Oral Answers to Questions
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
This is something the Department studied in detail in 2015, and we have conclusive evidence that giving somebody a community sentence rather than a short custodial sentence reduces reoffending over a one-year period.
Carol Monaghan
We have evidence of that in Scotland as well. The Scottish Government’s move towards community payback orders has helped Scotland to achieve its current 18-year low in reoffending. Is the Minister looking to the Scottish Government’s example and considering how they have managed to achieve these figures?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. We have a lot to learn from Scotland, specifically on community sentences, and indeed we will be looking at what more we can do to emphasise that a custodial sentence in the short term should be a final resort. In reoffending terms, it is often much better for somebody to be given a community sentence.
Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)
In Cornwall, I work closely with Konnect Cornwall, headed up by Ian Curnow, which does a lot of work on behalf of the Government and the Department for Work and Pensions to support ex-offenders and people who are on the way into trouble. What more resources can be made available so that no one is left behind?
Rory Stewart
A lot of this is about identifying those key local providers. The real challenge that we need to overcome, which is true not just for justice but for local councils, is that of making sure that when we work with the third sector we work, not with big national providers, but with small, grassroots local charities.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
I draw the House’s attention to the fact that I am a life member of the Magistrates Association. In the all-party parliamentary group on women in the penal system, we recently heard from the Magistrates Association that magistrates are not familiar with the content of community penalties. That makes them reluctant to choose such penalties. The issue, in part, seems to be a lack of funding for training. Will the Minister comment?
Rory Stewart
This is a long-standing issue—it was true even in 2008-09—that consistently, the judiciary and magistrates have expressed concerns about community sentences. We need to do much more to build confidence, but the fact that this has been going on for nearly 10 years shows that it is a very challenging thing to do. Training will be an important part of that.
Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
Any death from suicide in prison is a tragedy. We have managed to reduce the number of suicides in prison—it nearly halved between 2016 and 2017—and most of that progress is due to a new protocol that identifies the individual needs of prisoners and their times of maximum vulnerability.
Mr Cunningham
How many additional staff who are trained to deal with medical illness have been brought in?
Rory Stewart
Nearly 15,600 of our staff have received additional training—that is the figure produced by my colleague. The ACCT—assessment, care in custody and teamwork—process, which is the new protocol for suicide reduction, focuses on the evidence for when prisoners are most vulnerable, for example their first night in custody, and how to ensure that we deal with them. But we still need to reduce the number of suicides further.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
Ninety-three women have died in prisons in England and Wales since the 2007 Corston report. When the new female offender strategy is published, will it focus on community alternatives to prison, especially for the 70% of women who are sentenced to six months or less?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. This is a common theme. We have clear evidence that reducing the use of custodial short sentences and instead diverting people into the community can be good for protecting the public, by reducing reoffending, but it is also very good for mental health and for reducing suicide.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)
Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
To address education in prison, Dame Sally Coates’s report makes three key recommendations: first, to carry out an individual survey of a prisoner’s educational needs when they enter prison; secondly, to make sure that governors have more control over education provision to reflect the needs of the prison or local area; and, thirdly, to make sure that English and maths are a core part of that curriculum.
Mr Wragg
A 2017 report said that the quality of education in English and Welsh prisons was generally good, but it found that poor attendance and punctuality of prisoners often went unchallenged and that the process of moving prisoners to learning, skills and work activities from the wings was often ineffective and poorly managed. What is being done to address those problems?
Rory Stewart
It is absolutely right that there is no point having good educational provision if prisoners are not getting to the classrooms. Fundamentally we need to do two things: first, make sure that prisoners are moved reliably and predictably from their cells into the classrooms; and, secondly, make sure that the educational provision in the classrooms is sufficiently attractive for the prisoners to engage.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
I apologise for being late, Mr Speaker, but I was at the unveiling of the first statue of a woman in Parliament Square.
May we have an evaluation of how far we have got? Some years ago, when I was Chair of the Education Committee, we looked at skills training in prisons, but I do not think that much has happened since then, particularly for people on the special educational needs spectrum, and especially those with autism.
Rory Stewart
There has been a significant improvement in the Ofsted reports, but the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that people with special educational needs, in particular, and the more than 50% of prisoners who have previously been excluded from school or have literacy challenges remain a big issue for education in prisons.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that one of the keys to reducing reoffending rates is ensuring that skilled probation officers have manageable case loads so that they can give enough time and energy to each individual in their care?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. It is particularly important that there can be flexibility so that there can be a higher ratio of probation officers to high-risk cases than for low-risk cases.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
It is right, of course, that prisoners must turn up, but when I visited Deerbolt prison in my constituency, the governor said that the contractor, Novus, was extremely unreliable. What is the Minister doing to respond to the report by ensuring that as contracts are rolled over, control of them is decentralised to the prison?
Rory Stewart
This is a central issue about which governors get very frustrated. Over the next 12 months, the hon. Lady will discover that we are putting governors in charge of that provision so that they can put pressure on the provider within the prison and ensure that it meets their needs.
Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
While the frequency of reoffending—in other words, the number of offences committed by prolific offenders—has risen since 2009, the base rate, or the number of people reoffending, has dropped by two percentage points since the introduction of community rehabilitation contracts.
Vicky Foxcroft
In 2015, the Government commissioned two important reviews: the Dame Sally Coates review of education in prisons, which was mentioned earlier; and the Charlie Taylor review of the youth justice system. Both reviews highlighted basic failures in the current system and made important recommendations. Will the Minister tell me how many of those recommendations have been implemented?
Rory Stewart
My focus has been on the Dame Sally Coates review; youth justice is dealt with by the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee). The Dame Sally Coates review is driving the entire education transformation over the next 12 months, particularly in respect of the three indicators that I mentioned earlier, including the assessment of prisoners and coming up with a plan. I shall have to reply in writing to the hon. Lady’s question about exactly how many recommendations have been implemented.
Ruth Cadbury
The joint report of the inspectorates of probation and of prisons stated that if the key functions of community rehabilitation companies
“were removed tomorrow…the impact…would be negligible.”
So what exactly are we paying for?
Rory Stewart
I must respectfully disagree with that. As I have said, the base rate of reoffending has dropped by two percentage points, which is actually quite significant, as the rate was flat for nearly 40 years before that. It would be very dangerous indeed to remove the community rehabilitation companies, which are looking after 40,000 people who were previously under very short periods of supervision, and nearly 100,000 extra people who would be dangerous to the community if not properly monitored.
Gill Furniss (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
In Devon and Cornwall, as in my own constituency in Cumbria, the number of offenders is fortunately quite small in absolute terms, which means that provision is at Exeter and Dartmoor.
Scott Mann
The Minister will know that Dartmoor Prison is earmarked for closure, after notice was served on its lease back in 2013. The prison is an asset to the south-west and employs a number of my constituents. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox) is also keen and eager for the prison to remain open. Will the Minister review the decision and look at what more can be done to keep that facility open?
Rory Stewart
The decision to close the prison was based on the fact that it was built in 1805 and there are significant maintenance issues, with a great deal of damp and leaking. However, we pay tribute to the governor and the prison officers for running a very good prison regime that is popular with the prisoners, which is one thing that we will have to balance when making the final decision on the prison.
Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I should like to pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for his amazingly assiduous campaign. He asked exactly the same question, with exactly the same words, at the last Justice questions, since when I have met him another half dozen times. We have had a good meeting with his constituents, and I am now aware of their individual and general concerns. However, we need prison places in Wales.
Mr Speaker
The hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) is further evidence of the KBO principle. The Minister said what he said non-pejoratively, but I simply make the innocent and prosaic, but valid, point that repetition is not a novel phenomenon in the House of Commons.
Stephen Kinnock
Repetition can be a form of flattery, Mr Speaker. I should like to thank the Minister for meeting me and the representatives of the NPT Prison Group for a constructive discussion, and for agreeing to put plans for the Baglan prison on hold. I am sure he will also have noted the decision of the Welsh Government to put all plans on hold pending a strategic review. Can he assure me that all plans for the Baglan prison are well and truly on hold, and that the UK Government will engage in a constructive and positive manner with the Welsh Government in the strategic review?
Rory Stewart
I hope the hon. Gentleman feels that we are engaged in a constructive and positive manner and that we have very much taken on board the concerns around that site, but it is important to bear in mind that more than 1,500 prisoners with Welsh addresses are currently being held in English prisons. We need to think about how to provide accommodation for them in Wales, because that is important for reducing reoffending, resettling them in their communities and keeping the links with their families.
Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)
Given the overwhelming evidence that smaller local prisons, where family links and the Welsh language can be maintained, are far more effective at reducing reoffending, why is the Secretary of State still proposing super prisons in south Wales when they are known not to work?
Rory Stewart
There are of course reasons why larger modern prisons are favoured, and that is partly about how we can manage things at scale. However, if there are communities in Wales that would like to come forward with proposals for smaller local prisons, I would absolutely agree that there is a strong argument for keeping prisoners closer to their homes.
Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)
Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, there has been an urgent notification process. We have put a plan in place. I have now visited HMP Nottingham, and I pay tribute to Tom Wheatley, the governor, for the work he is doing. He has a much better care process in place, and he has highly trained staff. We expect to see improvements soon at HMP Nottingham.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
Rory Stewart
I will be meeting the Welsh Secretary specifically on this issue next week. We are setting up a meeting with the Head of the Welsh Government, who of course will be changing, and I would very much like the hon. Gentleman to join that meeting. I reiterate that, so long as offending rates in Wales remain as they are, although it is laudable that the Welsh Government wish to divert people away from prison, we currently need places for Welsh prisoners.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Ind)
Rory Stewart
Fentanyl is unbelievably dangerous and has contributed to nearly 20,000 deaths a year in the United States. We have underscored through the Crown Prosecution Service guidance for prosecuting people. Fentanyl is a class A drug, but 50 times more powerful than other drugs. People need to understand that even a tiny quantity of this drug is a serious danger to the person producing it, to the person supplying it and, above all, to the public, and must be prosecuted.
Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
The troubled Holme House prison in my constituency has had another damning report, this time from the Independent Monitoring Board, which talks of a shortage of staff, a lack of appropriate care for prisoners, a sustained drugs problem, and more violence against staff and between prisoners. Things do not seem to be getting any better. Will the Minister please take an interest in Holme House and ensure it gets the support it needs?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. The central problem in Holme House is, of course, not the age of the building—it is relatively modern—but the drugs. So the first steps we are taking are to get more scanners, sniffer dogs and staff in place. It remains a very serious problem; the connection between the drugs, the violence and the suicide in Holme House is making it a particular area of focus for this Department.
Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)
What steps are the Government taking to improve the court experience for victims and for witnesses, because it can be a highly stressful and intimidating environment?
Dan Carden (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
Most people know my constituency of Liverpool, Walton as the home of two premier league football clubs, but I think the Minister knows it better for the two prisons: HMP Liverpool, which was built in 1855, and Altcourse, which was built in 1997. Will he update the House on progress in the redevelopment of HMP Liverpool, and does he think that these Victorian prisons can ever be fit for purpose?
Rory Stewart
Unfortunately, as the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) implied in his question, the age of a prison is not always the determining factor. We have significant challenges in relatively modern prisons. It is true in Liverpool that Altcourse has been performing better, and it is the newer prison. In Liverpool, we have provided a new multimillion pound fund for the repair of the windows across the estate, and we are looking at improving the conditions right across the estate. Stafford and Dartmoor show that it is possible to run good prisons in older, Victorian buildings.
Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)
I am grateful to the prisons Minister for meeting me recently to discuss the Farmer review, and I welcome his commitment to it. Will he update the House on the implementation of the Farmer review?
Rory Stewart
The Farmer review focused on the importance of families in rehabilitation. Prisoners’ links with families are central to reducing reoffending, and we have very strong evidence that when family links are kept, reoffending reduces. That means better family rooms and more family visits. In certain cases, prisons are having a lot of success piloting interactions between prisoners and, for example, the teachers of their children. All that is central, and the Farmer review is something for which we should be hugely grateful.
Judith Cummins (Bradford South) (Lab)
In October last year, the Government announced that they planned to increase the maximum penalty for death by dangerous driving. They also said that they would create a new offence of causing serious injury by careless driving. Six months on, we have still not seen any action. Will the Minister tell the House just when these vital changes will be implemented?
Oral Answers to Questions
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 8 months ago)
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Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
As the House will be aware, a major change in the law was brought in in 1988 to allow victims to be able to challenge unduly lenient sentences. At the moment, that applies to the most serious indictable offences, but the Government have recently extended it to a range of terrorist offences.
Philip Davies
I am grateful to the Minister for that answer, but as he well knows the Government have promised for quite some time—including in our manifesto—to extend it to a further range of offences. When will the Government pull their finger out and extend the number of cases that can be appealed for being unduly lenient, as we have been promising for quite some time?
Rory Stewart
As I have already said in my answer, the most serious offences—murder and so on—are already covered by the unduly lenient sentence scheme. We have extended it twice in the past few years, but we are talking very closely to my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney General about looking at other opportunities to extend the scheme.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
The Secretary of State will know that I regularly write to him about unduly lenient and unduly severe sentences, but I never ever seem to get a reply. The fact is that too many women are locked up for non-violent offences for long periods of time, and that is the sort of case that I write to him about. Why do we never get any comeback?
Mr Speaker
It is reassuring to know that I am not the only person to whom the hon. Gentleman regularly writes. I am grateful to him for confirming that important fact on the Floor of the House.
Rory Stewart
To get to the nub of the hon. Gentleman’s question, there is a very serious issue here, which is that it is absolutely true that there are many more women in prison than we would like. The Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee), is working very hard to reduce that population for exactly the reasons that the hon. Gentleman has raised.
Emma Little Pengelly (Belfast South) (DUP)
While I welcome the fact that victims can ask for a review in relation to unduly lenient sentences, there is an absolute 28-day limit on that. A criminal case can be very traumatising for victims. Will the Minister consider perhaps introducing a discretion in relation to that 28-day absolute limit?
Rory Stewart
That is a very interesting idea. Perhaps the hon. Lady and I can sit down to discuss that interesting idea in more detail.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
Skilled professional prison officers are absolutely heart and centre of running good prisons. That is why we have committed to recruiting 2,500 extra prison officers. I am pleased to say that we are now nine months ahead of target on delivering those prison officers.
Andrew Bridgen
I of course welcome the fact that the Government are making progress in recruiting extra prison officers, but will the Minister reassure the House that he is making every effort to retain the services of experienced and long-serving officers who are absolutely essential for mentoring new recruits into the service?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. As my hon. Friend points out, this is not just about numbers. Working in a prison is incredibly challenging, and having the experience and the prison craft to do it is vital, so we are putting incentive schemes in place to try to retain our most experienced staff and to understand, when they do leave, why they are doing so.
Chris Green
There is a huge opportunity for rehabilitation in prisons, which is often not taken. What rehabilitative capacity will this increase in prison officers create?
Rory Stewart
The central objective of bringing in 2,500 extra prison officers is to allow us to pair each individual prison officer with six prisoners, which allows them to develop their individual personal relationship over time through weekly meetings to achieve exactly the rehabilitative and educational objectives needed to reduce reoffending and protect the public.
Tom Pursglove
The redevelopment of Wellingborough prison will provide many new employment opportunities for people across Northamptonshire, including in my constituency, but what are the Government doing to attract local people into the profession and to encourage them to stay in the role—including, for example, former members of the armed forces?
Rory Stewart
I am very pleased that this has been raised. As you will be aware, Mr Speaker, almost 40% of prison officers traditionally came from the armed forces, but that number has fallen. We are now working very closely with the Ministry of Defence to explain what an interesting career this can be, and we are doing a lot of advertising. But the most important thing we can do is remind people that, as we have all seen when meeting prison officers, although it is a very challenging and sometimes quite difficult career it also can be a deeply fulfilling one, and we would like to encourage many more people to come forward into the profession.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
Rory Stewart
There are a number of drivers of suicide and self-harm, of which the number of staff is one. There are other questions around the estate, but probably the largest single driver that we have seen since 2011 is the use of new psychotropic drugs that are creating extraordinary psychotic episodes and leading to a direct increase in violence. We must address those drugs.
Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)
The Government’s recruitment drive is welcome, but is it not true that we are just now catching up? The number of staff at Feltham young offenders institution in my constituency has fallen by a third, from 600 in 2013 to 461, which has had a huge impact on the governor and staff. The institution has been deemed unsafe for both staff and prisoners. Is it not time that the Government committed to working closely with staff and the Prison Officers Association to tackle this crisis and ensure that we get back on track with rehabilitation for young offenders?
Rory Stewart
One hundred per cent.—we will be working very closely with prison officers for exactly that reason. As the hon. Lady points out, we must get the numbers right. Those 2,500 extra prison officers will be vital in order to get the 1:6 ratio needed for rehabilitation.
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)
I have listened carefully this morning to the Secretary of State talking about high-security prisons. Ministers talk of finally starting to address the crisis that they made by axing so many prison officers, yet over a third of high-security prisons have actually seen a fall in the number of prison officers since the Department’s so-called recruitment drive began. Will the Minister guarantee that these high-security prisons will have more staff by the next Justice questions?
Rory Stewart
One of the challenges around the high-security estate, particularly in places such as London, has been the employment opportunities. We have put new incentives in place—a signing-on bonus and a retention bonus—to recruit people in London. I am not in a position to guarantee the employment market exactly, but we are making a lot of progress—for example, in recruitment to the high-security Belmarsh Prison in London.
Richard Burgon
I thank the Minister for his answer, but nearly one in four prisons has seen prison officer numbers fall since the Government’s recruitment drive began. Moving on, we have another problem of very experienced officers leaving the service, creating a dangerous cocktail of inexperienced officers and experienced prisoners. In the last year alone, 1,000 prison officers with more than five years’ experience each have left the service. That is the equivalent of more than 5,000 years of experience in the Prison Service lost in the last year alone. Will the Minister guarantee that there will be more prison officers will five years’ experience at the end of the year than there are now?
