agree that the fact that information is easily available for so long can render the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 essentially toothless, and that that is something we ought to look further at in this place?

[Robert Neill]

Again, my hon. Friend raises a fair point—it is not the immediate subject of our inquiry, but it is a good point. Perhaps, in our joint work on the Select Committee, that is something we could look at taking forward, because there is no doubt that that legislation has also failed to keep in touch with changes in science and technology.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Further to exactly that point, although it is not directly relevant to the discussion here, we must all accept the fact that that information is held independently and above that which we can legislate for in this place. I am aware that work is coming forward from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to address that, but, in all honesty, although we can tamper at the edges and change things in ways that make us feel better and directly make the lives of young offenders better, unless we can control how information about private individuals is used, we can have very little effect on the future.

[Robert Neill]

That is certainly true, and it indicates the need for a much more joined-up and holistic approach to dealing with this matter. I am sure it is something we need to return to and address. Although it can only deal with a part of that problem, disclosure and barring needs to be resolved itself. The updating of the whole approach to dealing with criminal records, disclosure of information and the regulation of social media is important, because all of them can get in the way of helping people to turn their lives around.

The point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) about examples from other countries is significant. Our criminal justice system has some of the worst reoffending results among our comparators, and one reason for that is the difficulty of getting people back into employment, education, homes, work and relationships. To a greater or lesser degree, the mechanistic operation of the current disclosure and barring system can be a bar to people moving on in those directions, all of which, the evidence overwhelmingly shows, make people less likely to reoffend. We are getting in the way of that.

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the cumulative impact of disclosing youth criminal records is an avoidable barrier to employment, education and housing, which can be devastating for a young person and can lead to long-term adverse effects way into adulthood?

[Robert Neill]

Yes it is, and the evidence, as I will perhaps demonstrate if I make a bit more progress, shows exactly that. That is entirely the problem that we find. The particular difficulty is that the system is not only mechanistic but is in practice arbitrary—there is no real discretion—and has no right of appeal to speak of. None of those can be just.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) and others pointed out, certain things can be filtered out, but that is arbitrary. A single conviction can be filtered out, provided it did not result in a custodial sentence, was not for a listed offence—broadly, a serious offence, although that is probably not the issue most of us would take, as other bits come into it later—and that more than 11 years have elapsed since the date of the convictions. All the evidence suggests that, nowadays, for young men in particular, maturity and desisting from criminal behaviour kick in around the age of 25. Eleven years back from that, they could have been convicted as a teenager for exactly the sort of stupid incident that my hon. Friend referred to, which would then not be filterable at a time when they sought to move into education and work. That is an obstacle, as the evidence clearly shows, and it is no longer realistic, in our submission.

Single offences can be filtered provided that the sentence was non-custodial and was not a listed offence, as well as that more than 11 years have elapsed since the date of the conviction, or more than five and a half years if the person was under 18. That could still be within a key time when they were moving into their mid-20s and getting jobs.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Are there not two further problems? First, the Government’s response seems to be that employers should exercise discretion, but many small employers play safety first, do not exercise discretion and just treat any disclosure as a bar to employment. A second area that causes considerable problems for many people is that if they move between police areas, that can cause considerable delays as their case moves between those areas, and again they lose out on those opportunities. That is economically inefficient, and it is also devastating on their lives in the way that the hon. Gentleman describes.

[Robert Neill]

That is absolutely right, and it tallies with some of the examples given to us directly by people who have been through the system. I agree entirely that it does not make sense.

Let us look at the remaining bits of the system. We have filtering for single convictions. Single or multiple cautions for lesser offences can be filtered out once six years have elapsed, or two years if the person was under 18 at the time. That structure is complicated enough, frankly, but we then get to what we cannot filter, including convictions and cautions for listed offences and multiple convictions for lesser offences, no matter how long ago they happened and regardless of the circumstances.

Those of us who have practised criminal law can think of many instances in which it is perfectly possible to charge more than one offence arising out of the same set of facts. For example, actual bodily harm and a theft, both of which ended up in a conditional discharge or a fine; two offences of theft; or two assaults, because more than one person was involved in a stupid fight. Those are multiple and cannot be filtered, however much time has gone by. That, to us, seems to be nonsense. The view of many witnesses to our inquiry is that the system is complex and arbitrary. It is a blunt instrument, it is restrictive and it is disproportionate. It has exactly the problems that the right hon. Member for Warley (John Spellar) mentioned.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

I completely agree on the need for flexibility in the system. If we are interested in rehabilitation and support for offenders, there is an argument that, for example, schools should be told something of the past activity of an individual, particularly if mental health issues were involved, so that they could provide the necessary support to make sure that the individual was looked after.

[Robert Neill]

It is ironic. At the moment we have a box-ticking exercise in which a conviction can be disclosed. As the right hon. Member for Warley rightly said, an employer may well have 200 applicants for a post so will simply play safe and delete anybody who has ticked the conviction box, regardless of how relevant that is for the job that they seek to employ a person to do. That is a burden for a small employer.

