Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I shall be as brief as I can at this time of night. I begin with two wishes and a disappointment. I wish that I had been able to raise this amendment at the start of the Bill, but it is the custom of the House that amendments to the Title are taken at the end rather than the beginning. I also wish that he wording of my Amendment 196A had appeared also for Amendment 197, since they are actually both the same. The disappointment is one that I declared at Second Reading: I was told that the Bill left the Ministry of Justice entitled the ““Legal Aid, Sentencing and Rehabilitation of Offenders Bill”” but emerged from No. 10 with the word ““punishment”” in the Title instead of ““rehabilitation””. I knew that I was not alone when I read in the House Magazine what the Minister himself said about this to the Liberal Democrat annual party conference. I also note his inclusion of the word ““rehabilitation”” in Amendment 198. In Committee, the Minister has explained several times that the Government’s apparent lack of courage in accepting amendments put forward in the spirit of the rehabilitation revolution is based on their appreciation that the electorate would not accept what was being proposed. I believe that the public would accept these amendments if they knew how ill served they are by the punishment agenda, which is preached by such as the Daily Mail and regrettably swallowed by too many people who should know better. It is often said that there are no votes in prisons. I absolutely agree because they are inanimate objects and the voting issue should not be prisons but the prisoners they contain. The aim of the criminal justice system is to protect the public by preventing reoffending. In line with this, the role of both prisons and probation is to protect the public by rehabilitating those awarded a custodial or community sentence so that they live useful and law-abiding lives on release. That is achieved by first assessing what has prevented their doing so thus far, and then attempting to rectify that in the time made available by the sentence of the court. In any civilised country, which is what we purport to be, the deprivation of liberty, imposed by a sentence, is the only punishment allowed in this process. Further punishment through the way in which sentences are administered is not to be tolerated, which is why I so deplore the addition of the word to the roles of the prison and probation services, and its inclusion in the Title of the Bill. To emphasise No. 10’s error, anyone reading or listening to our deliberations on Part 3 of the Bill in particular would realise that rehabilitation is what they are all about. At present, as has been mentioned many times during the passage of the Bill, the reoffending rate is disgracefully high, which suggests that the present system is failing to protect the public. One of the main reasons for this is the shortage of positive activities in prison or probation to encourage and enable useful and law-abiding living on release. In light of this, I would have expected the unprotected public to protest and ask Ministers why and what they were doing about it. Every constituent should harry their MP into pressuring the Government to make the necessary resources available to enable their better protection. If the Daily Mail really was the responsible newspaper that it claims to be, I would expect it to lead this charge, challenging successive Governments to better protect the electorate, rather than cynically trying to increase its circulation by sensationalising criminals. In other words, the continuing failure of our criminal justice system should be made a regular election issue on which every Government should expect be called to account. It is quite clear that the Secretary of State recognises this, which is why I so strongly support the intent of his proposed rehabilitation revolution. However, I have warned him many times, as I have mentioned in connection with many of the amendments that I have tabled to the Bill, that until and unless he improves the management of offenders, which has failed the public for so long, his intent will not be realised for all the wrong reasons. He will also need the support of his Cabinet colleagues as well as the public, who must be educated so that they understand what structured rehabilitation is all about. It is not a soft option; it rightly makes demands on offenders. However, its provision is crucial to the protection of the public. It therefore makes no sense to confuse either Cabinet colleagues or the public by giving Bills wrong and misleading Titles. That is why I so wish that my amendment could have been taken at the beginning, rather than have to wait until the end of proceedings on the Bill. I know the Minister will say that this is above his pay grade. However, bearing in mind the early support that both the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister gave to the rehabilitation revolution—support replicated on all sides of this Committee—I hope that the Minister, having accepted my amendments, will be able to persuade No. 10 to reverse its decision and restore the original, positive, accurate and meaningful ““rehabilitation”” to its rightful place in the Title, instead of the nihilist, populist and meaningless ““punishment””. I beg to move.