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5.37 pm
Mr. Alex Carlile (Montgomery): The speech by the right hon. Member for Fareham (Sir P. Lloyd) should be required reading in the Home Office. It was an excellent critique of the Government's proposals. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman's experience in the Home Office and what he has said today will be considered fully by the Government before they introduce any legislative proposals.
The White Paper "On the Record", published this afternoon, deals with access to criminal records. Broadly speaking, I and my party would support proposals that would ensure that employers and voluntary agencies, in appropriate circumstances, can have access to criminal records if they are relevant to the employment in question. However, in appendix B of the White Paper there is a new piece of theory which rings alarm bells and, I suspect, will be the subject of much criticism. It would reduce acquittals to the status of unproved convictions and would enable information to be given to employers, even about an acquittal, on the basis of the opinion of police officers.
I say to the Minister, partly on the basis of my 26 years of experience at the Bar, that police officers' opinions are often extremely reliable, but they are sometimes extremely unreliable. It would be an outrage to introduce a power to disclose an acquittal as information relevant to someone's employment unless a counter-balance were introduced to enable the subject to challenge the disclosure of that information. Without that counter-balance, we would be proceeding down a slippery slope where rumour came to have the force of law. That would not be acceptable.
I make two preliminary points on the main substance of the debate, one as a question and the other as a statistic. First, the question: how do the Home Secretary and the Minister of State account for the fact that, in 1991, contrary to the advice of the judges, they supported proposals that were designed to secure that fewer and fewer people went to prison, when today they support proposals that are designed to secure that more and more people go to prison? The House is entitled to logical explanation, if one be available, which I doubt, of that change of mind.
As an adjunct to my question, I ask the Minister to tell the House honestly and for the first time that the Government are now asking judges to pass shorter sentences. Is that not right? If there is not to be a significant increase in the prison population, as I think the right hon. Member for Fareham was implying, it is inevitable that judges will have to pass shorter sentences.
If they do, by doing the will of the Government they will be passing shorter sentences for burglary, robbery and offences of actual bodily harm.
Mr. Butler:
Will the hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
Mr. Carlile:
It is a short debate and I shall not give way. There is not much time.
Is it not a fact that the Government intend judges to pass shorter sentences? Is that the way in which they intend to send out the message that they will deal with crime?
The fact to which I wish to draw to the attention of Ministers--it is intended to deal with the canard that the Government can claim credit for the reduction in reported crime--is that most crime is committed by young men aged between 13 and 25. That is statistically proven. In the past 20 years, there has been a 13.6 per cent. reduction in the proportion of young men under 25 in the population. It would therefore be expected in the ordinary way that there would be a reduction in reported crime for that very reason alone. Let us lay the ghost of any credit that the Government can claim for a reduction in reported crime. The answer lies in a demographic fact.
Following my intervention, the Home Secretary offered to write to me on the reduction in reported crime. I look forward to receiving his letter. I shall be interested to examine the Home Office research that he claims to form the basis of what he is saying. I do not believe that such research exists. Having mentioned Home Office research, I express my sympathy for the high-quality research department within the Home Office. It used to be used as the locus classicus for legislative change in criminal justice. It is now the last place the Home Secretary looks for changes in criminal justice policy, despite the fact that the department continues to produce research of the highest quality.
The Home Secretary claims that prison works. It works as a cupboard in which we put people for a period so that they cannot commit crime. For the most part that is true, and self-evidently so. But surely prison really works only if, as a result of imprisonment, those who have been incarcerated do not repeat crime after release.
Young men commit small burglaries to buy drugs. Perhaps they buy drugs for less than £100. They share them out among their friends, and thus they are suppliers. They then commit another small burglary to obtain drugs. Again, they share them out among their friends. Next time, it is then three and out. As the right hon. Member for Fareham said, that will cause manifest injustice. What on earth is the interest--[Interruption.] I wish that the parliamentary private secretary, or whatever the hon. Gentleman is, would stop grunting behind the Minister of State.
If there is to be manifest injustice, what on earth is the Government's interest in introducing minimum sentences? Judges can, and do, pass severe sentences for serious crime. If the Government think that judges are not passing sufficiently severe sentences for serious crimes, it is open to the Attorney-General to appeal to the Court of Appeal against those sentences. I would be the first to concede that, because the prosecution's right of appeal has been exercised carefully and responsibly, it has worked reasonably well since its introduction.