However, frequently when people apply for jobs through large employment agencies, it is almost as if an algorithm exists and that anyone who ticks the box is automatically filtered out by the computer system before their application gets any farther. None of those show the level of discretion that was perhaps anticipated when the scheme was drawn up. But it is not fair to push the burden on to employers. There is an obligation on the state and Government to set up a fair and appropriate regime that gives them comfort that they can make appropriate checks and that equally helps people to rehabilitate themselves.

The other point is the disproportionate impact on young people. That may seem obvious, but I do not think it is really recognised by those who run the system. The qualifying period of five and a half years is a great proportion of a child’s life, and is perhaps one of the most critical portions of a young person’s life as they grow up, mature and move into the employment, work and qualification phase. To have this hanging over them then, rather than further down the track, could not come at a worse time. There is not enough recognition of that.

The Law Commission gave compelling evidence to us, observing that the filtering regime might be well regarded as disproportionately harsh on young offenders. Our report concluded that too many childhood offences are unfiltered, undermining rehabilitation and denying children—which is what they were at the time they committed the offences—a second chance. We urge the Government to revise that as a matter of urgency. We also heard powerful evidence on the adverse effect that childhood criminal records have on employment, education and housing, as well as on insurance and visas for travel—everyday things, not the obvious things that we think about. We heard clear evidence of the discriminatory and adverse impact of that.

[John Howell]

My hon. Friend mentioned insurance, which includes car insurance. We rely on cars for our jobs, for pleasure and for all sorts of things. The way that insurance companies look out for these people is not very helpful at all and can leave people in difficult situations.

[Robert Neill]

Absolutely. Because it is blunt, employers and insurers will inevitably take the risk-averse approach. I do not entirely blame them for doing that; the system does not help them to be proportionate and more careful in their judgment than would otherwise have been the case. We also concluded that there is clear evidence of particular impacts on black and minority ethnic children and those who came through the care system, as I think my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham hinted.

[Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman is making extremely good points. This is a thorough and excellent report on changing things for young people in the justice system. He mentioned young people in the justice and care systems. Does he agree that many issues arising at that time in a young person’s life are almost a cry for help because of adverse childhood experiences, particularly trauma? We need to do more within the system on help and remediation rather than directly on punishment.

[Robert Neill]

That, too, is a fair point. Certainly my experience as a lawyer representing people coming through the system was that there were instances of serious behaviour that had to be punished, but very often—this was particularly the case with younger offenders—offenders are also victims of other offending and there are underlying causes that too blunt an approach, such as that which we have, does not help.

We made a number of recommendations. Rehabilitation periods under the 1974 Act should be reduced. There should be an urgent review of the filtering regime, for the reasons we have set out. There should be a presumption against disclosure of so-called non-conviction intelligence, which is held on the police national database. That is legitimate for intelligence purposes, but there should not be arbitrary disclosure of it in the way that happens at the moment, particularly where the allegations on the database were made during someone’s childhood. Individuals should have a right to apply for a review prior to disclosure of their criminal record. That exists in Scotland and Northern Ireland, but not in England and Wales, and we see no reason for that distinction.

The Ban the Box approach, which has been pioneered under recent Governments and is used by some employers, delays the point at which a job applicant discloses criminal records to a prospective employer. That is sensible because it allows the employer, first, to look at the application on its merits and then, if disclosure is appropriate, to see whether the conviction makes any difference to the person’s employability.

[John Spellar]

The hon. Gentleman is rightly and very ably identifying all the issues that the current system causes for individuals and their families and therefore the impact on society if they fail to be rehabilitated. Is not there also an overall, macroeconomic issue, particularly as a number of employers are expressing concerns about shortfalls in labour either leading up to or following Brexit? Artificially restricting people from working and, indeed, from advancing is not just bad for those individuals, shocking though that is, but very bad for society and the economy.

[Robert Neill]

That is an unanswerable point, because we can see that people who are kept unwillingly in economic inactivity—

[John Spellar]

Or low-paid jobs.

[Robert Neill]

Low-paid and unsatisfactory jobs create burdens at every level, so the point is entirely true.

[Mr Lammy]

rose—

[Liz Saville Roberts]

rose—

[Robert Neill]

Let me just make one more point and then I will give way. I want to deal with the Government response to our report and then I will happily give way again.

Those were the guts, to put it inelegantly, of our recommendations. The Ban the Box approach should be extended to all public sector vacancies, with a view to that becoming in due course mandatory for all employers. That would be the right response. We pointed out also that the disclosure regime may well fall short of the UK’s obligations under the UN convention on the rights of the child, which prioritises the best interests of the child and requires states parties to promote the establishment of penal laws and procedures “specifically applicable to children”. The broad-brush approach here does not seem to us to meet that test.

[Mr Lammy]

The hon. Gentleman rightly mentioned Ban the Box in a positive light, and I am sure everyone in the Chamber would welcome it, but does he acknowledge that the problem with that initiative is, first, that it is voluntary and, secondly, that it is about the recruitment stage? The fundamental point about the work by the Select Committee and others who have raised this issue is that, beyond recruitment, there are questions about whether things should be disclosed to employers in the first place. It would be important for the Government not to lose that principle, which is rightly being raised by the hon. Gentleman and the Select Committee.

