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Police and Justice Bill

I regret the lack of scrutiny in the other place of the matters to which the amendments refer. No doubt there was a reason why time was unavailable. I have little personal experience of these matters, although when my late noble kinsman was Home Secretary, he had a reputation in the Prison Service of asking questions on prison visits that it had not expected a Home Secretary to ask. I believe that verdict was intended to be a compliment. I did, however, have the privilege of chairing the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in the 1997 to 2001 Parliament. We were a committee that, in a troubled province, had a range of opinion that stretched from Peter Robinson MP, Andrew Hunter MP, then the MP for Basingstoke, at one end, to Ken Livingstone, then the MP for Brent, but we divided on amendments only twice in four years on a long range of reports. One of our reports was on the Northern Ireland Prison Service. We had as advisers most distinguished academic experts on prison subjects from the University of Cambridge and from KCL. The report was unanimous. A crucial witness was the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, in his then capacity. After the report was published, the then Permanent Secretary of the Northern Ireland Office, with long Home Office experience on prison matters, thanked me for the agreed agenda that we had laid out for him and the director of the Northern Ireland Prison Service. There was no resentment of what we had said, or of what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, had said to us that had powerfully influenced us. I shall be most attentive to what the Minister says, but she will need to be phenomenally persuasive. I remark in conclusion that it is a nice irony that the Whip on the Bench during the presentation by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, of his amendments was the Whip who normally answers to your Lordships’ House on Treasury matters.