That sounds like an attractive idea. However, there are some problems to which I do not yet see a solution, although I agree with my neighbour from Hexham that plenty of people in both the charity sector and the private sector have something to contribute to the process.
The first problem, which was identified by my Committee, is that the average length of custody is 79 days. That is not a period in which a programme of education can be developed, and greatly extending periods of custody is not part of the Government’s policy. Secondly, people going into custody do not do so neatly at the beginning of a term or an academic year; they go when the courts have sentenced them. It is difficult to provide a range of basic educational courses for people who go into custody for relatively short periods and at different times, and it involves paying a price. Some of those people will be much further away from their local communities than
they would have been if they had been dealt with under the previous system, especially if the college has been created at the expense of, for example, secure children’s homes. I should be very concerned if those ceased to be available because a college was being opened in a much more distant place.
I think that the Government have quite a bit more thinking to do about how they can realise their very desirable objective of providing basic education by means of some kind of secure college framework. It would be wrong to assume that it is possible simply to set up a large institution in one part of the country, and that people who are in custody for relatively short periods in a constant turnover will fit neatly into a programme of education. The objective is right, but the means have yet to be fully explained.
The “reasonable force” argument was mentioned earlier. I had a word with the Minister about that. I think that there may be some confusion about it. It needs to be made clear that there will be no breach of article 3 of the European convention on human rights in secure colleges, and that reasonable force is used for the purpose for which it is provided—that is, for the safety of those in custody or of those around them, including those who are superintending the education for the purpose of which they have been placed in a secure college. There needs to be a safe environment.
By way of offering the Government a warning of the difficulties involved, I shall quote what the chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick, said in his oral evidence to the Select Committee. He pointed out that the youth custody population is not what it was two or three years ago, for the obvious reason that it is much smaller. That means that we now have the more intractable and difficult cases in youth custody, to which we are trying to apply this new system. He said that
“the nature of the juvenile population you now have in custody is different from what it was a year or two ago. The Government need to take that into account…What you now have is a higher concentration of the most troubled, most at-risk and most risky young people, concentrated in a very small number of establishments…You have to make sure that your future accommodation arrangements can guarantee the safety”
of those young people. He went on:
“It is not simply about the number of teachers you have; it is about whether you have the staff to get young people safely from their unit to the classroom, without trouble occurring en route, and to make sure that the teaching environment is safe and secure.”
Those are big challenges for the programme that the Government have set out.
My third topic is judicial review. The Public Bill Committee will need to look closely at the proposed change in the threshold for exclusion of judicial review from it being “inevitable” to being “highly likely” that the successful challenge would not change the outcome. There could be a risk of the argument becoming about the substance of the case, rather than about process. Judicial review is supposed to be about process. It is not an appeal mechanism in which the decision is considered by an alternative decision maker; it is a review of the process that has been carried out. However, if an argument had to take place about just how likely it was that the success of the review would make no difference, that would involve going quite deeply into the substance of the matter. The wording of that proposal will therefore have to be looked at carefully.
More generally, judicial review is inconvenient for the Executive. It is a nuisance, and the initials “JR” strike fear into the hearts of Ministers and, even more, of the civil servants who are always reminding Ministers about judicial review. However, it is a discipline by which we ensure that proper process is followed. It would be unsatisfactory to strip away that discipline completely and to say, “It doesn’t matter if you get the process wrong, as long as you make sure it’s not likely to affect the outcome.” The wording of this proposal also needs to be looked at, as do some of the cost attribution issues that have been raised today.
There is a problem when judicial review is used to try to delay a case sufficiently for the window of opportunity for something to happen to be closed, but such cases are few and far between. If we leave aside immigration cases, the increased use of judicial review is nothing like as big a problem as it was thought to be. The increase was identified as being primarily a result of immigration cases. I hope that the Bill Committee will look carefully at the wording of those measures. We must recognise that we need to maintain the discipline and that, if the law requires us to go through certain processes, we must go through them. If we do not, we run the risk of bringing trouble into court. I am referring not only to the Government in this context; this applies also to a wide range of local authorities and major infrastructure industries.
It would be wrong for me to conclude without referring to a point that has been underlying much of the debate—namely, that these are aspects of the criminal justice system whose primary purposes will be addressed only if we achieve further long-term reform. I see that reform as involving primarily what my Committee has called justice reinvestment—that is, taking resources away from the damaged end of the system and putting them into the beginning, so that victims do not become victims in the first place because crimes do not happen. We must ensure that we direct the resources to the appropriate areas, just as the Government have sought to do in the transforming families programme, so that they prevent crimes from happening in the first place. We need to create a virtuous circle in which we do not need so many prison places because fewer crimes are happening. We had an opportunity to do that, and crime levels have been falling, but that opportunity has unfortunately been compromised by the difficult financial situation in which the Government have found themselves. That means that it has been much harder to prime the pump, or to put in extra resources.
That brings us right back to the ultimate purpose of justice reinvestment, which is to move resources. In order to do that properly, we need to address a matter that the hon. Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) mentioned earlier—that is, something that the Select Committee calls local commissioning. In such a system, the decisions about the resources needed to deal with crime are made by all the agencies that have to handle crime at local level. Many of those decisions are now made locally, which is a good thing, but one crucial one is not: the decision on how much money is spent on prisons and where that money is put. That is still very much a national decision and it will remain so under the Government’s present policy.
I believe that we will achieve more in crime prevention when we have a rational allocation of resources at local level by all the organisations involved. They include the
police, the courts, the magistracy and the judiciary, as well as the youth offending teams and all those in the voluntary sector who are becoming involved in these processes. Quite a lot of good practice has developed—in youth offending teams, for example—and the lessons from that need to be learned throughout the criminal justice system as a whole.
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