[Robert Neill]

That is true. We do not see Ban the Box as a silver bullet; there is no single silver bullet. It is a sensible initiative and one that has been started, but we see it as a base on which to build rather than a solution itself. However, it would not be too difficult for the Government to extend it eventually along the lines that the right hon. Gentleman suggests.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

The hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. It is of course to be welcomed that Ban the Box has, as I understand it, been adopted in principle for civil servant recruitment, but I wonder how many people who are former offenders the Ministry of Justice would be able to employ in its own Department. This is just a proposition: to what degree within procurement could there be concomitant employment of ex-offenders in, say, maintenance contracts and other contracts that the Department releases?

[Robert Neill]

We talked about extending the initiative to all public sector vacancies, and I can see the logic of making this a condition of public procurement more generally. It is an interesting point that the right hon. Lady fairly raises. Like her, I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response. These levers are within the Government’s gift and there would be no requirement for primary legislation or anything of that kind.

Against that background, we were disappointed in the Government’s response. It was not entirely negative, but it did seem to us to lack a degree of urgency. It cited the litigation on criminal records that was ongoing at that time in the Supreme Court as a reason not to go into too much detail on most of our important recommendations. There was almost a predictive text response of, “It would not be appropriate to consider these matters until there has been an authoritative judgment from the Supreme Court.” That has now changed, as I will come to.

I recognise and welcome the positives in the Government response. The Government accepted parts of the report, in particular the commitment to improving information and guidance and exploring options for promoting Ban the Box—one of those has been suggested by the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts)—and there is willingness to work with the insurance industry to ensure that it operates more fairly in relation to spent convictions. I say to the Minister that that is all good, but we need more.

A concern for us was how policy is difficult to drive forward because it sits uneasily between the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. That is a classic case of a desirable change falling through the gap between two Departments. If we are committed to more cross-governmental working, more could and should be done.

[Alex Chalk]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech, and I pay tribute to his leadership of the Select Committee. He has not touched so much on the conclusions in the report about people aged between 18 and 25. The report said that consideration should be given to extending the filtering to young people. My view is that that is a bridge too far and we should focus purely on under-18s, but does he want to say anything about whether he thinks we should look at a filtering system for young people in that category?

[Robert Neill]

As my hon. Friend will remember from his time on the Committee, that is linked to earlier work in relation to young adults in the criminal justice system. I made the point earlier that we now know from overwhelming evidence that maturity and desistance from crime tend to kick in, particularly among young males, at age 25 or so. That is where that suggestion comes from. I agree. Rome was not built in a day, and we have to operate the system in a way that maintains public confidence and the confidence of employers where there are legitimate grounds for caution. Let us be honest: sometimes there are, and there always will be. We put the point in the report as part of the broader context. I hope that when, in due course, we get time to debate important issues of domestic legislation, rather than having the groundhog approach that we seem to have on other matters at the moment, perhaps that more holistic approach to young offenders will be appropriate, but it is not a reason to hold back the specific recommendations that we make about younger people, which we suggest should be moved urgently.

The Supreme Court judgment was cited as a reason for the Government not wishing to commit themselves. I understand that, but the Supreme Court has given its judgment, so the Government can move forward with a clear conscience. That judgment was of course in the joined cases of P, G and W and Lorraine Gallagher, who, being overage, could be named in that context. All the cases challenged various aspects of the filtering regime and dealt with a number of the issues to which we have referred. They all involved people who had been convicted of or reprimanded for relatively minor offending, and the disclosure of their criminal records had created barriers to employment, or there was a reasonable expectation that they would do so in the future.

The Court of Appeal concluded that the multiple conviction rule and the serious offence rule, without a mechanism for refinement, were not

“in accordance with the law”

as required by paragraph 2 of article 8 of the European convention on human rights, which protects the right to respect for private life, as they did not allow proportionality to be considered in any particular case. It is that bluntness and lack of proportionality that we think now need to be addressed urgently.

The Government, to our regret, appealed against that decision rather than acting on the Court of Appeal suggestions. They lost in the Supreme Court on the principal matters. The legal approach was somewhat different. They succeeded in one appeal but, broadly, the Supreme Court agreed that there should be a declaration of incompatibility under the Human Rights Act 1998 against the multiple convictions rule. We call upon the Government to deal with that declaration of incompatibility and reform the law accordingly to bring it into accordance with our convention obligations and, frankly, the requirements of the 1998 Act.

Similarly, the mandatory disclosure of childhood reprimands was upheld in the Supreme Court, but on different grounds. Lord Sumption, who gave the Supreme Court’s lead judgment, looked at the second part of the test for lawfulness under article 8(2) of the convention, on whether the measure is

“necessary in a democratic society”.

In other words, he looked at whether the measure is proportionate. It failed that test.

Lord Sumption found that the legislation involving strict, predefined categories could in principle be proportionate, and that most of these could pass the test. However, he went on to decide that two features of the regime were disproportionate: the blunt instrument effect of the multiple conviction rule, and allowing the disclosure of reprimands for serious offences when they were given to children. Those are two specific areas where it seems to us that there is no excuse at all for the Government not acting to fall into line with the judgment of the Court. We believe there is good reason for them going beyond that, too.

