My Lords, I join other noble Lords in welcoming my noble friend Lord Wolfson to his position. I can say from experience that it is a challenging but rewarding post.
It is well understood that deradicalisation programmes are particularly challenging to evaluate. There is nothing new about this. I remember attending meetings in Brussels to discuss with my fellow Justice Ministers the problem of radicalisation in prison and the best response to it. There was no real agreement on that but my clear impression was that in 2015, we were already adopting a much more sophisticated approach to the problem than were other countries within the European Union. This is not some tedious pro-Brexit point: the whole purpose of our meeting was to try to share intelligence and work out the best response. However, even the most enthusiastic supporter of the various deradicalisation initiatives would acknowledge the difficulty of assessing their success or otherwise.
As I understand it, there are already a number of programmes deployed in prisons that are targeted at terrorist offenders, and I expect the Minister to tell us a great deal more about them. I have read what Jonathan Hall said about what are, effectively, offences that are committed in prison by the radicalisation of prisoners by other prisoners. This may well have happened in the case of the murder of three men in Forbury Gardens in Reading, which many noble Lords will remember all too clearly.
In 2016, Ian Acheson made a number of recommendations. A number of noble Lords have said that little progress has been made. I await the Minister’s comments on that, but I understood that quite a few
initiatives had been taken, including training officers to spot signs of extremism and increasing the number of staff with specific counter-terrorism experience or knowledge.
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One of the most difficult decisions is whether to separate terrorists from other prisoners. I can see that the advantage of doing so is that it restricts the opportunities for proselytising. However, at the same time there is a real risk of giving terrorists some sort of quasi-political status. My fellow Ministers in the European Union considered that separation should be avoided at all costs, because conferring such a special status on terrorists could even increase the apparent respect in which prisoners are held in some quarters if they have been involved in terrorism. It could even become some form of rallying cry to others who are potentially susceptible to extreme views. Can the Minister tell us the Government’s view on this issue? In particular, how many prisoners—so far as it is possible to say—do the Government think are in a position where they might affect those in prison who have the potential to be deradicalised? That would give us an idea of the scale of the problem.
I welcome this amendment as a way of probing the Government’s plans with regard to deradicalisation. It is a challenging process, and one, as we have seen, where individuals can confound all those who genuinely hope to find out whether they have changed their ways. These ideas are deeply embedded in the psyche of many who have been radicalised. Like other noble Lords I look forward to Jonathan Hall QC’s recommendations on radicalisation in prisons. However, while I welcome further elaboration, I am not convinced that these amendments are needed.