Rory Stewart
The hon. Gentleman’s fundamental point is right: we need experienced prison officers. It is very difficult working in a prison. We can bring in huge numbers of new junior staff, but it will be difficult to get the kind of results we need unless they have experience. We therefore have a plan whereby we have targeted the prisons that are losing the most experienced officers and we are understanding why that is happening. We are both working with the staff and putting in place financial incentives to retain experienced staff.
Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)
Rory Stewart
I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend, particularly on prisons and advocating for the prison population in her constituency. It is absolutely true that there is a strange anomaly in the human resources procedure, and we must tackle it. It cannot make sense that people are paid more to act up than to occupy the role. We want people to have career development and we will focus on the issue immediately.
John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I believe that the hon. Gentleman and I have discussed this issue about five times in the past six weeks. I pay tribute to him for being a very firm advocate for his community. We have listened very carefully to his complaints. A decision on this prison is not likely to be imminent, as construction is not likely to be imminent. I would like to say, however, in addition to having listened to his complaints, that a prison built in the right place in the right way can provide significant economic opportunities for an area.
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for his answer, but the problem is that the proposed site is right next to residential areas, schools and a care home; is served by very poor transport links; is on a designated enterprise zone; is on marshland; and is restricted by a covenant saying that it can only be used as an industrial park. The Minister must surely agree therefore that the whole idea is a non-starter and should be scrapped with immediate effect.
Rory Stewart
The hon. Gentleman has made those points on a number of occasions. We are listening very carefully. Indeed, two members of our Department travelled to Port Talbot, to a very lively public meeting where those points were made repeatedly. We are listening very carefully to him.
Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
Would there be an answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question on the industrial estate if any new prison fully incorporated the work of ONE3ONE Solutions, which was designed more than six years ago to increase the productive and commercial output of prisoners? The numbers given by the Justice Secretary just now suggest that we have not made much progress in the number of prisoners who are working. Will any new prison include ONE3ONE Solutions, and how are we getting on with prisoners working overall?
Mr Speaker
Particularly if any prospect of their working is in Port Talbot, upon which the question is focused.
Rory Stewart
I look forward very much to meeting my hon. Friend to hear more about ONE3ONE Solutions.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
If a super-prison is built in Port Talbot, there will up to 1,000 more prison places in Wales than there are currently prisoners from Wales. Does the Minister share the Howard League’s concern that Wales is set to become Westminster’s penal colony?
Rory Stewart
I think we ought to be very careful with that kind of language. There are currently about 85,000 prisoners within the estate, so having 1,000 extra prisoners in Wales is not the creation of England’s penal colony.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
If that prison is built, will the Minister ensure that its chaplaincy avoids the extraordinary carrying-on that has recently been reported at HMP Brixton?
Rory Stewart
I would like to take this opportunity not to get drawn into the individual case of Brixton, which I am looking at personally, but to pay tribute in general to the work of the chaplaincy—that is the Christian chaplaincy, the Jewish chaplaincy and the five imams I met recently at Belmarsh Prison who are doing extraordinary work with the Muslim community.
Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
There have been a number of challenges with the community rehabilitation companies—CRCs—particularly in transition. It is not all bad news: in fact, the number of people reoffending has come down by 2% and certain CRCs, such as Cumbria and my own county, are performing well. But we need to focus particularly on the questions of assessment, planning and meeting, and that is what we have focused on in the report on London that is due on Thursday.
Alex Norris
Her Majesty’s inspectorate of probation recently warned that private sector probation companies’ focus on contract compliance rather the true quality of supervision was inevitably having an impact on culture and was undermining the established values of probation professionals. Does the Minister agree that it is time to put proper probation ahead of private profit?
Rory Stewart
The hon. Gentleman is a Nottingham Member, and I had a very interesting meeting with the CRC last week on my visit to Nottingham Prison, where the CRC is providing very good Through The Gate services—in fact, services for prisoners in prison that did not exist before the transformation reforms. Before, they were outside the prisons. I do not believe this is a question whether it is done by the private sector, the public sector or the voluntary sector, but it is a question of getting the basic standards right. As I say, that is exactly what we will be assessing the London CRC on on Thursday.
Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)
Putting it bluntly, probation privatisation has been a disaster. Despite that, the Government are still pursuing their privatisation agenda. Last week, the Government outsourced night staff in probation hostels. Given that those hostels house some of the most dangerous ex-offenders, will the Minister accept full responsibility for any impact on public safety resulting from that ideological outsourcing?
Rory Stewart
The shadow Minister refers to a decision by the National Probation Service—which is a Government- run service, so it is not a CRC service—to bring in additional contracted staff to provide double night duty in the hostels. That has been done because it is not work that is traditionally done by trained probation officers, but by contracted staff. Of course I will accept full responsibility for that decision.
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I would like to express, as I am sure would the whole House, our immense gratitude for the role that service animals play and have played for a long time in public life. They frequently do things that humans would not do, ranging from detection of bombs and drugs to taking on violent criminals. There are serious aggravating circumstances that a judge can take into account when sentencing, and serious sentences can be given to anyone attacking a service animal—that is absolutely right.
Stephen McPartland
Police dog Finn was brutally stabbed several times in my constituency while apprehending a violent criminal. The current law treats police dog Finn, a canine hero, like a piece of computer equipment—the charge is criminal damage. This is unacceptable. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Sir Oliver Heald) is leading a campaign to introduce Finn’s law. Will the Minister agree to meet me and my right hon. and learned Friend, so that we can provide greater protection for our service animals in the course of their duty?
Rory Stewart
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and others for the very active campaign that they are leading. I would of course be delighted to meet them to discuss that law.
David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
Given that Canada, America, Australia and many European Union states have a law similar to that being introduced by the right hon. and learned Member for North East Hertfordshire—I am a sponsor of his Bill—why did the Minister order the Government to block the Bill last Friday?
Rory Stewart
As we have discussed, very significant sentences of up to 10 years can already be imposed for this kind of action, but I would be delighted to discuss the issue in more detail with the right hon. Gentleman and my hon. Friends.
Mr Speaker
And doubtless with the right hon. and learned Member for North East Hertfordshire (Sir Oliver Heald).
Mr Speaker
Very well done. The right hon. and learned Gentleman is obviously ahead of events. I was enjoying the family history he was educating us on just now.
Rory Stewart
My right hon. and learned Friend is a great authority on the law. There are a number of issues here, ranging from the exact sentences that can be imposed to the work my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is doing to introduce new sentences for animal cruelty. I look forward to discussing all those issues both in the House and over a cup of tea.
Tracy Brabin (Batley and Spen) (Lab/Co-op)
Mr Speaker
I think the Minister might be a bit confused. I have the impression that he is answering a question that would have been put if the hon. Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) had not been called earlier on a different question. The question with which we are now dealing is Question 16, on levels of violence and self-harm.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
My apologies, Mr Speaker.
There have been worrying increases in levels of violence and self-harm. As was said earlier, a lot of that is being driven by new drugs inducing psychotic episodes. We are working hard on this issue. We have provided training to an additional 14,000 prison officers focused on issues of violence and self-harm. More staffing will help, but there is much more to do.
Tracy Brabin
The Minister will be aware that incidences of self-harm in prisons have risen by 75% since 2007. I appreciate the Minister giving us the drivers of violence and self-harm in prisons, but will he tell us in more detail what steps he will take to reduce the amount of self-harm and suicide? Does he agree that part of the solution is encouraging the use of mental health treatment requirements, which has fallen by 48%?
Rory Stewart
The hon. Lady is absolutely correct that mental health is at the heart of a lot of these issues. On the concrete steps we are taking, one is the training for 14,000 additional officers and the second is the proper use of the ACCT—assessment, care in custody and teamwork—strategy, which is the process for assessing the risk posed to the prisoner and coming up with a plan to deal with it. We have managed to significantly reduce suicide over the past 18 months, but the level is still far too high. Any death is a great tragedy, and we will continue to work very closely to reduce suicide further.
Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)
Sixty-two years ago, Bessie Braddock, the then MP for Liverpool Exchange division, stood in this Chamber and raised concerns about the appalling conditions at Liverpool Prison—then called Walton Prison—and particularly the treatment of prisoners with mental illness. In the past two years at that very same prison, seven inmates have taken their life, including Tony Paine two weeks ago. I note that the Minister said on 22 February that the conditions at the prison were “very disturbing” and “unacceptable”. What action is he going to take today to ensure that all prisoners’ mental health needs are adequately met and that no other prisoner takes their life in one of our prisons?
Rory Stewart
As the hon. Lady mentions, the situation at Liverpool Prison was very disturbing. I have visited Liverpool Prison, and mental health provision is now significantly better than it was at the time of the inspection—I spent quite a lot of time with the mental health staff there—but there is a broader issue. Although we are reducing suicide, there is still far too much of it happening. A lot of this will be about making sure not only that we deal with drugs, but that we have the right kind of purposeful activity in prisons, so that prisoners do not feel the temptation to take their own life.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
Reducing reoffending is above all about having healthy relationships between the individual and their family, the individual and society, and the individual and the state, so having that relationship with the family is vital. That is partly, of course, about the prisoners’ entitlement to two visits a month. There have been some excellent examples in Liverpool—for example, at Altcourse Prison, with its fantastic family centre for meeting family—and it is also about having telephony in place to keep those contacts up.
Maria Caulfield
I thank the Minister for his response. Does he agree with the findings in the Conservative-led strengthening families manifesto, which found that if family contact is maintained, reoffending can be reduced by more than 39%?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. Getting that family relationship right and embedding people properly with their family is vital to reducing reoffending, along with many of the measures we take on education.
Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I am very grateful. There is almost no Member of Parliament who has been more assiduous on this subject, with, I think, five meetings in the past six weeks. There was a vigorous encounter between my officials and the hon. Gentleman’s community on their last visit. I would like very much to have the next meeting here in London, if that is possible, and I would be delighted to discuss the issues on that occasion.
Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)
Rory Stewart
That is an interesting example of a community rehabilitation company in Devon and Cornwall. The particular strengths of the Torbay approach seem to us to be in the partnership working with the police and children’s services and in the work done with Catch22 on accommodation.
Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
Rory Stewart
As the hon. Gentleman will know, I had a serious visit to HMP Nottingham last week. I pay tribute to the prison officers and the governor for their work, but there are a number of serious challenges in the prison. We are particularly focused on safety. We have a new manager in place and a new violence reduction strategy, and the ACCT process will be central to solving these problems.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
Rory Stewart
It is absolutely true that many of the serious challenges we have been discussing in the House today, particularly on violence, self-harm and drug use, focus on the population imprisoned for less than 12 months. The more we can do to try to rehabilitate people in the community while protecting the public the better.
Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)
Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)
Rory Stewart
Levels of literacy in prisons are shocking. About 54% of prisoners currently have a reading level below that which we would expect in an 11-year-old. Let me put that in context. Nearly 50% of prisoners have been excluded from school at some point, compared with about 2% of the general population. Our solution is to give governors more control of their education budgets, and to ensure that literacy training is available in every prison as part of the core curriculum.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
The Minister’s earlier answers to questions about violence in prisons focused on prisoner violence. Our hard-working prison officers face daily violence in their jobs. I have just written to the Minister about a constituent who had urine and excrement poured over him, but let me now ask him a wider question. What is the Department doing to ensure that prison officers are given full support when they are assaulted, and also to ensure that mental health services become better than they are at present?
Rory Stewart
We have a huge obligation to prison officers, particularly when they are assaulted. We can deal with the problem in a number of ways. We need to ensure that prisoners are punished for assaults, and to make it clear that they will be punished. We need to reduce drugs, and we need violence reduction strategies. We are already using more CCTV cameras and body-held cameras to record assaults, but our prison officers must feel safe in their environment. [Interruption.]
Fiona Bruce
Will the Prisons Minister meet me to discuss the welfare of prisoner’ children, especially at the point of sentencing? There are 200,000 such children a year, and they often fall through the care system completely.
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. One of the most terrifying statistics is the very high number of prisoners’ children who go on to offend themselves. I should be delighted to meet my hon. Friend to discuss not just the issue of families, but the issue of children in particular.
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
What are the Government doing to reverse the dramatic fall in community sentencing, which has nearly halved in the past decade, with a particularly sharp drop in recent years?
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
So what exactly has happened at the chaplaincy at HMP Brixton?
Rory Stewart
That is a brilliant question. The answer is that I am still trying to get to the bottom of it and I cannot provide an answer to the House.
Mr Speaker
May I exhort the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) for the umpteenth time to circulate his textbook on succinct questions to all colleagues in the House? If he is in a generous mood, he might even offer copies to people sitting in the Public Gallery as well?
Death by Dangerous Driving: Sentencing
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 8 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. I begin by paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) for bringing this extremely important debate to the House. I also pay tribute to the work of the Express and Star and to the local Labour councillor, Doug James, who has done an enormous amount of work on the issue.
This issue combines the House across different parties, linking people from Scotland, Northern Ireland and England, and I am sure that colleagues from Wales would be here too, because, as my hon. Friend pointed out in his eloquent speech, this horrifying tragedy is something that does not stop at any national border. He has provided, much more eloquently than I can, a description of what that means for a family. We have seen cases in the last week where dangerous drivers have killed a toddler and a baby in a pram by charging across a road. Those are people whose recklessness with 1.5 tonnes of metal—an incredibly dangerous weapon —is unbelievable. The loss that it means for a family is something unimaginable. The hole it leaves in somebody’s life to have lost a child or a loved one in that way is unbelievable.
That is why we as a Government have committed to increasing the penalty for causing death by dangerous driving to a life sentence, and why we are now working to find time in the legislative agenda to bring that in. That needs to happen, and the fundamental reason for that is that families feel the system is not just. They feel it is not fair to them or to their experience. That has also been brought forward clearly by my hon. Friends the Members for Dartford (Gareth Johnson), for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) and for Moray (Douglas Ross), by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), and indeed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), who raised it with me yesterday in relation to his constituents.
The one area where the Government would have some disagreement with my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North is on the question of somebody fleeing the scene. There is already an offence for fleeing the scene, and although he pointed out that that in itself is a short offence, it is a very serious aggravating circumstance when the judge comes to convict. Were the judge to find that somebody had killed someone and then fled the scene, it would significantly increase the sentence that the judge was able to give. Once the opportunity for a maximum life sentence for causing death by dangerous driving is provided, fleeing the scene is an aggravating factor that would drive the sentence up towards a life sentence.
I know that Members of Parliament have challenged that, so I will be clear about what we are talking about. It is of course true that we are dealing with an enormous number of different types of situation. Those situations range all the way from somebody who is drunk, driving at twice the speed limit in a town and speeding through a red light, to my 25-year-old constituent who overtook, sober, at 5 in the afternoon and killed somebody coming the other way because he misjudged his overtaking. All of us in this House understand the importance of the judge and jury in making those difficult decisions in different cases.
We should be in absolutely no doubt about what dangerous driving means. Dangerous driving means that all those people, whatever they were doing, fell well below the standard we would expect of a careful and competent driver. They ought to have been aware of their physical surroundings, aware of the normal laws of causation, aware of the terrible danger posed by the vehicle they were driving, and aware that their dangerousness caused the ultimate thing—a lack of life.
The disagreement over whether that should be a case of murder is around the question of intention. This House believes that there is a difference between somebody who intentionally sets out to murder someone—to stab or shoot them—and somebody who is behaving dangerously in a car, who is overtaking, who may not intend to kill the person. However, the impact on the family is exactly the same; whether the individual intended to kill their family member or accidentally killed their family member, the impact is the same. That is why we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Members of Parliament who have campaigned tirelessly on the issue, which has been neglected by this House. That is also why we will be bringing legislation forward, and why I pay tribute again to my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North, to the Express and Star, and to all the Members of the House who have campaigned on this important issue.
Gareth Johnson
The Minister is right to point out that there are a range of circumstances. That is why courts should be given lengthy maximum penalties, to cater for the different scenarios that can arise. We have a situation where the maximum penalty for someone charged with causing death by driving without due care and attention and then fleeing the scene is just three years. Worse than that, any unduly lenient sentence cannot even be appealed by the prosecution. Therefore, we need the matter to be reviewed right across the board.
Rory Stewart
The Government’s belief is that, by increasing the maximum sentence to a life sentence for causing death in that situation, the distinction my hon. Friend is drawing between different types of crime—in particular, the question of manslaughter that he raised in his intervention earlier—will be dealt with. The maximum penalty of life that the Government will introduce will then allow life sentences to be imposed on an individual who did that, regardless of whether it was done in a car or in some other fashion. With that, I will conclude with another tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North.
Question put and agreed to.
Private Probation Services
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 9 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) on securing this debate, which is hugely important, given the risk that criminals can pose to the public, as the hon. Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain) eloquently put it. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) expressed the very important idea that people can change and improve, and that the public can be protected through that individual journey.
We have always faced fundamental challenges, but the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge is absolutely right that there have been very significant challenges since 2014. However, let me briefly take it back to before 2014. As the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) pointed out, the reality is that it is and has always been extremely difficult to do this kind of work. Before the privatisation of 2014, for nearly 30 or 40 years, probation services worked extremely hard under different Governments to reduce reoffending, and over a 40-year period the reoffending rate barely moved. It hovered around 50% within one year and 70% within nine years. It did not matter whether people were involved with innovative housing, mental health or employment projects. It was stubbornly difficult to reduce reoffending.
Despite all the problems with Through the Gate services that the hon. Member for Bradford East talked about, those services effectively did not exist before 2014. I was at Nottingham prison yesterday. Before 2014, nobody in the prison would have been working on the initial five-day assessment and the pre-12-week assessment to ensure that prisoners are properly co-ordinated Through the Gate. The CRC is now embedded in the building. It is also true that, even before 2014, there were sadly a number of issues with people coming out of prison, reoffending and harming the public.
