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Prisons: Howard League Commission

My Lords, noble Lords will recognise that I am in no way an expert on the prison system. I have only two locus standi for being here. First, I chair my party’s working group on localism and how to decentralise Britain. Secondly, I was involved in the Offender Management Bill some years ago, and spent some time talking to people in prisons and probation services around Yorkshire on what the Bill would mean for the prison system. I became less and less convinced of the case for NOMS as we went through the Bill, and more and more sceptical of the entire ideology of new public management. I viewed with immense enthusiasm a quotation from Geoff Mulgan, of all people, in this report: ""There were never any serious theoretical, empirical or popular arguments in favour of centralisation … overcentralisation tends to be associated with poorer performance, and decentralisation with better performance"." That is one of the more important messages of this report. The other important message is that giving way to what the report calls "penal populism", and which I would call the clamour of the Daily Mail simply to lock people up and forget about them, leads to greater expenditure and worse outcomes. I note that the United Kingdom now has the highest spending on law and order in the entire OECD—a point to consider when we think about future cuts in spending. Social care is cheaper; probation is cheaper. Above all, local management not only is cheaper but has much more effective outcomes. Many of us have seen local magistrates’ courts being knocked down and moved away from towns to region centres. The whole process of justice and social care is becoming less and less local, and it is now quite evident that we need to localise justice, offender management and looking after those who have started in care and are likely to go on being in care until they enter the prison system. I met a number of people in Leeds prison who were called POPOs—prolific and persistent offenders whom the prison officers assured me they had seen before and expected to see again and who would go on being recycled through the prison system until, in their mid to late 30s, they would finally grow out of it. I was also shocked to discover how much prisoners were moved around the system out of their own region. They lost touch with their families and were therefore likely to come out of prison without the framework that they needed to prevent reoffending. I strongly support the report. I particularly support the whole idea that the offender must be seen not just as an individual but as a member of a community, and must be encouraged to go back into that community. That community also needs to be involved in the whole process. Liverpool has been mentioned. I should also mention Chard in Somerset, in which the Liberal Democrat-led council has done a great deal to experiment usefully with restorative justice. That seems to all of us to be the way forward. We welcome the report. Sadly, we also welcome its condemnation of one of the greatest failures of new Labour over the past 12 years.