Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, I look forward to receiving those amendments from the noble Lord. The noble Lord, Lord Low, challenged me to say that in general, despite a few positive comments and so on, the Bill has been warmly welcomed. I am not going to say that. We have had a serious and important debate and, of course, my noble friends and I who sit on the Front Bench look forward to intensive debate during the next few weeks on the important matters raised by noble Lords. A ““hotchpotch””, ““curate’s egg””, ““ragbag””, ““ironmonger’s shop”” and other apt or not-so-apt phrases, depending on your point of view, have been used. I am not going to trade on the number of Bills that my Government have passed in relation to criminal justice with the number that the Conservatives passed. That shows a certain familiarity with the way that criminal justice Bills have been developed over the years and the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, had important points to make about that. I accept, of course, that a considerable number of clauses were introduced in the other place. Actually, the Bill was in Committee for 47 hours and a further eight hours were given over to the remaining stages so we should not underestimate the time taken. However, I fully understand that your Lordships’ House will bring its customary energy to scrutinising the Bill. We will consider very carefully the points made by the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, and the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, on the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I am sure that during our debates on amendments we will discuss the recommendations made by that committee. On the issue of lessons to be learnt from the legislative process, of course we want to learn lessons from legislation that has not fulfilled the purpose for which it was designed. Noble Lords have referred to the Governance of Britain Green Paper and the intent of the Government to rebalance the role of Parliament vis-à-vis the Executive. We want to learn those lessons and to take them to heart. I agree that it would be good to have a wider debate on the purpose of criminal justice legislation and particularly, as the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, said, on its impact on public confidence. None the less I would argue that the measures in this Bill are useful and help to deliver our objectives of protecting the public, reducing reoffending, promoting the rehabilitation of offenders and strengthening confidence in the criminal justice system. Whatever disappointment noble Lords have expressed about parts of the Bill, we share those overriding objectives. We should also acknowledge that crime has fallen by 32 per cent since 1997 and that the fear of crime is lower. We will always argue about statistics, but there is sufficient hard evidence to suggest that we are on the right lines. Whatever doubts there are about government policy, it is important to put them in perspective. The noble Baronesses, Lady Howe and Lady Stern, were disappointed that the Bill is not being used as a vehicle to put into practice the report of my noble friend Lady Corston. The timing is not right for that, but two valuable debates will come up in the next 10 days on women’s justice issues and the report of my noble friend Lady Corston. The Government have largely accepted the recommendations of my noble friend’s report. I say to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, while not repeating our debate of last week on the structure of murder offences, that I hope that he will accept that this is not shelving. We are attempting to look at the partial defences first and then to come back to the overall framework. Since I have been in this position, we have had a number of interesting debates on youth justice. I know that this subject is dear to the hearts of all noble Lords. We are all concerned about the rate of offending and reoffending. The position at least is stable, with rates of reoffending by young people having fallen by 3.8 per cent since 1997. Of course, that is no excuse for complacency. I understand the points raised by noble Lords about the use of custody for young people, and about the intent of the youth justice system in general. I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, that we are responsive to the concerns expressed about the use of physical restraint in under-18 establishments. We debated the statutory instrument and set up an independent joint review. That is currently taking evidence and is due to report to Ministers in April. On the wider question of youth justice, we accept the need to look at this in a comprehensive way—to consider what more can be done to prevent children and young people coming into the criminal justice system, to make more effective use of the time that they spend in the system and to reduce reoffending. There is nothing between us on these matters and proposals on how to tackle this will be set out in a youth crime action plan, to be published in the summer. I listened with interest to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and I am sure that whatever the fortunes of the many amendments that she is going to put down, they will certainly feed into this wider review and be very useful. On the question of youth rehabilitation orders, I will respond in detail to noble Lords in writing. The intention is that the requirements, which will apply to 10 to 18 year-olds, will be flexible enough for each youth rehabilitation order to be more onerous than the last and to address directly the offending behaviour. I agree with the right reverend Prelate about the need for proper tailoring. We expect youth offending teams to work with the courts to provide them with appropriate information that they can use to help them decide which requirements should be attached to the orders. I do not know whether that has convinced the right reverend Prelate but the intention is certainly to have a kind of hierarchy with the emphasis on preventing reoffending. I well understand that we shall have a debate on the threshold, although I point out to noble Lords that the courts already have to have regard