House of Commons Hansard Debates for 3 Dec 1991

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will be appalled to hear from my right hon. Friend that the cost of damage to our prisons last year exceeded £100 million.

The Bill is the latest in a long line of measures to protect society from criminals and to improve the penal system. A succession of Conservative Home Secretaries have ensured that we now have the largest prison building programme this century, with nine prisons built and 4,000 places provided, and 12 new prisons on the way. We appointed a superb chief inspector of prisons, Judge Tumim, and set up the Woolf commitee on prison reform, which has produced an excellent report. As a result, we shall end overcrowding by 1995 and slopping out by 1994. We are funding prison security much more excessively than in the past. We have ended some of the petty things like routine censorship of letters, and we have increased family visits.

More to the point, we have considerably improved, by increasing their numbers, the service provided by prison officers. There are 4, 700 more prison officers, with 1,600 on the way, and 3,000 fewer prisoners, so the prison population has risen by 7 per cent. while the prison service has increased by 47 per cent. We have a better staff-inmate ratio than France or west Germany, and if we include prison auxiliaries and night patrols, we do not compare all that badly with the Scandinavian countries.

If it becomes obvious that the first private prison at Wolds, which is to be run by Group 4, is a success, I hope that the burden on the prison system will be further lightened by the extension of private prison building and private prison management, certainly for remand prisoners as there can be no sensible objection to treating unconvicted prisoners better than convicted prisoners. I think that we can all applaud my right hon. Friend for the other improvements in prison security about which he has told us.

In all these matters Government prison policy has been positive, constructive and beneficial. We have no need to take lectures from the Opposition, who presided over the slashing of prison building by 29 per cent. while the prison population rose by 14.5 per cent. The Liberal Democrats, starkly represented by the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan), seem to concentrate on reducing the use of prison rather than on anything else. Of course, there is still a considerable task ahead for Government in improving the penal system.

It is not much use improving the number and quality of the prison buildings if the prison management does not also improve. There is clearly much room for improvement in a number of management areas, such as the co-ordination of intelligence within prisons and the co-ordination of response. It is no secret that the governor of Brixton prison knew on 4 February 1991 that a breakout from the prison was being actively contemplated by IRA terrorists in the prison, yet they were not split up or moved. It seems that they were not closely watched--and the inevitable happened.

I warn the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook--I hope that he will accept that I do so in the best possible spirit--not to be carried along by media representations of what happened at Brixton. One of my constituents is the prison officer allegedly involved in those activities, and he strongly insists that the portrayal of what happened in Brixton in last week's Thames Television programme is totally wrong. When the inquiry has been completed, we

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shall all know what happened, but in the meantime I warn the right hon. Gentleman that all is not as portrayed on the media. To give the House another example of a fault in the management of the prison service, I remember taking part in a case several years ago involving a prison breakout. Some convicted men went over the wall and the judge, who was born in that very prison, called for an improvement in security at the prison. It was Brixton prison. I do not know how many men have since gone over the same wall, but there have been several even recently. Yet not very much seems to have been done to make that wall unclimbable. That is not the fault of the prison governor ; it is the fault of the prison service, for which my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and his predecessors have the unavoidable responsibility.

There is something wrong with the management of the prison service when the Prison Officers Association has 70 disputes in 41 prisons. Indeed, there is so much dissatisfaction with that union from within the prison service that another union, the Prison Service Union, is being set up and I understand that it has so far received 1,000 pledges from prospective members.

Mr. David Trimble (Upper Bann) : It is not recognised.

Mr. Lawrence : Indeed, the question is when my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary will recognise it. I hope that the proposed union will receive more support not only from the Government but from the House, because not having a monopoly union in the prison service must be healthy, especially if the monopoly union brings about so many disputes.

Mr. Robin Corbett (Birmingham, Erdington) : As the hon. and learned Gentleman is asking questions about the management of our prisons, what has he to say about the management of a prison service in which, 12 months after a learned judge advises the Home Secretary to move suspected and convicted terrorists from Brixton prison, they are still there?

Mr. Lawrence : The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point, which is not very different from the point that I was making about what the governor of Brixton prison knew several months before those IRA terrorists broke out. I accept that the hon. Gentleman has made a fair point. Perhaps my right hon. Friend the Minister of State will respond by telling the House what she knows when she replies to the debate.

