Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, we welcome the cheery optimism of the Minister in opening this debate, but we do not welcome the Bill. Not only is it the 54th Bill dealing with crime and criminal justice that has come before us in the past 10 and a half years, but it perpetuates muddled thinking, a lack of understanding of the fundamental legal principles that lie behind the British concept of justice and populist but meaningless gestures towards the red-tops’ concerns of the day. Rhetoric and vote-catching matter more than practicality and principle. It is not surprising that the Joint Committee on Human Rights has today expressed concerns about almost all the Bill’s provisions. Thank you very much—it is a paradise for lawyers, as the noble Lord, Lord Henley, hinted a moment ago. Above all, though, the Bill is a missed opportunity to encourage, in a principled way, the prevention of crime in this country by creating and resourcing the means to put young offenders on the right path and by approaching social problems not through the criminal courts but with imaginative and constructive solutions. With regard to youth justice, there is no attempt to put forward a radical policy that will shift the emphasis towards prevention and earlier interventions. We can pick out the scattered provisions from the Bill dealing with youth justice: youth rehabilitation orders in Part 1, the sentencing of young offenders in Clause 9, youth offender contracts in Clauses 36 and 37, conditional cautions in Section 98 and Schedule 18 and a review of ASBOs in Clause 174. It is all over the place. There are three things lacking: a comprehensive approach that would deal in one comprehensible Bill with all the provisions relating to youth justice; a government structure that would place one Minister firmly in charge of policy and implementation; and a commitment to resources to carry out the tasks that are seen to be necessary. The youth rehabilitation orders are to be made by a magistrates’ court, whose prime purpose in the Bill is said to be punishment. Yet magistrates are turned into a social agency who must pick and mix from a selection of requirements tailored towards the individual young offender. They are to initiate service provision, such as accommodation by local authorities, medical treatment, drug treatment and education. They are to consider intensive supervision and fostering. Is that the role of a sentencer in a criminal court? If it is, how can that possibly be done without extensive reports, assessments into the background and personality of the person in question from social workers, probation officers and, frequently, medical practitioners? What input will there be from parents and from the offender himself, as happens with the more enlightened Scottish system of children’s panels? If our courts are to become a social agency of this nature, surely it is incumbent to state that the prime purpose in sentencing young offenders is not punishment but the consideration of the best interests of the child, as is set out in the children’s convention, whether that includes an element of punishment or not. As the Joint Committee on Human Rights says in its report today, detention or imprisonment should be seen only as a last resort. We shall be putting forward amendments for debate on all these matters. My noble friends Lady Linklater and Lady Falkner will expand on that. The grave danger that exists with all these restrictions and requirements is that they set up children and young people to fail. The sanction in each case is a fine and, in the ultimate, imprisonment. Around 6,500 children and young people are in prison, a 200 per cent increase since 1991. Reoffending rates following custody are 82 per cent, rising to 96 per cent for those who have more than seven convictions. The cost is £245 million a year, which is 70 per cent of the Youth Justice Board’s budget. According to the Audit Commission’s 2004 report, six months in a young offender institution costs £25,400 as compared with £8,500 for the most intensive community sentence. Meanwhile, on 7 January, the Minister for Prisons, David Hanson, confessed in a reply to a Question in another place from my colleague, Mr Tom Brake, that convictions for robbery in London where the defendants are under 18 have increased threefold in the past seven years, from 592 to 1,533. It is a fivefold increase in respect of girls. The Government claim that their policies have in some areas resulted in a fall in crime. In some respects, that may be so, but they cannot take the credit for it. Crime has fallen across Europe. The European Crime and Safety Survey, published last year, and sponsored by the European Commission, compared levels of crime across all EU countries. It found that levels of common crime have fallen in the EU during the past 10 years, but the UK is regarded as a crime hotspot. For example, out of 20 countries, we rank fourth for the level of thefts of personal property reported to the police, which is twice the rate it is in Poland. When it comes to a comparison of 16 capital cities, London leads the field in the provision of security devices, but it has the highest levels of theft, burglary, robbery, sexual incidents and assaults in Europe—it is higher even than in New York. It was no surprise to learn last October that gun crime had increased by 10 per cent in a year. London has the lowest percentage in the EU, bar Amsterdam, of citizens who have not been victimised in the past five years. That accords with our own perceptions: how many of your Lordships would feel safe, not just in London, but in your nearest town, in walking the streets after nine o'clock in the evening? Even the Home Secretary finds it necessary to take her minder to the local kebab shop in Peckham.