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Mr. Michael Howard (Folkestone and Hythe): On a point of order, Madam Speaker. I shall respond in detail to the allegations made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) when I reply to this debate. I respond immediately, however, to her invitation to ask the Home Secretary to release the full transcript of the meeting to which she has referred, in the hope that it can be made available in time for my speech later today.
Madam Speaker: That is not a point of order for me.
5.21 pm
Mr. Denzil Davies (Llanelli): I am sure that the House and the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) will understand if I do not attempt to follow her remarks.
I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary on his appointment and on his excellent first speech as Home Secretary. Like most of my right hon. and hon. Friends who have spoken in this debate on the Loyal
Address, I welcome both the tone and most, if not all, of the content of the Queen's Speech. I welcome my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary's remarks and the Government's proposals on law and order, as I do those on health and education.
I especially welcome the windfall tax proposal. If it is successful--I am sure it will be--it will impinge upon and help with law and order problems. During the past 18 years, in my constituency, as in most others, one of the greatest scourges has been youth unemployment, particularly among young men. I hope that the windfall tax and its attendant measures will do something to alleviate such unemployment, which has caused misery to those unemployed men and women, worry to their parents, and serious economic and social consequences for the community.
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary mentioned the drug problem, which is complex and has often had disastrous consequences. The causes of the problem may not be easy to determine, although, in my constituency--which, in terms of the drug problem, is no different from other--there was only a very minor, if any, drug problem in 1979, when the previous Labour Government left office.
One consequence for candidates and for the electorate--I will not say that it was necessarily a benefit--of a six-week election campaign, during which there was almost constantly good weather, was that we saw a lot of each other. We probably saw more of each other than we did during the previous seven general election campaigns that I have fought, and I met more electors and constituents than ever before. I usually found--as the election results showed--that my constituents welcomed Labour's proposals on law and order, health, education and the windfall tax.
There was, however, one group of electors--who are now constituents--who were very angry: pensioners. For the first time in the eight general elections that I have contested, in a traditional Labour constituency, I did not detect an enthusiastic welcome from pensioners for the Labour party's policies or for its candidate for Llanelli. They were angry and frustrated primarily because, in 1979 or 1980, the Conservative Government broke the link between pensions and wages, which had been introduced by a previous Labour Government. That was the root cause of their anger, after someone had calculated that pensioners had lost at least £18 a week because that link had been broken.
I told the pensioners that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse the actions of the past 18 years, and they grudgingly accepted that. Then they asked, "But what will you do?" I started with our proposals on decreasing VAT on fuel; again they grudgingly accepted my answer. I went on to say that pensioners would be helped by Labour's proposals on law and order, on health and on other social issues, as mentioned in our manifesto. They again expressed a grudging acceptance of my answer.
I was still not able to escape, however, because they asked me about television licences. They asked, "Why should we pay £87 a year when other pensioners pay nothing?" They did not criticise that exemption, but they asked, "Why should we, who have very little
entertainment available, pay an exorbitant sum for a television licence?" I did not want to tell them that the chattering classes at the BBC had to be kept in the style to which they have become accustomed, because that might have been pushing my luck a bit far. I had no answer for them.
When I thought that I could perhaps make an escape, they hit me with a question on the Republic of Ireland--because west Wales has suddenly discovered Ireland. West Wales, if not all of Wales, has discovered that the average gross domestic product per head in Ireland is now as high as it is in the United Kingdom--and that it is much higher than it is in Wales. I was told--I could not refute it, because I did not know the figures--that pensions in the Republic of Ireland are higher than in Britain, that Ireland's television licence fee is much lower, and that pensioners can travel free throughout the island of Ireland.
My confrontations--sadly, that is what the meetings became--with pensioners in my constituency were not very productive for me or for the Labour party. After reflecting on the general election and thinking about it, however, I have concluded that the only way in which we can eventually--not tomorrow, but soon--deal with the matter is to consider increasing the basic rate of the old age pension. I see no other solution. The introduction of price differentials in television licences would probably be too difficult, and travel is often a matter for local authorities, but we should consider increasing the basic pension by perhaps £5 a week for a single person and £8 a week for a married couple.
I do not criticise my right hon. and hon. Friends for not including such a step in the Queen's Speech. I shall not criticise them if it does not appear in the next Budget--it will not--because I am told that the cost of such a proposal, taking into account the need to uprate income support and the effect on the Exchequer, is probably around £2 billion. However, we say in the Queen's Speech that we are a party of one nation. The speech deals with young people, law and order and the health service, so I hope that, over the next year, we can consider the injustice that has been done to pensioners and, somehow or other, find the £2 billion to put it right before too long.