to whether a custodial sentence is justified. We will also debate the purpose of juvenile sentencing. The Bill makes it clear that, when dealing with young offenders, the court must primarily have regard to the principal aim of the youth justice system, which is the prevention of offending by young people. It also makes it clear that the court must have regard to welfare needs. However, when a court is sentencing a young offender, welfare needs never have taken, and in our view should not take, priority over the prevention of offending. We shall come back to that matter and also to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I turn to the subject of the Prison Service, about which we had a lot of very interesting comments. The allegation is that, through various legislative programmes, the Government are engaged in knee-jerk reactions to media attention on the problems that we have with the prison population. I have started to visit prisons again over the past few months and, although the Prison Service is under considerable pressure at the moment, I pay great tribute to the improvements that have taken place. I have seen an enormous improvement in healthcare in prisons. There is more to be done and that is why we have the review of mental health issues, but we have also seen much more effort being made in relation to educational and housing support for those leaving prison. There is much more to do but let us pay tribute to what has been achieved. I know that we will be discussing Titans, although they are not subject to legislative provision. I emphasise that the noble Lord, Lord Carter, proposed large campuses, which could benefit from investment in good design and management but could also have smaller units where the benefits of smaller-scale institutions could be brought to bear. My noble friend Lord Graham and the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, raised concerns about the prison officer disputes and the reserve power that we wish to take. I pay tribute to prison officers, who have an incredibly difficult job. They do not often get a good press outside or, indeed, even in your Lordships’ House. The great majority of prison officers do a fantastic job but we face a very difficult situation in view of the action taken in August and the decision of the POA to withdraw from the current joint voluntary agreement. I say to my noble friend Lord Graham that we hope it will be possible, before Royal Assent, to agree a new dispute resolution and trade union recognition agreement with the POA, but we think that we need the reserve power. We do not believe that the kind of industrial action that took place could ever be justified in the prison context, not least because of the prisoners’ welfare considerations. A great deal of attention has been paid to indeterminate sentences for public protection, and we shall come back to that in Committee. I am the first to acknowledge that these have not been targeted well enough and that too many cases with short tariffs have caused problems with managing and rehabilitating offenders in the prison system. That has had a knock-on impact on the availability of programmes that IPP sentence prisoners have to undertake before the Parole Board can consider their eventual release. Clearly, we have to deal with that. We believe that the proposals in the Bill will enable us to ensure that these are focused on the most serious and dangerous offenders. I turn to the subject of extreme pornography. The noble Earl, Lord Onslow, and a number of other noble Lords expressed some concerns, which I well understand, about the definitions and how they might be applied. The reasons for bringing this matter before your Lordships’ House are well taken: some very disturbing cases, with disturbing impacts, have arisen from the availability of extreme pornography. Equally, I accept that we have to be very careful about the definition; we do not want it to be wider than we intend. I said in my opening speech that we will bring forward amendments—in Committee, I hope—to make that absolutely clear. We have had a very interesting, almost cameo, debate about prostitution. I certainly accept the comments of my noble friend Lord Faulkner and the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, that we need to see this in the round, as part of a comprehensive approach. Noble Lords have rather made fun of my ministerial colleague’s recent visit to Sweden, but it should be seen as a positive, fact-finding tour and a contribution to this wider debate. It feeds into a six-month review in tackling the demand for prostitution. My noble friend Lord Faulkner accepted that the intent of the clauses in the Bill is positive. It deals with the revolving-door problem of people being consistently caught by the police, brought before the courts and then reoffending. That is the aim of the clause; it aims to help people to address the causes of offending. The consensus I sensed from the comments of noble Lords is that we need to have programmes that are designed to help people get out of the position that they are in. I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester for his comments on blasphemy. No doubt he will take on board the earnest request of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, to speed it up even more than the church is already doing. I pay tribute to the church for its work in this area. As for homophobic offences, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, that there is a distinction between the Public Order Act, which protects individuals from harm, and the clause, which deals with incitement to hatred of people as a group on the basis of their sexual orientation. Police activity obviously comes down to their operational independence, but like most organisations I suspect that they must go through a learning process. The Crown Prosecution Service will always assess a case and bring a prosecution only if there is a reasonable prospect of conviction. Let me emphasise that this new law will not prevent free speech or debate; it will not prevent jokes or expressions of religious belief. We recognise the importance of safeguarding freedom of expression, conscience and religion. I give way.