Since then, we have been in correspondence with the Government, drawing attention to these facts and the incompatibility, as we see it, of the Government’s current stance with the Supreme Court judgment. We urge the Government to deal with our outstanding recommendations and, in particular, to set out what steps are being taken to ensure that the DBS suspends the unlawful elements of the current regime without delay. We seek from the Government—perhaps the Minister can help us today—an update on how they now intend to address those elements of the regime to ensure that it fits the legal proportionality test in a meaningful and workable way.

The debate comes against that background. The Secretary of State replied, as always, in courteous terms, but mentioning the need to balance giving employers necessary information, which I concede, with respect to the individual’s right to private life. The Government said they will consider the Committee’s recommendations, but need to fully consider the implications of any change. They said that they are not able to respond formally at this time. When will they be able to respond formally? Lives are being damaged at the present time by this needless failure to comply.

That is why we are pressing for urgent action. The Government can deal with this very easily, it seems to us. They can use section 10 of the Human Rights Act to present to Parliament a remedial order to amend those parts of the disclosure regime that are incompatible with article 8 according to the Court’s judgments. Remedial orders to amend legislation and remove any incompatibilities can be statutory instruments. That does not, therefore, involve primary legislation and the time that that would involve. There is precedent for statutory instruments having been used on a number of occasions.

If the Government do not take that step, they cannot really expect anything other than further legal challenge, and I do not want to see the Government putting themselves in that position. I hope they will take those remedial orders to bring our law into compliance, and that they use the opportunity to make an urgent and comprehensive review of the whole regime, particularly the impacts on those who offend as young children or young adults. That is long-overdue for all the reasons that a number of right hon. and hon. Members gave in interventions. I hope that sets the scene and enables colleagues to participate and raise their points, which may even shorten things as the debate goes along.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I thank the Justice Committee, its Chair and the hon. and right hon. Members who serve on it for the excellent report they have published. I also thank the Committee and House staff who do the painstaking work of writing the report and the recommendations. I was a member of the Committee from 2010 to 2015. I can honestly and sincerely say that today’s debate has been one of the best I have attended in the nine years that I have been in Parliament. Every Member of Parliament who has spoken today has spoken with real passion, conviction and sincerity and with a real desire to change a very important aspect of people’s lives. It will be a pleasure to be able to say that we were in the debate today.

Before I go into the details of my speech, I want to acknowledge all the Members who have contributed. The hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) eloquently went through the whole report and explained in detail for us, and those watching, what the report said. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) for his review, which I will refer to later in my speech, and for the work that he has done. The report emphasises the high proportion of BAME children in the criminal justice system. The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) talked about the impact of housing. Let’s face it: to have a decent life you need a decent home to live in. That is such an important factor.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) talked about the importance of employment and jobs, without which it is difficult to survive in life. I am so pleased that the hon. Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) was able to hotfoot it from the Chamber. Clearly, with the work that she does, she is in the thick of it, as they say. Her contribution was absolutely brilliant. She went through the whole system and what needs to change. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham, she eloquently put the case for race and class and the effect that it has on whether people end up in the criminal justice system. The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) alluded to the issue of class and he also made a succinct point. I understand that everybody has commitments and I want to acknowledge their contributions.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (David Hanson), a former Justice Minister, talked about education and employment, which are crucial. He touched on whether a conviction should be disclosed when someone applies for a job or whether it should be left to the end of the process, after someone has been considered on merit. That is an important point. Last but not least, my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) rightly talked about children in care. A lot of the children also have mental health issues and autism. We know that the child and adolescent mental health services in our local authorities have long waiting lists for children to be assessed. As she was speaking, I was reminded of a case that I had when I was a prosecutor many moons ago.

A young man of 14 or 15 was in a care home. He attended court to give evidence against his mother’s ex-boyfriend, who had been charged with indecent assault on his younger sister. He turned up at the court and, on seeing him, his mother went over to him and punched him in the stomach twice, and he burst into tears. He went back to the care home and set light to a curtain. He quickly realised what he had done and tried to put it out, but the fire brigade was called. That goes to exactly the point that my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston talked about. Because the young man was in a care home, the police and prosecuting authorities got involved. I wanted to recommend no further action on the grounds of public interest. Sadly, my boss overruled me and said that we must proceed, so we came to a compromise and she at least agreed to a caution. That illustrates the point that if that incident had happened at home, the outcome would have been different; sometimes when children do things in anger at home, nothing happens.

For me, listening to all the speeches today has been important, and I hope the Minister and the civil servants are paying attention. I will now return to my scripted speech.

At the heart of any proper youth justice system is an attempt to rehabilitate an offending young person while protecting their fellow members of society. Although those two aims do not need to be opposed to each other, a knotty issue they throw up is deciding what information those with convictions and cautions must disclose later in life. In many cases some disclosure is essential to ensure that offenders are not exposed to vulnerable people in dangerous circumstances. Unfortunately, it is increasingly clear that our balancing act between personal rehabilitation and societal protection is worryingly skewed in favour of the latter. In fact, our wrong-headed, punitive approach means that we might be shooting ourselves in the foot, as forcing people to disclose largely irrelevant information years after a crime often deepens pre-existing social divides, as we have heard.

