Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, said, it is a great pity that the position of women in the criminal justice system was neither included in the Bill nor debated when it was being processed through the other place. I was very glad that so many recommendations from the excellent report of the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, were accepted by the previous Government and supported by the coalition. Many repeated what I recommended in two earlier thematic reviews on women in prison in 1997 and 2001; that the Prison Reform Trust recommended in a report chaired by Professor Dorothy Wedderburn in 1999; and that the Fawcett Society recommended in three reports published between 2002 and 2006. Like the noble Baroness, we all appreciated that too many women who should not be there were in prison and that, while there, their treatment and conditions were not fit for purpose. I was motivated by my shock at finding, among other things, that women were being chained while in labour and having any injuries recorded on diagrams of male bodies because no diagrams of female bodies were issued. Therefore, while warmly welcoming the report of the noble Baroness, I must admit to my disappointment that it was not until they appeared in a report which the previous Government themselves commissioned that they either noted or took action on the recommendations for essential improvements that had been made earlier. Several times during the passage of the Bill, the Minister has told us that such and such an amendment is not necessary because a group has been appointed in the Ministry of Justice or NOMS to look at what is being put forward. I have to admit that every time he does I clench my fists and groan inwardly. Policy-making groups inside ministries are neither capable of designing and overseeing, nor designed to direct and oversee, the implementation of strategy—a word that is frequently misused because it is so imperfectly understood. A strategy is an overarching direction that binds everyone and everything involved in achieving a particular purpose. I have quoted previously the senior civil servant in the Home Office who berated me, saying that she wished I would stop talking about strategy because it was not a strategy that was needed but strategic direction. When I asked her what she meant, she replied, ““Top-down, of course””, implying that every ministerial utterance was to be regarded as strategic direction. No wonder offender management is in a muddle. Strategies require implementation, not just verbiage, and verbiage does not become strategy just because it comes from the top. I plead guilty as charged by any noble Lord who may accuse me of allowing my military background to influence my understanding of strategy, as well as my appreciation that nothing involving people will succeed unless they are overseen and led. That background fuelled my appreciation that all was not well with offender management in general, and with the treatment of and conditions for women in particular, when I saw what was and was not happening during my first inspection of Holloway more than 16 years ago. I admit to my astonishment when the then director-general of the Prison Service told me that there was no such person when I asked to see the director of women’s prisons, who I presumed was responsible and accountable for their custody. The Prison Service, he told me, thought that a civil servant in the policy branch was quite sufficient. When I asked him who the governor of a women’s prison could go to for help and advice, he said the area manager, who was responsible for the budget but might or might not have worked in a women’s prison. In my report on that never to be forgotten inspection, I included a recommendation that a director of women’s prisons be appointed. Since then, I have watched a series of expensive changes to the bureaucracy of offender management predictably fail to bring about the desired improvements on the ground because they did not include the appointment of individuals responsible and accountable for overseeing implementation in different types of prison and with different groups of prisoners. This, too, surprises me because Ministers and their officials are ignoring evidence that is before their eyes every day. My Army contemporary, General Sir John Learmont, came to exactly the same conclusion for exactly the same reasons when invited by the then Home Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne, to inquire into the escape of high-security prisoners from Parkhurst in 1994. However, his recommendation—that a responsible and accountable director of high-security prisons should be appointed—was accepted. As a result, they remain the only properly managed part of the prison system, in which good practice somewhere is turned into common practice everywhere, and incoming governors are required to carry on from where their predecessors left off. Why on earth has that success not been repeated with and for other groups? I repeated my recommendation in every other inspection report and the thematic reviews of women in prison that I mentioned earlier. Those reviews were only about prisons, but I was immediately attracted by Professor Wedderburn’s recommendation that there should be a women’s justice board, on the lines of the Youth Justice Board, that was responsible and accountable for women everywhere in the criminal justice system. I warmly supported the proposed wider responsibilities of the chairman seeing my hoped for director of women’s prisons as an essential, responsible and accountable subordinate. I also saw the chairman sitting alongside the director-general of the Prison Service, the director of the National Probation Service and the chairman of the Youth Justice Board on an executive board in which each was responsible and accountable to Ministers for their part of the offender management system. My Amendment 182B differs in only two respects from that tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Gould, Lady Corston and Lady Hamwee. I recognise the noble Baroness’s suggestion that we should get together and decide on one to go forward on Report. First, and semantically, I prefer the title ““women’s justice board”” to ““women’s justice strategy commission”” partly because it resonates with the success of the similarly roled Youth Justice Board and partly because the fact that boards produce and oversee strategy is already well understood by the public. Secondly, to accentuate the point that the chairman is responsible and accountable to the Secretary of State, I believe that he or she should be his or her principal adviser on women in the criminal justice system. My Amendment 182C mirrors recent introductions such as the requirement on the Secretary of State for Defence to give an annual account to Parliament of the operation of the Armed Forces covenant. The treatment of, and conditions for, women in the criminal justice system have been allowed to go by default for too long. My amendment is designed to ensure that this cannot happen in future.