It is proposed that there should be mandatory life sentences for offences other than homicide. I face with terror, as do many others, including Lord Taylor of Gosforth, the former Lord Chief Justice, the consequences of mandatory life sentences for rape. What will happen? I ask Ministers to listen, which they failed to do in 1991. Their failure to listen caused them to have to unwrap the 1991 legislation and change it.
I beg Ministers to listen for once to people who hear evidence in the criminal courts and who sentence people--in other words, the judges. Ministers should listen for once to those of us who in practice have to deal with cases in the criminal courts, whether as prosecutors, defenders or police officers. Many police officers who carry out the real inquiries do not support the Government. The same can be said of probation officers and, especially, the families of victims of crime.
I shall tell the Minister of State what will happen if mandatory life sentences are introduced for rape. People will be murdered because offenders will know that, if they are caught, they will be sentenced to life imprisonment for rape in any event. The Minister of State shakes his head. He does so against a weight of authority, which includes the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Donaldson, and Lord Justice Rose, whose practice was not in esoteric areas of the law. Lord Justice Rose, as he now is, came from Manchester to the High Court and the Court of Appeal. He has applied a wealth of practical experience. The Minister shakes his head against almost every criminologist in the country and, I believe, against the views of the researchers within his Department.
Mr. Carlile:
I shall give way briefly.
Mr. Maclean:
I am grateful to the hon. and learned Gentleman. I merely wish to say that I have the weight of evidence from the Home Office research department on my side when I shake my head in response to the hon. and learned Gentleman's argument.
Mr. Carlile:
The right hon. Gentleman may claim that there is some evidence on his side. I should like to see it. I do not understand how the right hon. Gentleman can claim to have evidence on his side that overwhelms Lord Taylor, Lord Justice Rose, David Faulkner and all the other authoritative figures who have ranged themselves against the Government's proposals. If the right hon. Gentleman goes to Oxford university, which the Government hold so dear, and listens to the criminologists there, including David Faulkner, Sir Stephen Tumim and Roger Hood--there is a bevy of them--they will tell him that what the Government are saying about minimum sentences, and especially mandatory life sentences, is utter and absolute nonsense.
Prison works? It works as a way of paying builders for building prisons. That is the only way in which it works. Are the Government, who reduced the prison budget by 13 per cent., making prison work? They removed every probation officer from our prisons. Is that making prison work? They are cutting prison education, which enables
young men and women who are illiterate when they enter prison to leave literate and able to obtain jobs. Is that the Government making prison work?
In taking the actions to which I have referred, the Government, at the same time, are proposing to spend between £600 million and £1 billion on creating new lock-ups so that we can have a far larger prison population than ever before. The Minister should take account of the experience of the United States, where they imprison far more people than we do. He will find that prison does not work there. The prison population of the United States, which, proportionally, is far in excess of ours, has not decreased. Violent crime in the United States has continued to increase. The Government seem to rely on an American experience that is a failure.
I shall say a few words about boot camps. The Minister cites evidence from the Home Office, but I suggest that he look at the Home Office research on what happened during the unhappy period of the short sharp shock. Two things happened: one group of prisoners were bullied; the other group took it like the easy medicine it was for fit young men, who came out more fit to commit more crime of the sort that they had committed before they went in.
The truth is that the Government have not begun to tackle the reasons why young people commit crime. I saw a sentence in a Home Office press release about the possible introduction of drug courts. That is the sort of idea that the Government should consider seriously and to which they should devote their attention--breaking the spiral of drug misuse that turns young people in this country to crime.
The Government should pay more attention to the prevention of crime by ensuring that hard messages are delivered to schools and colleges by police officers and others who understand and can explain the consequences of offending, but we see little about that. It is time the Government concentrated on the reasons why people commit crime, and did not simply devote themselves to the rhetoric of retribution. I fear that the Government are doing a grave disservice to this country by misrepresenting the criminal justice issues in the rhetoric of retribution.
A democratic representative in the United States, Mr. Bobby Scott, was quoted in The Economist last week as saying:
"When you call for more incarceration, you do not have to explain yourself; when you argue for effective alternatives, you do."
The Government have simply decided that they can profit electorally from that simple message. The Government cannot explain themselves; but those of us who believe in sensible, constructive sentencing that will reduce the incidence of criminal behaviour believe that we can--and we shall not fear to criticise the Government's simplistic approach before the electorate at the appropriate time.
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