As was noted in both the 2017 Justice Committee report and the Government’s response last year, forcing people to disclose their criminal record is a power that needs to be carefully applied. Past convictions can have an impact on a person’s capacity to find housing or to take up a place at an educational institution, and can have an impact on finding work. Sadly, by forcing people to reveal past convictions years after they have served their time, we throw up barriers and prevent them from becoming fully integrated members of society. For some, it leads to long periods on benefits, at significant cost to the state. Even worse, many return to the kinds of criminal activity that we should have provided every opportunity for them to escape, and end up in prison, at even greater cost to the national purse. Locking individuals into negative patterns is particularly foolish and cruel when they committed crimes as young people.

We are well out of line with other countries internationally. A 2016 report by the Standing Committee for Youth Justice compared the treatment of childhood criminal records across Europe and America and found that the system in England and Wales was distinctly more punitive. A criminal record acquired by a child in England affects them longer and in more restrictive ways than in any of the other jurisdictions studied. Not only do we criminalise an unusually high proportion of children, but the processes by which those criminal records can be hidden from employers are arcane and inflexible.

The 2017 Justice Committee review provided persuasive justification for wide-scale reform, listing 21 conclusions and recommendations. Although the Government’s response addressed each of the recommendations, I am afraid that in too many areas they chose to kick the can down the road. One justification for that was that they chose to take their case to the Supreme Court to defend our system of disclosures, but, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham said, the Government or the MOJ should have followed the Court of Appeal and dealt with the issue and not pursued it to the highest courts. It comes as no surprise to those of us who agreed with the findings of the original Select Committee report that a Supreme Court judgment this year found that our disclosure scheme is contrary to article 8 of the European convention on human rights on two key fronts: the rule that requires the automatic disclosure of all convictions where a person has more than one conviction, and the requirement that some childhood cautions be disclosed indefinitely. Importantly, we have a mechanism by which previous offences can be taken off DBS checks—a process termed “filtering”. However, that process also has major flaws. The current filtering will remove a spent childhood conviction from a DBS standard or enhanced certificate only when five and a half years has elapsed since the date of the conviction. It must also be the individual’s only offence and it must not appear on the list of exempt offences that will never be removed from a certificate.

I—and clearly, going by what they have said today, other right hon. and hon. Members—urge reform on all three counts. Although five and a half years is significantly less than would be required for an adult—there is an 11-year wait before filtering can take place—that is still an incredibly long and pretty much arbitrary period. It means that it is difficult for 19-year-olds to get jobs because of offences—often minor—committed at the age of 14. That makes no sense, especially when they have not committed other offences. During those years, most of us are growing, changing and maturing, and the law should be flexible and forgiving enough to recognise that.

The fact that convictions remain unfiltered if there has been more than one conviction or when the conviction is on the exempt offences list also holds back young people at a crucial time in their lives. The offences include those involving a degree of violence, drugs, and some sexual offences. That is a broad range of offence categories, and putting them on an unfilterable list prevents individual discretion and creates a single rule totally at odds with the need to achieve personalised restorative justice for young people. We need a child-specific system that recognises that the offences in the list are diverse and complex.

[Robert Neill]

I very much agree with the hon. Lady. Does she agree that her point about the need for a different approach for younger people is strongly reinforced by the conclusions in the February 2017 Law Commission report, which states precisely that the system bears disproportionately harshly on young offenders, and argues that some offences that might justifiably be non-filterable for adult offenders should be filterable for young offenders? She says that a different approach is needed, and the commission also said so.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman and with the Law Commission’s recommendation. I hope that the Minister and Ministry of Justice civil servants will also be listening, and will be reminded of what the Law Commission said. I hope they will take those things on board and that we will not find that, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn said happened when he was a Minister, civil service-speak means we do not quite know what will happen.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham has spoken about the Lammy review, which he carried out. I will touch on it, because it is important. I am worried that its findings, which are relevant to the issue that we are discussing, are being ignored, as many other recommendations have been ignored. When we look at how unequal outcomes are for BAME children and for those in care when they pass through the criminal justice system at a young age, it is clear that there is something particularly wrong about tying them for the rest of their lives to crimes that they committed as children—worsening pre-existing inequalities. I hope that the Minister will be able to throw some light on that, and suggest what actions the Department is taking on issues set out in the Lammy review.

Another issue emphasised by the Select Committee was the need to recognise that young people mature at different rates up to their mid-20s—a point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham. The right hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers), who is not in her place at the moment, concurred and reinforced the point. While I welcome the Government’s acceptance of that basic fact, will the Minister clarify what concrete steps are being taken to enshrine that recognition in law? Further, now that we have received confirmation that the Government’s disclosure rules are in breach of international law, can we have some clarity on the timescales on which the Government hope to bring their regulations up to date? Scrapping the current exempt list and the two-offence rule would be great first steps and I should like to know whether the Minister recognises that the Government need to make up their mind, make up for their inaction and move quickly. Finally, do the Government plan to take steps to introduce a review mechanism by which individuals can apply to have their convictions filtered? That would allow for a genuinely case-by-case approach to justice.