I take very seriously the complaints that have been made. Those are serious observations by Members of Parliament and the chief inspector, who found and raised powerfully significant problems relating to morale—in particular, staff morale—case load, which the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) raised, and the tragedy when things go wrong. The hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) described the horrifying situation that happened to her constituent, Conner, when somebody who was supervised under a CRC contract reoffended.
All those things need to be gripped and dealt with. The disagreement between the Government and the Opposition is that, for a number of reasons, I do not believe the question is only whether the service should be provided by the public sector or the private sector. Many of these issues predate the privatisation. There were very significant problems with probation in 2010, 2012 and 2014. It made sense—on this, I defend my predecessors—to try to work out how to deal with some of those stubborn problems, including, first, the absence of any proper Through the Gate services; secondly, the fact that before 2014, 40,000 prolific reoffenders were not supervised at all; and, thirdly, how on earth to deal with the stubborn reoffending rate of 50%. It seemed perfectly justifiable that people would try to think about how we could focus relentlessly on dropping the reoffending rate and on encouraging innovation. Why innovation? Because an enormous number of voluntary-sector organisations and charities around the country have proved that the reoffending rates can be reduced. I was looking at a recent example in Stafford, where a chaplaincy housing project has managed to reduce the reoffending of persistent reoffenders—a very tough group to work with—from 50% to what appears to be about 17%. There are similar examples, such as the Clink restaurant in Brixton Prison. Meeting people at the gate, finding them a job and putting them into the catering industry reduces reoffending dramatically. The idea of the reform was to try to bring some of those new ideas into the system.
Jenny Chapman
The Minister is trying to be helpful in acknowledging our points, but I want to challenge him. He is arguing that trusts were not innovative, but they absolutely were. He talks about the Clink and other examples. There are always pockets of absolutely excellent practice that have amazing successes, but the challenge is mainstreaming that, and getting it out so that it is the norm and not the exception. This reform has made that more difficult. Rather than analysing where we are, I hope the Minister will move on to tell us where he intends to take us next.
Rory Stewart
That is a very good challenge, and I will move on to the question of the voluntary sector and how to take good small examples to a bigger scale.
The challenge is what on earth to do about that. How do we address the problems? The fundamental thing is to get back to the basics, which are exactly what hon. Members in the Chamber have discussed. Basics include ensuring that people have a manageable case load, which means not going beyond 50 to 55 cases. They must meet the people in the cases regularly; they must ensure that they not only meet them but put in place a good assessment of the needs of the individual and of public protection; and they must come up with a plan linking that assessment to action. That is before we go on to the other things that we have been discussing, which is how we work with the voluntary sector and wider society. The basics need to happen first.
Around the country we can see that some people are delivering those basics well. Cumbria, for example, which has a CRC, has a good report from the inspectors for doing that. London, as the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge knows well, got a negative report from the inspectors exactly about some of those areas. We will not go into the details and explanations for some of that today. Some are about transition and inheriting a difficult situation, and London has always been difficult for probation services and has more than 30 different boroughs. There are complexities with IT systems and so on. However, we do not want to make excuses. The fundamental question is: can we sort those things out? I believe we can.
I am very confident that we can get to a situation, even in London, which is probably the most difficult area in the country, where we can have manageable case loads, where people can be met regularly, where there is good tracking of offenders—we know where they are and take good enforcement action if they do not turn up to appointments—and where the assessment and the plan are in place. I am very hopeful that, when the next inspection report comes out from the probation inspectorate, we will see those improvements even in London. I expect to be held accountable if those improvements are not recorded in the next report.
Liz Saville Roberts
I am interested in what the Minister is saying. Will he commit to ensure proper parliamentary scrutiny of how those organisations operate, whatever their name in future? That is not the case at present.
Rory Stewart
It would be interesting to know what kind of parliamentary scrutiny the hon. Lady means. There are some pretty good examples of scrutiny—the Justice Committee is doing a report on the probation service and we have an incredibly active, energetic and highly critical chief inspector of probation who is doing an enormously good job which is drawn on by everyone around the Chamber—but I am open to more. Debates such as this one are very powerful ways to hold us to account.
The next issue, as we move on from addressing the basics, is to look at some of the questions the hon. Member for Darlington talked about, in particular how we scale up pockets of really good small practice in individual local areas. That seems to be a huge challenge for everything—not just probation but everything we do with the voluntary sector. It is infuriating to find in most of our constituencies good local providers being pushed out either by contractors coming in from elsewhere or by large charities and voluntary sector organisations. In my case, in Cumbria, they appear to come up from London with hundreds of proposal writers to take over a local council contract, but lack the local skills and knowledge to deliver.
We need to find ways to encourage CRCs to provide both the money that could go to those voluntary organisations—for example, in housing—and the cultural change, as the hon. Member for Darlington is aware, which is to encourage probation officers to let go of the cases to let specialist providers in mental health or housing take over their clients. That can be done but it must be driven through individual CRC by individual CRC. However, that is just the beginning. The big aim is to move from what happens with the individual in the probation office to what happens in broader society.
The real reason we have faced reoffending rates stubbornly stuck at 50% for nearly 40 years is that, in the end, the behaviour of someone coming out of prison is not controlled simply by what happens in the interaction with the probation officer or, when in prison, the prison officer. That is a very individual psychological engagement. What tends to happen is that the probation officer tries to change the behaviour of the individual in the room. However, that individual exists not only in the room but in a broader society. Unless such individuals can repair their relationships with family, society and the state, we will not get into a cycle in which they offend less or, eventually, do not offend at all.
That involves difficult things, with the individual feeling a sense of hope and agency; and that they can take control of their lives and have a sense of dignified participation, not as a labelled criminal but as a citizen in the fullest sense in society. No one in the Chamber has easy answers to how to achieve those things, but we must focus on ensuring that we get everything right, from the basics of meeting, assessment and planning, right through to the broader engagement with society to make that citizen function. We must recognise that the idea of desistance is not a linear path, but it is a path to reduce reoffending and protect the public.
I will conclude with three remarks. First, I pay tribute to the very hard work of probation officers. They are some of our most dedicated and serious professionals. Yesterday in Nottingham Prison I was lucky enough to see the Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Rutland CRC—people who have worked in probation trusts for nearly 30 years. They are based in the prison, telling very powerful stories about the assistance they provide in housing, and they represent exactly why we should be so proud of the work that probation officers do. They have difficult work which, as hon. Members have pointed out, combines the work of a social worker with that of someone who has to implement a court order and protect the public.
Secondly, I pay tribute to Members of Parliament. Their work in this area is often ignored by the public and, sometimes, too much ignored by Parliament. Such work matters deeply, as the hon. Member for Strangford pointed out, both for the individuals themselves on their journey towards improvement, and for the public.
Finally, I undertake to the House that we must focus. The results that we are getting from the inspectors are simply not good enough. I wish to be judged on driving the CRCs back to the very basics of their task, and on opening up to all the innovations and new ideas shared around the Chamber, to ensure that 40 years of stubborn rates of reoffending begin to be addressed, for the sake of individual offenders and the public as a whole.
HMP Liverpool
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 9 months ago)
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Robert Neill
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I know that he knows Liverpool Walton jail, as it is often called locally, very well. I entirely understand the point of his remarks and I hope that the Ministry will reflect on that. The whole thrust of our report is that we need to shine the light of transparency and publicity on these matters. We also, in a separate piece of work, have in hand an inquiry into the shape of the prison population by 2020. Part of that, again, is this need to deal with overcrowding. Our recommendation on persistent overcrowding is part of that. Getting the fabric right is necessary. Walton jail—Liverpool prison—is one of the old Victorian prisons and there is a real need for work to be done there. If we are publishing the public framework on facilities maintenance, I do not see why we should not be able to have similar publicity about the capital works that are required.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
This is an historic opportunity. I think that this is the first time in more than 200 years of our Prison Service that we have had an individual prison debated on the Floor of the House. I pay tribute to the Justice Committee for bringing the matter forward.
The situation in Liverpool prison was, as the Chairman of the Select Committee has pointed out, genuinely shocking. It is very disturbing and it is unbelievably important that Select Committees, inspectors and Members of Parliament hold us accountable for prisoners. These are closed communities. They are often hidden away from the public. In many areas, they can be forgotten, and without scrutiny standards can drop. They dropped very seriously in Liverpool prison.
The condition in the cells was unacceptable; how prisoners were treated was unacceptable, and the lack of purposeful activity was unacceptable. We are now addressing this hard and quickly, but there are still huge lessons to be learned through the system. I pay tribute to the new governor, Pia Sinha, who has come in, taken cells out of commission and made it clear that she has cleaned the prison and that her objective over the next six months is to get those cells into a smart, good condition. We now have the money in place to put in the new windows and she is focused on ensuring that the education and employment activity is good.
More generally, there are lessons right the way through the prison system. We need to get the basics right. There is no point talking about rehabilitation or dealing with reoffending unless we have clean, decent and safe spaces for all prisoners. We want our prisons to be smart and well-functioning. We are bringing in more than 2,000 more prison officers, and that will relieve some of the pressures on the prison estate, but these are new prison officers and will need training and support until they have the prisoncraft to deliver what we require. We also need to invest a lot more in training. Because prisons are unbelievably complex environments, the governor needs the support and training—this could mean months of training—to ensure that they are in a position to turn around the prison. That training should also apply to the uniformed staff. Finally, the role of the inspector and the Select Committee will be vital in improving performance.
Robert Neill
I am grateful to the Minister for that response. He is very much on the case in recognising that we must get basic things: cleanliness, decency, the maintenance of the establishment, and the ability to run a regime where people can get out to healthcare appointments and rehabilitative work. All that is critical. Unless we turn the existing problems around, we will face a real crisis in our prisons.
I look forward to working with the Minister on those matters. In particular, I hope that he will take up our recommendations on the inspectorate and the constructive role that it can play. I can honestly say that this is a case of a small investment being likely to pay off in the long term.
Prisoners: Outdoors Endurance Activities
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 9 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I begin by paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) for bringing the debate. It was fantastic to see the energy that he put into it. His interests as an ex-soldier and as the Member of Parliament for South Dorset came through. It is great that an initiative partly pioneered in the first place by a Member of Parliament is now being pioneered again and promoted by another Member of Parliament.
The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made some characteristically powerful comments, reflecting on some of the practicalities of the subject and some of the moral and philosophical background when it comes to balancing the protection of the public with our obligations towards prisoners. My hon. Friend the Member for Moray (Douglas Ross) provided a good example in John McAvoy of exactly the kind of transformation that can happen for somebody who would, by definition, have been considered one of the most at-risk prisoners most likely to reoffend. He has come through an extraordinary personal journey and transformation.
The right hon. Member for Delyn (David Hanson) was almost the longest serving prisons Minister in British parliamentary history, I think, so he is quite an intimidating man to have opposite. He made, I think, more than 67 separate visits to prisons; he has a deep understanding of the whole system, and I will not attempt to quibble with him on any of the things that he said. Indeed, he and the hon. Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain) pointed out very powerfully that there is no point in simply looking at this thing in isolation.
For any of these schemes to work, we need to think much more broadly about who these people are, who they were before they got into prison, as the hon. Member for Bradford East pointed out, what kind of resources exist—how much money there is, how many prison officers there are—and what kind of routines are run in prisons. In addition, there were practical issues raised by my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset, which extend all the way from relief on temporary licence conditions to conditions in relation to drugs.
I do not want to expand on this subject too much or trespass too much on your time, Mr Howarth, but clearly the challenge that we face is very remarkable. We are all aware of fantastic initiatives—the Airborne Initiative is one of the most powerful and admirable—and we have been aware of them as they have been run for some time. The right hon. Member for Delyn will be aware of many such initiatives that he will have seen when he was the prisons Minister.
The tragic truth is that, although there have been incredibly powerful initiatives for many decades around the country, and although each of these programmes points to fantastic improvements, reoffending rates in general have barely moved. That has been true with more resources and fewer resources; the reoffending rates were roughly the same when the right hon. Member for Delyn was the prisons Minister as they are today. That is partly for some of the reasons that were mentioned.
This is a very difficult cohort to deal with. As hon. Members know, nearly half the people entering prison are almost functionally illiterate. Nearly 60% or 70% come in with pre-existing behaviour issues and particularly drug use problems. Nearly 90% are reporting different ranges of mental health issues. There is an incredibly high homelessness rate among people who leave prison, and they have many problems getting employment. Even the Airborne Initiative, a successful scheme, touches only the percentage of people—it is in the mid-20s—who get into education or employment. These are terrifyingly difficult issues to deal with and to turn around.
That is why the hon. Member for Bradford East and my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset were absolutely correct to pay tribute to the Prison Service. At the centre of a lot of this is the dedicated, tailored work of prison officers. We have tried, by having a keyworker programme where one prison officer is assigned to six prisoners and through some of our work with physical education instructors, to ensure that we build up tailored relationships. Having 2,500 more prison officers is important, because it will begin to make that possible, but each prisoner is different—that leads to the question of empowerment—and each prison is different. One of the reasons why we need governor empowerment is that the kinds of education and activities provided for young, short-term prisoners will be quite different from those provided in a category C prison, let alone in the high-security estate. Governors need to be able to adjust.
Balancing the power of the centre with empowered governors is more of an art than a science. Obviously, in any organisation, we need to trust people and empower them. They need to feel that they are in charge, that they have the necessary levers and, in the end, that the buck stops with them. To take an extreme military analogy, the captain of a ship needs to feel to some extent that, if the ship crashes, it is his fault. Equally, of course, he operates in the huge system of a navy, where there are many other reasons why a ship might crash that might not be entirely down to the captain. Getting that balance right, setting decent national standards and holding people like me to account will be critical.
I expect to be held to account on some of the basic standards issues that were raised. Frankly, I should be able to come back here in 11 months’ time and show that we have significantly reduced the number of people testing positive for drugs in our 30 worst prisons. I would like to come back and present cleaner prisons and prisons with fewer broken windows, and I would like to be judged on some of the basic issues around education provision. If I am not judged on those things, I am not doing my job.
Richard Drax
As always, the Minister is making an eloquent and powerful speech. On his point about reoffending rates staying the same, the Airborne Initiative is aimed at the young. If we stop those people—all right, 20% is not 50%, but it is better than nil—moving on to category C, B and A prisons, we surely will be achieving. If the scheme works and we stop young people from going up the chain to more serious crime and longer prison terms, that surely will be another reason why it is particularly brilliant and different.
Rory Stewart
One hundred per cent! Any scheme that dramatically reduces reoffending does an incredible amount for the individual young person, because it gives them a chance to have a life that is not in prison, and for the public, who would be the victims of the crime that that person would go on to commit. It also, of course, makes a huge difference to the Prison Service and the prison population, because it means there are fewer people in prison and there is less pressure on the whole system. For all those reasons, reducing reoffending has to be at the centre of this issue.
Reducing reoffending is partly about the Airborne Initiative, but it is about many other things, too: ensuring that people have accommodation to go to when they leave prison and trying to ensure that they have jobs to go to as well. A lot of that is not in the gift of my Department. We need to get together a taskforce with all the other bits of the Government and ensure that local authorities have houses to provide, that employers are really reaching out and so on.
There are brilliant ways of doing this. To take one example, there is a fantastic scheme being led by Liverpool Altcourse prison, where prisoners are being trained on metal welding and metal painting, and are connected directly with a company that employs metal welders at the other end. The same is happening with recycling machinery: prisoners make huge recycling trucks inside the prison and are connected with the recycling company for a job as soon as they leave the prison gate. They get some income—that can go into an escrow account, which provides them with some money when they leave—and a vocational qualification, and they get a job at the end.
The Football Association is leading a fantastic programme to pair every premier league club with a local prison. Two people from the club are paired with 16 prisoners, who train for level 1 coaching qualifications with the aim of filling a gap—we need 4,400 coaches in the British system. Leeds Rhinos rugby league team makes fantastic use of its facilities to develop a connection whereby prisoners can use all the community facilities and all the club’s contacts once they leave prison. That is what I want to try to get to.
The Airborne Initiative has three brilliant elements. The first is the military element. We have seen everything that that means. It is shared by initiatives such as the 3 Pillars initiative in London, which emphasises exercise, employment and, above all, a military ethos—the sense of courage, pride, honour and self-confidence that is hugely important for pushing people forward into the world.
The second element is the benefits of the outdoors—we heard about those from the hon. Member for Strangford—and all they mean for everything from someone’s endorphins to their health, their love of nature and, after coming through ice baths and freezing rivers, their sense of resilience. Crossing the River Dart and orienteering alone through the night must be challenging experiences. The third critical element is everything that people get in the evenings. These are residential courses that give people the ability to reflect on their character, their future and their life.
However, we could be doing more to take these schemes to the next stage. First, we should work with the incredibly dedicated and impressive PE professionals in prisons to ensure that they feel absolutely central to these programmes. They should not feel replaced—the voluntary sector is not a replacement for them—but they should feel that they bolt in as role models and mentors. That applies both to these programmes and to other things: PE staff can be central to helping people wean themselves off drugs and to guiding people through nutrition. We now provide much more nutritious food in prisons. Proper nutritious meals have an extraordinary impact—a nearly 30% reduction—on violence and behavioural issues.
We should think not just about young people but about older people. There is no reason why older people cannot go on these courses. We should think about what outdoor activities and sport we can use to reach out to older people. We should embrace sport as a way of doing education—mathematics, for example—as a leveller and as a way of including people who may have struggled at school. We should think about diversity. The Airborne Initiative may be ideal for one cohort but, in another context, something like the Clink restaurant in Brixton may be ideal for someone who wants to go into catering.
Above all, we should stick with courses. We do not want short, shiny, high-quality courses that are delivered for very short periods. That is deeply depressing for prisoners. They turn up, get a terrific package that runs for about three or four weeks, have their fantastic role model and feel their life is turning around, but then that person vanishes and we never hear from them again. Prisoners really want through-mentoring. They want people meeting them at the gate. Clink restaurant is a good example. It meets prisoners at the gate, takes them out, connects them with a catering company and stays with them. Fulham football club is another great example. It meets prisoners at the gate, takes them out and tries to involve them in activities outside the prison. None of this stuff is a silver bullet, but it is all stuff that we need to lean into, facilitate and make easier.
