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Dr. Robert Spink (Castle Point): Come off it.
Mr. Straw: Is the hon. Gentleman not aware that, since 1979--year zero for the British public--the number of recorded crimes has doubled, while the number of people
convicted and cautioned for those crimes has dropped by 6 per cent., and the number convicted of any crime has dropped by 33 per cent.? No wonder people are up the wall about this Government's record and complacency.
Mr. Howard: If the hon. Gentleman is so concerned about the difficulty of securing convictions, why did he vote against our proposals to allow the courts to draw an inference from silence--proposals deliberately designed to increase the number of convictions of the guilty, which are having precisely that effect?
Mr. Straw: We shall take no lectures from the Secretary of State. He voted for the Criminal Justice Act 1991, which he now says makes a mockery of the sentencing system. If he reads the record, he will find that we suggested alternative, constructive proposals based on recommendations made by the royal commission on criminal justice which he and his predecessors established.
The simple fact is that nothing we have heard from the Secretary of State today or at any time since he made his proposals last October has challenged the wisdom of the conclusion reached by the Government in 1990--that automatic minimum determinate sentences would result in more guilty people walking free.
Then there is the issue of timing. What is clear from the White Paper is that the Secretary of State has been deserted by the Chancellor, himself a former Home Secretary, and by most of his other colleagues on this issue. Automatic minimum sentences for repeat burglars will add hugely to the prison population, which is already rising fast. Far from gaining the extra cash needed for this prison expansion, the Secretary of State got rolled over in the last public spending round; and the prison budget is to take a cut in each of the next three years.
Reading the small print of the White Paper, one finds that this much-heralded policy of gaoling repeat burglars will not come into force at all until October 1999. The relevant convictions will not start until after commencement of this part of the Act. So, on the most optimistic assumptions, a prolific burglar may not be affected by the proposal at least until the year 2000.
By now, that notorious clarion call about time and crime, with its "simple answer", should read: "If you don't want the time, don't do the crime--save where the court exercises its discretion to waive the minimum sentence in genuinely exceptional cases, and in any case not until the start of the next millennium." That is hardly what the public would call honest or straightforward.
The public cannot wait another four years for an effective sentencing system that ensures proper consistency and progression. We need a criminal justice system that is swift, efficient and consistent, and that ensures proper progression for all repeat offenders--not just drug dealers and domestic burglars.
The way to achieve that is, as Labour has proposed, by imposing a clear duty on the Court of Appeal to lay down clear guidance for all the main categories of offence, and to consult widely on draft proposals before they are made operational. Such a proposal would work; it would be just; it could be brought into operation swiftly--next year, not next century. It would properly protect the public.
It is significant that it is exactly this latter proposal which the Secretary of State for Scotland--I am not surprised that he has fled--is advancing in his White Paper for Scotland, in place of the proposals for automatic minimum sentences for repeat burglars and drug dealers.
It is the first duty of any Government to ensure that their citizens can leave their lives in freedom, free from fear and insecurity. In that first duty this Government have failed.
Mr. Anthony Coombs:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Straw:
No, I am coming to the end of my speech.
Britain today is a society disrupted and disfigured by crime and disorder, led by a Government who, on their own admission, have reduced the criminal justice system to a farce and a mockery. Under this Government, there is more crime, and more criminals are getting away with it. The British public need a criminal justice system that works, acting to prevent crime and its causes, dealing effectively with juvenile offenders, getting tough on criminal and anti-social neighbours, ensuring the proper protection of the public, giving effective backing to the police and real dignity to victims, and dealing effectively with persistent criminals.
Those are the answers to the epidemic of crime and disorder over which the Government have presided. The Secretary of State and his friends have had 17 years to get it right. They have failed. They have lost the trust of the British people. Where the Tories have failed in that first duty of Government, Labour will succeed.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes):
Order. I remind hon. Members that the 10-minute rule is now in operation.
Sir Peter Lloyd (Fareham):
The Labour party's amendment is one of brazen vacuity. The words
The Government have gone the other way. My right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for the Home Department has the admirable virtues of clarity and courage but--as he just said; it is no secret--he has, alas, upset the judiciary to the extent that one noble Lord remarked that relations between judges and the Executive were now at their lowest ebb since James I.