There are other examples of management failures. Old Bailey barristers are being prevented from having conferences with their clients at Brixton prison by prison officers, the prison service, or both. If one wishes to interview a client, one has to give notice about a week in advance, and sometimes interviews are cancelled at the last minute on the diktat of whoever is running Brixton prison. That is outrageous, as judges at the Old Bailey have made clear, but judges have no power over the running of the Prison Service. That again is a management failure, and improvements must be made. I am therefore pleased that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has recognised the importance of such management failures and that he has appointed Admiral Sir Raymond Lygo to improve management in the prison service. We can only hope that that review will be followed by sensible action. It is worth noting that the Woolf report

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also drew attention to those management problems, as has the director of the prison service, Mr. Joe Pilling. Management is at fault and we must clean it up. I know that my right hon. Friend takes this matter seriously.

With regard to the Bill, after 30 years at the criminal Bar and 35 years in politics, I have been driven reluctantly to the conclusion that fear is a more effective motivator of human behaviour than anything else, especially when dealing with people of ill will. I have seen too many offenders laughing at the courts for their weaknesses, too many malcontents exploiting the absence or inadequacy of the law, and too many criminals making the cool assessment that the risk of detection is well worth taking. As a result, I share the preponderant view that shorter sentences are often worse than longer sentences. It would be better for law and order if criminals were deterred by the possibility of receiving a longer sentence.

Mrs. Teresa Gorman (Billericay) : I entirely support my hon. and learned Friend's view that people should be afraid of the law and of being caught, but does he agree that boredom has played an important role in prison riots? I hope that our reforms will make it possible for prisoners to do some useful form of work in prison. That trend is growing in America. It enables prisoners to pay off their debts to society by working hard and banking the money.

Mr. Lawrence : My hon. Friend is a charming relative newcomer to this place and we are delighted that she is here, but if she had been here as long as I have--getting on for 18 years now--she would have heard me banging on about exactly that point. I am pleased to have her support. It is necessary to turn our prisons into workplaces in which the inmates do not receive parole but can work their way out of prison by dedicated activity, which should be properly paid so that they can compensate those whom they have wronged and pay something back into the system. I am pleased that the idea that we should turn our prisons into workplaces is slowly beginning to take hold. The Woolf report gave some articulation to it. Apart from anything else, if prisons were places where criminals had to work, fewer of them would want to go to prison.

Harsher sentences are necessary to make fear a dominant element in deterrence. It might not be a wholly popular view among pundits, but I am sure that it will be wholly popular among the people that the Bill should provide the power to impose deterrent sentences. Of course, not every would -be escaper would be deterred by the fear of a harsher sentence, but even now some prisoners refuse to go along with escape or mutiny plans due to fear of the consequences. The Bill will ensure that many more prisoners will refuse to join or support others' plans to forgo the consequences of their offending. Only the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook could describe that as a pointless publicity exercise. I hope that the provisions will reach the statute book quickly.

5.38 pm

Mr. Robert Maclennan (Caithness and Sutherland) : The hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) persisted in talking about the new harsher penalties that would be available under the Bill. I believe that he was misleading the House and the country by those assertions, because the burden of the case of those of us who think that the Bill is completely irrelevant to the problems of our

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prisons which it purports to tackle is that the penalties already exist in the Public Order Act 1986, for which the Government can legitimately take credit.

The Bill does nothing to increase the powers of the courts if order should break down inside a prison, although it touches in a new way on some of the matters relating to aiding and abetting an escape outside a prison. But that was not the burden of the case made by the hon. and learned Member for Burton, any more than it was the Home Secretary's case when he spoke in commendation of the Bill. It was notable that, in his introductory speech, the Home Secretary devoted very little time to the content of the Bill and scarcely sought to justify it.

Mr. Lawrence : It is a short Bill.

Mr. Maclennan : That does not diminish the need to explain and justify the complete volte face by the Home Office.

Mr. Lawrence : It is not a volte face.

Mr. Maclennan : Yes, it is.

In 1986, the Home Office, under a previous Home Secretary, published a White Paper in which it explicitly rejected the proposal to introduce a new crime of prison mutiny. I cannot understand why the hon. and learned Gentleman says that it is not so. It is there in black and white. It was recommended initially by the Prior committee that an offence such as we are considering tonight should be created. The Government rejected it for precisely the reasons that I mentioned. The instruments for punishing prison rioters were already available and the offence was unnecessary.