Let me set out the action points that I want to take away from the debate. We clearly need to work out exactly what the problems are with getting prisoners into the Airborne Initiative and to solve them. I will contact governors so that, next time the course is run, we do everything we can to ensure that prisoners are available to go on it. We will have to deal with the deeper structural issues in the next debate, but the basic philosophy is absolutely central: if PE instructors in prisons, prison officers and the voluntary sector work on outdoor education and sport and think about how to connect those things together, that can transform prisoners’ lives, transform reoffending and protect the public.
Along with everything I am talking about in terms of back to basics—the stuff with drugs, cleaning up prisons, fixing broken windows, having basic standards and getting 2,500 prison officers back in—Britain, with its astonishing love of sport and the outdoors and the commitment of soldiers from the Parachute Regiment, MPs and everyone in the Chamber—can make a huge difference to vulnerable lives, and ultimately to public safety.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 10 months ago)
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Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I should like to begin by paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for his work on the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017. With the agreement of colleagues from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Act should come into operation in April. It is absolutely vital that every prisoner leaving custody has a home to go to.
Bob Blackman
I thank my hon. Friend and welcome him to his new position. As he rightly says, it is in our best interest that ex-offenders leaving prison do not reoffend. One of the key issues is to ensure that prison governors honour their commitment under the Homelessness Reduction Act to ensure that people are prepared for life outside prison. What action will he take to ensure that prison governors train offenders who are due to leave prison so that they do not reoffend?
Rory Stewart
There are two key things to do: first, to empower governors so that they have real flexibility and control over education budgets and career advice; and, secondly, to connect that to housing. There is an obligation under the Act that my hon. Friend has championed, and co-ordination with local authorities will be essential.
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
Why has the number of women who become homeless on release doubled in only a year? Is this not more evidence of the Government failing prisoners and probation policies?
Rory Stewart
There are a number of complex issues relating to homelessness, but we absolutely agree that this is unacceptable and shocking. We need to work much more closely with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, with local authorities and with prisons to ensure that we cut those numbers.
Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)
Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I visited Liverpool prison yesterday. The inspector’s report was genuinely disturbing, and of course that is reflected on the ground. There are some very good prison officers working there, but unfortunately the conditions are really shocking, particularly basic sanitation, with piles of garbage. We now have a new governor in place, millions of pounds are going into the infrastructure, and 172 places have been closed so that we can begin a proper refurbishment and maintenance programme. Most importantly, we must not allow this to happen again.
Rosie Cooper
These appalling conditions did not emerge overnight. Who will be held to account locally and nationally for failing to implement the recommendations of the many critical reports about the prison? How in 21st century Britain could this national disgrace be allowed to happen? Lack of adequate healthcare meant that lives were lost. What happened to the regulators and the leadership? Were they being paid while asleep?
Rory Stewart
Those are important questions that we will look at closely. We have published an action plan for Liverpool prison. There are two key things we need to do. The first is about leadership. The governor has now been replaced. The second is that we have put in place a new urgent notification process, so if anything like this happens again and inspectors raise it, we will be forced to reply within 28 days. But that is only the beginning, because this requires a complete change in culture that focuses on getting back to basics: cleaning the prison, reducing the violence, reducing the drugs and making sure the healthcare provision is in place.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Ind)
Rory Stewart
This is a big question of management. There are many very hard-working people at Liverpool prison who take their jobs very seriously and work very long hours, but we have to balance that with a recognition that clearly there have been fundamental failings. People will be held to account. Above all, we need to work with the team at the prison to ensure that in future it is a clean and decent place, both to protect the public and to reduce reoffending.
Dan Carden (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
I welcome the Minister’s prompt visit to HMP Liverpool in his new role, and to Altcourse prison, which is in my constituency. His action plan states that there will be a full conditional survey and investment proposal for medium-term refurbishment. Given that Walton prison was built in 1855—some 15 years before this Palace was completed—is that the most realistic outcome for the future of the prison?
Rory Stewart
It is certainly true that there are challenges with older buildings, as we see with this place, but it is possible to keep them going—Westminster Hall was built in 1080. Stafford prison, which was built in the late 18th century, is a clean and decent prison. We will look carefully at the fabric, and in some cases there is reason to build a new wing. But in Liverpool prison we can make a huge difference simply with £2.5 million for new windows and for refurbishing individual cells.
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)
The inspectors described the conditions at HMP Liverpool as the worst they have seen, citing rat infestations and filthy conditions. Prison maintenance at Liverpool was outsourced to Amey. This shows that the problems with outsourcing go way beyond Carillion, which mismanaged maintenance at 50 different prisons. Will the Secretary of State commit to a review looking at bringing prison maintenance back in house, in Liverpool and at all prisons, as Labour has pledged to do?
Rory Stewart
We will look carefully at the maintenance issues in Liverpool, but sadly the problems are not only to do with Amey; they are also to do with relationships between management and the contractors and how prisoners were, or were not, used to clean the estate. We have made a huge amount of difference in just the past five weeks by changing not the Amey contract but the management approach and the focus on cleanliness.
Richard Burgon
I thank the Minister for his answer on Amey and contractors, but it is hard to have faith that he will address the problems at Liverpool or, in fact, any prison, because it has recently come to light that his Government handed £40 million to Carillion in 2017, even after the then prisons Minister had expressed concerns in Parliament about Carillion’s performance in prisons. Will not poor maintenance in Liverpool continue to contribute to inhumane conditions while responsibility is left in the hands of private contractors who, in reality, put profit first?
Rory Stewart
We do not believe that this is fundamentally an ideological fight between the private and public sectors. Most of those people working for Carillion—70% of them—were public servants just three years ago, and most of those people working for Amey were public servants in the prison service. Most of the problems have been solved through basic management and leadership. There has been a deep clean, the yard units have been increased from five to 18, and the conditions have improved rapidly. In the end, a lot of this is about management, not a private/public debate.
Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
We have been doing three things on education: first, we have been making sure that governors are empowered to bring in their own education providers; secondly, we have been setting minimum standards, particularly on English language learning; and thirdly, through the new futures network, we have been connecting people to jobs.
Rory Stewart
As the Speaker implies in his reprimand to me, the causes of offending are many and multiple. Literacy is one of them, along with many issues relating to people’s health, education, social background and, indeed, our criminal justice system as a whole. Nevertheless, literacy is key to the reduction of reoffending because it is key to getting a good job. Good education provision in prisons, driven by governors, is going to be key to addressing this issue.
Mrs Latham
Can the Minister say anything more about the steps the Government are taking further to empower governors to deliver effective education and training in prisons?
Rory Stewart
Yes. We have empowered governors by having in place a new procurement contract, which means that we in the Ministry are going to do the central procurement bureaucracy, but the governors will be able to choose who they use to train and educate the prisoners. I saw a good example in Altcourse Prison in Liverpool of how governors are also going to be able to choose which companies to pair with. The excellent work on metal welding that I saw in Altcourse will really contribute to those prisoners getting jobs in the community.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
Does the Minister agree that whatever plans he comes up with will require there to be enough prison officers on the estate so that they can release prisoners from their cells and take them to education and training classes? Does he now accept that the Government’s dash to reduce the number of prison officers has seriously hampered the chances of preventing prisoners from reoffending?
Rory Stewart
Among the many challenges that face education in prisons is the issue of numbers, which is why we have now committed to having 2,500 more prison officers on the estate, and we are delivering that ahead of target. That will allow us to have in place the key-worker programmes, in which each officer will be paired with six prisoners to guide them through the process.
Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)
Does the Minister accept that there are some good examples of literacy classes in prisons and reoffending rates thereby reducing? Will he undertake to ensure that best practice from throughout the United Kingdom is replicated so that reoffending rates fall across the UK?
Rory Stewart
That is absolutely true. An enormous number of programmes have huge success in reducing reoffending. For example, in Brixton prison, the Clink programme has reduced reoffending by 43%, but we can do much more to learn the lessons and have a proper standardised document that takes what works elsewhere and drives it through the entire system.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
In order to encourage more businesses to take on ex-offenders, the Government need to lead by example and not just by exhortation. The Ban the Box initiative was brought in across Government a few years ago to encourage that. How is ex-offender employment going within Government and the public sector?
Rory Stewart
First, I wish to pay tribute to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), who did this job far better than I will be able to do. One of the things that he introduced, which is going very well at the moment, is working with the Ministry of Defence. We are providing basic supplies for British military troops. It is something that is providing not just employment to prisoners, but the training and vocational skills they require for future employment.
Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)
Prisoners move round the prison system and, in the end, they come out of the prison system. One thing that consistently goes wrong is the lack of consistency in education and training between different institutions and in institutions once the prisoner leaves. The Minister has talked about power to the governor, but governors must work within the construct of the wider environment. What will he do to ensure that we have that consistency?
Rory Stewart
This is of course a balance between empowering the governor so that they can have a tailored programme that is flexible and works for the prison and having decent national standards. That will mean setting the curriculum at a national level, having the area managers engaged over the governors and also giving the governors the ability to have education that is relevant to their areas—skills that are relevant to the jobs outside the prison gates.
Jeremy Quin (Horsham) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I first pay tribute to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Mr Gyimah), for his extraordinary work on drones. We have done a range of work, ranging from Operation Trenton with the police, which took place in 2016, through to the conviction of over 28 individuals for drone-related offences.
Jeremy Quin
What particular extra support is given to those prisons with a high incidence of drone attacks? Will the Minister agree to meet me to discuss potential improvements to the relevant legislation?
Rory Stewart
We have established specialist teams for prisons that have particular vulnerabilities to drone attacks. I am very happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss some of the legislative issues. I also believe that there is much more we can do on basic issues such as netting and grills, as well as focusing on high technology.
Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)
Drones are one of the ways in which mobile phones are got into prisons, where they can be used for criminality alongside drugs. What measures are being taken to use technology to limit the use of mobile phones in prison?
Rory Stewart
Two types of technology can be used on mobile telephones. One is jamming technology, and the second, which is more commonly used in prison, is a wand to detect mobile telephones. An astonishing number of phones—at over 20,000, there are far too many—are detected in prisons. We should be addressing this in two ways. The first is by making sure that they do not get in: these are closed environments and we should be able to massively reduce the amount coming in. The second is that, by putting phones in cells to allow people to talk to their families, we can monitor the calls and control the need for phones in the first place.
Andrew Lewer (Northampton South) (Con)
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
We focus on making sure that we have a proper capital investment programme in place, so additional money has been allocated for the building of new prisons, two are currently being commissioned, and we currently have spare places in our prisons. To reassure my hon. Friend, it is absolutely vital that we have the places so that people can serve their sentence. Sentences should not be driven by availability of prison places.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)
We know that conversion to a radical brand of Islamist thinking too often occurs in a prison setting. Will the Minister update the House on the work being done to address this issue and set out the procedures to vet religious officials working with the vulnerable prison population?
Rory Stewart
This is a hugely important issue for Members on both sides of the House. We know absolutely that extremism—we can see this in France, and we of course saw it in Iraq—can be driven in a prison setting. The problem is not simply the 230 prisoners arrested for terrorist offences, but others who can be influenced when they are in a prison setting. We are working very hard with colleagues in the Home Office on this issue, and it will be a priority for the Secretary of State and me during our time in office.
Eleanor Smith (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
Recent reports by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons reveal a consistent failure by the Prison Service to act on recommendations made by the inspector in previous reports. Does the Minister agree that compliance with inspectorate reports should be the norm, rather than the exception?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. Peter Clarke, the chief inspector of prisons, does an extraordinary job. We are doing two things to make sure that we implement those recommendations better. First, we have set up a special unit in the Ministry to follow up on every one of those recommendations. Secondly, we have introduced an urgent notification process, which requires us to reply within 28 days to any issues raised by the inspector.
Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend will be aware that the prisoner transfer agreement was suspended because of the corrupt release of prisoners from Pakistani prisons. We are addressing that at the moment with the Government of Pakistan, and we continue to work very closely with officials in the Foreign Office, the Department for International Development and the Home Office to make sure that we continue to return a record number of foreign national offenders—4,000 last year—to the places from which they came.
Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)
In the 18 months prior to May 2017, three openly transgender women took their own lives while they were in custody in England. What is being done to ensure that staff have the right training and, critically, that prisoners have the right mental health support to head off such tragic events?
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
When a prisoner is released, they are not even at base camp in their rehabilitation unless they have accommodation. Some local authorities actively discriminate against ex-offenders—for example, by claiming that they have no local connection because they have been sent to a prison a long way away. Fairness is what is required. Will the Minister challenge that behaviour with his counterparts in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government?
Rory Stewart
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his knowledge of this issue. There are three things we are doing to address this issue, but we can do much more. The first is having a statutory duty on governors to identify prisoners who are at risk of homelessness. The second is investing more in bail accommodation support services to provide temporary support and accommodation. The third is working with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to make sure that, through the Housing First pilots, we can actually have homes available even for people with severe mental health needs. Housing is essential.
Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)
One of my constituents has a young son who is serving a very long prison sentence. He often spends 23 out of 24 hours locked up in his cell. How does the Minister think that is affecting his mental health and his chances of rehabilitation on release?
Rory Stewart
Clearly, this is not good. Prisoners need decent, purposeful activity. If they are locked up in their cell for too long, they are obviously not having educational opportunities. We should aim, as the chief inspector of prisons made clear, to make sure that people are spending eight or 10 hours a day outside their cells. That is partly about numbers of staff, which is why we have brought 250 more staff into the Prison Service. It is also about better scheduling of educational and vocational provision. However, the situation the hon. Lady describes is not acceptable.
Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)
Following campaigns by victims’ families, the Government announced in October last year that they would bring in tougher sentences for those causing death or serious injury by dangerous driving, but still nothing has happened. Why the delay?
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
I would like to put on record my role as co-chair of the justice unions parliamentary group.
When north Wales’s only prison, HMP Berwyn, partially opened on 28 February last year, its regime of skills development and rehabilitation was lauded as pioneering, yet we now learn that, in its first six months, 27 staff members left, and I am told by the Prison Officers Association that morale is at rock bottom. I understand that, in the early months, prisoners assaulted staff on nine occasions, and only one was referred to police. How will the Minister improve offenders’ rehabilitation when recruitment, retention and, critically, staff safety at HMP Berwyn are in crisis?
Rory Stewart
I am very happy to speak in detail with the hon. Lady, who has put an enormous amount of passion and energy into studying issues in prisons in Wales. We believe there are some very positive signs now at HMP Berwyn, but we can talk those through. Recruitment figures have actually been very positive—we are ahead on the recruitment of 2,500 people across England and Wales—but I am very happy to sit down and talk about Berwyn in particular.
Several hon. Members rose—
Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are some of the most vulnerable inmates in prison and are often subject to bullying, abuse and victimisation, with high rates of suicide. What progress is being made on autism accreditation in prisons?
Rory Stewart
This is a hugely important issue. I would very much like to sit down with the hon. Lady, because the Scottish Prison Service has a lot that it can teach us. It is doing a very good job on many of these issues, and I think we can learn a great deal from it.
Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]
Rory Stewart Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
I wish to speak to new clauses 2 and 3. As the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) has just pointed out, the Secretary of State has asked me to lead a review of these matters. I would like to pay huge tribute to the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) and the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) for the work they have done on that. There has been a very good cross-party focus on the matter over the past few years, and I have a huge amount to learn.
Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)
Is my hon. Friend aware that the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee visited Washington last summer and saw at first hand some of the stuff we are talking about? Is he willing to take evidence from some of the Members who were on that trip to ensure that it is included as well?
Rory Stewart
I would be delighted to do that. My hon. Friend’s intervention reminds me just how much expertise there is in the House. I see that there is an enormous amount of expertise on the Opposition side of the House. He has a great deal of expertise on the matter, as do many other Members in the Chamber this afternoon.
We need to focus on this for three reasons: first, we have an obligation towards individuals in the criminal justice system as a whole; secondly, we have a huge obligation specifically to those who have served in the armed forces; and thirdly, we have an obligation to society as a whole. The US experience suggests that there is something we can do. It is unusual in such a situation to find that we have concrete levers that might be able to improve our relationship to reoffending.
There already exists enormous expertise, for example in the Howard League for Penal Reform, Combat Stress and the Royal British Legion, and in the work that has been done by all the forces charities—29 different forces charities are currently working on the issue. There is also deep expertise in our universities. For example, King’s College London has done an enormous amount of work on some of the trauma elements, and in the past 24 hours I have been contacted by seven doctoral students doing theses on these issues. I hope not to try to reinvent the wheel, but to learn an enormous amount, including from Opposition Members, to make this as much of a cross-party enterprise as possible and to bring in the expertise that is here.
Alison Seabeck
I look forward to the results of the work that the hon. Gentleman is undertaking, which I know he will do with a great deal of care and intelligence. We are talking a lot about trauma and front-line experience being among the key issues, but surely the institutionalisation of young men in particular has an impact on how they behave when they come out. That must also be part of his review.
Rory Stewart
That is a very important intervention. First, essentially we need to be looking at the base data. We need to understand what exactly is happening because, as hon. Members have pointed out, we do not yet have enough data on that. Secondly, we need to look at the causes of the incidence of offending and reoffending by people who have formerly been in the armed forces. Thirdly, we need to look at our response. In doing that, we need to be absolutely sure that we are not stigmatising. We must make it absolutely clear that we are not trying somehow to portray people who have been in the armed forces as more likely to offend. In fact, a lot of the data suggest that they might be less likely to offend than those from similar socio-economic backgrounds. We need to get that clear. It is important in terms of the recruitment and employability of people leaving the armed forces.
