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Prisons: Howard League Commission

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and, like other Members of this House, I am very grateful to the Howard League for producing this report. I also welcome and support the remarks made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, about children, about which we have had many debates on the Floor of this House. When I read the report, I could not help reflecting on the fact that, in the Army, if you were told that you had to write a report on something, the first thing you did was go to the library and look up all the other reports on the same subject. You looked up all the recommendations that had been made, what had happened to them, and why, after all those other reports—there were usually a dozen—you still had to do the same thing. The first thing I opened was the bibliography. I looked in vain for two documents which I very much hoped would be there: one was the wonderful report on the riots in Strangeways Prison and 23 other prisons, written by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, in 1991, and the other was a White Paper, Custody, Care and Justice, agreed to by all political parties, which took the Prison Service into the 21st century, based on a real crisis. I looked for those documents because there were 12 objectives in that report with which, at the time, everyone agreed. I shall quote four of them: to end overcrowding; to improve co-operation with other services and institutions by working closely with the probation service and by membership of a national forum and area committees; to increase delegation of responsibility and accountability to all levels with clear leadership and a published annual statement of objectives; and to develop community prisons which will involve the gradual realignment of the prison estate into geographically coherent groups, serving most prisoners within that area. That was 19 years ago and absolutely nothing has happened. Here we are with another report saying exactly the same sort of things, but bringing them up to date with justice reinvestment, which I support, with the dreadful story of the hyperactivity of new Labour, with all its Bills, its new crimes, its overcrowding and more prison places but no progress other than an increased reconviction rate. I welcome the four ideas, including the significant reduction in the prison population; investment in localities, exactly echoing that; and the replacement of short prison sentences with community-based responses. Three weeks ago, I was in Libya advising the Libyans to do exactly the same thing. The Libyans have now gone further than we have as a result of our advice based on this document. To the dismantling of the National Offender Management Service I say, "Hear, hear"; it is a monster and it is a bureaucratic disaster. However, I have one problem with the break-up: it is about to appoint a new chief executive. It is very dangerous to appoint a new chief executive to an organisation which has clearly failed without being quite clear what that chief executive is to do, particularly as the Conservative Party has already announced that it intends to do something about NOMS as well. That is another matter. Finally, on local partners, yes, they are waiting for that and we all know that they want to do it. Why on earth have we not listened to the advice on which everyone agreed 19 years ago?