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[Edward Argar]

I take the right hon. Gentleman’s point. I am not aware of any Department not doing it. There may be some roles, perhaps in the policing or security aspects of Government, where there might be more complex considerations. I undertake to write to him with a clarification on that in due course, when I will answer a number of his other questions.

[Robert Neill]

Further to that point, will the Minister also commit to letting us know whether any of the Ministry of Justice’s contractors are not operating Ban the Box? The Ministry has considerable procurement leverage in these matters. Subject to the caveats about security, we would like to know that, too.

[Edward Argar]

I am happy to include that, if it is appropriate, when I write to the right hon. Member for Delyn—I will copy it to the Chairman of the Justice Committee, who makes a good point. I do not know whether that data exists, but I will endeavour to get it. The right hon. Member for Delyn also asked, I think, about the direct impact on the Ministry of Justice. My understanding is that of those people with a previous conviction who applied through the approach that has been taken in the civil service since 2016, 92% subsequently secured employment, which is a positive outcome.

Beyond the guidance for employers, I am proud of the rehabilitative support we have offered in the past. As I say, I will write to the right hon. Member for Delyn with some detailed answers to his questions about the specific list of activities undertaken to ensure that responses and commitments went beyond responses and commitments and followed through into actions. One thing that he mentioned, to which I can respond directly now, is about the education and employment strategy, which was published in 2018 and was explicit, as I understand it, in referring to this. I will give him the detailed action plan that sits beneath the strategy.

I am proud of the rehabilitative support we offer to people who have offended in the past. Our education and employment strategy, published in 2018, sets out how we will transform our approach to ensure that those in the adult custodial estate develop the skills they need to secure employment on release. We are giving governors the power to commission education provision and engage with employers to take on ex-prisoners—for example, via the New Futures Network.

A number of hon. Members have mentioned the debate about the age of maturity and its impact on criminal justice. There is a live debate on whether it should be 18, 25 or somewhere in the middle, reflecting different scientific papers that have been put forward. I think that even the Lord Chief Justice has commented on this ongoing debate. It is something of which I am very much aware. A degree of caution needs to be exercised, if only because the age of 18 is when we deem people mature enough to enjoy certain rights and benefits. If we were to look at whether it should be 18 or 25, would that lead to a wider debate? If we are saying that someone is not criminally mature, what other rights and benefits come with a particular age? I am not setting out a particular view on that, but it does lead to a wider debate. We should not be afraid to engage in that, but we should be conscious of the wider implications.

As hon. Members have mentioned, the Supreme Court recently handed down its judgment in the case of P and others, which considered the disclosure regime. On the most fundamental point, the Court found—for the Government—that it was proportionate and practicable to make disclosure decisions in accordance with a clearly defined and unambiguous system, through the operation of legislative rules agreed by Parliament. However, as has been set out, the Court went on to find that two key features of the filtering regime are disproportionate as framed: the multiple conviction rule and the disclosure of youth reprimands and warnings. I will not recount the detail of how they operate, because hon. Members have already done so.

My Department is working closely with the Home Office to give proper consideration to the judgment. The Justice Committee’s report touched on something that is relevant. It highlighted the fact that responsibility in this area is split between the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. Indeed, in some of the issues we have touched on, which I will turn to later, other parts of Government also have a relevant interest, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government being an obvious example.

I saw the Committee’s suggestion that placing responsibility on a single Department could enhance coherence. We did not accept that recommendation for a simple reason: we come back to the balance at the heart of the system, that balance between a focus on rehabilitation—giving people a second chance—and an element of public protection. Part of that sits with the Home Office and part sits with the Ministry of Justice, which can lead to a creative and hopefully positive tension and balance. Where we must strive to avoid problems is when that balance and those counter-positions or counter-interests can lead to things taking a lot longer than they might do otherwise. In a few moments I will turn to the matter of timing, because the Chairman of the Justice Committee is a deeply patient man but does not have infinite patience.

We work closely with the Home Office to give these things proper consideration. Although that judgment has been handed down, the order behind it has not yet been sent over to us. We await that order. When it is received, it is important that we are speedy and timely in addressing it.

[Robert Neill]

One thing that might be able to speed these matters along is for the issue to be discussed by the Criminal Justice Board, a mechanism that is there precisely to give an overview across the whole criminal justice system, and which involves the two principally concerned Departments and others. Will the Minister undertake to have it raised on the board’s agenda?

[Edward Argar]

I will raise that very good point with the Secretary of State, who sits on that board. Although I cannot go into the details in advance of that order, I can say, and Members can read into this what they will, that I generally find justices to be wise and sensible in their opinions. They consider what they say extremely carefully and open-mindedly. I believe, from my experience in this role so far, that when one receives a judgment from the Supreme Court, there are often opportunities to look at it in broad, rather than narrow, terms. I will endeavour to reflect on that when the order comes through.

We previously committed to considering the Committee’s recommendations for reform of the criminal records system on receipt of that judgment, and we remain committed to that, because it is appropriate for us to consider any recommendations about the disclosure regime in the light of that authoritative ruling. The Committee’s recommendations sit neatly alongside it, so it makes sense to consider them in the round.