On the specific issue of causes, most of the research, according to my preliminary reading, suggests that the hon. Lady is absolutely right that there are different elements, one of which may be experiences before people join the military. For example, people who join the infantry tend, comparatively, to come from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. A second element is experiences in the military, such as combat stress, and another is that raised by the hon. Lady, namely the question of what happens when individuals leave the military and go from what for many of them may be a very fulfilling institutional framework in which they feel a strong amount of team work and esprit de corps, to suddenly finding themselves in an environment in which perhaps less support exists.
That said, people coming out of the armed forces already benefit enormously from the forces charities and even from individual regimental associations, so we should not underestimate the amount of support that exists or try to reinvent the wheel.
Oliver Colvile
Will my hon. Friend also recognise that in the United States of America all veterans are given a mobile phone when they leave the military and receive a couple of telephone calls during the following six months to a year, which means that there is permanent contact?
Rory Stewart
I can see that the hon. Lady wishes to intervene and I will let her do so.
Lady Hermon
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for taking an intervention from me as a Member who represents a constituency in Northern Ireland. I know that he will be very sensitive to the role of the British Army in Northern Ireland, which has in the past been very divisive for some sections of the community. May I urge the hon. Gentleman to bear it in mind, when he does his research in Northern Ireland, that former members of the Royal Irish Regiment and the Ulster Defence Regiment are very reluctant to raise their profile, because they are anxious not to be targeted by dissident republicans? I would be keen to meet the hon. Gentleman when he comes to Northern Ireland to do his research and to be as helpful as I possibly can be. I am sure I speak for all Members who usually sit on these Benches.
Rory Stewart
I thank the hon. Lady very much for her offer and I would love to take it up.
On the penultimate intervention, the provision of mobile phones is a simple example of a very important point that every Member has raised so far: what we do know about veterans who offend and reoffend is that the military provides a very powerful possible support network. Unlike other sectors of society, it provides an instrument or lever that could be incredibly helpful and supportive to backing people in their recovery process. Trying to make sure that we get the very best out of institutions that already exist will be the key. We have an obligation to the individuals who offend and reoffend; we have a particular obligation towards the military; and we have an obligation towards society as a whole.
John McDonnell
I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) and, in particular, to the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd). I attended the first session he held in Portcullis House about two and a half years ago, which was also supported, I think, by the ubiquitous Harry Fletcher, and we were shocked at the scale of the numbers of ex-military who were in prison and at the scale of the trauma they were experiencing. I welcome the review. It will be useful to get clarity on time scales and on how the recommendations will be dealt with by the Government at a later stage. I appreciate that.
I want to speak to new clause 12, which stands in my name and relates to domestic abuse. The scale of domestic abuse and the figures involved are always shocking. Last year, 7% of women reported some form of domestic violence or abuse against them. Two women a week are killed by partners or lovers, and the number of sexual assaults is about 70,000.
The existing probation service established national programmes in response to the issue. There is a 30-week programme in which perpetrators are placed, but there are concerns that it will be lost as this privatisation rolls out. I therefore suggest in my new clause 12 that programmes for tackling domestic abuse on which offenders are placed should remain with the national probation service. That would give the assurance that such work will continue and that there is consistency of approach. It would also allay several fears. I do not want to make this a contentious point, but one of the fears that has been excited relates to the unpaid work programme that Serco has taken over, in that some women’s workshops have been closed as a result of that privatisation. We do not want that to be experienced by such important programmes as those currently provided by the probation service, but they would be laid waste if privatisation took place.
The new clause is fairly straightforward. It would ensure consistency of approach, as well as the maintenance of such programmes, and the best way to do that is to retain those programmes within the state sector.
Philip Davies
To be perfectly honest—I am trying to think of the polite way to describe that—what the hon. Lady says is utter garbage. It is utter rot. The idea that women are sent to prison for short sentences and non-violent offences is a myth—it is a big myth, but it is a myth. At any one time, there are about 3,700 women in prison. Perhaps she will tell the House which ones she believes should not be there. Perhaps it is the 211 who are in prison for murder; the 135 in for manslaughter or attempted homicide; the 352 in for wounding; the 142 in for serious assaults or other violence against the person; or the 58 in for cruelty to children. Perhaps she means the 58 who are in there for cruelty to children; or the 83 who are in for rape, gross indecency with children or other sexual offences. Perhaps she means the 272 women in prison for violent robbery. Perhaps she means the 151 who are in there for burglary. Perhaps she thinks the 398 drug dealers should not be in prison. Perhaps she means the 91 arsonists; the 24 convicted of violent disorder; the 45 in there for kidnapping and blackmail; or the 192 in there for serious fraud and forgeries. Perhaps she means the 320 in prison for importing drugs into the country, which end up being sold on our streets. She might mean the 111 others serving time for other serious drug offences. The hon. Lady might believe those people should not be in prison, but they are not non-violent, minor offences. It is a disgrace for her to suggest to the victims of those crimes that they are the victims of minor, non-violent offences. She should be absolutely, utterly ashamed of herself for suggesting that. That is the type of nonsense we have had to deal with in the debate for many years. I am delighted that I can shine a light on the utter rot that people like her have spouted year after year.
Rory Stewart
I am interested in what my hon. Friend says, but some of those figures on female offending seem relatively low. Does he have comparative figures for men in those categories?
Philip Davies
Absolutely. My hon. Friend is making my point for me. Some 95% of people in prison are men. If 95% of either men or women were treated in what we might call a harsh manner in any other walk of life one would think there would be uproar on behalf of the 95%, but, would you believe it, all the uproar is that 5% is too many women prisoners. It is a nonsensical argument to suggest that women are treated more harshly than men. My hon. Friend is quite right that a lot more men are in prison for those same offences. My point is that men and women should be treated the same, irrespective of their offence. For the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) to suggest that they are non-violent, non-serious offences is utterly disgraceful. Perhaps she would like to go to each of those victims of crime and tell them that they are the victims of non-violent and non-serious offences.
In conclusion, clause 10 is unnecessary because the facts are already stark: women are treated more favourably than men when it comes to sentencing. Men are more likely to be sent to prison, more likely to be given a longer sentence and more likely to serve more of that sentence in prison than women for every single category of crime. For every single category of crime, men are also more likely to be given a serious community order and a longer community order, and are more likely to have more requirements made. Why is it, then, that the Government are not satisfied with that and want to go further to make the criminal justice system even more imbalanced and even more in favour of female offenders?
Mr Llwyd
That is precisely the point of the joint group, and I am proud to say that the police force where I live, north Wales, have been doing that for more than 12 months, as have others. It is difficult, though, because some ex-military personnel are not prepared to admit to having been in the forces; they feel they would be letting the regiment down. Then there are others—we have all met them; they always seem to be former leading members of the SAS—who have not served a day any more than I have. It is not simple—we need to be doing a complex set of things—but I am pleased that we now have something to concentrate our energies upon.
I first became aware of the disproportionate number of veterans in the system when appearing as a barrister in Chester and north Wales Crown courts one particular week some years ago. I noticed that increasing numbers of people who were appearing in court for serious crimes professed to have a military background, and often the distinguishing feature was that their crimes were inexplicable, or at least difficult for a person who had not served in theatre to explain. I remember one case vividly of a young man who had come back from Iraq and was standing in a fish and chip queue when the lad behind him who had had too much to drink bumped into him. He knocked the hell out of the young lad in no time at all. He was trained to look after himself—almost by reflex he would do it—and he ended up doing three years for assault.
When people come back from theatre, they need to be decompressed and brought back into society. Heaven knows how I would be affected, had I been out with the forces in theatre. It is natural to presume that many people will suffer mental scars as a result of service, and we owe it to them to do something about it.
Rory Stewart
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that there is a particular issue with the reserves? For those in the regular forces, there is more of a framework for returning from operational theatre to battalion, whereas for the reserves we have a very specific challenge.
Mr Llwyd
Yes, and actually, as one who follows these things, I know that, interestingly, an increasing number of reservists are appearing in court, having left their work for a period and gone into the eye of the storm. On coming out again, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says, they are expected to go back to civvy street as normal, but it is clearly extremely difficult. That is a big problem, and the amendments would be a step forward.
Almost by instinct, as a lawyer I have something at the back of my mind saying, “Why should any class of society have a court set up especially for them?” In this case, the answer is simple: because these people have been through extraordinary situations that we cannot even imagine. Of those who would wish to argue along the lines I previously argued, I would ask: why do we have specialist drug courts in the UK? They have worked well. The Liverpool drug court was a great success when it was in full swing, as these courts, or disposals, could be—we are talking about disposals for veterans, to begin with, which is perfectly sensible.
Human Rights Act 1998 (Repeal and Substitution) Bill
Rory Stewart Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Charlie Elphicke
I thank my hon. Friend, who speaks with great experience. He is not only a war hero himself, but has pursued justice and kept the peace in dangerous places throughout the world for so many years, dedicating his life to such causes. I completely agree; there should be such a system. If we have a system in which we have to second-guess the justice of other countries, putting them down by saying they are not good enough and will not come up to the standard, perhaps there should be an international mechanism for people to be tried and made to answer their crimes.
I feel very uncomfortable about the fact that someone can butcher people and commit genocide in Rwanda, yet still be allowed to drive a taxi around Essex today. That is wholly wrong. I worry about the passengers in that taxi, who may not know the driver’s background, previous conduct or behaviour. They may be literally putting their lives at risk by getting into that taxi. My hon. Friend’s idea of having an international court for these cases is one that should be explored.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend clarify why the idea of an international court should be considered, given that the problem with the European Court of Human Rights is presumably the entire notion of trying to create a set of universal international rights that can be applied irrespective of the political codes of individual countries? Would not the movement from the European Court to an international court simply exacerbate the problems that my hon. Friend describes?
Charlie Elphicke
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I think either option would provide a way forward. The issue I am touching on is justice in Britain and how to ensure that people who are a threat to our national security, who threaten the livelihoods of others or who have committed criminal acts are allowed to escape answering to justice anywhere. We seem to be saying that because the courts of those people’s countries are not safe, they should not face justice at all. That is wrong-headed, and I believe most British people would say that it is wrong-headed and not the right way to go.
Let us take the example of Abu Qatada, a Jordanian who could not be deported to Jordan on national security grounds because of the real risk that evidence obtained by torture might be submitted against him in his own country’s trial for terrorist offences. The answer of the current code is, “Well, let him not face justice at all.” I think that is unwise, and that is what the debate is about. There is no real risk that Qatada himself would be tortured, and the ruling was made despite an earlier finding by the deportation tribunal that the case for his deportation had been well proved on national security grounds as he was seen by many as a terrorist spiritual adviser, whose views legitimised violence.
Charlie Elphicke
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point, and I hope that he, too, will consider joining the Committee to scrutinise the Bill to ensure that we get the right balance. I hope that he will table amendments to take forward the debate, even perhaps on whether we should remain part of the treaty. He might join forces with my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset on that issue. Such issues are important and they need to be explored. This is a Second Reading debate, so it is a sighting shot as to what a British Bill of Rights would look like. I have no doubt that the Bill could be dramatically improved in Committee and that the new settlement could be made even more ideal.
As I said, my first principle is that the UK Supreme Court should be the final court in UK law for human rights matters. Secondly, serious foreign criminals and persons in the UK illegally should not be able to avoid deportation by using human rights claims, as has happened in the past. Thirdly, the right to family life should not be available as a tool to avoid justice and escape answering criminal charges. Fourthly, suspected foreign terrorists should not be able to subvert national security or our personal security, or avoid deportation, by using human rights claims.
Fifthly, freedom of thought, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion should be protected to a greater extent than they are today. We have seen too many attacks on people’s thoughts, feelings and beliefs. There has been too much aggressive secularism, which has sought to attack the Church and people who have deeply held religious beliefs. We have seen that in the case of the Plymouth Brethren and the Charity Commission, and in the constant attacks on the Church and on religion both in Parliament and outside it. We must ensure that there is a space for people to have religion and religious beliefs in this country, and that people should be able to set out and preach what they think. Their right to free speech should be better protected.
Rory Stewart
I wonder whether my hon. Friend might reflect on a broader application of his provision. Would he see it as applying to Islam as well as to Christianity in terms of people’s freedom of speech and freedom to express what they believe, and the inability of the state to interfere in personal beliefs?
Charlie Elphicke
Yes, I would. It is important that every British citizen should be able to hold a belief. I may be a Christian, but I think we need to respect Muslims following the Islamic faith, as well as people following the Jewish and Catholic faiths, and Protestant Christianity. All those faiths are important. This freedom should not be unlimited; I have been careful to say in the relevant provision that freedom of religion does not extend to inciting physical harm or undermining national security. We cannot have a situation where freedom of religion could be used to promote terror, as has happened too often. That important limitation is in place, but it is important that we have religious freedom.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
I begin by praising my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) for introducing the Bill. It raises an extremely important issue which clearly irritates many people in Britain and is very dangerous. We have got to a situation where human rights are talked about as though they were some trivial, unnecessary issue. The phrase is connected in people’s minds with phrases such as “health and safety”. That is a very sad effect.
The question for us today is how we deal with the problem. My hon. Friend has eloquently explained that we have a problem and has eloquently given countless examples of things which intuitively make many members of the British public extremely anxious and extremely unhappy with the judicial and the political institutions. We should respect that. It might be tempting to say, as some lawyers do, that the British public are not focused enough on the moral details and the legal details of the case, and to trivialise their objections. This would be unfair, because there is obviously something important, deep and intuitive going on that makes people anxious about this kind of activity under the banner of human rights.
What is our solution? How do we look at these issues? We have to begin with a sense of what human rights are. Let me politely challenge slightly the definition of human rights put forward by my hon. Friend, without calling into question his overall point, which is that we are now in a mess. It seems to me that we can begin with a definition of human rights that would state that to say that somebody has a human right is to say that anyone, anywhere, treated in this fashion is wronged, and that their possession of that right is not relative to the costs or benefits of upholding it in any particular case. That sounds very technical and it sounds pathetic, but it is an important thing to establish at the beginning of this debate.
Human rights are based on notions of dignity and of inviolability, and they are in their nature universal. To say that somebody has a human right is a statement about their moral status. It is not a statement about their nationality. It is not a statement about their citizenship. It is to say that anyone, anywhere, treated in this fashion is wronged, and that although there may be a threshold above which that right could be suspended, below that threshold their possession of the right is not relative to the cost or benefits of upholding it in any particular case.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
But surely once there is a threshold, the right is not absolute.
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend makes a very important point. Let me give an example. The concept of human rights is based on a notion of human dignity and on a notion that humans should be treated as ends in themselves, rather than as a means to an end. In other words, it is a sort of Kantian world view. It has an absolute view of the world on how people should be treated, but at a very extreme level there may be a threshold at which we in the Chamber would intuitively feel that that right could be suspended.
For example, if a child were in possession of information about a ticking bomb that was going to destroy a million people in a city, we might feel that in that situation it was justifiable to twist the child’s thumb to find out where that bomb was. In other words, there might be a threshold, in situations so extreme as to be almost hypothetical, where our human intuition would be that the right would be suspended, but, below that threshold, the possession of the right is not a function of the costs or benefits of upholding it in any particular case.
For example, it would not be justifiable in any situation to kill one individual in order to harvest their organs to save five other individuals.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
May I come back to my hon. Friend on his previous example? He said that a particular act would be justifiable to save a million people. What about 500,000? What about 50,000? What about 10,000? What about one?
Rory Stewart
That is a fantastic argument. The argument that I was trying to make was that in the case of five, 10, 15 or 20 people, our moral intuition is that a particular act is unacceptable. At another level, at the level of a million, our moral intuition is that it might be acceptable. This is a very difficult point. The point that I am trying to make is that we are in a sense deontologists. We are absolute up to a certain threshold, but there is a certain threshold at which a utilitarian or consequentialist calculus comes in.
As I said earlier, if it were a case of one person being killed to save five—in other words, that somebody could be killed, their organs would be harvested, and those organs would be used to keep five people alive—that would not be justifiable. Their possession of their inviolability—their immunity, their right to life—is not proportional to the costs or benefits of upholding it in any particular case. There may be—we almost never get anywhere near this kind of threshold—as a hypothetical, theoretical point, a threshold at which a right might be overruled by a consequentialist consideration, the one against a million. But below that threshold, the possession of the right is not relative to the costs or benefits of upholding it in any particular case.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way once again. I think that he rather sold the pass once he had the child whose thumb could be twisted to save 1 million people, because if their thumb could be twisted, could their arm be broken? We are now getting into an argument about what is relative and find that there is no absolute. The same applies to the example of harvesting a person’s organs: we might not allow it if it would save five people, but what if it would save 5 million people? Does it then become justifiable?
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend asks a very important question of moral philosophy. It is a question of moral intuitions. We are trying to create in our legal and moral systems something that reflects our common-sense intuitions as humans. We try to interrogate them, be logical and go back to first principles, but our common-sense intuition, I feel, is that humans have a moral status, that they are inviolable, that they have an intrinsic dignity, and that they should be treated as ends in themselves, not as means to an end.
However—this relates to the case of one against 1 million—we also have a strong moral intuition that there might be certain extreme circumstances in which it is justifiable to overrule an individual’s rights. There are different ways we can deal with that. In the German legal system, for example, it would be argued that twisting the child’s thumb, although morally justifiable, is not legally justifiable. The individual responsible would be prosecuted and convicted, but they would be congratulated on having made the correct moral decision, even if it was the wrong legal one. In our normal lives, however, such scenarios are purely hypothetical; we do not come across ticking bombs or children who could save 1 million people.
In our everyday lives, human rights are, in themselves, inviolable, which is why, as we consider the case brought by my hon. Friend the Member for Dover, we must ask ourselves this: what is wrong with the current system? It seems to me that there are four possible answers to that question, and he has given four possible answers. One of them, which my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) has raised, relates to the question of sovereignty. The first possible answer on what is wrong with the current settlement on rights is that there is a problem of parliamentary sovereignty. The notion, which we could explore in greater depth, is that Parliament is sovereign and that the European Court of Human Rights, by overruling the decisions of the British Parliament, is not acting in accordance with the British constitution.
