My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, and I was delighted to be able to co-sign her amendment. It is also a pleasure to witness a debate in the Chamber this evening which has brought us together in unity, both of purpose and of experience. All of us, in our different ways, have had different experiences of the prison system, the courts system and of prisoners, and yet we have all reached the same conclusions, the starkest of which was presented to us by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, in the first group of amendments, when he observed, entirely correctly, that there is a reluctance to be bold. I would convert his observation—if I can do so while looking at a former Lord Chief Justice—into an injunction: we must no longer be timid, we must be bold.
I have absolutely no doubt that my noble friend the Minister and all his colleagues in the Ministry of Justice, and in particular the estimable current Lord Chancellor, are entirely well motivated in what they wish to see in relation to IPPs and indeed to other pretty appalling aspects of our prison system. However, having a benign intention, walking quietly and saying nice things is really not enough; the reluctance to be bold must be got rid of, because we need action. We need it for the reason that the noble Lord, Lord Carter, and the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, highlighted of the very sad case of the man on licence who took his own life.
I was very pleased indeed that the noble Lord, Lord Carter, was able to lead on the group of amendments we are now discussing, because if ever a speech fulfilled the promise made at a maiden speech, it was his. I am very grateful to him, because we constantly need prodding and reminding that IPP prisoners are not a subject to be spoken of once every six months, with sympathy and wringing hands. They are a living, constant problem, and indeed, as the late Lord Brown, said, what has been done to them is a stain on our justice system. We should all be very grateful, as I think a number of us have already indicated, to the late Lord Brown for the work that he did.
We should also be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who is absent, for his change in attitude and his admission that he got it so badly wrong when he was Home Secretary in the early part of the Tony Blair Government. It is not difficult to salute him, because you can tell when you talk to him and listen to him that his change of heart is indeed sincere. So, if he can be bold in doing that, please will the Government be bold and get on and do what is right?
Like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, I have spent quite a considerable time visiting prisons. I have probably said this before, and I can never remember the precise figure, but I think I have been to about 75 prisons, young offender institutions and secure training units in England and Wales—I have not been to a prison in Scotland or in Northern Ireland. It was abundantly clear, whenever I went to an adult male prison in which there were prisoners serving IPPs, from both looking at, talking to and interacting with them but also with the governing staff, that the most impossible group to manage were the IPP prisoners. They were literally hopeless. They had no future—no boundary and no observable, touchable limit to the torture that they were going through. That is why we must be bold, that is why we cannot allow this to go on, and that is why all these amendments, in every group, deserve the support of this House and the support of the Government.
6.45 pm
I know I was in government for a very short time, but I learned while trying to push policy that Whitehall is covered in treacle. It is extremely difficult to walk purposefully and with some degree of speed and expedition across the departmental world which constitutes non-political government. The only thing I was able to achieve in government as a law officer, which is obviously not a policy-driven post, was, with the assistance of my noble friend Lord Clarke and other Ministers within the coalition, from his Prime Minister downwards to the Deputy Prime Minister, was to introduce deferred prosecution agreements. That required hard work, co-operation and determination, and that is what we need now when it comes to sorting out the mess of IPPs.
It seems that there is a pressing need in the last months of this Parliament to settle this issue now. My noble friend Lord Moylan was gracious enough to accept that he had had to spend all afternoon looking up what Lord Clarke already knew. I hesitate to confess that I did not know it, either—and I would probably have had to spend all week looking it up. But there is a mechanism there ready to be implemented, so what is
stopping us? What is stopping the Government? It seems that there is also a political will in this House, and I suspect in the other place, to deal with IPPs along the lines of these amendments. It is a falsehood to imagine, as I suspect that my now noble friend Lord Cameron, the then Prime Minister, thought, that it would be electorally disadvantageous—