As I said, I welcome the Queen's Speech but, sadly, I have one reservation. It involves the proposal to transfer the power to control and set the price of money and to set interest rates from the Treasury--and, basically, from the House--to the Bank of England.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst):
Order. I am sorry to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman, but we are now debating the amendment. I hope that he will steer his remarks in that direction.
Mr. Davies:
I apologise; I was under the impression that we were debating the Queen's Speech in general. The amendment may have been moved, but I did not think that we were precluded from debating topics not mentioned in it--that has certainly not been the practice in the past.
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
As I understand it, once the amendment has been moved, the debate should concentrate on its contents. However, I have given the
Mr. Davies:
In that case, I shall continue to deal with the question of parliamentary responsibility with which my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary dealt when he mentioned the Prison Service. Indeed, the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald dealt with parliamentary responsibility--she said that it had not been exercised in relation to the Prison Service. My remarks on the Bank of England deal with what I should think is the overriding issue of parliamentary responsibility. However, I defer to the occupant of the Chair. If I am out of order, I shall draw my remarks to a close, but I repeat that the transfer of power to the Bank of England is a transfer of democracy, just as the transfer of some power to the prison authorities was a transfer of democracy. The point is that such a transfer leads to all kinds of problems, as the right hon. Lady said.
Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed):
I congratulate you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, on your election to your new office. I had intended to congratulate the Home Secretary on his appointment, but, as he has already fled the scene, I shall save my congratulations for another occasion. Perhaps he has gone for a rummage in the archives, but he will quickly discover that he does not have access to the records of the previous Administration.
The debate has taken an intriguing turn. It must especially intrigue my many newly elected colleagues, not to mention many new Labour Members of Parliament, because it has shown that there are two Conservative parties. We heard initially from what we must assume is the moderately pro-Howard Conservative party, which speaks from the Front Bench--at least when it is in the form of the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean). We then heard from the anti-Howard party in the form of the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) who in fact extended the debate of 19 October last by saying various things that she ought to have said then, and which she should have said from the Back Benches rather than the Front Bench.
I am sorry that the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald has left the Chamber so soon after making her speech, because there are several questions to be put to her. I wonder whether she communicated the full extent of her concerns to the Prime Minister at the time. Was he made aware of them? He certainly ought to have been. If he was, but did nothing about the situation, it suggests that the Government were as little under control as many of us came to believe in the course of their last few years.
I can now congratulate the Home Secretary, who has returned to the Chamber. I wish him well in his important and demanding office of state--few are more demanding, and I genuinely wish him well.
I do not think that I need to have given any notice to the former Home Secretary that I intended to refer to him in this debate. Indeed, everyone is expecting the debate to
turn to a considerable extent on the previous Home Secretary. I have a number of things to say about him. He failed to keep the promise to increase police numbers that the Conservative Government made in 1992. He distorted and debased the debate on prisons and punishment. The country was treated to tabloid and soundbite penal policy, which was extremely damaging to any reasonable debate on how crime can be reduced. The test to earn the approval of the Home Secretary depended on how many people one was prepared to lock up.
The former Home Secretary demoralised the prison service, and the full extent of that was illustrated by the remarks of the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald. He also seriously undermined parliamentary accountability, especially in relation to the Prison Service. He sought to draw a distinction between policy and operations, which is difficult to do in the Prison Service. However, if there is a distinction, the right hon. and learned Gentleman was no more capable of abiding by it than a drunken man is able to walk along the straight line that used to be drawn on the police station floor.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman was temperamentally incapable of observing a distinction between policy and operations and intervened in all manner of things. Had he been more open about his intentions, he could have defended them. They were all based on his very firm conviction that he was right and that suspension of this governor, the changing of that salary structure or the alteration of that prisoner's term were all matters in which he should properly intervene. However, once questions were asked, the matter became a matter of operations, nothing to do with policy and not something to which he should refer when answering to the House. He is now getting his come-uppance as the Conservative party splits into two. The second of those parties was represented here this afternoon by the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald.
I have to say to the new Home Secretary--some of his friends as well as his political opponents will have said this to him, too--that he was a consenting participant in the tabloid competition to sound tough in the period before the general election. Some of his sympathisers think it was all a deception. Polly Toynbee, most notably, writes in the press that we do not have to believe what the then shadow Home Secretary said because it will change when he gets into office. I, however, take him to be a more sincere and honest man than that. The worry that arises from my belief in his sincerity is that he accepts much of the tough talk about prison working in which he participated before the election. He now has to face the challenge, especially in connection with prison policy and policing.