The second argument that could be made is that a question such as whether prisoners should have the right to vote—a recent and difficult case—is purely relative; that it is culturally relative. It could simply be argued that the reason the European Court should not get involved in prisoner voting is not because of sovereignty, but because the question is culturally relative—I say “tomato”, you say “tomayto”. These things are purely subjective and based on a particular cultural or historical context and the Court should not be fussing about them. The British think one thing, the Spanish think another. There is no way of resolving it, because it is purely relative.
The third argument is that we are dealing with subjects that are purely trivial, the argument being that voting rights for prisoners simply do not matter. There might theoretically be a moral solution to the question of whether prisoners should be able to vote, but it is a trivial issue and not something the European Court should be dealing with. Instead, it should be looking at more important issues.
The fourth argument, and the one I am tempted to choose, is that this is not fundamentally a problem of sovereignty, relativity or triviality; it is the problem of the European Court using the wrong principles to come to the wrong judgments.
Permit me to expand on those four arguments in more detail. The first argument is about parliamentary sovereignty, which my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset dealt with so eloquently. It is of course true that traditionally within the British system parliamentary sovereignty was supreme. Although Dicey talks about parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law, it is quite clear that what he means by the rule of law is not what Lord Bingham means by the rule of law. In other words, in the conventional British interpretation, the rule of law is not something equivalent to the US constitution. It is not an independent body of law against which parliamentary statutes can be judged. It was not the case in Britain that an Act of Parliament could be struck down by a court on the grounds that it did not accord with the rule of law. That notion, which is of the 15th and 16th centuries, that there was an independent common law that trumped the actions of Parliament, was put aside. Essentially, for the past 300 years we have believed that Parliament is sovereign.
Under that interpretation, the European Court cannot possibly be engaged in trying to subjugate Parliament. At the very best, all it is engaged in is an international treaty obligation through which the British Parliament has voluntarily determined that it wishes to accept the rulings of the Court but can choose to ignore them if it so wishes, and in doing so it would not be breaking British law but would simply be in breach of its international treaty obligations.
So deep is that belief in the British mind that we are now the only advanced democracy in the world that makes no explicit distinction between constitutional and normal law. In other words, we have a situation in which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dover has so eloquently explained, our constitution shifts continually over time and, at its worst, “bends like a reed” in the wind. It is theoretically possible, in a way that it is not in any other advanced democracy in the world, for a simple majority in Parliament—a majority of the people gathered here today, for example—to change the fundamental constitution of the British nation.
Every other advanced democracy draws a distinction between constitutional and normal law so that changing the fundamental constitution requires a special procedure. In northern European countries there is generally a demand for a two-thirds majority in Parliament, and in southern European countries there is more of a focus on a referendum. In some countries, such as Italy, there is interest in an intermediate vote, so the Parliament must be dissolved and the proposed constitutional change put to the electorate through a general election. That is all designed to make it very difficult for a Parliament to change the constitution. The idea—not a British one—is that a Government or Parliament are temporary, but the people are public, and the constitution exists to protect the people from the Parliament.
It would be possible to base the entire opposition to the European convention on human rights on an argument about parliamentary sovereignty, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset has, using British constitutional history. But that argument rests, fundamentally, on political institutions, not morality. It is difficult to see an ethical or moral case for the notion of untrammelled parliamentary sovereignty as an alternative to the protection of the inviolability of the individual’s rights. Indeed, the modern notion of democracy, which is shared in every other advanced democracy in the world, combines representation of the majority with protection of the individual’s rights.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I do not think that my hon. Friend has fully established the inviolability of the individual’s rights. He has stated it, but he has not established it.
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend, with enormous eloquence, raises a fundamental philosophical debate. The answer to his point is that one cannot establish the existence of inviolable rights unless one accepts two further principles. The first is the equality of humans; the notion that I, you, Mr Deputy Speaker, my hon. Friend, and indeed someone we have never encountered who lives at the other end of the Congo, are in all important respects equal in dignity and in rights. That is an insight of logic and of human consciousness and a basic commitment to the notion that, although we might feel that we are special and the only people who exist, as we become adults we acknowledge that other people, too, are independent moral actors who possess exactly the same dignity. The inviolability—the rights of the human being—which my hon. Friend has raised, is derived from that notion of equality and dignity.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
For the record, I think that the Deputy Speaker is so many leagues above me that I am not sure my hon. Friend is right. If one takes my hon. Friend’s point about the equality of humanity—the equality before God that I believe as a matter of faith—that does not mean that rights are always applied equally. Even in this Bill, the right to life—that most essential right—is qualified in the case of self-defence, so rights immediately become relative.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Just for the record, I think we are all equal unless there is a long intervention, when I might show a little more power.
Rory Stewart
Rights are indeed qualified, but that does not mean that they are relative. This is an important distinction. The clause that my hon. Friend mentioned does indeed establish the right but says that under certain specific circumstances it may be qualified or overruled. That is not a statement that the right is relative. It is not a statement that the right to life contained in the European convention on human rights is purely relative. It is not a statement that, below the threshold of the qualification, in other words, the specific circumstances in which a right may be suspended—this is what makes rights quite different from any other form of moral law—one’s possession of a right is not relative to the costs or benefits of upholding it in a particular case.
One’s right to life may be suspended at a certain threshold. The thresholds described in the European convention include those relating to civil disorder and military law. However, below those thresholds one’s right to life cannot simply be looked at in terms of the costs or benefits of upholding it in any particular case.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
But this right is so clearly absolute. The old Riot Act provided for the militia to start shooting because of the decision made at that time that the maintenance of order required immediate use of fatal force. That is no longer thought to be appropriate. It is therefore about a relative judgment relating to the balances between the individual and the collective.
Rory Stewart
We need to be very clear about what we mean by “relative”. The notion of “relative” that my hon. Friend is rehearsing simply says that rights and moral values evolve in a historical context. As he says, it is simply a matter of historical fact that different cultures at different times have taken different moral positions. Aristotle, alongside his other great observations, believed that women and slaves lacked souls. Today we realise not merely that he thinks one thing and we think another—that it is relative—but that he is wrong. He is wrong because moral language is implicitly not relative; it is, in its very structure, absolute. Moral language does not say, “I don’t happen to like you killing someone, but if you want to kill someone that is up to you.” In other words, it does not say that killing someone or not doing so is like you liking chocolate ice cream and me liking strawberry ice cream; it says that it is wrong and ought not to be done. Moral language is about questions of “ought”, not questions of “is”.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
But in saying that something ought not to be done one immediately goes on to add “except in certain circumstances.”
Rory Stewart
I will try again. The central point is that the notion of moral obligation—the notion of what ought or ought not to be done—relies on two conflicting principles that connect at the moment of the threshold. Those two conflicting principles are, on the one hand, the notion of the inviolability and dignity of the human being, and, on the other, a consequentialist or utilitarian argument of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Philosophically, the origins of these two types of argument are entirely distinct. One is a deontological argument that simply states the dignity of the human being and their inviolability; the other is an instrumental argument based on consequences or results. Our legal system, and indeed our moral intuitions, combine these two, which meet at a point of the threshold. This is what we mean by “ought”. We mean exactly what my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset suggests: that the individual ought not to be treated like this except in very extreme circumstances above a certain threshold below which the individual’s possession of the rights is not a function of the costs or benefits of upholding it in any particular case.
This is important because it is a distinction between a relative position that says “I can take your life whenever I feel like it on the basis of no moral argument and no logical position” and a separate position that says “I may not take your life. There are certain extreme situations in which it could become legally permissible to do so, but I may not.” The distinction between human rights and a relative position is a distinction on permissibility—a distinction on what may be done.
Rory Stewart
Before my hon. Friend intervenes again, let me be absolutely clear that the distinction is this: when I say that somebody has a right not to be tortured, I am saying that they may not be tortured. I am not saying that they will not be tortured; there might be a horrible situation in which their Government do torture them. The statement is a moral statement, not a prediction about the future. It is a statement about what we morally give permission to do: “You may not be tortured; you may not be killed.” It is then possible to state certain threshold circumstances in which our moral intuitions in terms of human rights shift to moral intuitions in terms of a consequentialist world view in which we say, “One person might be killed for the benefit of a million.” These are nice questions of moral philosophy that do not usually come up in our everyday life, which is based on the dignity and inviolability of the human being regardless of circumstance.
Charlie Elphicke
My hon. Friend is making a very powerful argument in which he highlights a key difference between civil law and common law. In common law, we would take a utilitarian approach. If a plane were heading to London with 100 people on board and a nuclear bomb, we would say “Save the city”, but in Germany, under the civil law code, people would say, “You can’t touch the plane because of the inviolability of the right to life.” That is at the heart of some of the problems that I have been wrestling with in the Bill.
Rory Stewart
The example of the plane is a very good one. It is an exact example of where our moral intuitions collide. My instinct would be that neither ourselves nor a German legislature would be comfortable with the decision either way. These are terrible, terrible decisions involving two very deep moral intuitions. The first of those is that individuals should be treated as ends in themselves and not means to an end. As my hon. Friend so rightly points out, the German supreme court holds that a plane could not be brought down in those circumstances because it feels deeply that that would be to treat the people on it as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. In effect, it would be doing to them something similar to killing one person in order to harvest their organs to benefit five others. The calculus is that five having benefited is not enough to outweigh the harm done to one. That is an important moral intuition.
However, my hon. Friend is correct to suggest that in the end most of us would disagree with that notion. I personally would disagree, as would, presumably, my hon. Friend the Member for Dover. In a situation of that sort, where 1 million people are going to be killed by an atom bomb, another deeper, stronger moral intuition arises which we often describe in terms of common sense but is in fact a utilitarian calculus—that there is a certain threshold of absurdity beyond which the protection of the rights of the individuals in that plane no longer makes sense. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset has been very good at pointing out the contradiction that these are two separate philosophical principles, and at raising the question of where the threshold comes in. The terrible judgment that a politician would need to make in that situation is not one that can be resolved except through a deep understanding of the particular facts of an individual case.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way; I will try to make this my last intervention. Once we accept the threshold, it becomes fundamentally arbitrary and merely a matter of arguing where it should be set. Therefore, the question is of the legitimacy of who sets that threshold—whether it should be the Queen in Parliament or a foreign court.
Rory Stewart
There is a disagreement here and it is not one that we can paper over. The question is: where should we put the weight of sovereignty? How important is sovereignty? Does sovereignty confer some form of immunity? Is there some magic in this Chamber that allows the legislators in it to do whatever they want? Is it the case, as Lord Hoffmann suggested in his judgment, that if this Chamber wished, it could simply flout human rights? Is that a statement about political fact in institutions, or is it about morality? Do we think that it is simply a fact that this Parliament could do whatever it wants, or do we think that this Parliament ought to be able to do whatever it wants? On this is based our whole conception of democracy.
Those who feel that this Chamber not only could, but ought to be able to do whatever it wants are basing their argument on one principle only, which is the principle of majority representation. Where I suspect there may be a disagreement between myself and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset is on the notion that democracy is based not on one, but on two principles—majority representation and the protection of minority rights—and that, in the absence of the second criterion, we cease to be, in the full sense, a democracy.
This is a very difficult argument to make, because in this country we have every reason to be proud of the performance of this Parliament. Although theoretically, constitutional anxiety leads us to believe that this Parliament could do truly barbarous things, as a matter of fact it has not. In fact, consistently this Parliament has shown itself very respectful of the unwritten laws of the British constitution. When Parliament has attempted to fundamentally change the constitution of the United Kingdom through a simple majority in the House of Commons—as, indeed, it did with the proposal to abolish the House of Lords—it refused to take that opportunity. It backed away from it. Parliament’s reluctance, innate conservatism and caution with regard to issues relating to the constitution have meant that, from 1911 to the current day, people pushing for a written constitution or more formal constraints on the power of Parliament have not won.
That is good and it shows two positive things. First, it shows the important principle of common sense. Everyone in this Chamber agrees that we do not want to live in a world of technocrats. We like the fact that the British public have a say and that their common sense permeates this Parliament. At our best—we are not always at our best—we are a lens that connects the Executive to the voting public. We act as a mediator between public opinion—the sentiment, imagination and culture of the British people—and the laws passed in Parliament. Nobody in this Chamber wishes to pass to a world where we vest our power in technocrats or experts, such as a Mario Monti-type figure with great insight, who think they know what is best for the people. Our unruly common sense means that the public have tended to respect their landscape, to challenge the Government on, for example, wind turbines, and to refuse to co-operate—in a similar way to that in which the French public occasionally refuse to co-operate on farming—with the theoretical ideas of experts and Government.
The second reason to be proud of the sovereignty of Parliament is that it reflects a culture, but the question for my hon. Friend, who is one of the great supporters of untrammelled parliamentary sovereignty is this: do we have the confidence that the unwritten rules, the culture of this House and the deep understanding of the history of the British constitution—which meant in 1911 that Members of Parliament were very cautious about changing it—still hold, or did our vote on the House of Lords Reform Bill take us close to the brink? Is it possible that we are suffering from collective amnesia and that one can no longer say that the British Parliament is so deeply entrenched in its constitutional history that it can be guaranteed never to change fundamentally the British constitution?
If we are moving into a world that takes us into that danger zone, I believe that we need to follow the example of every other advanced democracy in the world and separate constitutional and normal law, and say that, in order to make a fundamental change to the constitution, which would affect the rights of citizens—this is why this is relevant to the European Court of Human Rights—we must ensure that special procedures are followed. The special procedure that we have tended to develop through precedent over the past 40 years is, of course, a referendum. We may not want a referendum to be the fundamental means by which we change the constitution. We may want to adopt a different procedure, such as a two-thirds majority or a free vote in the House—which, of course, is what the previous Government used to deal with the issue of the House of Lords—but we are moving to a world in which we need a proper procedure.
The reason why that is relevant to this debate is that the question of parliamentary sovereignty and its relationship with the European Court is the nub of the issue. The argument against the European Court cannot simply be that Parliament is sovereign, absolute and always right and that it should never be challenged. We have developed a doctrine of international intervention with regard to the notion that sovereignty does not confer immunity—that the rights of a country’s individual citizens can trump the sovereignty of a Parliament.
The second argument—moving on from sovereignty, with apologies for having paid so much attention to it—is about the question of moral relativism, although my exchange with my hon. Friend may have covered this issue adequately. The idea of moral relativism states that the question of prisoners voting is purely relative. I like chocolate ice cream, Mr Deputy Speaker, but perhaps you like strawberry ice cream—that is a question of taste, not of moral decision. The Spanish believe that prisoners should have votes and the British do not, but to argue that such things are purely relative and that there is no way of resolving them is very dangerous, because all these questions about rights are fundamentally issues of morality. Moral language is a statement about what is right and what is wrong—what we ought to do and what we ought not to do. It is not a statement of personal taste akin to saying, “I like red, you like blue, and that’s the end of the discussion.” What one says is, “You are wrong.” We must believe it is possible to resolve the question of who is right and who is wrong on the issue of prisoners voting and to do so through moral investigation and debate.
Charlie Elphicke
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way; he is being very generous in taking interventions. I would say that the issue is slightly different. The Spanish think that prisoners should have the vote and the British do not, but the error is the one-size-fits-all approach taken by the European Court. There should be an acceptance that different countries will arrive at different solutions. A universal morality should not be thrust on all.
Rory Stewart
The powerful argument made by my hon. Friend is, indeed, the same as that made by Lord Hoffmann, who says that universal rights, such as those under the European Court of Human Rights, are simply aspirational and that any universal code is aspriational, but it is always national in its application. The argument made by Lord Hoffmann and my hon. Friend is that the European Court of Human Rights and the convention are purely aspirational: they are a good way of encouraging people to behave better, they are a good way of doing political lobbying and they are a good way of applying pressure, but in their application, human rights can only be national. The notion is that human rights are relative to a particular historical or political context. In the view of Lord Hoffmann and my hon. Friend, but not in my view, the question of whether prisoners should vote should not be determined by moral debate because it is specific to a particular historical or national context. For them, the real answer to whether prisoners should vote depends on the difference between Spanish culture and British culture.
That is, of course, a position that I reject. I cannot accept it because rights are absolute, universal and inviolable. It cannot be the case that one’s possession of rights is relative to the circumstances of a particular culture. It cannot be the case that the mere fact that somebody lives in Saudi Arabia means that they have fewer rights as a woman. It cannot be the case that the mere fact that somebody lives in Taliban Afghanistan means that they do not have freedom of the press. Those rights, if they are rights at all, rest on one fact and one fact only: the fact of one’s humanity, not the fact of one’s nationality.
Charlie Elphicke
Lord Hoffmann said that human rights are universal in their abstraction, but national in their application. I think that what he was saying was that one-size-fits-all does not work and we need room for what used to be called subsidiarity, but which in this debate has been called proportionality or the margin of appreciation. The margin of appreciation is central to getting the right settlement that all countries can live with.
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend brings us neatly to the third question on the Bill: the question of subsidiarity and triviality.
To move on from the big questions of sovereignty and meta-ethics, the central argument that my hon. Friend has made, which is an important one, is fundamentally about triviality. Lord Hoffmann may be suggesting that although at a theoretical level it may be possible to resolve whether prisoners should vote, as a practical point, the issue does not really matter. It is subsidiary—that is, it should be left to individual countries—because it is just too disruptive to the international system to try to impose, as my hon. Friend puts it, a one-size-fits-all approach. The argument is that trying to resolve the issue of whether prisoners should have the vote is disruptive to the international system.
That is a strong intuitive argument and one that we might have a lot of sympathy with in this House as politicians. It is obviously not a moral argument, because Lord Hoffmann’s argument does not hold water as a moral argument. It cannot be the case, as a question of ethics, that nationality is the prime determiner of one’s rights. However, that may be true as an issue of practicality. We might want to allow some flexibility in the process for the sanity of the international system. Although that is really tempting, the reason why we should not go down that path is twofold.
