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Home Office

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, for securing this debate. I do not in any way underestimate how much the Home Office is in turmoil today. The events of the past few weeks are a clear demonstration that all is not well. Many of us remember that not so long ago the rest of the world looked up to the Home Office for much of its pioneering work on law and justice matters. We have had some great Home Secretaries who occupied that office of the state, some of whom were Members of your Lordships’ House, and we have valued their contributions. Today, unfortunately, the Home Office’s mission statement, of,"““building a safe, just and tolerant society””," is tarnished. There is always a temptation to use the present crisis to add to the constant barrage of criticism levelled at the Home Office. I hope to avoid that temptation. It is also very easy to succumb to the culture of blame. I do not believe that would take the debate forward. The sooner trust between administrators and legislators is established, the better. We need an effective home department to ensure that it stands for the values it has always promoted in its great days and that it can deal with threats made against this country. We all have our own ideas about what has gone wrong. My own analysis is that there is too much emphasis on promoting fresh legislation. With an all-time high prison population and asylum and immigration issues getting out of hand, the capacity to become an effective department is certainly diminished. With more legislation introduced each year—as the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, pointed out in the debate on the Police and Justice Bill, there have been 52 pieces of legislation in the last nine years—the time comes when serious problems will surface, and that is precisely what has happened now. I regretted the resignation of Charles Clarke, particularly the way it was handled by No. 10. He paid a heavy price for dealing with an unmanageable situation. The Motion we are debating calls attention to the role of the Home Office. I suspect that, with the point-based immigration system, we now have the opportunity to regulate that system in an objective and effective manner. That leaves us with the other area of concern: crime and punishment. I suggest that the role of the Home Office, particularly the role of the Home Secretary and his Ministers, is to put forward and argue strongly for rational, well thought-out and just measures to reduce crime. To do that properly means explaining to the public the central importance of the rehabilitation of offenders, if we are to meet the Home Office target of reducing reoffending by 5 per cent by 2008 and 10 per cent by 2010. The research showing the importance of resettlement for the reduction of reoffending is well known, and we have ample evidence to take a robust stand on this matter. Ex-prisoners who get and keep a job have their likelihood of reoffending cut by between one-third and one-half, depending on which research study you look at. Getting ex-offenders into stable accommodation reduces their reoffending rate by at least one-fifth. One recent research study found that offenders who had gained qualifications as a result of educational programmes were reconvicted at only one-third of the rate of similar offenders who had not received educational help. These effects are related. For example, it is harder to get a job without basic skills and harder to keep one if you are homeless. The National Offender Management Service has developed targets to get more ex-offenders into employment and sustainable accommodation. It is the role of the Home Secretary to emphasise to the public that achieving these targets will do far more to reduce crime and reoffending than any amount of tough-sounding, headline-hitting rhetoric. In my view it should be the role of the Home Office, and of the Home Secretary in particular, strongly, repeatedly and robustly to argue the case for a reduction in the unnecessary use of prison sentences and to point out that the overuse of prison jeopardises the prospects of reducing reoffending. Instead, in the past we have seen periodic confrontation between the Home Secretary and the judiciary. Much of the additional money provided for prison education in recent years has been cancelled out by the large increase in the prison population, with the result that, according to the Forum on Prisoner Education, only about 30 per cent of prisoners are involved in education of any kind. All too often prisoners are denied the chance of education or have courses disrupted because they are transferred to other prisons at short notice when governors are struggling to cope with excessive numbers of prisoners received from the courts. The Home Secretary should look again to the target adopted by the last but one Home Secretary, David Blunkett, of reducing the prison population to 80,000 by 2009, and at his commitment to legislate to make sentencing guidelines take into account the capacity of the prison system. The Home Secretary and his Ministers must adopt a high-profile strategy to ““talk down”” the prison population, and to explain the benefits of rigorous community sentences and the impossibility of effectively rehabilitating offenders if prisons suffer gross overcrowding. This means ensuring that the probation service and its partner organisations are positively supported and resourced to provide an effective service, not simply attacked and harangued when something goes wrong. It is the role of the Home Office to ensure that we have a penal system which respects human rights—those of the suspect, the offender and the victim of crime. There should be no suggestion that the human rights of one must be sacrificed to the other. A proper system of criminal justice must ensure that the rights of all parties are properly respected. Among other things, this means that the Home Office must do everything possible to reduce the rate of suicide and self-harm in prisons. High suicide rates are associated with higher levels of overcrowding and lower levels of purposeful activity in prisons. Research into prisoners who have unsuccessfully attempted suicide has found that they emphasise the importance of greater access to work and activities in providing a distraction from the distress which leads to suicide. Measures to promote a more sparing use of custody would not only help to resettle offenders and reduce reoffending, but directly save lives. It is a particular responsibility of the Home Office to ensure that we deal with the youngest and most vulnerable offenders in ways which have proper regard for their welfare and rights. Half the young people in young offender institutions have a history of being in local authority care, compared with 2 per cent of the general population. A quarter of them have suffered violence in the home. Many, including a third of the girls in custody, have suffered sexual abuse and many more have suffered emotional abuse from parental neglect. Nearly half have literacy and numeracy levels below those of an average 11 year-old, and over a quarter have levels below those of a seven year-old. They also have a high level of mental health problems. Yet in this country we use custody excessively for young offenders and on a more extensive scale than any other country in Europe. In most cases, that means Prison Service custody, with its 84 per cent reconviction rate for this age group. Many of the young people who we detain would be far better dealt with by supervision programmes in the community and, where necessary, intensive supervision in the community, which can tackle the problems at the root of their reoffending. The Government should bring forward their draft Youth Justice Bill that was published a year ago, which contained greater restriction on the use of custody for young people and measures to increase the credibility of community sentences for young offenders. It should be the responsibility of the Home Office to restrain—rather than promote, as it has been doing—the growing practice of publishing in the media the names of young people who have been given anti-social behaviour orders. For over 70 years juvenile offenders have not normally been named in media reports because such reporting can hinder their rehabilitation. Some 20 per cent of the male prison population and 31 per cent of the female prison population are now from racial minorities, even though Home Office studies have found that black people between the age of 10 and 25 are no more likely to commit crime than white people. The Criminal Justice System Race Unit has a programme of work designed to reduce the disproportionately negative treatment of black and ethnic minority people in the criminal justice process. It is the responsibility of the Home Office to resist trends in this direction and to explain clearly to the public that constructive rehabilitative measures are far more likely to increase their safety than measures of repression. If we were to move in this direction of reducing the prison population and dealing with immigration and asylum matters on the basis of objective policy, I suspect that many of the problems that we face would be diminished.