Like the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley), I thought hard and long about why the Government had reversed their decision. What change of circumstances had come about which made them take an entirely different view? One recoils from the obvious answer, which is that the Home Secretary wants yet again to produce a cheap headline in the popular press such as "Crackdown on crime", by producing, as the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook said, a modest and short Bill. The Home Secretary is receiving a disproportionate amount of attention from the press for the action that he has taken. There might have been some other more rational explanation, but it was not furnished to the House by the Secretary of State. I will deal with what he said in a moment.

The Secretary of State did not tell us that there had been a change in circumstances since the Government rejected the Prior report. The change is in the procedures proposed for adjudication on offences in prisons by boards of visitors. It may be argued that, in 1986, the Government rejected the idea of abandoning the adjudicatory role of the prison visitors board, which was part of the Prior

recommendations, so, as they had gone some way to changing the internal discipline regime, they might reasonably look again at Prior. But we had none of that from the Secretary of State tonight. Instead, we had the bizarre suggestion that prison order was likely to be more easily maintained if, on entering a prison, prisoners were given a little package telling them the consequences of their actions if they stepped out of line. An Act of Parliament is not necessary to do that. I am

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not averse to packs of information on what happens when someone goes into prison. It seems to be part of the Woolf proposal for compacts and for making prisoners fully aware of what is happening in prisons and what the plans are. The provision of such packs of information is concomitant with that proposal. However, if prisoners are at risk of sentence under the Public Order Act 1986, the pack of information can explain that just as easily as it can explain the contents of this miserable and irrelevant little Bill.

Once again, the Home Secretary has recognised that there is a problem. He feels that he must do something about it. He must persuade the public that he is doing something quickly, never mind the effectiveness of what he is doing. When there were tragic cases of dangerous dogs assaulting young children, the Home Secretary had to produce a Bill overnight. It was then withdrawn and another Bill was introduced, just so that we could have a crackdown on dangerous dogs. So, when there are riots and problems in prisons, we have to have a speedy and instantaneous responses from the Home Secretary, which is presented as the solution to the problem. Candidly, that will not wash.

The Bill is scarcely worth opposing. I wholly agree with the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook that it would be inappropriate to oppose the Bill on Second Reading, but, like the right hon. Gentleman, I intend to look closely at what happens to it during its passage through the House. It will have damaging consequences which willl flow from it not being targeted tightly on violent offences, as the Home Secretary suggested that it was. Violent offences gave rise to the need in the Home Secretary's mind to introduce the Bill. The word "violent" does not appear in the Bill. If a prisoner disobeys an instruction to place his laundry in a certain basket, he will be at some risk of being found guilty of mutiny under the Bill. The Minister of State, Home Office (Mrs. Angela Rumbold) indicated dissent.

Mr. Maclennan : The Minister of State shakes her head. It may be that, if the matter went to the Director of Public Prosecutions, he would take the view that the matter was not sufficiently serious to prosecute, but that is not the point. The point is that the definition of the offence in clause 1(1)(b) is so wide that any stepping out of line could constitute prison mutiny. As Lord Richard said most eloquently and correctly in another place, the only new element of the offence is that it is non- violent and is almost certainly conducted without conspiracy or the involvement or others. In an intervention during the Home Secretary's speech, I asked whether he had consulted or heard from the Prison Governors Association about the Bill. Perhaps the Minister of State will be kind enough to inform the House who was consulted before the Government introduced the Bill, and who approves of it. We had some anecdotal evidence from the Home Secretary that one or two prison governors whom he happened to run into in recent weeks said that the Bill might not be a bad thing.

The Prison Governors Association has told me clearly that it opposes the Bill on the grounds that the measures that it contains are "too draconian"- -I use its exact words. No one is more anxious that the penalties should be apt for the crime than those most immediately affected by prison

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disorder. The prison governors have said that it is too draconian, and the Prison Officers Association has expressed the view that it is an unnecessary knee-jerk reaction to a deeply serious problem. However, I recognise that the Prison Officers Association does not carry much weight with the Government at present.