For a legal system, the question of triviality cannot be relevant. It is not possible for a judge to determine a case simply on the basis of whether they think that the question of prisoner voting is important in the grand scheme of things. The judge is there to make a decision on the basis of the law. That is why we often get frustrated and often find the system very peculiar.
The classic example, which is something that I hate about the European Court of Human Rights, is the case that was brought by the man who did not want to give his name when he was caught speeding. That case went all the way up through the courts system. The man argued that he should not have been obliged to give his name when spotted by a speeding camera because he had a right of privacy and a right to silence. He objected to the fact that he was going to be fined for giving his name.
Throughout the process, the courts did not say, “This is a trivial issue. It is a minor speeding fine, so we’re not interested.” The case went all the way up to Lord Bingham who, at great length and with enormous politeness, explained to the gentleman that his right to silence did not extend to not giving his name in relation to a speeding fine. At that point, the gentleman applied to the European Court which, perhaps to the delight of speeding motorists, seemed for a moment in a majority judgment to say that the man should not have to give his name because of the right of privacy.
That case shows that the triviality argument does not operate and, much more importantly, that judges are not politicians. It is not for a judge to determine whether it would be politically disruptive or inconvenient for a particular judgment to be passed. They may intuitively, in the back of their mind, be influenced by what they have read in the newspaper and they may be anxious that if they pass a judgment that is objectionable to the public, it will undermine the legitimacy or reputation of the judiciary, but those cannot be formal considerations in their decision. It cannot be that the European Court, which by its very nature has sanctions, can consider whether making a certain decision is disruptive to the international system or undermines the legitimacy or reputation of the Court itself. Those cannot be the terms on which moral or legal decisions are made, although we may often feel that they are the terms on which political decisions should be made.
A good example of that is the question of gay marriage, which has been a controversial issue in this Chamber. It makes perfect sense for a political Chamber to say, “This is a philosophical question and we feel, for political reasons, that this is not the appropriate moment to raise it because it would cause too much disruption and unhappiness.” However, at the point at which the issue is raised and put to the vote, it no longer makes sense to talk purely in terms of public opinion and disruption, particularly in a case that relates to morals or ethics, and it becomes necessary to look at the merits of the case and examine it philosophically.
The argument for why the European Court should not get involved in prisoner voting therefore cannot be that the issue is trivial or disruptive. The reason why there must be subsidiarity and why there cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach cannot, from a moral or legal point of view, be that it causes inconvenience.
Before I move on to the fourth and final part of the argument, I will go over the three arguments about the European Court that we have considered and that do not hold water. The first is the argument that the European Court should not exist because Parliament is absolutely sovereign. As a moral principle, as opposed to a statement of constitutional fact, that is objectionable. The current evolution of British culture and the behaviour of the British Parliament over the past 20 years suggest that it would be dangerous to put the entire reliance for our constitutional system and the protection of rights on the individual decisions of a temporary majority in a sovereign Parliament.
The second argument that we have rejected is that questions such as prisoners’ voting rights are purely relative, that there are no moral absolutes and that such questions cannot be resolved in a philosophical sense. The contention is that moral arguments are simply a question of, “You think this and I think that,” and there is no way of resolving them, as if they are just a question of taste, as in the trivial example that I gave of one person liking chocolate ice cream and another liking strawberry ice cream. No; we believe very strongly that moral arguments are different from arguments of taste. There is an answer to these questions.
There is therefore an answer to the question of whether prisoners should have voting rights. It is based on whether we believe that the dignity and inviolability of the prisoner’s status as a moral actor—as a human—requires them, always and in all circumstances, to have a vote or not. Personally, I do not find that argument convincing. A prisoner is not entitled, as a fundamental element of their human dignity and inviolability, to a vote in all circumstances. That is not, however, simply a question of taste. It is a question of moral argument.
The third argument we are rejecting is that it is simply inconvenient to talk about such matters and that it disrupts the international system. That is a tempting argument, because we set up the Court; David Maxwell Fyfe essentially drafted this document and steered it through. Britain is in the rather unfortunate situation of embarrassment. We were proud of this Court, and if we wished to tease ourselves a little bit, we could point out the fact that for 40 years we rather enjoyed the fact that the Court told other countries how to behave. We felt—probably intuitively—that the point about the Court was that it would hopefully drag others up to what we rather pompously felt was “our level”.
We became anxious about the Court only once it turned round and started telling us, as opposed to foreigners, what to do—a difficult and embarrassing situation. We liked the Court when it did a good job of insisting that countries in southern Europe should have habeas corpus and no detention without trial. We became anxious only when the countries that we had cheerfully made accord with British legal norms for 40 years turned round and tried to demand that we accord with their legal norms on prisoners voting. There is a good reason to feel politically and institutionally, in terms of public opinion, that we do not like that idea and would allow subsidiarity simply to avoid political embarrassment. However, as I have argued, that is not a moral or legal position; it is purely a question of expediency and convenience, and no moral principle can be based on expediency.
The fourth and concluding argument concerns what we should do about the European Court. We should not give up the notion that there are inviolable and universal human rights, or that the sovereignty of Parliament must respect the rights of the individual. We should not give up the notion of moral absolutes or accept the notion that political expediency can override moral or legal principles. We must return to the fundamentals and challenge the moral and legal argumentation of the European Court, and we would do that in exactly the way that my hon. Friend the Member for Dover has so eloquently explained.
From my point of view, my hon. Friend is not producing a measure that would lead us to leave the European convention, but he points out that the Court’s current operations are resulting in absurd, surreal consequences. The way to address that problem is to look again at the European convention on human rights, and consider how it was drafted in 1950, what ingredients lie within it and how much latitude that gives the Court. A Court that one year ago had 100,000 cases waiting to be heard—an absurd number—needs to say no to far more cases. The Court must understand that the 1950 drafting of the convention allows it very little latitude, and that it is currently engaged with many issues that are outside the purview of the original convention on human rights.
A classic example of that is prisoners voting. The point is not that the question of prisoners voting cannot be resolved legally or philosophically but that it cannot be resolved on the basis of the European convention on human rights. Nothing in the convention provides sufficient detail or cogency to allow a judge, purely on the basis of the nostrum of a democratic society, to derive from that vague and abstract principle the conclusion that prisoners should have a vote. Such a thing could be done, but not by the European Court. It could be done by the British Parliament or by a British court, because it requires a much deeper background of legislation. In our case it would require the corpus of the common law; in Spain it would require the corpus of its continental legal system. To reach such a conclusion requires far more than the brief statements in the European convention on human rights.
That does not mean that the European convention on human rights is useless—far from it. The convention with its fundamental principles is an incredibly useful, dynamic document that is unambiguous and clear—as it should be—on questions of torture. It makes every sense for the European convention on human rights and the European Court to rule on the protection of fundamental political rights of the sort contained in that document. It is not that torture, genocide, arbitrary arrest and arbitrary imprisonment are the only issues that matter. Many other issues of human rights also matter, but those are the only issues covered in the convention and on which the Court should be ruling. That is why the Brighton declaration brought together by this Government as the President of the European Council—the statements by the Secretary of State and the Lord Chancellor—are correct.
We require fundamental reform of the European Court. We must radically reduce the number of cases it deals with and clarify its legal and philosophical basis to determine on which cases it should and should not rule. The notion of subsidiarity, which was raised so eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Dover, is not a moral, legal, or philosophical principle but concerns the ingredients of the European convention on human rights. Those things are subsidiary because they are not covered in that document. We should not lose confidence in the notion of rights and in a convention that we were proud to create and which was created by a Conservative Member of Parliament and Lord Chancellor.
David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)
My hon. Friend is giving an eloquent defence but the logic of his position seems to be that we should not have a European convention on human rights or a Court, but rather a world convention. Is that his position?
Rory Stewart
That is a telling intervention. The answer is that we have signed and ought to respect and uphold the United Nations universal declaration of human rights. It exists; we are signatories to it.
Rory Stewart
Yes. As my hon. Friend points out, we are signatories to that declaration of human rights. We were the first signatories to it in 1948 and it is the precursor to the European convention. We have signed it and we should respect it. Should we establish a court to uphold the information in the UN universal declaration of human rights? I think we should be very cautious of doing that. The UN declaration includes many elements that would be difficult for a court to rule on and that would be difficult to apply to the 200 members of the United Nations. For example, the declaration includes a right to paid holiday. That is difficult to imagine in Chad, Mali or the Congo. It is difficult to imagine what would be involved if somebody in a developing country who lives on a dollar a day asserted their right to a paid holiday, and it is therefore difficult to imagine an international court that would rule on that kind of information.
Nevertheless, in certain circumstances we should respect the UN declaration and international courts. A classic example is the International Criminal Court or the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Britain is a signatory to all cases with the ICTY and the ICC and upholds the rulings of those courts that deal with crimes against humanity. To return to the beginning of the argument, we sign up to such bodies because we accept that crimes against humanity can be committed anywhere by anyone in any circumstance, and the sovereignty of an individual Parliament or country does not trump an individual’s rights to be exempt. Not even the sovereignty of this Parliament. Not even this Parliament ought to be allowed to commit crimes against humanity—to put the most extreme situation. We sign these things at international level, and we constrain the power of our Parliament, as we should, in those specific cases.
In other cases, the moral, legal and philosophical arguments are better conducted in the domestic context.
Bob Stewart
Is it not the case that the International Criminal Court and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia try crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide only if there is no way that a national jurisdiction will deal with the problem? Only then does it go to the ICC or the ICTY.
Rory Stewart
That is a fundamental principle, and my hon. Friend is correct to raise it. In the international system, we have an important conception of state sovereignty. The only argument being made today is that state sovereignty is not absolute; it does not trump everything else, but to return to the language that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset does not like, up to a certain threshold, state sovereignty obtains. Up to a certain point, there must be the opportunity to attempt to resolve the situation domestically, but at that point, when the state concerned has failed to deal with crimes against humanity, it is not only legal under the international system but morally correct for an international court to overrule the national Government.
David Mowat
May I press my hon. Friend further on his position on a world court of human rights? The logic of his position seems to be that the scope of the European court should be extended as far as possible, given that these things are absolute and not relative, as he says.
Rory Stewart
That is a very interesting and important question. The answer of course is that when David Maxwell Fyfe, of whom Conservatives should be proud, and Hartley Shawcross, of whom the Opposition are equally proud, brought the convention together, the objective was to spread it as widely as possible. Indeed, for more than 60 years the British Government have had as their policy an attempt to push it as far as possible, which is why the European convention now extends a long way beyond the boundaries of the European Union and takes in countries such as Russia. That is because we believe that the ingredients of the European convention on human rights are basic, inviolable and universal dignities. If anybody wishes to sign up to the European convention, we absolutely encourage them to do so. Any country that wishes to join, to sign up to the declarations and to be held to the high and exacting standards contained in that document, should be welcomed, but if the Court is to survive at all it needs to narrow its focus drastically; that is where my hon. Friend the Member for Dover is absolutely correct.
If the Court is to have any credibility or legitimacy in the long run, it cannot continue contributing to a situation where the British public end up feeling that human rights are trivial, that human rights are an excuse, that human rights are a charter for triviality, that human rights have the same relationship to real rights as “Health and Safety” does to real health and safety—in other words, that it is a factory for lawyers and insurance claims. To return to its fundamental principles, the Court needs to remember what it is there to do, and it is on that point that I really will conclude.
The European convention on human rights is not something that we as a party should set aside by suggesting that human rights do not exist. Human rights do exist, and all of us are proud to live in a society where our rights have been protected in different forms since Magna Carta. We did not use the words human rights until the French began to popularise them in the late 18th century; until then it was a specialist phrase that nobody in this country would have used. Indeed, it was not until after the second world war that anyone in this country started using the words human rights, but we have had the basic notion of the rights of man for 800 years. It is that the human is dignified and inviolable; certain things may not be done to that individual; anyone anywhere who is treated in that fashion is wronged; their possession of that right is not relative to the costs or benefits of upholding it in any particular case.
The European convention, drafted by us, enshrines those notions of basic decency—of equality of humanity and of inviolability. The problem with it is not the sovereignty of Parliament. The problem is not that rights do not exist. The problem is not that it is politically too complicated. The problem is that we have allowed the Court to stray from its fundamental job. It was given a very narrow task and a very narrow focus, which, broadly speaking, was to deal with crimes against humanity. We should therefore join my hon. Friend the Member for Dover in strongly demanding that the case load of the European Court is radically reduced, that the principles of subsidiarity are radically increased and that the Court ceases to get involved in situations that in principle, ethics or law, it is not competent to handle.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
It is an enormous pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart). That was one of the most instructive and thoughtful speeches it has been my pleasure to listen to in this Chamber. That is, I am afraid to say, a preamble to saying that there is a good deal of it with which I disagree, but I genuinely mean that it was a fantastic exposition of a defence of human rights to the extent that we have them.
There are difficulties with my hon. Friend’s view, as we discussed in various interventions. The question of absolutes is very difficult in the political context which law ends up being. In terms of moral absolutes, I have no difficulty, wearing a Catholic hat, in accepting them. I believe that clear moral absolutes are established by the Church, but the state is something very different, and pressures on it mean that the moral absolutes have to be dealt with in the context of the time. An obvious example is the definition of a just war. As we know, the definition, from Thomas Aquinas, sets out three conditions for a just war to overcome the problem of how states can deal with a threat to their existence against the Christian teaching that we should turn the other cheek. We find that a moral religious absolute is impractical in terms of the secular behaviour that states, Governments and nations require.
Individual Bills of rights or lists of human rights are not moral absolutes; they deal with political problems that exist at the time they are drawn up. My hon. Friend gave a wonderful example, of which I was unaware: the United Nations human rights convention that maintains the right to paid holiday. It is hard to believe that the right to paid holiday is an absolute moral right; it is something that comes about because of political pressure at the time—because of negotiations between the drafters and the sorts of things that lead to a political decision-making process.
When we look at the Bill, we see that some of the rights that are insisted on for a British Bill of rights relate to immediate and specific problems that we face. There is a part on voting rights for prisoners, and there is a part on the right to self-defence if one’s property is attacked. These are at the forefront of political debate at the moment. Therefore, good though the document is, it is hard to argue that the British Bill of Rights is an eternal moral document that will stand for 1,000 years.
The American Bill of Rights deals with the specific problems the Americans thought they had at the time when they were drawing up their constitution; although, interestingly, in the constitution rather than in the first 10 amendments, there is the part on how acts of attainder are limited: they may not relate to blood and they may not affect the next generation. An act of attainder was something that was an immediate political issue when the American constitution was being drawn up, but it is of no relevance today. Therefore, I dispute the point that Bills of Rights and human rights legislation deal with moral absolutes; instead I would argue that they deal with political problems.
I mentioned the wonderful example, from our own Bill of Rights, of the right to bear arms to maintain a Protestant militia, which was introduced immediately after the country had a Catholic King and a fear that he would use arms to enforce Catholicism on the country. A Protestant militia was considered necessary to defend against that. Wonderful and antique although that might be, it is not an eternal, everlasting moral principle. Indeed, I do not think eternal and everlasting moral principles often go well with the day-to-day practice of government and legislation.
The first of the four points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border is the overwhelmingly important point—that the legitimacy of the political power that is making these decisions may then be altered by a subsequent political power. The next two points, on the issues of triviality and inconvenience, were arguments set up to be knocked down—they are clearly wrong-headed. It is absurd to say that some aspect of law is so unimportant that somebody should not have the right to bring a case on it. Equally, it is absurd to say that if something is inconvenient Governments can just override it because that would leave us with no rule of law at all. Therefore, the first point and last point are essential. The fourth point is the question of whether there is an essential morality that we can bring into our legislative system or whether it is, in fact, a matter of political legitimacy. In answer to that, I would say that it is a matter of political legitimacy.
It is interesting how well our constitutional settlement has served us. My hon. Friends the Members for Penrith and The Border and for Dover (Charlie Elphicke), have both referred to the Magna Carta, and said that we have had 800 years of these rights. Actually, the Magna Carta was a confirmation of rights that it was thought we already had. In 1685, habeas corpus was brought in as a confirmation of a right that we thought that we already had. The Bill of Rights itself is about confirming rights and stopping abuses of those rights. The approach has been to use the development of powers within this country—the barons in 1215, and Parliament in the 1680s—to assert these rights against an Executive who were abusing them.
We come to the position of Parliament. A great deal is made of parliamentary sovereignty. I am indeed a great defender of parliamentary sovereignty, but that is not an end in itself. Great, powerful and noble though these two Houses are, we are here as the servants of the British people with whom authority and legitimacy lie. That is the great safeguard of our rights and of our liberties. For a maximum five-year period, the British electorate have the final say on whether we are to continue in office, or whether somebody else is to be given a chance instead. That is at the core of the legitimacy argument.
The rights are the rights of the individuals who make up the United Kingdom. They may aspire to international rights, and that may be a wonderful ideal, but it is not one of practical implementation or politics. They have the right to suspend those rights from time to time when they see that there is a dire emergency. I am a great believer in habeas corpus as one of the most important rights that we all have to defend us from arbitrary government, but do I think that Pitt the Younger was right to suspend it during the Napoleonic wars, and do I think it was right to lock up fascists during the second world war? Yes, I do. It was correct to suspend a fundamental right when the nation was under fundamental attack, and no court outside this country could conceivably judge—
Rory Stewart
In suggesting that the right of habeas corpus can, in extreme circumstances, be suspended, my hon. Friend seems to be agreeing with the notion that there is such a thing as a right, a form of inviolability, albeit one that in certain situations may be set aside.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My point of difference with my hon. Friend is the question of whether it is an absolute right that can be enshrined, or whether it is fundamentally arbitrary because once the threshold has been negotiated, the absolute quality of that right disappears. In that case, it is not an absolute moral right; it is part of our ancient liberties of which we are justly proud—and it is important that we should maintain it—but it is a liberty that can, in certain circumstances, be suspended. The question then is: whose judgment is legitimate during that suspension? In my view, the only possible legitimate authority for suspending that liberty has to be the body that represents the democracy that is at issue. It cannot be a foreign body or an overseas democracy; it has to belong to the people who are affected by it.
