Police and Justice Bill

My Lords, this is a Bill covering a wide range of issues in both policing and justice, of which some are welcome and others, as we have already heard, are very controversial. It develops measures instituted over time by this Government, which here involve still further enhancing the powers of the Home Secretary and creating substantial new police powers, which are potentially worrying and require close scrutiny. My interest, as always, is in children and young people in the criminal justice system, where the Bill is relevant in a number of areas. In the policing aspect it relates to the new conditions for street bail granted by police to suspects who may be children and where there are important child welfare issues. There is also a standardisation of the powers and duties of community support officers, including the new power of ““truancy sweeps””. That is important since a large proportion of their work happens to relate to young people. In Part 3, there are new provisions to deal with anti-social behaviour arising from the creation of local authority oversight committees scrutinising crime and disorder reduction partnerships and the requirement on local councils to respond to a community call for action, which will directly affect young people. There is also an extension of those agencies which can enter into parenting contracts and apply for parenting orders—in particular, registered social landlords—which is especially inappropriate. Finally, in Part 4, there is the major proposal to amalgamate the five criminal justice inspectorates into one king-size inspectorate thereby merging decades of specialist knowledge and expertise which, as we have heard already around the Chamber, is a major cause for concern, particularly for the prisons inspectorate. There are real concerns over the proposal that the police powers to grant bail on the street should be extended to impose pre-charge conditions at the same time. The intervention of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, was particularly appropriate. The point was also echoed by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. Worries have been expressed that, if inappropriately used, this could develop into a form of summary police justice. When we debated the Anti-social Behaviour Bill in 2003 there were particular concerns that, where young people and children were involved, there should be proper protection for them and an appropriate adult present, so that they would understand fully the implications of the whole process. An understanding of child welfare issues is always paramount, and appropriate welfare assessments by an arresting officer on the street may not be possible or even desirable. These concerns are now far greater when the process also involves the possibility of conditions of bail being put in place—what that means to a young person, who may have special needs or mental health issues or, simply by virtue of his or her age, not understand the implications, including those of non-compliance. We argued then, and we argue now, that the age limit for all appropriate safeguards for children and young people should be extended to include 17 year-olds. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us reassurance on this. Where community safety officers are concerned, it is clearly desirable that their powers and duties should be standardised. The ““truancy sweeps””, whereby they will now be able to take a child back to school or some other place, may well be very positive, albeit with limited long-term results unless the root cause of the truanting is also addressed. It is quite clear that there will have to be a significant investment in their training, particularly if they are to be involved in the enforcement of ASBOs, on which the definition of what constitutes anti-social behaviour is at best woolly. It is known that a high proportion of CSOs’ work is with children and young people, and that almost 50 per cent of ASBOs are on young people. Since there are plans for the number of CSOs to be increased to around 24,000, unless and until they all have adequate training, particularly with young people, far from this added presence being a benefit, there will be serious risks for all concerned. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us on this point too. Two further areas in the Bill deal with anti-social behaviour and both require a great deal of further discussion. There is an extension of the role of local authorities, with a new duty on councillors to respond to the call for action if a resident feels that not enough is being done locally to deal with a problem of an anti-social nature. We have already seen with the Anti-social Behaviour Act what an unfortunate and unhelpful thing naming and shaming is. There are real concerns that this may become worse as a result of this new duty. More worrying is the proposed power of both local authorities and registered social landlords to apply for parenting contracts and parenting orders. Most authorities in this field agree that it is highly inappropriate for RSLs to have such a power. Their role is to deal with housing and not the intervention in such a sensitive and potentially momentous way in the lives of their tenants, particularly when the penalty for failing to comply with a parenting order becomes a criminal offence. It is imperative that social agencies with expertise in this area—we are dealing with such difficult family issues—work with families through parenting contracts and the range of supportive strategies available to them. However, the merging of the criminal justice inspectorates in Part 4, on which there was no time for a debate at Third Reading in the other place, is the cause for gravest concern—for the future of the prisons inspectorate in particular, although all five have particular roles and areas of expertise. Therefore it is in this House that we must give this issue the fullest attention. Again, there are some serious implications for children and young people. The argument is that the proposed amalgamation of five