I now turn to a number of issues that came up in the debate. I am grateful to the Committee for highlighting such a wide range of issues in its report, particularly on access to housing, travel and insurance. I recognise the acute impact that lack of access to those things can have, as well as the cumulative impact on children who have offended. I will take each of the points in turn, but before I do so, I pay tribute to the speech made by the hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer), who rightly highlighted the need for us to understand not just the requirements of a regime but the context for each individual. She highlighted the impact on the behaviour of young people who have been looked-after children, who have had adverse childhood experiences and who may even have been victims of child sexual abuse or other forms of abuse. That should be a consideration, and she was absolutely right to raise the issue. Those individuals have a passionate advocate in her. She made her point forcefully and well, and I will certainly reflect carefully on what she said.

The Committee’s report concluded that the criminal record system undermines the principles of the youth justice system. Although we do not share that view, the Committee’s work highlights further opportunities not yet taken that can enhance the principles and the work of the criminal justice system if we reflect on how the disclosure regime operates more broadly. Children who come into contact with the police and youth offending teams are some of the most vulnerable children in our societies, as the hon. Lady highlighted. We all agree that rehabilitation is important in improving their life chances. Society has a right to expect that we will do everything possible to ensure that all people with convictions desist from crime. Those who offended as children are no different. We have a particular responsibility to children who fall into the categories that the hon. Lady highlighted.

We know how important employment, education and other factors raised by the Committee are in enabling rehabilitation. The hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) highlighted that issue and touched on some powerful examples. We are committed to supporting children to turn their lives around. In 2013, the coalition Government changed the law so minor offences no longer needed to be disclosed. It takes significantly less time now for offences committed by children, as opposed to those committed by adults, to become spent, after which they no longer need to be disclosed for most purposes. Those features of the disclosure regime all relate to the fact that children who offend are often highly vulnerable and might not be as mature as adults who do so. There has been progress, and the hon. Lady would expect me to say that, but given her comments about pre-emptive action, I will not say, “That’s progress. That’s job done. We are in the right place,” because I believe that there is clearly more to do.

The Committee raised concerns about equality and disproportionality. I am committed to reducing disproportionate outcomes for BAME children in the youth justice system, and I share the concerns voiced by the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) in his 2017 report. I reassure the shadow Minister that we take that report incredibly seriously. Since I was appointed to this role last summer, I have met the right hon. Gentleman a number of times. We announced last November via the Cabinet Office the cross-Government “one year on” update on the progress that has been made in that area. I have regular roundtables with those with an interest in this issue to chase up progress. We have a director general in the Department who is directly responsible for bringing officials from a range of parts of the Department together to drive forward progress on reducing disproportionality and implementing the recommendations in the right hon. Gentleman’s report. That reflects the fact that I recognise the need for systemic change. A key focus is on explaining or changing disproportionate outcomes for BAME children in the justice system.

I am also aware of the over-representation of vulnerable groups with multiple and complex needs—particularly looked-after children, excluded children and those with mental health issues. Again, it is a fundamental priority for the youth justice system to ensure that those children receive the support and intervention they need to fulfil their potential.

A number of Members touched on the disclosure of police evidence. In our response to the Committee’s report, we noted that disclosure of police intelligence can be an important aspect of the regime. That was a key finding of the Bichard report after the Soham murders. It plays a vital part in ensuring that children and vulnerable adults are protected. The police cannot automatically disclose all intelligence. Disclosure of non-conviction information is subject to a statutory relevance test, so the chief officer has to consider whether the information is relevant and ought to be disclosed. That includes consideration of the individual’s age at the time of the offence, its seriousness and how long ago it occurred, but once again, as hon. Members have emphasised, the key is proportionality and relevance.

My Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) touched on housing. Social housing is a precious resource, so ensuring that it is allocated fairly, as he set out, is crucial. We recognise the need to understand better how the allocation system is playing out in local areas, so we know whether it is striking the right balance between fairness, support and aspiration. In the social housing Green Paper, the Government propose an evidence collection exercise to help us to understand how the allocations framework is working across the country in different areas. Following that exercise, we will consider whether changes to legislation, regulations or statutory or best practice guidance are necessary, but we believe that making changes prior to having a clear evidence base would be premature. My Department continues to work closely with MHCLG colleagues to ensure that the points that my hon. Friend and others made, which are directly relevant in this space, are considered in that broader piece of work.

[Robert Neill]

I am grateful to the Minister for the constructive dialogue that we can have. In carrying out that evidence exercise, will he particularly bear in mind the evidence that we received from the Standing Committee for Youth Justice? Like me, the Minister comes from a background in London local government, and that organisation’s findings were that some 13 of the 30 London local authorities it looked at had housing policies that tended to have an unreasonable impact on the allocation of housing to former offenders. If, as he said, a pay cheque is one way of stopping offending, secure accommodation is another.

[Edward Argar]

My hon. Friend alludes to our shared past in London local government, where I first met him many years ago, when I had a little more hair and it was not quite so grey. He is absolutely right: I meet with the Standing Committee on Youth Justice and consider its reports and input with great care. It is for local authorities to ensure that their allocation schemes are lawful, taking account of any relevant decisions made by the courts. No authority may breach section 4 of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, which requires that a person who has a spent conviction be treated as if the offence was not committed.