Notwithstanding the scope of Lord Justice Woolf's inquiry, he did not recommend that the new crime of prison mutiny should be introduced. I have not at any point heard Judge Tumim suggest that such a crime is appropriate. I can only assume that, as the matter was extensively discussed earlier, they thought that the issue was dead and that there was no point in discussing it, because the arguments had been so effectively canvassed and dismissed that the Government would not contemplate introducing such an offence. The extensive and widely approved report from Lord Justice Woolf said nothing about introducing an offence of prison mutiny. The Government appear to be flying in the face of that report. If the Government have received no recommendations that an offence of prison mutiny is necessary or desirable from anyone involved in the management of prisons, from what other organisations have they had such recommendations? Have the Government considered the experience in Northern Ireland or Scotland? Both countries have suffered prison violence, disorder and breakouts. Indeed, in Scotland, the power of a governor to limit remission is about half the power of a governor in England.

Nevertheless, as far as I am aware, there is no pressure to align the law in Scotland with the Government's proposal. The Secretary of State for Scotland has not introduced a measure of this type. I wonder why. I wonder whether the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was consulted about his experiences. The situation in the three separate parts of the United Kingdom is not so radically different that it is appropriate to establish different crimes as part of the panoply of the law for dealing with offences in prisons.

Mr. Lawrence : Is the hon. Gentleman in favour of reducing the age of consent in homosexual offences to 16? If so, Scotland has a different approach to such matters from that of the rest of the United Kingdom.

Mr. Maclennan : That has nothing to do with the matter under debate. I do not propose to get involved in what is clearly a diversionary tack. That is a Conservative tactic : when faced with a difficult question, they invariably try to divert attention by mentioning another issue.

In the Bill, the Home Secretary has sought to divert the public's attention from the powerful recommendations in the Woolf report. He has failed to give a timetable for the implementation of those proposals, to set out a schedule which would carry weight and to tackle the problems at base. Instead, he has produced a little Bill which has no friends and which the House will not find--

Mr. Steve Norris (Epping Forest) : That is why no one is going to vote against it tonight.

Mr. Maclennan : As I explained to the normally silent Parliamentary Private Secretary, it is not appropriate to vote against a Bill of this sort at this stage.

Mr. Lawrence : The hon. Member seems to agree with it.

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Mr. Maclennan : I think that my comments will be taken by a fair commentator as fairly hostile to the Bill. I certainly hope that is the message that got through.

Clause 1(2)(b) is the part of the Bill which runs the greatest risk of causing mischief. It is far too widely drafted. If the Home Secretary does not want the Bill to do serious damage to internal discipline in prisons, resulting in matters that should be dealt with by internal disciplinary procedures going to court and taking up the time of the criminal justice system--making it far more difficult for prison governors to run their prisons--he had better look again at that clause and amend it. He must tighten that clause and accept the argument that he claimed to be attempting to grasp, which is to target the offence on violent offenders.

The Bill will win few friends. We shall wait to see what happens in Committee before deciding what our attitude to it should be. 5.52 pm

Sir John Farr (Harborough) : I give a general welcome to the Bill. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary telescoped his remarks. I had hoped to intervene to ask him about the extent of the Bill, but he sat down very rapidly at the end of his speech.

An important issue in terms of the application of the Bill is contained in clause 3(3), which says :

"This Act extends to England and Wales only."

Apart from the general belief of many constitutionalists that all Acts of Parliament should apply to the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland, that is a real mistake. Some parts of the Bill are relevant to an attempted escape. A trainer containing a weapon was sent from Northern Ireland to assist an escape quite recently. The person receiving the parcel in prison could be prosecuted under the Bill, but the dispatcher could not be dealt with because the Bill does not apply to Northern Ireland.

This is a fairly modest and harmless little Bill. We must get to the cause of the mutinies that have occurred, especially the mutiny at Strangeways, which was probably the most recent, and the savage mutiny at Gartree in my constituency not so long ago. As the Home Secretary said, the Bill touches on one of the chief causes of the mutiny at Strangeways--shocking overcrowding. There were 1,647 inmates in a prison designed for 970. We must have more prisons, more staff, and better conditions for both staff and prisoners. It must be Government policy to give the lifer some dignity.

Hon. Members have already discussed the Bill briefly, but I must mention clause 1(2)(a) again. As has already been said, prisoners frequently

"engage in conduct which is intended to further common purpose of overthrowing lawful authority in that prison".

There is a sound reason for rewording that clause, because that is too frequent an occurrence in day-to-day life in prison.

