Rehabilitation of Offenders (Amendment) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall answer the questions first before going into the main body of my speech. I will attempt an impassioned peroration and I ask my noble friend Lord Dholakia to trust me. The Government intend to take on the main thrust of the Bill. We are in the process of consultation based on the Green Paper. Therefore, we would like to take on board the main parts of the Bill. I offer my noble friend full consultation on the form of government legislation. I do so with a sense of urgency and also in the full knowledge that if I do not deliver, he will be back with the persistence that he has shown already. I turn to the question of Scotland. I am going there in about a month to talk to Scottish Ministers about their experience. The issue has been raised of bringing the work of the YJB into the MoJ. The matter will be fully debated in the Public Bodies Bill. I will explain to the House our intentions at that point. As I have said before at the Dispatch Box, the Youth Justice Board was one of the great achievements of the previous Government. It did a great deal to push the treatment of young offenders to the top of the agenda. However, we believe that we can justify bringing its work in-house to the MoJ without diminishing its effectiveness. We hope to learn some of the lessons of the youth justice experience over the past 10 years and apply them to the treatment of adult offenders. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, will be patient. I shall be back at the Dispatch Box at some stage next week with the Public Bodies Bill, because I assured my noble friend Lord Taylor that when we reached the YJB part of the Bill, I would do my duty and defend the decision. It is good to end this turbulent week in the House by demonstrating both to ourselves and to the public what we do best, and by showing the side of the House that people most admire, which is our ability to draw on the experience and expertise of Members in a matter of public interest and concern. I fully share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Bach. His stewardship at the Ministry of Justice is still highly regarded, not least by me. I share with him the fact that in piloting a liberal approach to these matters, we have to carry with us people who have a genuine fear of crime and a genuine concern for its victims. There is not a great deal of difference between us. We are talking about getting the balance right between proper protection of the public and a genuine offer of the opportunity for rehabilitation and reform. Before I go into the body of my speech, I will say that I take real pride in the fact that the three maiden speakers today all came from the Liberal Democrat Benches. They all demonstrated that the new intake maintains the reputation for quality on those Benches—a reputation that is appreciated on all sides of the House. Pause for those on all Benches to say, ““Hear, hear””. As was pointed out, my noble friend Lord Dholakia has vast experience as president of NACRO and in the way that he has associated NACRO, UNLOCK and the Prison Reform Trust in this campaign. He has rightly argued that the rehabilitation periods in the current Act are far too long, and prevent rehabilitated ex-offenders from making a fresh start. The Government have sympathy with that position; we believe that one of the more effective ways to ensure that an ex-offender becomes re-integrated into society is to offer them the chance of stability which, among other things, means employment. The Government are well aware that the Act has not been reformed since its introduction in 1974. The result is that it does not reflect current, more severe sentencing practice and it can, therefore, fail in its aim to help reformed offenders resettle into society. The long-standing criticisms of the Act include the fact that rehabilitation periods are too long, and they do not reflect the point at which the risk of re-offending reduces. Also, the threshold at which a conviction never becomes spent—that is, all those convictions which attract a sentence of more than 30 months—is seen as too low. At the same time, the exceptions order exempts a growing number of occupations from the Act. The legislation is also criticised for being over-complex and confusing, with the result that some people may not realise that they benefit from its application. The Government are therefore looking at what can be done to address some of those criticisms and to get a better balance between rehabilitation and public protection. The Government are currently consulting on potential changes to the Act through our Green Paper, which has been referred to several times, on sentencing and rehabilitation. The Green Paper explains that the proposals we are considering include: broadening the scope of the Act so that it covers all offenders who have a determinate sentence; reducing the length of rehabilitation periods; and producing a clearer, simplified classification of rehabilitation periods. The consultation paper also asks for views on how we do more for young offenders, a point referred to by several speakers, so that minor convictions as a juvenile do not blight their future prospects, and how offenders with minor convictions a long time in their past, but who are subject to full disclosure of their convictions, might be treated. We share similar aims to my noble friend Lord Dholakia and are committed to bring in reform in this area. It will also be apparent from the overall thrust of the Green Paper that rehabilitation is very much at the heart of our approach. We believe that the right way to improve public safety and reduce the number of victims is to reduce reoffending, and that an important aspect of that is to ensure that rehabilitated ex-offenders are offered a chance to reintegrate fully into society. I noted a number of points that noble Lords made. I will try to cover most of them in my reply, but I will also say that the consultation period ends on 3 March, so there is still a month and a half for individuals and organisations to respond to the Green Paper. I urge noble Lords with contacts with interested organisations or individually to make a response to the Green Paper. I assure noble Lords that the team within the MoJ working on our next steps in this area will receive the Hansard of this debate, as itself a constructive response to the problems that we are discussing. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, together with a number of other noble Lords, pointed out that the whole question of criminal records needs to be looked at. A Home Office working party is considering the matter, including a number of the points that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, made about the system being over-prescriptive and over-bureaucratic. We are hoping that the outcome of the working party will enable us to clarify and simplify the matter. Anyone who is faced with these things, as I am, sees the same issues coming up time and time again. Getting to the bottom of some of these problems involves something less than rocket science, although of course there are dilemmas. The noble Baroness mentioned exclusion. There is the dilemma of the impact that exclusion will have on the excluded child, but there is also the dilemma of what not excluding the child does to the rest of the class or the ethos of the school. There is not always a simple solution. I welcome the contribution of my noble friend Lord Addington, who reminded us how many of these issues are related to educational problems, including the area of his own expertise, dyslexia. This comes up time and again. Along with the Department of Health, we are trying to identify at an early stage the mental problems of one kind or another which are a factor in offending. The noble Earl, Lord Erroll, asked me a question which I think was partly answered by the noble Lord, Lord Bach. He asked how many adults had a criminal conviction. The best answer that the Box could come up with was that about one-third of all men have a recordable conviction by the age of 30. That sounds like an enormous amount to me, but I think that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, said that research carried out in 2005 indicated that the figure was 25 per cent. I shall check the figure again, although I have heard it mentioned before. However, it is extremely worrying because it means that convictions leading to a criminal record are very widespread, and the blight might be wider than we think.