Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, my Amendments 185FA to 185FD would amend government Amendment 185F. I very much welcome the new clause proposed by my noble friend the Minister, which will amend the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. As noble Lords are well aware, I have consistently campaigned for changes to the Act for many years, and my efforts have been supported by noble Lords of all parties. Although there has been general sympathy from many quarters for change, my noble friend’s new clauses are the first concrete change to the Act for nearly four decades, and I certainly welcome them. The Government’s initiative will allow many more people with criminal records to start again with a clean slate and will undoubtedly make a real contribution to the reduction in the number of crimes committed by former offenders excluded from the job market. I welcome the explanation already given by the Minister in relation to my amendments, but I have no desire or wish to pursue them any further, other than to put forward a point of view that may be different and on the basis of which I have designed my Private Member’s Bill. My amendments are designed to go further than the government proposals in two respects. First, they would further reduce the rehabilitation period for sentences of between 30 months and four years. The Government propose that the rehabilitation period for this group should be seven years from the end of the sentence, whereas my amendments would fix that period at four years. Secondly, my amendments would enable sentences of between four and 10 years to be spent up to seven years from the end of the sentence. This goes further than the Government's proposals, which would leave offenders with sentences of over four years out of the scope of the Act, so that their offences would never become spent. My amendments are nearer the periods of Breaking the Circle, the review of the Act that was published in 2002 and which the noble Lord mentioned. The Government's proposals are considerably more timid than the recommendations of that review. The House will recall that in 2001 the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, set up a review group to examine whether, three decades after the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, there was a cause for reform. The review group was chaired by a senior Home Office official and included representatives from the police, the probation service, the legal profession, the judiciary, employers and voluntary agencies. In 2002, the review group published its conclusions in the report Breaking the Circle. Following consultation, the then Government accepted a modified version of the review group's proposal in 2003. Under those modified proposals, the rehabilitation period would have been one year for non-custodial sentences, two years for custodial sentences of under four years, and four years for custodial sentences of four years or more. These rehabilitation periods would have applied to all offences except those that resulted in a life sentence. These proposals also received widespread support, not least in many debates in this House, but were never implemented by the previous Government. My noble friend the Minister's proposals are welcome as far as they go, but they are much more cautious than the modified Breaking the Circle proposals. For non-custodial sentences and for sentences of under six months, the Government’s proposals follow Breaking the Circle, and I certainly welcome them. However, for those serving sentences of between six and 30 months, the Government propose a rehabilitation period of four years compared with the Breaking the Circle proposal of two years. For offenders with sentences of between 30 months and four years, the Government propose a rehabilitation period of seven years compared with the Breaking the Circle proposal of two years. For those serving sentences of more than four years, that review proposed a rehabilitation period of four years. In contrast, the Government’s proposals leave those offenders out of the scope of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act completely. Their offences will never be able to become spent, however many years they avoid turning back to crime. This is very sad indeed. My amendments do not go as far as the Breaking the Circle proposals, but they would improve the Government's proposals in two respects. For offenders with sentences of between 30 months and four years, they would reduce the extremely lengthy proposed rehabilitation period of seven years to four years. They would also bring offenders serving between four and 10 years within the scope of the Act, so that their offences would become spent seven years after the end of their period of post-release licence. I must add that all ex-offenders will still have to declare all their past convictions if they apply for jobs in a sensitive area of work, such as criminal justice agencies, financial institutions and working with young or vulnerable adults. However, my proposals would reduce the degree of unfair discrimination against reformed offenders who have not reoffended for several years and are applying for jobs in areas that are not high risk. Why is it important to ensure that offenders with shorter sentences do not have to wait an unduly long time to benefit from the Act, and that offenders with longer determinate sentences can also benefit from it? It is because unfair discrimination against ex-offenders is wrong in principle. It imposes an additional illegitimate penalty of refusing employment to people who have already served a judicially ordered punishment for their crime. Regrettably, such discrimination is still widespread. Surveys of ex-offenders in Nacro projects—I declare an interest as president of Nacro—have shown that 60 per cent have been refused jobs because of their criminal records. Many of those were non-sensitive jobs, and in many cases employers turned down applicants even though their offences had no relevance to the job for which they were applying. The scope of discrimination is wide because the decisions to employ people or refuse them a job are not made at the top of a company—they are made by a large number of individual personnel staff who usually have had no specific training in how to deal with applications from people with criminal records. This kind of discrimination does not help to protect the public. On the contrary, it puts the public more at risk because an ex-offender’s risk of reoffending is reduced by between one-third and one-half if he or she gets and keeps a job. The whole community benefits when offending is reduced, but employers benefit in particular because crime such as cheque and credit card fraud, shoplifting, the robbery of retail outlets and the burglary of commercial premises have a particularly damaging impact on business. I hope that the Minister will look favourably on these proposals and see whether they are at all possible in the areas that I have talked about. That would extend the benefits of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act more widely than the Minister’s current proposal. I have one further request: will the Minister examine how these systems could be monitored so that the impact of his amendment could be measured and, if necessary, we could look at further amendments in future criminal justice legislation? I beg to move.