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Home Office

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, for initiating this worthwhile and timely debate. His experience in these matters is hard to match in longevity or depth. The Home Office is one of the great departments of state. Many distinguished people have held the post, not just of Home Secretary, as we were just reminded, but of permanent secretary. I shall follow the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, by giving a small piece of history. One permanent secretary was Sir Geoffrey Lushington, who served from 1885 to 1895. He told a government committee on the penal system:"““I regard as unfavourable to reformation the status of a prisoner throughout his whole career; the crushing of self-respect, the starving of all moral instinct he may possess, the absence of all opportunity to do or receive a kindness, the continual association with none but criminal . . . I believe the true mode of reforming a man or restoring him to society is exactly the opposite direction from all these; but of course this is a mere idea. It is quite impracticable in a prison. In fact the unfavourable features I have mentioned are inseparable from prison life””." This is a rather more elaborate way of saying what a Home Office White Paper said in 1990:"““Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse””." I begin with this comment but to illustrate the point that there is a history of evidence-based policy-making in the Home Office. For many years, distinguished public servants worked to manage a system that was proportionate, aimed at maximising public safety and minimising social damage, based on findings from a world-renowned research department, and grounded in a deep respect for law. Sadly, this is not the Home Office we now know. We have seen ways of implementing policy that are deeply flawed. I give just one example. The Home Office decided one January morning in 2004, on the basis of scant evidence—some would say no evidence—that the penal system would work better if the prison and probation services were abolished as separate entities and combined into one service to be called the National Offender Management Service, never mind that 8,000 people in it are not offenders at all because they are remanded in custody and presumed innocent until found guilty. Since then, the prison and probation services have struggled on against a background of uncertainty, indecision, plans, renewals of plans, reversals of plans, postponements and confusion. This debate is about the role of the Home Office and, as such, it must be about the limits of the role of the Home Office. I shall now concentrate on what is not the role of the Home Office. In 1971, the Home Office’s work with children was transferred to the Department of Health. It is not there now, as we know; it came back. The Home Office is not the appropriate department to deal with the care of the most disadvantaged, problematic and damaged children we have. This February, the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, published his shocking report on the use of physical restraints, solitary confinement and forcible strip-searching of children in custody, some of whom are as young as 12. In his introduction, he says that the way in which children are treated in penal custody would, in other circumstances, trigger a child protection investigation, and could even result in criminal charges. He made many recommendations, the first and overriding one being that,"““Overall policies and responsibility for all children, including those in custody, should rest with the Children’s Minister””." The Children’s Minister is in the Department for Education and Skills, which is where policies on all children should be made. The treatment of children in trouble with the law in England and Wales has been criticised by every organisation concerned with children and human rights. The unsuitability of the Home Office to carry out this responsibility was encapsulated for me in the Government’s response to the 10th report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which I am now a member, although I was not then. The committee recommended removing all children under 18 from prison-service custody into the care of people whose outlook is firmly grounded in a culture of respect for children’s human rights and devoted to rehabilitation and care. In its reply, the Home Office said that it did not accept the recommendation because,"““Children who are in custody are not just children””." One must ask: what are they, then? In this comment, we see the Home Office—as it is and, indeed, must be—first and foremost a ministry of the interior, with security and public order at its heart but trammelled with numerous additional responsibilities that it cannot do well. Another role that, in my view, it cannot do well is to devise policies and operational procedures to govern how local communities ensure safety, social harmony and quality of life. These, surely, are matters for the Ministers who deal with local government, environment and health, and for local people. By allowing the Home Office such a measure of jurisdiction over social problems and social choices about the solutions, social policy becomes criminal policy. Should noble Lords think I am going a bit far when I say that, let me remind the House what the Attorney-General said in this House on 18 January:"““It is often forgotten that anti-social behaviour orders are often a very important way of getting urgent intervention to people who are in need of help which otherwise they would not get””.—[Official Report, 18/1/06; col. 663.]" One must ask why they would not get it. Why does help come only with an order of the court? A case was reported that seemed to me to show clearly the transformation of a social policy matter into a criminal one—the story of Amy Dullamura, who kept trying to commit suicide in the sea at Aberystwyth and was put under an ASBO. She told the BBC, ““The pain has led me to make desperate decisions about my future””. The police said, ““We took the step of applying for an ASBO because we thought that what she was doing was anti-social. It was causing the public who witnessed what she did distress””. The anti-social behaviour order prevents her from going anywhere near the seafront in Aberystwyth. If she does, she can face five years in prison. I may have sounded critical of the Home Office. That is not my intention. The Home Office is basically our ministry of the interior. As such, it does what needs to be done, which is a very necessary role. The problem comes when it deals with matters that should not be seen through the perspective of a ministry of the interior. In the 1990s, I did a fair bit of work in eastern Europe and central Asia, helping countries transfer their prison systems from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of Justice, which was a requirement of joining the Council of Europe. I remember in particular two outstanding prison reformers who were in charge of the prison systems in their countries. They both knew that it was essential for their reform plans to get out of the Ministry of the Interior and escape its mindset, which in its essence, and at its extreme, has a view of people—they are guilty more often than not; social arrangements—we need more control; and how to manage—from the centre and by decree. Professor Robert Hazell from the Constitution Unit gave evidence to the Constitutional Reform Bill Committee in April 2004. He said that,"““there is a ‘tension . . . between the values of justice on the one hand and the values of law and order on the other . . . this tension is universal, all governments have to address it and generally in most governments there is one figure, call him the Minister of the Interior or whatever, who upholds the values of order and there is another figure, often called the Minister of Justice, who upholds the values of justice. They will always clash’””." We have no such clash in England and Wales. We need one. Therefore, in some form, we need a ministry of justice. Clearly, it is not a panacea. It is not a solution to the day-to-day management problems identified here today. It is not a way out of a crisis. It may not be the right moment for it, but in due course it will be a way to ensure that we have a society with more justice, particularly for its most vulnerable members.