Home Affairs and Justice

I agree with the hon. Gentleman to this extent: we do not want an over-centralised system, but we need some central management of the system. Whereas many coroners do a good job, some have not managed their work very well at all. There are examples in some parts of the country of terrible delays in holding inquests. I am not thinking of the serious delays in inquests relating to service in Iraq or Afghanistan, which have raised separate problems; I am thinking of areas where inquests have built up because the service was not properly managed or resourced. It is therefore necessary, as the Government maintain, to have a chief coroner, who will need the power to ensure a certain level of approved standards. At the same time, however, we do not want areas to be dependent on a distant service that does not recognise, for example, that life in rural communities is different from life in urban communities. I have referred to that part of the coroners and justice Bill that relates to coroners, but it is not yet clear what else will be in the Bill. There will be data protection provisions, which I hope will include strengthening the Information Commissioner's independence and giving him the powers necessary to fine organisations that breach data protection provisions. The commissioner has been left with only the nuclear button to press. He needs wider powers, as we have argued, and the Government seem to recognise that. In the longer term, it would be better if the commissioner had the independence that comes from being a creature of Parliament, not of the Government. That is the position for the Scottish Information Commissioner, our Comptroller and Auditor General, the parliamentary ombudsman and the chairman of the Electoral Commission, who all relate to Parliament, not to the Government. We understand that there will also be provisions in the Bill relating to homicide and the Sentencing Guidelines Council. We intend to look into those carefully. The Queen's Speech prompts the question whether, as a result of the coroners and justice Bill and the Government's other activities, there will be, in the words of the Government's declared objective, an"““effective, transparent and responsive justice system for victims, witnesses and the wider public.””" There will not be an effective justice system if money continues to be spent without regard to the effectiveness with which it is spent. The background to that point is the Carter report on prisons, which had no evidential base at all, but which led to far-reaching conclusions, including the plan to create massive, Titan prisons, into which no cost-benefit analysis has been conducted. Interestingly, having reported that the consultation was over, the Government have now told our Committee that it is not really over, as they intend to do some further work, owing to the fact that so many of the people who were consulted pointed to the lack of a cost-benefit analysis. I am glad that the Government have changed tack, at least to the extent of giving the issue some further thought, and I would be the last person to complain if they changed their mind. I hope that they will now look much more carefully into the cost-effectiveness of the proposal, which has never been examined on any research or evidence base at all. If we spend lots of money on creating more prisons, but at the same time send out unrehabilitated, unsupervised or unsupported prisoners, there will be more crimes and more victims of crime. If we spend on prisons money that is needed for early-years intervention, youth work or community sentences, there will be more criminals and more victims. We therefore need to look at all the money that we spend in the criminal justice system and at whether it is being spent effectively. Our report ““Towards Effective Sentencing””, from the 2007-08 Session, deals with some of those issues and demonstrates the ways in which money was wasted when sentences were introduced without any proper mechanism for carrying them out and without any certainty that they would meet the requirements of the justice system. We are now doing further work on the much wider concept of justice reinvestment: are we spending the money in the right places; if we spent it differently, would there be fewer crimes and fewer victims? We are very conscious of the need for an informed public and media debate that is not just based around a few cases. The Front Benchers of all parties need to help in bringing about such a debate. Instead of chasing ““tough on crime”” headlines, we should ensure that the public are able to debate in an informed way what methods will ensure that they are least likely to be the victims of crime. We should not be misleading the public into thinking that we have a solution if all we propose is simply putting more people in prison and keeping them there for longer. There are many public misconceptions about crime. All the evidence shows that the public believe that crimes are more frequent than they actually are and that sentences are more lenient than they actually are. As long as that is the case, the public will be prey to both newspaper headlines and populist rhetoric suggesting that there is an easy solution to a massive problem of increasing crime in the form of opening more prisons and cramming more people into them—when that is clearly not the case. We have the highest prison rate among any of the major countries of western Europe—and not just marginally higher, but by far. Yet that has not enabled us to have a different and more successful record on crime and the prevention of crime than those countries have had. We see a strong need for a much more informed public debate and we look to the leaders of all the parties to contribute to it and to resist the temptation to grab a current case and the public fears generated by it and say, ““Ah, this proves that we must have more prisons or longer sentences.”” Although long sentences are necessary and appropriate in a few cases, they are not the answer to general crime problems.