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Mr. Straw: The Government have panicked about their appalling record on law and order, and are desperately trying to regain public support. But their every move loses them more public support.
Mr. Howard: As the hon. Gentleman is making entirely unfounded allegations about changes of position,
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may I ask him about his announcement a few moments ago that his indeterminate sentence would apply to offences of attempted murder? That is not to be found in any of his documents or previous statements, which have been confined to sexual offences. When did the hon. Gentleman decide to make this U-turn? Could he perhaps refer us to any of his earlier documents that included attempted murder?
Mr. Straw: I told the Secretary of State just now that he ought to apply himself to the detail before standing up again. I am afraid that he did not take my advice, and he is wrong again. I shall turn up the reference for him as soon as I sit down; I made exactly this point in the speech on the Loyal Address last month.
Listening to the breathless tones of the Secretary of State, one could be forgiven for thinking that all the measures in the Bill would start to operate as soon as they became law. But the Secretary of State did not bargain for other members of the Cabinet. If I may let my hon. Friends into a secret, the Home Secretary may not be popular with the public, but that is as nothing compared with the hostility that he now arouses among his Cabinet colleagues, who these days spend more time briefing against him than they do even against the Prime Minister. Most of all, he cannot convince his predecessor, now the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
So the proposal in the Bill designed for the biggest headline will not operate this year, next year or the year after. Indeed, no third-time persistent burglar could in practice receive a so-called fixed minimum sentence under the Bill until the dying days of the next Parliament, in the year 2001. No wonder, as the public learn the truth about this Secretary of State and his policies, that confidence in both of them is falling to record lows.
Although the Bill contains some improvements, it does not begin to measure up to the problems faced by the British public after 17 years of Conservative rule. There are no proposals to deal with the most glaring faults of the current system: the gap between crime and convictions, the desperately needed reform of the Crown Prosecution Service, the desperate need to put in place fundamental reforms of the youth justice system. The Secretary of State seems blind to the fact that almost all the 55,000 adult prisoners began their lives of crime as juveniles. Almost alone, he and the Minister of State defend the current system of youth justice, although, as our paper published in June shows, that so-called system is wasteful, ineffective and replete with delay.
There is nothing, moreover, in the legislative programme to harness local communities and their representatives to fight crime in partnership with the police, and there is no strategy to deal with the plague of disorder on our streets which so undermines people's quality of life. No wonder even those on the right hon. and learned Gentleman's side are deserting him. The right hon. and learned Member for Putney has accused him of losing the plot--of having been outflanked by Labour on law and order.
Mr. Douglas Hurd (Witney):
I am amazed, although I have listened to him before, that the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) should think that that kind of speech will impress the House, his constituents or anyone else's. It was highly politicised. Our constituents do not think about crime, criminals or criminal justice in those terms, but he set those issues in a certain political context, from which lessons may be drawn.
The Bill, and measures contemplated on firearms, knives, stalking and perhaps other issues, are sometimes portrayed in the press as though they were stages in a desperate race for votes--the assumption being that the public believe that every potential weapon should be outlawed, that every offender should be sent to prison, that the only good sentence is a long sentence and that it is the job of a politician to come as close to that ideal as possible.
If that is the race set by the media and some sections of opinion, my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary will not and cannot enter such a race in such crude terms. In any such race with the Labour party, he would suffer under an inescapable handicap. What he proposes must be workable. He is the Home Secretary; he carries the responsibility. The hon. Member for Blackburn is irresponsible.
That was not always so on the Labour Benches. The Labour party used to contain a tradition of liberal thinking on penal matters. In my time, I occasionally found that tradition extremely irritating. Earlier, when the Attorney-General answered questions, we were reminded of the Labour party's record in resisting the Conservative Government when we proposed the prosecution's right of appeal against lenient sentences. I believed that the Labour party was wrong about that and several other measures in my time, but we recognised that as part of a consistent tradition.
All that has been thrown to the winds by the hon. Member for Blackburn. His stand is now entirely wayward and unpredictable. He tries to pretend to the public that he is the terror of the criminal classes. I am waiting for him to tell us before too long that, after much thought and careful research, and probably nowadays a little prayer, he has found the answer to prison overcrowding--to hang offenders outside the prison gate. Nothing that the hon. Gentleman did would surprise us now.
Actually, common sense--and, I believe, the latest opinion research--suggests that there is not much profit for any of us in treating those matters as a race for votes. It must be right and in the public interest for the House and the other place to consider the proposals for a major criminal justice Bill on their merits.
