Police and Justice Bill

My Lords, sometimes it is an advantage and sometimes a disadvantage to speak about a job that one has had the privilege of undertaking oneself. As the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, has already said, for five and a half years I served as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, a position which is covered in the Bill. It is an advantage because I had to do a job for which I did not apply and I had to learn how it was done, what was required, and so on, on the job. When I took the job I told the then Home Secretary that I would be grateful if I could still have two days a month to carry on with work that I was doing with the United Nations. However, it was immediately clear that that was a foolish request because inspecting prisons is a whole-time occupation and two days a month simply could not be spared. The most important part of the work was accompanying inspections. After hearing from my inspection team what they had found during the week, I would spend a whole day walking round a prison with the governor. I would spend an evening with the team discussing exactly what they had found and the following morning I would spend up to three hours with the governor and the management team of the prison, telling them precisely what we had found and the recommendations that we were going to make. They could then start to carry on from what I regarded not just as an inquisition but as a free consultancy which had the aim of helping them to move forward. The added advantage of such an inspection was that, of course, I was then able to speak first-hand to Ministers, the public and anyone about the state of things in the prisons that I had visited. When I heard a suggestion that the Inspectorate of Prisons would be subsumed into something far bigger, I was concerned that in future the chief inspector would not be able to give the amount of time that, by experience, I had found was essential if an inspection of those in custody is to be carried out properly and, in my way, what should be done in a humane system. The disadvantage is that you would expect me to say that, wouldn’t you? I do not disagree with everything in the Bill; I speak only about Part 4. I applaud the intention to end the use of the Prison Service as accommodation for children, something that I recommended as long ago as 1997. But if I were to take a couple of texts for what I am to say, first, I would look back through military history to October 1809, to the ill-conceived, useless and mal-directed expedition to the island of Walcheren, in which my regiment took part; it was disastrous for disease as much as anything else. On the way back, a regiment passing my own on its way up shouted, ““Good luck, the Rifles. You, too, are being made the sport of theory””. Secondly, a very distinguished commander, who did not like long rules and regulations, when asked what were the most effective rules he had ever found, quoted a company that had only one rule: a breach of common sense is a breach of the rules. My theme is that the Inspectorate of Prisons is being made the sport of theory, in breach of common sense. How did that come about? It did not come about as a result of an Act of Parliament, as the first inspectors did in 1835, after a long period of prison reform, starting way back in 1773, which required that every prison should be inspected every year and reported on to Parliament through one of His Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State; nor did it come about as a result of an inquiry into the prison department and the reformation of the inspectorate in 1981, when Mr Justice May’s report of 1979, originally put in place by the Labour government under Mr Callaghan, recommended the reformation of independent inspection, which had ceased in 1877. No, it came about in the Budget Statement of 2005, in which it was announced that the 11 public sector inspectorates were being rolled into four, in line with the Audit Commission’s 10 principles of inspection of public services. Looking at those principles from the point of view of prisons, they filled me with horror, because the Inspectorate of Prisons does not inspect a public service; it inspects the treatment of and conditions for prisoners. No one inspects the Prison Service. Someone inspects the police service, the probation service, the Courts Service and the Crown Prosecution Service—the other four partners in the merger. Those four inspectors come from the services that they inspect and they act as professional advisers to Ministers on those services. The prisons inspectorate is entirely different, and I welcome the four principles of the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, as to what it does. They state that you are required to monitor and influence the treatment and conditions of prisoners and report on them as you find them; and you report on fact, not dictated by anyone. I found that the unannounced inspection was hugely valuable. Only once did I make the mistake of telling the Home Secretary that I was going to inspect a prison the following week. It was the only inspection that had been predicted when I got there. The Audit Commission states that:"““Inspectors are also normally required to have regard to value for money considerations and as such there is an overlap with economic regulation””." That is not the case with the prisons inspectorate. It is up to the people who receive the reports to look at the economic considerations. The inspectorate is instructed to be concerned with the treatment of and conditions for prisoners. The Office of Public Services Reform’s review in 2003 found that the purpose of inspection was seen as providing assurance to the public. That is absolutely right. One of the principal reasons why independent inspection was restored in 1981 was that there was public disquiet at the self-regulation carried out by inspectors in a Home Office department who hid things that are now exposed. On 23 May this year, the new Home Secretary, commenting on the premature release of foreign national prisoners, told the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee:"““I think when you embark on a review . . . if you find that the facts warrant a particular position then you should be prepared to countenance that””." Those were wise words and I hope that the Minister will bear them in mind when she considers all that has been said about the inappropriate merger of something that has a totally different role into something that is broad and covers actions other than the treatment and conditions of prisoners. I am concerned about Clause 30, which has been mentioned, because when the chief inspector exercises his functions he must have regard to any aspect of government policy that responsible Ministers may direct. Prisons are not a party-political issue, nor should they be, because prisoners will be in prison whichever government are in power. It must be the duty of every government to ensure that the treatment and conditions of prisoners are appropriate and allow their resettlement into the community. The Government’s protestations that the compromise inspectorate will be just as independent as at present are nonsense. Everyone is weakened by compromise. I was able to speak out because I was the independent Chief Inspector of Prisons and, as such, was required to do so by Parliament. I do not think that I could have done that if I had been the deputy chief inspector for justice, community safety and custody (prisons). My successor, to whom, rightly, great tributes have been paid in this House, has said that she is concerned about the quality of who might apply for the job of deputy chief inspector for justice, community safety and custody, and whether they might be able to speak out, or whether people might listen to them. I am very worried about a word that the Minister used and which I have also seen used in many other documents about inspection; that is, ““modern””. There is only one way of inspecting, and that is to go and see for yourself. I do not know what ““modern”” means in this context. I presume that it means following targets and performance indicators, producing reports and coming to a paper judgment. I am sorry, my Lords, but I do not believe that that is appropriate for the treatment and conditions of prisoners. You cannot do it on paper; you have to do it yourself. I also draw attention to something that has a slightly Alice in Wonderland ring about it, and which has already been mentioned: the optional protocol to the UN convention against torture, which the UK ratified in June 2004. Under that, all ratifying nations are required to have an independent monitoring of places of detention at national level. I have been asked to go to Geneva on Friday by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture to take part in a seminar on the formation of those independent monitoring boards on the grounds that we in the United Kingdom have the only board that currently meets what they think the requirements should be. When questioned about the absence—or the presence—of a national preventive mechanism in this country, a former Minister, Fiona Mactaggart, said that we did not actually need to form another one because we already had one in the independent Inspectorate of Prisons, which enabled us to satisfy the required conditions. However, I have just received an invitation from the Department for Constitutional Affairs to attend a conference on 13 June to discuss the formation of a national mechanism for the inspection of places of detention; it adds that practical details need to be worked out. If we have already got such a mechanism, which Ministers have recognised as such, why on earth is the Department for Constitutional Affairs having a conference to find it? That is as far as I would like to go because I know that we will introduce a number of amendments to bring out the details of what I have been saying in relation to every clause in Part 4. In an ideal world I would hope that, having listened to the arguments that have already been made, the Minister will withdraw the prisons inspectorate from the proposal. It has not, as we have heard, received due scrutiny in the other place. Sub-Committee D, which studied it and which has a government majority of seven to six, contained two Home Office Ministers, but it did not really get down to the subject of Part 4. That part was not discussed at all on Report because there was insufficient time. I therefore submit that while we must obviously look again at inspectorates from time to time, the proposal is not appropriate. I hope that when the time comes we will be able to dismiss becoming privy to the sport of theory and restore common sense.