My Lords, I am grateful for the chance to participate—I thought I was going to be cut off at the knees at the end of the last session when the Committee was adjourned promptly. I also apologise to the Committee because I did not participate in the Second Reading debate. I intervene this afternoon to support Amendment 14 tabled by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and supported by my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the other amendments concerned with restorative justice or RJ.
I have quite a personal reason for this because when I came into your Lordships’ House some years ago, my best friend rang me to say that his best friend from school had just been made a chief constable and was very interested in this thing called restorative justice, and would I be prepared to go and meet him? I said I would, of course. I knew virtually nothing about RJ at that time. I went to meet the chief constable and he explained to me how he thought we were missing a trick in not using RJ more widely to deal with what he described as our lamentable record in reoffending.
He arranged for me to go and get involved in some cases, hear the facts and even, with the permission of the participants, sit in as a facilitator on one or two cases. I got a great deal of first-hand experience of how RJ might or might not work. All he said when I finished was, “Will you just repay me by raising RJ and speaking about it in the House of Lords in the future?”. So here I am this afternoon, keeping faith with my friend, the chief constable. From my great experience, then, the key issue—this important point was made by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries—was that it works only if each participant, on the two sides of the argument or the case, is prepared to get inside the head of the other. That was an important part of what I learned while I was there.
I will not talk at length about what I learned specifically, but it is worth briefly recounting one case. A confirmed drug user with a charge-sheet as long as your arm saw an empty house and thought he would break in, find a piece of electrical equipment, take it, flog it and use the proceeds to feed his habit. Unfortunately for him, the house was not empty. The owner of the house, a designer, had a small studio upstairs on the second floor. He came downstairs to find this man in the hall and asked, “What are you doing?”. The man said, “I’ve come to read the gas meter”. The owner said, “Bad idea, because there’s no gas in this house. We don’t have gas”. A struggle ensued, during which the owner of the house hit the man over the head with a flowerpot. There are pictures of the person with blood streaming down his face when the police arrived and arrested him.
From this unprepossessing, unlikely beginning, a case of RJ was introduced. The men met a few times then, as was inevitably right, the burglar got a custodial sentence. The men corresponded while he was in prison and a degree of agreement and understanding—the ability of both sides to put the past behind them and do better in future, from the point of view of the perpetrator —was arrived at. When I talked to the perpetrator, I asked, “What was it?”. He said, “You can see my charge-sheet. All I saw on it were names but, this time, when I met the owner of the house, he said, ‘Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve terrified my family. My two teenage daughters will no longer sleep in separate bedrooms upstairs; they share a room next door to me and my wife. My wife has every single door and window locked—everything locked. You have completely wrecked our security as a family. What do you think about that?’”. Although he did not put it this way, it was a bit of a lightbulb moment for him.
On the other side, when I talked to the owner of the house, he said, “When we began to talk to the chap, he had had a hopeless start. He had a single mum—not much of a single mum, really—and was in and out of care, with little to no educational achievement. Inevitably, his life was largely devoted to crime”. From these two understandings came an ability to work together; it put them, in particular the perpetrator, to an important and life-affirming task to live better and have a worthwhile lifetime.
That is a great, moving story but I said to the chief constable, “There must be a but”. He said, “Of course there’s a but”. He was anxious then, as I think I would be anxious today, not to put too much weight on restorative justice. He said, “There are two things you can do to make sure that RJ does better”. The first is that you need—these are the words from the briefing, not the chief constable—“voluntary and honest participation” by both sides. That is straightforward.
Not in the briefing is the second point that he made: you need expert, trained facilitators. Being expert and trained means, first, that you move the conversation forward but not so that you avoid tackling the awful, painful issues that lie at the heart of the problem; and, secondly, that you are tough enough to blow the whistle when you believe that somebody is not trying. This is not always easy to do because, sometimes, a bit of effort has been invested and people are reluctant to let the case go, but someone has to realise that there
are cases in which people will, in the famous phrase, swing the lead in the hope of a reduced sentence. The facilitator needs to be well trained. As the chief constable would say, “A facilitator cannot take on too many cases because they’re quite emotionally exhausting if you get really stuck into these people’s lives”.
The chief constable, if he were standing here, would say, “I certainly would not want RJ to be presented as a silver bullet”—the point made by my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier. “Above all,” he would say, “I don’t want it to be presented as a cheap silver bullet because it isn’t—at least, not in the short run. However, if you can turn a number of cases round, the long-term savings and benefits to society are incalculable.
Our re-offending rates remain too high—the same situation as when I met the chief constable. We surely have an opportunity now to be imaginative in our thinking about how to reduce offending rates. We need new tools in our toolbox, and restorative justice would be an important one. I hope my noble and learned friend the Minister will react sympathetically to Amendment 14. That would give me great pleasure, because it would mean that I have kept faith with my friend the chief constable.