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Queen’s Speech

My Lords, this is the last gracious Speech before we head for the general election next year. It is less tempting to speak on what is proposed in the Queen's Speech than to look back to the general election of 1997 and take stock of the Government's record on crime and justice matters since then. The Government can produce the statistics to justify their record, but the fact remains that fear of crime now is greater than the crime itself. It is also a fact that a plethora of unremitting and unending criminal justice legislation has done little to build confidence in the system. Again, public confidence is shaped by the quality of the legislation and not by following the hysteria on crime generated by the tabloids. Talking about tabloids, their naked bias often comes to the surface. I am not talking about immigration or asylum matters, nor Islamophobia. Just look at the example of the deplorable way the Prime Minister was treated over the letter he wrote to a bereaved family. There is a proverb in my country and it is applicable to the Government. It says, "Don't keep snakes as pets because one of these days they’ll bite you". We have seen evidence of unsettling times in the Home Office. We have seen the coming and going of six Home Secretaries and accusations that the department was "not fit for purpose". That cannot be a confidence-building exercise among staff, let alone the general public. Over the 12 years since the Labour Government were elected in 1997, I have spoken in debates on every Queen's Speech. The Government have made changes that I have welcomed—for example, the formation of the Youth Justice Board and youth offending teams, new targets for the prison and probation services to get more offenders into work and accommodation, an increase in resources for drug treatment programmes, and most recently the establishment of the new Sentencing Council. Overall, however, looking at the state of our criminal justice system today and comparing it with 1997, I am struck by how little has changed for the better. The prison system is still seriously overcrowded— 82 out of 140 prisons are holding more prisoners than they were built for and 19,000 prisoners are held two to a cell designed for one person. This country has 151 prisoners for every 100,000 people in the general population compared with 96 in France and 88 in Germany. Overcrowding produces inhumane conditions and increases the risk of self-harm and suicide. It makes it harder for prisons to provide rehabilitation programmes for all their inmates and it increases reoffending on release. The pressure of numbers results in prisoners being moved from one prison to another part way through education or rehabilitation courses that could help them to avoid further crime on release. It causes many prisoners to be held in prisons far from their home areas, making it hard for relatives to visit and increasing the risk of family break-up, yet support from a family can be a crucial incentive to avoid reoffending. Over the past decade, the Government have built an extra 20,000 prison places, yet the system remains as overcrowded as ever because the prison population has increased even more sharply. As a result, the Government are now committed to a further large programme of prison expansion. That will absorb ever-increasing resources that could otherwise be spent on prisoners' resettlement, alternatives to custody, crime prevention and victim support. What should the Government have done to improve the penal and criminal justice system? First, they should have introduced legislation to make sentencing guidelines take account of the prison system. When David Blunkett was Home Secretary, the Government committed themselves to doing that, but they then regrettably abandoned the idea. The Government should have prohibited courts from using prison except for dangerous offenders unless they had first tried an intensive community supervision programme. They should have compelled health authorities to devote adequate resources to diverting mentally disordered offenders from prison into health and social care. Successive Home Secretaries and Ministers of Justice should have adopted a sustained, high-profile strategy to "talk down" the prison population by explaining the benefits of replacing prison sentences with rigorous community sentences. The Government could have introduced measures to reduce the imprisonment of people who have breached community supervision, for example by missing or being late for probation appointments. The number of people jailed for breach has escalated alarmingly as probation officers' discretion over breach proceedings has been progressively restricted. That has made a significant contribution to the overcrowding of local prisons. The Government should have introduced a graduated scale of punishments for breach of supervision, with prison being used only when less severe penalties have first been tried. The Government should have introduced legislation to reduce the use of custody for young offenders. Although there has been a recent fall in the number of juveniles in custody, the number is still much higher than it was in 1997. That is partly because the Government have passed legislation making it easier for the courts to detain children at increasingly younger ages and for less serious offences. As a result, most of the Youth Justice Board's budget is now absorbed by the cost of custody. Those resources would be far more effective in reducing youth crime if they were spent on strengthening and expanding community supervision programmes. The Government should have copied Canada, which in 2002 introduced legislation restricting the use of custody for young people, resulting in a reduction of more than 30 per cent in the number of young people sent into custody. It is particularly distressing to see that the position of minority ethnic people in the criminal justice system is now worse than it was when the Stephen Lawrence inquiry reported. The disproportionate use of stop and search is now even more extreme and the proportion of the prison population made up of racial minorities is now higher than it was in the late 1990s. The Government should have placed a clear statutory duty on all criminal justice agencies to adopt numerical targets for reducing racial disproportionality in their operations. The Government should also have done much more to tackle the lack of help or supervision for short-term prisoners. Most imprisoned offenders receive sentences of less than 12 months. These prisoners do not receive supervision by the probation service and their reconviction rates are much higher than those for other prisoners. They are responsible for much of the high-volume offending which causes such distress to people living in high-crime areas. The Government passed legislation in 2003 to fill this gap with a new custody plus sentence, which would have provided post-release supervision for short-term prisoners. However, this was never implemented. The Government should have done something else to fill the gap, such as establishing a national resettlement service for short-term prisoners. Such a service could have been commissioned from voluntary organisations, which play such an important and useful role in this country. I declare my position as president of the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders. The Government should also have taken more radical action to reform the way women offenders are dealt with. Most imprisoned women are neither violent nor dangerous and the majority have few previous convictions, but they have particularly high rates of mental disorder, histories of abuse, problems of addiction and personal distress arising from separation from their children. The Government should have established a women's justice board with a similar remit to that of the Youth Justice Board in relation to young offenders. A women's justice board could set standards for meeting women offenders' needs for resettlement and rehabilitation, mental health services, family contact and culturally appropriate support for foreign national women, and it could set targets to reduce the damaging use of custody for women offenders. The Government should have legislated to reform the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bach, for the considerable advice and help that I received from him on that legislation. However, I need much more assurance as regards the Government’s intention on this matter. The important thing is that the Government recognised the problem and promised reform but have not done much since 2002. A Home Office review group recommended reform of the Act by shortening the very long rehabilitation periods that must elapse before offences become spent. Such a change would greatly reduce the scope for unfair discrimination. In conclusion, if the Government had used the past 12 years to introduce the measures I have outlined, it would have needed political courage, particularly as regards educating the public on the need to reduce the use of prison, but in my view these measures would have done a great deal to reduce crime and reoffending as well as moving us away from the unenviable position of having the highest prison population in western Europe. If there is one lesson we should all learn, it is that there is a need to give leadership at the top. No longer should we succumb to the popular press and focus groups as a basis for our criminal justice legislation. It is a tough challenge and it is still not too late for others to learn the lessons of the past twelve years.