Clause 1(2) states that there is a mutiny

"where two or more prisoners while on the premises of any prison" engage in certain conduct. Two is the obvious number, but in certain circumstances a case could be made for one prisoner or three prisoners.

The Woolf report referred to overcrowding, the need for more staff and, above all, the need for meaningful, educational training and a constructive programme of jobs

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for prisoners. That is absolutely essential. The security of any prison hinges on the attitude and conduct of prisoners. If they are held in overcrowded conditions, unfit for a dog to live in, and have no meaningful occupation--I do not mean soulless, non-productive work- -they have no alternative but to fall into mischief and cause trouble.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) referred to the need to give prisoners some work. I agree, but it must be meaningful work. The trouble is that that is not easily obtained. It is all very well for us to say that we must ensure that prisoners are properly employed, but when the unemployment figures increase every month in the east midlands, there is resentment and resistance to prison inmates engaging in meaningful work as such work would probably take away jobs outside the prison. We must get around that conflict.

The work must be meaningful, and it must satisfy the prisoners. As my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton said that the work should ideally enable prisoners to earn a remission on part of their sentence, or it could earn money to pay compensation to victims. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton also referred to the need to maintain what he described as the quality of managers in prisons, and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has also spoken about that. I have in my constituency the prison at Gartree and the young offenders centre at Glen Parva. It has been noted at Gartree that the better the governor, the more quickly he goes. If, as I understand, that is Home Office policy, an explanation is needed. I speak from experience, having met many Gartree governors. Some have been brilliant, others not so brilliant, but the more successful they are, the more quickly they seem to go, often within a year. The Home Office may think it necessary on security grounds to make regular changes, perhaps believing that it would be undesirable for the routines of governors to be known to the general public. Even so, the present policy seems to prevent our getting the best from some of the good male and female governors we have. Need they be rotated so rapidly?

In 1987 there was an escape from Gartree. Clause 2 recommends that the maximum penalty for assisting a prisoner to escape should be increased from five to 10 years' imprisonment. I share the doubt that has been expressed about that change. Some of those involved in the helicopter escape from Gartree would not have been deterred by life imprisonment. Adding another five years to any possible sentence seems pointless, especially as some of those involved may already be serving that length of time. The proposal seems no more than a window dressing exercise.

We learned some lessons from the escape at Gartree. At the time, there was much unease in my constituency because, although Gartree is reasonably isolated, it is only two or three miles from the centre of Market Harborough, with its population of more than 15,000 people. There was terror in the neighbourhood for a long time afterwards. That made me realise how much we depend on the prison officers and the fantastic security systems that have been built up. We depend on them and, by and large, they do their jobs brilliantly.

Even so, it seems that some of the lessons which should have been learnt from that escape have not been applied,

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at least not so fully as they should have been. A confidential report that I have--it is not public and I have no intention of revealing its contents--referred to an Exercise Rogue Elephant which should have been put into practice regularly by police and prison officers. It should have been carried out prior to the escape, to put into practice action needed in such an event.

Perhaps I can be told, either today or in correspondence, whether Exercise Rogue Elephant is still carried out in midlands prisons. Are practice escapes still carried out? The report, by the deputy director-general of the prison service following the escape on 10 December 1987, revealed in connection with lessons that should have been learnt from the escape that effective co-operation between the police and the prison service appeared to be slow to get into action.

Although the escape was, in part, aborted--because of fog and the fact that the escapers had to land their helicopter at a spot where they had not intended to land, after which they terrorised a number of local people-- they still got clear away. One would have hoped that by now the procedure would have been polished and tightened up to prevent such a breakout recurring or to ensure that a more effective response would be forthcoming in the event of a breakout from such a top security prison.

Gartree is a category A prison. In 1988, after the escape, a review was instigated into category A prisons by the Home Office, with emphasis on what was called the dispersal system. I have a Home Office document of that date detailing the management of category A inmates, with a statement of the Department's intentions. How is that programme proceeding? A letter on the subject from the Home Office at the time said that it was envisaged that a number of changes would be made from category A to category B, including at Gartree, which should go from category A to category B by 1992. Is that changeover still on schedule?