The way that people on both sides of the argument have reacted to the other side of the argument has allowed the impression to get about that the row is little more than a top people's demarcation dispute. It is far more important than that. I believe that dissension between judges and the Home Secretary damages both sides, and the respect in
which the criminal justice system is held. It should have been avoided. The critics of the White Paper's sentencing proposals--I leave out the rest of the White Paper--have a powerful case. I agree with a number of the points that were made by the hon. Member for Blackburn.
I shall deal first with honesty in sentencing. There is a real problem for the public when they hear that a criminal who has been sentenced to three years is released after serving only 18 months. The judge and the professionals know that three years means 18 months in prison, plus any added days for misbehaviour, and 18 months at risk in the community--time that he will serve in prison if he commits another offence before the three years expires, in addition to the sentence for the new offence. The solution to this is simple--it does not need legislation. The judge should spell out in full what he and everyone else in the criminal justice world knows he is doing when he sentences, so that everyone else can know too.
By a strange irony, the change proposed by the Home Secretary will lead to different charges of sleight of hand. The Home Secretary wants the courts to take into account the change to serving full sentence so that there will be no general rise in the prison population. If the judges oblige, the prisoner who would have had three years will not serve three years as the public expects--he will still serve only 18 months, as the judge always knew he would. Moreover, because there will be less time after release when he will be at risk of serving the balance of the longer nominal sentence if he offends again, there will be less protection for the public.
Similarly, the loss of parole for more serious cases is not adequately replaced by earned remission. Earned remission has the merit of encouraging good co-operative behaviour in prison, which makes running a prison easier, but that is not quite the same thing as providing an incentive to prisoners to demonstrate that they will not be a danger again on their release and to make realistic preparations for that release. If the sentences remain the same, as the Home Secretary wishes, and parole disappears, the public will again be less well protected.
Secondly, where minimum sentences are concerned, I fear that the White Paper proposals are too sweeping. They will certainly lead to injustice. There are plenty of third-time burglars who should do more than three years and there are plenty of drug traffickers for whom seven years is too short--but there will be quite a few cases where such sentences will be visibly unjust and counter-productive.
For example, young drug addicts who sell small quantities of drugs to other addicts will get the same sentence as professional drug pushers. They will not come under the disclaimer in the White Paper because they have to be genuinely "exceptional" cases. They will not be genuinely "exceptional", and they will not be "unforeseeable". The same applies to opportunistic inadequates stealing from the homes of other people getting similar sentences as career housebreakers, as the Home Secretary just called them.
That will occur if the judiciary does not lengthen all sentences to maintain differentials. Perhaps, when my right hon. Friend the Minister of State winds up the debate, he will tell us about the Government's expectations in this regard. I fear that those minimum sentences will not do very much for deterrence, but that they will succeed in driving up the prison population.
Gaols will be filled with too many young drug addicts who ought not to be there and with the inadequate and immature for whom prison does not do much good, and does much harm if the education, training and diversionary programmes are not there. With a rising prison population and a reducing budget, such programmes will not be readily available. Perhaps the Minister will also refer to that in his winding-up speech.
Surely the right way to deal with sentences that are too short is to extend the prosecution's powers to appeal against them. The judiciary can do quite a lot more to achieve consistency, to demonstrate appropriate severity when needed and, most particularly, to explain to the public the principles on which it works in what is a complex and demanding task.
Thirdly, I am in complete sympathy with what the Home Secretary is seeking to do with mandatory life sentences for serious violent and sexual crimes. It cannot be right to release a violent offender back into the community when he is highly likely to attack again. In one sense, I would prefer to go further than the Home Secretary and find a means of detaining a violent first-time offender after the expiry of his determinate sentence if he shows signs of repeating it.
However, I do not feel that a mandatory life sentence is the right approach. It should be the unique and special penalty for the most serious of all crimes: murder. It is not right or wise to dilute it with a range of other very nasty but lesser crimes. The White Paper says that the judge will be responsible for the tariff and will presumably set one similar to, or perhaps below, the sentence that he would have given anyway. The public would quickly see that such a life sentence means even less than usual--so much for honesty in sentencing.
5.9 pm
"tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime"
appear in the second half of the amendment--they are well-known words and they trip familiarly off the tongue. They would make the kind of slogan for which advertising men receive prizes from other advertising men at seaside resorts every so often. However, the words remain devoid of any real meaning--even though the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) has ostensibly addressed himself to them for the past 35 minutes. They may not have a clear meaning, but they have a clear purpose: to ingratiate the Labour party with readers of the Daily Mail and The Guardian at one and the same time--the Labour party hopes that the readers of each paper will notice only the half meant for them.
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