The operation of our criminal justice system is not in the hands of my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary alone or of the Government. Under our British system, it is in the hands of a variety of people--chief constables, the Crown Prosecution Service, judges, magistrates, prison governors, probation officers and others. Under the British system, none of them is a creature of the Government. The House has given them
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My right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary, and any Home Secretary, has the right and duty to propose changes in the light of experience--experience of what reduces crime and what does not. It is nonsense to suppose that there is a final answer, and that an incoming Home Secretary, or any Home Secretary, will be for ever content with the criminal justice system. As long as there is crime, and as long as there is fear and anxiety about it, he must constantly seek ways to improve matters. What at one time appeared workable and adequate may no longer be so. What at one time appeared impracticable, not workable, may become so. It is wrong for the hon. Member for Blackburn to make purely partisan points as though, at any one time, anyone could claim that the position is final.
However, Parliament needs to consider carefully what will work in the long term. Let us face it; at present, the House is not very good at legislating, for various reasons. The quality of legislation coming out of Whitehall is low. The number of Government amendments--I am not talking about the policy changes that my right hon. and learned Friend mentioned, but the number of corrective Government amendments--is high. The House is not very good at improving legislation during its passage--anyone who has sat in a Standing Committee as a Minister or as a Back Bencher knows why.
The Bill should, therefore, be carefully examined, and my right hon. and learned Friend has undertaken that it will be. Two questions, both of which have been mentioned, arise for examination in Committee. I welcome the fact that there is phrasing about discretion given to the courts to set aside the new mandatory life and minimum sentences in genuinely exceptional cases. The hon. Member for Blackburn characteristically mocked that provision, but it is a sensible, commonsense provision. It does not negate the principles that my right hon. and learned Friend spoke about in the autumn of 1995. Nevertheless it is important to get the phrasing right and to ensure that it is, in the practitioners' view, an adequate way of remedying those proposals to prevent possible injustice. Proper phrasing of that provision, which occurs three times in the Bill, is important.
My hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Mr. Waller) mentioned honesty of sentencing. There is strong pressure on judges to make sentences longer, and my right hon. and learned Friend would acknowledge that, today, he somewhat added to that pressure in some of the things that he said, yet under the heading of honesty in sentencing, so that his proposals work without placing an even greater burden on prisons, he is requiring the nominal sentences pronounced in court to be shortened so that they are closer to the realities that he is producing under the heading of honesty in sentencing.
Does my right hon. and learned Friend really believe that judges have got that message? It is only fair that it should be repeated; otherwise, that expectation will be proved fallible because of the strong pressure on the judiciary to introduce longer sentences.
The Prison Service is the hidden public service. I have worked closely with several Prime Ministers, but I have never known a Prime Minister to visit a prison. I may be
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Yet any criminal justice policy rests on prison for serious offenders and, understandably, my right hon. and learned Friend, for reasons that he explained, proposes to place greater weight on them. Not many right hon. or hon. Members have taken a consistent interest in prisons. I am afraid that I have not. My right hon. Friends the Members for Fareham (Sir P. Lloyd) and for Westminster, North (Sir J. Wheeler) do, and the prisons Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone (Miss Widdecombe), certainly does. She and others have been stalwart in their work to keep prisons secure and, as I once said, to ensure that they are decent but austere.
I am delighted that slopping out has ended. I am delighted with the progress that my right hon. and learned Friend reported this afternoon in keeping fine defaulters out of prison; he proposes to take that further. All that and much else is good news.
Much has been written about the purpose of prison; I cannot go into all that now. One purpose is to punish--Conservative Members have no problem about that. Another is to deter, although that depends, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr. Jackson) said, on the likelihood of detection. The higher the likelihood of detection, the greater the deterrence of a prison sentence. I shall dwell for a second on the third purpose of prison--to incapacitate the criminal.
If we lock up more burglars for longer, they are not capable of burgling while behind bars, so our streets and homes are safer while they are there. That is a significant short-term gain. When their sentences expire, more burglars will enter prison as they are sentenced, under the new arrangements, for longer, but more burglars will leave prison. There will be an increased flow of released offenders on to our streets. Will those people go straight, or return to crime?
In the medium term--not in the short term--whether prison works depends not only on the length of the sentence, but on what happens in the prison. Exaggerated hopes about that have been associated with Lord Longford, but there is a realistic ambition at the centre of any criminal justice proposals. The Director General of the Prison Service, Mr. Tilt, has made an admirable start with his responsibilities. He recently made a fine speech to the Howard League for Penal Reform. He strongly rejected as simply untrue the implication that
"all prisoners are nasty, evil, vengeful, unrepentant".
He went on to say that the
"purpose of the prison service should be to provide as much assistance as possible to get them settled back into the community, thereby providing additional protection for the public."
I underline the phrase
"additional protection for the public".
We are not talking about what might be called progressive waffle. The case for training, probation, work and education in prison is the case for the future protection of the public, and that case is directly relevant to the Bill.
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