Some of the points that I am raising may sound tedious to hon. Members, but they are important issues for my constituents. For example, what is being done about what are known as SSUs--special secure units--of which at that time there were Leicester, Parkhurst and Full Sutton? Are those three SSUs still operating? A report on the subject dated April 1989 said :

"The future of the SSUs at Leicester and Parkhurst will be reviewed when the new accommodation is available."

Those issues are so tied up with prison security that I would have been at fault had I not raised them in the debate.

However heinous the crime, a prisoner is entitled to dignity and an aim and purpose in life. Conservative Members expect the Home Secretary continually to struggle to try to improve the lot of prison officers and prisoners. I have often been to Gartree prison and seen life prisoners who have committed the most fearful crimes, but they can all see the light at the end of the tunnel. That window of hope makes them better prisoners, more amenable to discipline although they have no prospect of leaving prison for many years.

I have written to my right hon. Friend about a particular prisoner whose name I shall not mention. After 25 years in prison, he is now due for remission. In this case, as in many others, I am unhappy because the remission programme seems to have fallen by the wayside. In fact, I am still awaiting a reply from my right hon. Friend about

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this prisoner. However guilty a prisoner may be, when he has done his term, he should come out as pure as the driven snow and be given an opportunity to start life again.

With those few words, I welcome the Bill.

6.11 pm

Mr. David Trimble (Upper Bann) : When the Home Secretary introduced the Bill, he referred to the riots and disturbances that occurred recently in several prisons, and said that those scenes must not be allowed to recur. Those scenes led to the commission of several offences and to three people losing their lives. Obviously, one does not want that to recur. The Home Secretary said that the existing legislation was not enough and that consequently he was introducing a new offence of prison mutiny. Like other hon. Members, I am somewhat concerned about the terms of the new offence. Reference has already been made to its considerable width in that it will cover not only violent prison riots like those that occurred recently, but also minor protests, particularly in clause 1(2).

I am equally worried about the drafting of clause 1(3), which says that, for the purposes of defining the offence of prison mutiny, "The intentions and purpose of prisoners may be inferred from the form and circumstances of their conduct".

The Home Secretary may have had that aspect in mind when he said that the test was intentionally strict, but I find the strictness alarming. However, the use of the word "may" will allow the courts to rescue people from falling within the net of that provision. The offence is extremely wide. I come from Northern Ireland and must therefore bear in mind the situation in Her Majesty's Crumlin road prison in Belfast. The hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) referred to prisoners carrying on their war against society while in prison, and that has certainly been happening in the Crumlin road prison. It is a war between both major terrorist factions there, partly directed by one faction against the other, but also partly by one faction for the purpose of obtaining what they call segregation within the prison.

I appreciate that this is neither the time not the place to go into detail about the extent of that war, but it has been going on for a considerable period. There have been serious disturbances involving the wrecking of part of the prison and attacks on prisoners, culminating only the other week in a bomb being smuggled into the prison and going off, resulting in the death of two prisoners. If the Strangeways riots, which resulted in three deaths, justify the Bill, perhaps the continuing warfare within the Crumlin Road prison, which has resulted in two deaths so far, merits consideration. It is unlikely that the explosion in the prison will be the last disturbance, because the atmosphere seems to be deteriorating, and further violence and injury are expected. Indeed, the new visiting arrangements that have been introduced in the prison may backfire, because the warfare may extend among relatives and visitors. Visiting arrangements are now carried out in larger open plan areas, and the authorities seem to be mixing the relatives of the two factions. If that is happening it is extremely curious. It is strange that the disturbances in England and Wales that led to the Bill have not so far led to the consideration of legislation to apply to other parts of the United Kingdom. The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) asked whether it was

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contemplated to introduce legislation for Scotland and the same could be asked with regard to Northern Ireland. I may be wrong, but I understand that there is at present no intention to extend the legislation to Northern Ireland. That may be partly because the Government think that other penalties under public order legislation are adequate, but it may also be because, unlike England and Wales, Northern Ireland already has an offence of prison mutiny. It is not contained in primary legislation but in the prison rules under the Prison (Northern Ireland) Act 1953. Rule 31, "Offences against discipline," states :

"A prisoner shall be guilty of an offence against discipline,--if he (1) mutinies or incites another prisoner to mutiny".

The prison rules contain no definition of mutiny, thus avoiding the criticisms that we have made of the drafting of clause 1.