criminal justice inspectorates into one justice, community safety and custody inspectorate will rationalise their activities into a common framework, where they will become more effective and efficient, and that common methodologies, cycles and assessments will create better standards and co-ordination across the piece. This is a dangerously simplistic argument as far as the inspectorate of prisons is concerned. As Dr Silvia Casale, the distinguished president of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, has said:"““The deprivation of liberty is fundamentally different from other criminal justice measures and has different legal and moral implications. Thus, inspecting the treatment and conditions of people in custody is of a different order to other inspections””." Anne Owers, the current Chief Inspector of Prisons, explains that as well as focusing on the activities of prisons and beyond, their task is to focus on the details of the life of prisoners, and has much more to it than looking at issues of process, management or audit. Of necessity, much of what happens in prison is a closed world and quite hidden. As the Prison Reform Trust has said, prisons can go bad very quickly so the spotlight which the inspectorate can shine on conditions, from a completely independent and authoritative standpoint, has proved over and over again to be essential to exposing some shaming situations—in Norwich, Forest Bank and Woodhill, to name but a few—which in turn can act as a trigger and help the Prison Service to bring about improvement and change. Indeed, as has already been mentioned, the outstanding quality of the work of our prison inspectorate is acknowledged worldwide, as well as by our own Government; it is used as a model and leads the way in best practice. It is strange, therefore, to propose to subsume it into a far bigger, wider organisation which will inevitably dilute its capacity and impact. I want to echo the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, in saying that the key element to the success of the Prison Service’s work has been its complete independence: the chief inspector comes from outside the service; it is independent in the use of its own criteria and methodology; its ability to criticise policy as well as practice; and its reliance on unannounced inspections. While none of these is specifically prohibited in the Bill, neither are they guaranteed in it. Indeed, Clause 30(3) states that the chief inspector must,"““have regard to such aspects of government policy as the responsible ministers may direct””." So the independence of inspections in future looks to be severely compromised. This is another area where a great deal of comfort has to be sought from the Minister. I have an added concern for the future of children and young people caught up in custody. Even within the highly specific and specialised field of prisons inspection there is the still further specialised work with juvenile prisoners. Currently, there are separate criteria, a different set of expectations and a dedicated, specialist team that adopts, as indeed it should, a child-centred approach. As any of us who have worked with vulnerable children knows, this work requires highly skilled and specialised professional experience, knowledge and understanding. It is in recognition of this that this specific team exists for inspecting YOIs. Its work is now part of the development of a memo of understanding with children’s services, so that while HMI continues to inspect, it will feed its findings into a joint area review and into the broader spectrum of children’s services. Thus, an understanding of the very different worlds of both custody on the one hand and of children on the other has to be sought from appropriate professionals. Finally, I urge the Minister not to forget the hidden world of the STCs, run by private companies, where children as young as 12 are imprisoned. Here inspections are done only by the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) because the relevant children are so very young. But it took an inquiry, chaired by my noble friend Lord Carlile, to highlight the extent of the use of restraint, during the course of which one child died, strip searching and solitary confinement. For as long as we continue to incarcerate children in this way, it would be more appropriate for HMI’s expertise also to be involved in this area. There are fears for the future of the prisons inspectorate as a whole, but the fears for these even more specialist areas of work are greater still. It is sometimes helpful to look back and learn the lessons of the past. I have a sense of déjà vu here of a parallel moment in the social services back in the late 1960s, when I was a childcare officer. Just like today, the argument was made that there was a need to rationalise the range of services, to simplify, co-ordinate and bring under one umbrella work which had a great deal of overlap and common practice. Following the recommendations of the Seebohm Committee, the individual roles of childcare officers, psychiatric social workers and welfare officers among others were swept away, and with them, ultimately, went years of specialised knowledge and practice in the law and many other related fields. The individual departments vanished and the generic social worker was born, operating out of a social services department and working in a ““multi-disciplinary team””. Only one specialism remained: the probation officer, who alone has been allowed to retain his own distinct role. The result was not an improvement, but a diminution of provision, because it is impossible to retain those levels of specialism when subsumed into a bigger whole, and the work was, indeed, diluted. We could not be all things to all people. Now, indeed, many of the specialisms have returned of necessity in different guises. It seems to me that something similar is being proposed for the inspectorates. We should be very careful not to make the same mistakes again. I look forward to following the progress of this very important Bill over the next few weeks.