My hon. Friend the Member for Henley also touched on education. As we set out in our response to the report, most higher education institutions are autonomous, independent organisations, and as such admissions are a matter for each individual institution. They are best placed to decide which applicants are the most suited for their organisations and the courses that they offer. Similarly, further education providers, including colleges, are independent organisations that can set their own entry criteria for qualifications, in line with those published by the qualification owner.

That said, we expect providers to take account of the Committee’s recommendation as part of a transparent admissions process. On universities, I am happy to say that for the 2018-19 cycle, UCAS has dropped the automatic requirement for all applicants to declare unspent convictions, regardless of whether they are relevant to the course for which the applicant is applying. The eligibility for Disclosure and Barring Service standard or enhanced certificates applies to work placements in the same way as other paid or voluntary employment. If a course does not involve a work placement that is eligible for a check, the university can only ask about unspent convictions.

Hon. Members raised the matter of insurance, the Association of British Insurers and other matters. The ABI published a good practice guide in 2011—it was updated in 2014—that sets out high-level standards of how insurers should treat people with convictions or related offences. The guide makes it clear that insurers should not ask for spent convictions. When an insurer is unable to provide full or any cover because of a consumer’s unspent conviction history, the insurer should provide information about alternative sources of help.

The hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston touched on the UN convention on the rights of the child and similar. As stated in our response, the Government consider that the disclosure regime is compatible with the convention. It treats convictions and cautions received by those under the age of 18 differently from those incurred by an adult and, although I hear that hon. Members feel that those people should be treated more differently, we believe that we are compliant with the convention. In the light of the Supreme Court judgment, any future changes to the regime will take the convention into account.

I want to touch on the passionate speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), and her passionate campaigning work. I am very pleased that she was able to dash from the main Chamber to deliver her speech. I know that she is a passionate advocate for the Ban the Box campaign. She speaks with eloquence and with great knowledge and experience, having worked on this issue for some time. I would be very happy to meet her to discuss that campaign more broadly if she feels that that would be helpful. If the right hon. Member for Delyn and others wished to join us, I would be very happy for them to do so.

There is always a balance to be struck between giving the employers the information that they need to make informed recruitment decisions and having a criminal records system that enables rehabilitation. I look forward to our bringing forward proposals both in response to the Supreme Court judgment and to formally address the issues set out in the Committee’s report. As I said, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst is a patient man, but not infinitely patient—nor is his Committee. Hon. Members quite rightly highlighted that although words are important, and this place uses an awful lot of them, they must lead to action.

I am clear that we must, and will, act to address the issues raised and the Supreme Court judgment when the order comes forward. I hope that we can all believe and support a system that believes in redemption, rehabilitation and a second chance. More than ever, that should apply to children who, at a young age, make a simple mistake that should not blight the rest of their lives. I commit to working closely with the Committee in the coming months to respond to and address its points as well as those raised by the Supreme Court judgment. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to speak on this subject.

[Robert Neill]

It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir David.

This has been an extremely well-informed and constructive debate. I thank all right hon. and hon. Members, Committee members and others, who have spoken. I am particularly grateful for, and warmly welcome the contribution of, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), whose work in this field we all pay tribute to and who recently engaged with us as a Select Committee. My colleagues from the Committee spoke powerfully and persuasively in this debate.

This is an area on which there was a good deal of agreement between the two Front Benchers, and so it should be. In such important matters of not only criminal justice policy but social justice policy, we ought to seek and are well able to achieve a broad cross-party consensus in this place.

This welcome the tone of the Minister’s response, because I know that he is genuine, and also welcome his constructive engagement with the debate and the Committee. I look forward to that continuing. There is compliance not just with the letter of the convention but with its spirit and the ability to take that further, and I know that he and the Secretary of State—both genuine reformers—will seek to do that.

I thank all our Committee staff who worked on the report—some of them are in the Public Gallery today. They did an excellent piece of work. I also thank all those witnesses who gave evidence to us, including those who brought their own experience of the system—it is not always easy to talk about—to assist us directly.

There is an opportunity to consider some of these matters in the other place as well. As the Minister knows, the noble Lord Ramsbotham has a private Member’s Bill—the Criminal Records Bill—which awaits Committee in the other place. If the Bill progresses further, the Minister’s colleague, the noble Lord Keen, will probably deal with it. I hope he will look as favourably as he can at the changes. It is a broader Bill, but includes specific provisions on rehabilitation periods for childhood and young person offences, which I hope that the Ministry will look at constructively. I am sure we would all want to recognise Lord Ramsbotham’s work in this field over very many years.

The Minister has been constructive, and I look forward to engaging further with him, as do all the Committee. He is right that I have a measure of patience—you, Sir David, will know more than anyone that a lifelong West Ham supporter has learnt to be patient over many years, although even our patience in that respect is not inexhaustible. However, I take the Minister’s comments in the generous and constructive spirit in which they were made. I again thank all Members who have participated in an important and constructive debate.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the First Report of the Justice Committee, Disclosure of youth criminal records, HC 416, and the Government response, Cm 9559.