Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I was very interested in all that the noble Lord, Lord Graham, had to say and, if I may say so, the restraint with which he expressed those views. My experience in this area is that there is too much confrontation between the sides and not enough conciliation and reasoned talking. It always seemed to me that one of the big problems in the Prison Service was that there was not a full understanding of the fact everything will not be right for prisoners unless things are right for staff. I remember writing as the subtitle of a report on one prison, ““A Staff Neglected””, because the staff needs had been neglected so much that it made it almost impossible for them to carry out their task. I realise that the amendment being discussed is not the one to come later, which refers to the question which gave rise to the action in August on the staging of a pay rise. I remember being extremely angry when that happened in the Army, because the staging did not just mean that people did not get their full pay, but that people who left in the first part of the year did not get the second part of the rise. It also affected pensions—again, not by a huge amount—but by an amount which, to my mind, amounted almost to dishonesty. Recently, the problems faced by the Armed Forces have been expanded into something which I never heard of during my service, which is a so-called covenant between the Armed Forces and government. There is a definite feeling that that covenant, whatever it is, has been broken by the fact that the Government have appeared not to be supporting the Armed Forces in the way that they might. I believe that, on the basis of that, the Prison Officers’ Association feels that the covenant between it, the Government and the Prison Service has been broken. It seems to me that it has been broken in an entirely avoidable way. I therefore very much hope that the Government will listen to the wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Graham, and not take precipitate action now but think very carefully about what he said and think through the meaning of the phrases that he has questioned, so that precipitate action on 8 May can be avoided. Such action would be unfortunate but, for the long term, it is hugely important that the relationship between the Prison Officers’ Association, the Prison Service and the Government must be a covenant felt to be fair by all sides.