Mr. Corbett : I hope that the hon. Gentleman will accept that all hon. Members try to understand the special conditions that lead to some of the circumstances that he has described in prisons in Northern Ireland. I hope that we can take that for granted. Does the hon. Gentleman feel that the ability to deal with events that could be labelled as "mutiny" as a disciplinary matter inhibits prison governors in Northern Ireland? I do not wish to hurry the hon. Gentleman, as he may be about to explain that to the House, but would it help us to deal with the special conditions in Northern Ireland if the Bill were extended to Northern Ireland?

Mr. Trimble : I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention but, as he anticipated, I should be happier to deal with the point later. As I was saying, one of the offences against discipline is the offence of mutiny. Hon. Members may be interested to know the current penalties for mutiny in Northern Ireland. Under the prison rules, a governor may--it is at his discretion--refer a charge to the Secretary of State, in which case, the Secretary of State may impose one or more of the following penalties :

" (a) caution ;

(b) loss of remission for a period not exceeding 180 days ; (c) stoppage of earnings for a period not exceeding 56 days ; (d) stoppage of any or all privileges

(e) exclusion from associated work for a period not exceeding 56 days ;

(f) cellular confinement for a period not exceeding 56 days." Those are the penalties for prison mutiny in Northern Ireland, where the continuing problems clearly fall within the definition of prison mutiny in the Bill. The Government consider that, in England and Wales, the maximum penalty for such an offence should be 10 years. They say that they have no intention of extending the legislation to Northern Ireland, where the present penalty is loss of remission for 180 days or confinement in a cell for 56 days. The penalties seem disproportionate.

The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) described the legislation as a publicity exercise. If we consider it as such, what sort of message will it send to those prisoners in Northern Ireland who are presently creating a disturbance? The might consider that their activities are not regarded as important and are minor offences. Is that the sort of message that the Government intend to send?

I cannot underline enough the fact that the present serious problems in Northern Ireland need to be adressed.

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I know that there have been inquiries and that Lord Colville has been asked to assist the Government. One hopes that sense and control will be restored in Crumlin road prison, and that the prison authorities will exercise discipline in the interests of the prisoners' safety if no other reason. I wonder why the Government have engaged in this exercise when there are such grave prison problems in Northern Ireland.

The Home Secretary said that one reason for the legislation was that it should act as a deterrent. In its response to the legislation the Prison Officers Association has queried that motive, and suggested that in its experience the majority of prisoners who have been, or are likely to be, involved in serious disturbances in prisons are long-term prisoners who may not be deterred by the legislation. One curious factor about the disturbances in Northern Ireland is that they are taking place not among long-term prisoners, but primarily among remand prisoners. That makes me believe that there might be some validity in the deterrence argument.

If an additional offence were created, it might dissuade remand prisoners from continuing with their actions in the Crumlin road prison. Whatever weight one attaches to that argument--I am not sure how much to give it--I believe that detection, not deterrence is the important factor. We must detect those prisoners causing problems and there should be a proper system of management and control within the prison.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mr. Corbett) asked if it would help if the legislation were extended to cover Northern Ireland. I am not sure whether it is best to take the matter out of the prison discipline system and put it into the courts. If that is to be done, I hope that it will be done in a much better way that in the Bill, which is too widely drafted. I entirely endorse the comments of other hon. Members on the Bill's width.

I agree with the hon. Member for Harborough (Sir J. Farr) that, if we take such action, we should do so on a United Kingdom not a Northern Ireland, basis. If the legislation is introduced in England and Wales to create a new offence that must be handled through the courts, while in Northern Ireland a similar offence will be left to internal prison discipline, with comparatively minor penalties, we shall have the worst of all worlds in Northern Ireland. It seems most likely that we shall be left in that position. I hope that that will not happen, and that the legislation will be significantly amended in Committee.

6.26 pm

Mr. Richard Alexander (Newark) : I apologise to the House because, as soon as I sit down, I shall have to attend a committee and, as I am standing for office, I think that I should be there.

In my view, and I think that of virtually everyone in the House, the public were rightly appalled last year when they saw the unprecedented violence committed on the roof of Strangeways and heard of the threats, often of a sinister nature, to other inmates. They were even more concerned when they learned that all that was likely to happen to the perpetrators was that they would lose some remission.

I served as chairman of the board of visitors at Ranby prison before entering the House, so I know the restrictions on punishment that can be awarded in prison.

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