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Debate on the Address

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, on the breadth of his opening speech. Like other noble Lords, I look forward to the vigorous debate that he forecast on some of the issues. If noble Lords had been sitting in the Gallery of the other place just before 10 o'clock on the night of 20 July 1910, they would have heard the then Home Secretary winding up in the debate on prison estimates. He said: "““The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country””." The 36 year-old Winston Churchill went on to say that in pursuit of that there must, among other things, be, "““a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment””.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/7/10; col. 1354.]" When I listened to the gracious Speech on Tuesday, I heard Her Majesty refer to the Government's intention to rebalance the criminal justice system in favour of the victim. That is something I have never really been able to get my head around because I did not think that one rebalanced scales; I thought scales were balanced by evidence. I found the best description of what that means in the context of the criminal justice system on the walls of a young offender institution; it was ““to prevent the next victim””. We prevent the next victim by rehabilitating people so that they do not create victims. There are no more important players in the rehabilitation process than the Department of Health, the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills because the combination of looking at the healthcare and education needs of offenders is crucial to helping them live a useful and law-abiding life. I shall not concentrate on healthcare, because I am sure that will be covered by others, but shall turn to education. I do so because in recent years the ministries that I have mentioned have been responsible for the financial affairs of healthcare and education in prisons and are therefore responsible for the outcomes. Noble Lords may think it is the responsibility of the Ministry of Justice, but those departments' contribution to the funding will make all the difference. On healthcare, I was particularly glad to hear the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, mention the importance of the development and use of the budgets, to which the noble Earl, Lord Howe, also paid considerable attention. Within those budgets there is one responsibility of primary care trusts that I never hear mentioned. It is the responsibility for providing diversion schemes for mentally disordered people when they enter the criminal justice system. A recent publication by the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Heath referred to diversion and stated: "““Diversion can ensure that people with mental health problems who offend are treated in the best and most appropriate settings available. It can also help to reduce the rising custodial population and the increasing re-offending rates for those leaving prison, both of which will help to protect the public and save money that would otherwise be spent on reconvictions””. " My plea to the Department of Health is that it should pay much more attention to the provision of these diversionary schemes to enable that to happen because nobody else can do it. I turn to the Education and Skills Bill. I was very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, mentioned the responsibility that the state has for young people in its care and that parents and carers should be able to choose the most appropriate education for them. I would of course include prisons in that because people in prison are also in the care of the state. Therefore, I was disappointed to discover that the brief I received on the Education and Skills Bill via the internet made no mention of offenders of any kind in the provisions for people up to the age of 18 and19. That is disappointing because I hope that in building up the provision, that for people in the care of the state is examined. The noble Lord, Lord Darzi, mentioned, quite rightly, the horrendous number of people who have been in care, and the failure particularly in their education which results in them going to prison. If you look at it the other way around, one is continually horrified by the vast numbers in prison who have come from care and who have failed in education and many other things. That matter really must be included in the future. I do not think that I am politically correct in one of my major concerns in education, which is based on my first visit, as far as I can remember, to a British Forces comprehensive school in Germany in 1966. This secondary school was achieving amazing results with children who arrived at about the most difficult times for schoolmasters. They arrived in the middle of term from all over the world as their fathers were posted in, and, of course, they left in the middle of term when their fathers were posted elsewhere. However, the school was achieving astonishing results. I asked the headmaster why. He said: ““It all boils down to the fact that every child has different abilities in different subjects. We assess their ability in each of those subjects and we send them to classes which are appropriate for their ability. We block the day so that the whole school does English, maths, history or whatever. Then the child goes to the class appropriate for their ability and is encouraged upwards according to that ability””. I said: ““Goodness me, if that is comprehensive education I cannot think of anything better””. He said: ““Unfortunately, that may be comprehensive education Hohne-style””—which was where the school was—““but it is not comprehensive education in a country where people move on by year and not by ability””. There is a lot of heavily political discussion about that, which I do not intend to get into it. However, it has always struck me about people in prison who dropped out of school and who mention frustration and boredom that very often it may have been because their ability was not assessed and channelled at the right time. I mention that because, as regards these young people in particular, I hope that in the Education and Skills Bill the Government will not lose sight of the importance of assessment at the very start to find out what the young person has in them—the treasure in their heart to which Winston Churchill referred—whether it is educational or vocational. That can then be harnessed and put to best use. There is only a limited time available, and it would be quite wrong for the state to waste that time. What sort of assessment do I mean? I have previously mentioned in the House that I believe that one of the scourges of the 21st century is the inability of people to communicate with each other. They cannot talk; they do not listen; and they have not been engaged in conversation. That leads to an inability to conduct relationships. One of the worst effects of that is that they are unable to establish that very important first relationship with a teacher when they go to school. They do not know how to communicate with them. Speech and language therapists should see every child before they start primary school to help them to communicate so that they can engage in the system and get the best out of it. In prisons that is desperately important in order to get prisoners involved in all the activities they are presented with. At the same time—and again this appears in the requirement to look at vocational skills in this Bill, which I am delighted to see—the aptitude test for vocational skills should be related to what people can do, not to what it is felt would be good for them to do, because self-esteem follows achievement and success. They have not had that. It is remarkable when you see what happens when people are suddenly faced with something they can do. My final plea is that the role of the arts is not forgotten as an entry point, a trigger or an identification of what somebody can do on which they can build. The arts have always been seen, rightly, as an entry point to education, skills and training. I hope that that will not be forgotten. That may seem a long way from the Bill presented to us. When looking through it, I was slightly concerned to see a long list of duties on parents, schools, local government and so on. I remind the House that there is a duty on government to make certain that provision is made. I was interested to see the Association of Colleges asking for a duty on the Government to provide proper independent advice and guidance to young people as well as high quality education and training. I am mightily encouraged by the attitude of the Ministry of Justice to its task. In what I have heard, the same goes for the attitude of the two new education ministries. There is a challenging agenda, but I hope on behalf of all young people, including those in custody in the care of the state, that the opportunities will be seized.