So, yes, in a religious context, there are absolute morals, and they may or may not be judged by a higher court at a much later stage in our lives, but they are not easily convertible in a temporal, secular society that has to deal with the immediate issues of the day. Our ancient liberties are a crucial way for us to defend ourselves against arbitrary government, and our constitutional settlement has been a great protector of those rights, in spite of the ease with which our constitution can be changed. Indeed, it is a greater protector of those rights than exists in all those countries with careful constitutions. Let us take the example of the arrangements at Guantanamo Bay, which the US Government have managed to say are constitutional. If a Government can find in their detailed constitution a legitimate way of doing something that is in fact outrageous, they can do that because they can say they are following the letter of the law. In our nation, however, we are always following the spirit of the unwritten constitution, which politicians have to abide by. We cannot get away with doing something outrageous by claiming to the electorate that we are following the letter of the law.
The row that we have had over terrorism prevention and investigation measures—TPIMs—and control orders relates to that point. We have introduced measures of an incredibly arbitrary and unjust nature, but they obey the letter of the law and meet the criteria set down in the European convention on human rights, as interpreted by our own judges. They replaced measures that were actually much fairer, in that, under an Act of the British Parliament, a foreigner living in this country who we did not want to live here could either leave or stay in prison. That seemed to me to be a perfectly reasonable thing for a sovereign Parliament to say. However, the courts said that it was incompatible with the convention, so we have come up with something that is compatible but fundamentally unjust.
That is the problem that arises when we try to impose absolute rights on a governmental system that needs to work with a degree of flexibility. We all accept that that flexibility is necessary, and it should then simply be a question of the examples that we need in order to determine it.
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend’s analysis is moving and convincing, but I would challenge it by saying that it puts a high degree of trust in the seriousness, the historical knowledge and the culture of Parliament itself. If Parliament ceases to take on its responsibilities with that level of seriousness, and if it starts to make trivial changes to the constitution for reasons of political expediency, how are the British public to be protected against their Government?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
It is a matter not of trusting us, the politicians, but of trusting the British people who send us here in the first place. If we start playing fast and loose with the British constitution, there will be an election and we can be thrown out. If we use our powers arbitrarily, we can be thrown out.
There are in fact pieces of superior law under our constitution, one of which is the Parliament Act 1911, which specifically protects the life of a Parliament against an extension purely by the House of Commons. There is therefore an in-built reservation to ensure that we have to go back to the electorate and get their permission to carry on with what we are doing. Arbitrary Governments that extend themselves beyond the powers that are thought to be legitimate find that the British people want to get rid of them. Indeed, that was a major issue at the last election. It was one of the areas in which the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats came closely together, in that we were advocating the ancient liberties of the subject against the Labour party, which was constantly infringing those liberties and placing more and more power in the hands of the state. The British electorate, in their wisdom, decided to put into office two parties that were committed—at least they were when they were in opposition—to preserving the freedoms of the British subject. We have seen it tried and tested, and it actually works.
A further point is that once we start saying that this House of Commons or these two Houses of Parliament are not capable of making these decisions, and that they must be handed over to unelected judges overseas, we undermine this House’s confidence to deal with matters properly and we give an incentive for it not to take its responsibilities seriously. Why? Because if we get it wrong, there is somebody else who can clear up the mess. Leaving the responsibility here makes us take more seriously the duties we have as parliamentarians and the obligation we have to protect our constitutional settlement.
Let us come back to the key issue of legitimacy. I choose the word “legitimacy” rather than “sovereignty” deliberately, because it is about doing what is acceptable to the people to whom it is being done, and for that we require a body of people with a sufficient unity of purpose to accept that what is being done to them has legitimacy even when they themselves are in a minority in opposing it. When we in Britain are in a minority opposing a judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, we do not feel that that there is such legitimacy or that the majority that has overruled us has a proper authority to do so. When our courts come out with a judgment that does not relate to human rights, we may rail against it and be cross about it, but we accept it as legitimate. When Parliament passes Acts that we as individuals do not like or that minorities oppose, we accept that Parliament has the legitimacy to do it because we attach ourselves to the whole of the United Kingdom in acceptance of that legitimacy.
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend is making a powerful and moving speech, and a lot of it is immensely appealing and convincing. There is a problem, however, which is the fact that we set up this Court and we seemed to be quite happy with it so long as it was going around telling other countries how to behave. All these problems of illegitimacy and of undermining the sovereignty of other people’s Parliaments did not worry us at all until this Court that we created turned around and started telling us off.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I do not disagree at all with my hon. Friend. I think we do take the view—the rather foolish view—when we set up these Courts that they will never affect us. Let us take the International Criminal Court. Nobody ever thinks that any senior British politician could be hauled in front of it. If that ever happens, we might suddenly decide that we were not so keen on the ICC. I admire the judgment of the Americans who have not joined the ICC because they recognise that if it is justice for one, it is justice for all.
As a strong independent sovereign nation with a history of behaving well going back way before the Magna Carta, I think that we ought to be able to settle our rules for ourselves and should be cautious of setting up courts that are essentially victors’ justice. In setting up the European Court of Human Rights, what we were really doing was saying, “We have defeated all these nations of Europe. They have had terrible dictatorships before. They are not like good old Blighty, so let us therefore show them how to behave like gentlemen by giving them this Court and this convention.” Then, when they started saying to us, “Well, you, too, must behave like gentlemen”—and of course like ladies in this modern age—we did not like it because we thought it affected and undermined our sovereignty.
To sit on the fence to a degree, I think that providing some guidance after the war might have helped for a limited period some of the immature democracies to reform and rebuild themselves, but I no more think that Germany or Italy need to be guided by a European Court of Human Rights than does the United Kingdom.
Rory Stewart
The challenge to what my hon. Friend is saying is that it is not primarily Germany or Italy about which people would be concerned. What would concern people would be that if we left the European Court and dismantled the infrastructure that we have created, what is at present the Court’s real purpose and influence—which seems to be directed towards Russia and countries throughout eastern Europe—would be undermined. It is the countries that are still, perhaps, in the position that my hon. Friend described, for whom the Court exists, and it is for their sake that we would be tempted, simply on the basis of the foreign-relations contribution to those countries, to continue to participate in such organisations.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am afraid that that was the former mandarin speaking. It is the Foreign Office view of the world that we must do all these things that undermine our own constitution because it makes it nicer for us when we are dealing with our colleagues overseas. It may influence them a little, and so forth. I would never give up one whit of our constitution for a minor diplomatic advantage. The proportion of the benefit to us of guiding our own constitution and safeguarding the democracy of the British people, in comparison with thinking that we can influence President Putin by half a—
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend is making a powerful point, but it is undermined by his earlier statement that after the second world war it made sense for us to give a limited amount of sovereignty to this organisation, in order to create exactly the peace and stability in Europe that was so central to the welfare and security of the British nation.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am glad to say that I did not undermine my own argument. My hon. Friend may not be aware that until 1969 Henry VIII’s Act in Restraint of Appeals was still on the statute book, and that until 1969 it was treason to take an appeal out of this country to a foreign court. Between 1950 and 1969, therefore, it was impossible, illegal, treason, for the European Court of Human Rights to rule against the United Kingdom. We had set something up that was very beneficial for people who had emerged out of war without there being a risk of anyone’s appealing to it—except in Northern Ireland, which repealed the Act a little earlier, but that is slightly beside the point. We were safeguarded by our wisdom in not repealing rather more ancient laws—rather more ancient laws with which I have a certain sympathy, as it happens.
I think that it was when we had the confidence to be a nation standing on our own two feet that we said, “We will not allow any appeals to go outside this country.” A case in point at that time was the papacy. When we felt ourselves to be a weaker nation, a nation in decline in which the business of politics was managing decline and in which we could not look after ourselves, we had to have a foreign court to serve as the final safeguard and fallback for what we are trying to achieve in this country. I simply do not believe that that is right or legitimate. I do not believe that our membership of the European Court on Human Rights has sufficient influence on other countries.
Rory Stewart
If we were to adopt my hon. Friend’s proposal and leave the European convention and the European Council, how would he explain to the other European countries that, having created the European Court and drafted the convention, then trumpeted it and helped to impose it on other Governments, we had suddenly decided that we no longer wished to be a party to it?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
We have created an awful lot of things that we do not necessarily still run. After all, we created Belgium, and we do not claim to run that. I think we can fairly argue that our legal system and tradition are fundamentally different from the continental system, and that over generations the common law has built up protections that differ from those in the universal declaration of human rights. Indeed, it was probably a mistake for us ever to sign that declaration.
Rory Stewart
In other words, my hon. Friend would say to the European people, “We created the European Court of Human Rights 60 years ago, and we—Conservative and Labour Governments—spent a long time saying that it was a great force for civilisation and progress. We sent some of our most distinguished barristers and judges to the Court. We celebrated its judgments. We used it to put pressure on eastern Europe and Russia. But now we have decided that it was all a terrible mistake. We will leave, and we will encourage other countries to leave as well. The whole European Court system can collapse, and the consequences for our commitment to human rights, and our attitudes towards eastern and central Europe and Russia, can take their own course.” Is that a rough version of what he would say?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend says we celebrate European Court of Human Rights judgments, but it is hard to think of many of them that we have celebrated. I do not remember any jubilee parties having been held to celebrate its judgments. Indeed, as he will be aware, we dispute and dislike many of its judgments.
Rory Stewart
I think my hon. Friend would agree that we celebrated very strongly the European Court’s rulings on the issue of habeas corpus, of which he is, rightly, so proud. We took enormous credit for the fact that the European Court introduced elements of habeas corpus, the notion of no detention without trial, and the prohibition on torture, which has transformed the political economy and human rights of southern Europe. We were immensely proud of that, and it was part of our foreign policy and our contribution to our own security. Are we now moving away from all of that, or are we saying times have changed?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My concern is how the European Court of Human Rights operates in this country. Just because we leave it does not mean other countries cannot remain part of it. The key reason why it is so difficult for us is because of the differences between the common law and Napoleonic law and the fundamental basis of rights.
In England and Wales, we have, under the common law, the right to do anything that is not specifically proscribed by law. That is a very different system from the continental system, under which people have the right to do what they are allowed to do. For a European system, therefore, a detailed list of rights setting out what people can do is needed, whereas here people only lose rights when Parliament, through its democratic process, has decided that they need to be taken away in the interests of the state. That might be someone’s right to liberty for having committed a crime, or it might be their right to vote because they have committed a crime and lost their liberty, but those decisions are made under the common law by Parliament. It is not a question of having a list of rights defining what people can do and then assuming anything not on that list is not allowed. Our system of rights, in common with that of the Americans, produces a much freer and better system—which protects ancient liberties, which I hold very dear—than a system of specific rights, where anyone who comes into contact with them may be provided with a judgment, as opposed to being free to do anything that is not specifically not allowed.
I am, of course, in favour of some aspects of the convention. I do not want us to pull out of it and then start torturing people, but it is worth bearing in mind why the common law did not have torture, and how our system developed without torture whereas the continental system developed with torture. It all goes back to 1215, when, interestingly, we get Magna Carta and they have the fourth Lateran Council, which states that trial by ordeal cannot be supervised by the Church, and because the Church cannot supervise it, it cannot be the will of God, and therefore in a continental system someone can only be found guilty if a confession is extracted. Hence, for very good reasons—for moral reasons—the fourth Lateran Council gets rid of trial by ordeal, and the law of unintended consequences means it results in torture being routine in the continental judicial system. By chance and good fortune, at the same time, because the barons have come up against the King, we get the rights of liberty preserved and the continuation of the development of the jury system as a means of getting to truth, while also dropping the right to trial by ordeal because then, in pre-Reformation times, we were still tied up to the doctrines of Rome. That demonstrates that our systems diverged very sharply. Of course people living under a system in which torture forms an instrumental part need rights to be defined more carefully, and they have not had them before, so they needed them to be imposed.
Rory Stewart
I promise this will be my last intervention. My hon. Friend spoke very well about the notion that deeply rooted in Magna Carta is a British immunity to any of these temptations. The problem, however, is that we are facing very difficult kinds of challenges today. It is very difficult to believe that the kinds of mechanisms my hon. Friend is talking about, which are primarily to do with the expression of a Back-Bencher’s opinions in the House of Commons and elections to this place, can have a fundamental effect on issues such as predator drones. How would he deal with the question of predator drone assassinations? How would he explain how British tacit participation in and knowledge of assassination by predator drones has continued for three years without this Parliament touching on it at all and, as far as I can see in my junior position as a new Member of Parliament, without having any intention of touching on it in the next few years? In the absence of any code of rights—in the absence of anything to which one can appeal in order to protect people—how on earth is one going to have protection for citizens?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
That is essentially a matter of politics and the doctrine of the just war. If we are involving ourselves in predator drone strikes, we must ask ourselves whether the three criteria of a just war are met. Is there sufficient cause? Are we a legitimate authority? Is there is a reasonable prospect of success? It is for the Government to make that case and if they cannot do so, Parliament will ultimately have to decide. However, I would certainly not put the safety of the nation in the hands of a bunch of judges overseas—that is the worst possible example for my hon. Friend to use, even though I am sympathetic to his basic point that using drones is not something with which the British should be involved. The decision on that—the decision on our own national security—must surely rest with the Executive, held to account by the legislature.
That is why we are here and why MPs have been here since Parliament was first assembled; we are here to bring redress of grievance against the Crown and against the Ministers of the Crown. It is our job when representing our constituents, and in the legislation that we vote on and the questions we table, to redress grievance where the rights, liberties and freedoms of our citizens have been undermined. We do not need an overseas court to do that. Indeed, to the extent that an overseas court does do it, that reduces our ability to do it for our constituents, because the overseas court appears to be the legitimate authority for redress of grievance rather than this House.
The Bill is a step in the right direction, although I will not agree with every dot and comma of it. If I am asked to serve on the Committee, it will be a privilege and an honour to do so. I would like to see the Bill slightly simplified and to see it remove the European convention on human rights altogether. Indeed, I am not entirely sure that I would not like to see the Act in Restraint of Appeals return to the statute book to apply a slightly higher penalty for appealing outside this kingdom to foreign courts, because it is, in essence, the legitimacy of our democracy, the legitimacy of Parliament and the legitimacy of each Member here representing our constituents that defends the liberties of the British people. If we fail—if we do not defend those liberties and we pass them off to somebody else—the British electorate can get rid of each and every one of us and put in our place people who will stand up for their liberties.
Leveson Inquiry
Rory Stewart Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Zac Goldsmith
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point; I agree with him.
A new statute to make independent regulation effective would improve investigative journalism, if it included express public interest defences. It would ensure that when the ends were in the public interest, the means would be justified. The example of The Daily Telegraph has already been cited, but I will give it again. The information that led to the expenses scandal was illegally accessed, but it was so obviously in the public interest that no one has ever challenged the newspaper. Theoretically, it could have been challenged. We now have an opportunity to protect journalists engaged in that kind of activity.
Let us not pretend that the state does not already influence the media; it does. There are countless laws relating to the press, a number of which—defamation and contempt, for instance—bear directly on the content of newspapers. What is more, despite arguing vigorously against any form of state intervention in the media, Lord Black and Paul Dacre have both advocated the use of legislation in their own submissions to Leveson. Both advocated a tribunal that could hear defamation and privacy cases and protect newspapers from high legal costs and damages, and both acknowledged that that would require statute. It does not follow that legislation would inhibit journalism. For example, Finland, which has been No. 1 on the world press freedom index in eight of the past 10 years, has a system of independent press regulation backed by statute. In 2003, it passed a law that gave people a right of reply and gave publications a duty to correct.
Television has a far higher level of regulation than anything I—indeed, most people in the Chamber—would endorse for newspapers, but it is worth noting that, no matter what survey we choose to look at, we see that television remains the country’s most trusted medium. Neither is television journalism cowed. Every Government, more or less without exception, have taken issue with the BBC, fought with the BBC and actively disliked the BBC. In addition, many of the recent high-profile exposés—for example, of Jimmy Savile, Winterborne View, of “The Secret Policeman”, racism in Polish football and so on—came from television.
Those who oppose any form of legislation have genuine fears, and I absolutely do not seek to discount them or pretend they do not exist. Good regulation would, I believe, improve our newspapers without inhibiting any public interest journalism; bad legislation would do immeasurable harm. There is room here to get it very wrong.
I want to point briefly to what I believe is a mistake made by Lord Leveson. The same “ConservativeHome” editor I cited earlier made a statement that I thought risible at the time. He said:
“Essentially, they”,
meaning advocates of legislation,
“want to create a climate of opinion in which, for example, doubt can’t be expressed about whether global warming is driven by human activity.”
Having read much of the Leveson report, although I admit not all of it, I have some concerns. Instead of confining himself to protecting the victims of newspaper smears and malpractice—Christopher Jeffries, Milly Dowler and so forth—I believe Lord Leveson has strayed beyond his brief. Let me quote directly from the report:
“Overall, the evidence in relation to the representation of women and minorities suggests that there has been a significant tendency within the press which leads to the publication of prejudicial or pejorative references to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or physical or mental illness or disability…A new regulator will need to address these issues as a matter of priority, the first steps being to amend practice and the Code to permit third party complaints.”
The rumbustious, politically incorrect and sometimes irresponsible—and, in my view, occasionally, appalling—approach of the tabloids is not to everyone’s taste, but in an open society, it is part of the rough and tumble of free expression. I know I am not in a minority on either side of the House when I say that we must never make it possible for lobby groups with their own political agendas to suppress free speech. Unless there is an individual victim with a legitimate grievance, the regulator has no business interfering.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
Could my hon. Friend produce an example of such a system somewhere other than Finland and Ireland? One of the problems of this debate is that it is difficult to point to a country such as the United States, France or Germany where such a regulator exists, but perhaps I have misunderstood.