Our prisons are already appallingly overcrowded. The prison population has risen by 15,000 in three years; the number of women prisoners has gone up by two thirds over the same period; and 86 per cent. of people in prison are there for non-violent offences. So serious are the dangers of overcrowding, following, as they do, an attempt to find a more humane pattern to prisons, that the Home Secretary now has to visit prison ships moored off Dorset and consider whether holiday camps should be brought into use. Before long, he will have to consider whether police cells are to be used to house prisoners, which would be not only an unsatisfactory way to house them but a waste of police time. We must not take that step if we are to continue our serious attack on crime.
Using police cells and police time and resources to deal with the custody of prisoners is the very opposite of an attack on crime.
I should like to refer to a couple of recent reports to the Home Secretary from boards of prison visitors. The report on Swaleside prison published in April says:
All that poses an even more serious question for the new Home Secretary. We must know not just what he will do about the effects of the recent trend in prison numbers, but whether he is serious about implementing the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997, passed just a month or so ago. If he is serious, we shall need not just the eight new prisons already planned, but a further 12, 20 or, according to some unpublished Home Office figures, even 60 new prisons.
Significantly, the Home Secretary said this afternoon that he would not be prepared to implement the measures if the prison places were not available. That must mean a significant change in the timetable for implementation set out by the previous Home Secretary. Even if the timetable is changed, it will require a huge diversion of resources into prison building.
Is the new Home Secretary converted to the building of private prisons? All the estimates so far made for building prisons to meet the provisions of the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997 are based on the assumption that they will all be private prisons. On that assumption, there will be no immediate capital cost to the Exchequer, merely the payment of revenue costs to private providers of prisons. Is that new Labour's policy? It cannot be squared with what Labour said before the election. I do not believe that the new Home Secretary will be able to implement the Act. I think that he will gradually slide away from the commitment that he made in the heat of the election campaign. Even his repetition of it today was heavily qualified.
Another severe challenge to the Home Secretary is what he intends to do about police numbers. Nothing in his speech or, to be fair, in Labour's manifesto, suggests an increase in police numbers. He sought to defend that today by pointing out that the decision on how money is used rests with chief constables. I do not think that that
was the only reason for there being nothing on the subject in the manifesto. I think that the Home Secretary did not want to make a promise that he had not made provision to keep by setting aside additional funds. Unless police authorities get additional funds, we shall not get additional police officers.
Many police authorities have reorganised their resources as effectively as they can, cutting out management structures to release more officers to put on the beat. There is not much slack left in many forces. Getting more officers on the beat will need additional resources that are not already pre-empted for new equipment or other essential expenditure to which the Home Secretary referred.
The story does not end there. The Home Secretary wants to introduce new responsibilities for the police. He is inviting them to engage in zero tolerance campaigns in some areas. That requires additional resources, unless the rest of the police authority area is to be seriously denuded. We had some experience of that in Northumbria, with all the Meadowell problems and the concentration of resources in one area.
The Liberal Democrats have some anxieties about the concept of zero tolerance. We do not want to encourage the use of the phrase, which implies a social authoritarianism that does not seem right to us in a free society. I hope that the Home Secretary means not such social authoritarianism, but that rigorous enforcement of the law will ensure that the extent to which an area is law abiding will be vigorously improved in ways that the public would welcome, although some senior police officers have already expressed doubts about how manageable the consequences of some of the more aggressive zero tolerance campaigns might be.
Even if the campaigns meet all our criteria, they require more resources and more officers. If those resources are to be taken from other parts of a police authority area, the net effect will probably an overall increase in crime, with one area being helped, but others suffering.
Other new responsibilities are proposed. If there are to be general child curfews, police officers will have to stop and question young children they see about at night. We are not convinced that that is a good scheme. Police officers are already able to use their common sense and stop and question children who are too young to be wandering around late at night. If they are to be pressed to organise curfews, more police resources will be needed.
We would place the emphasis in dealing with crime on having more police officers available in communities and on a range of crime prevention measures, including diverting young people from crime and confronting offending behaviour. Such measures are more likely to be effective than the massive diversion into custody implicit in the plans that the Government have inherited and seem willing to continue.
As we have said for many years, the drugs problem lies behind much crime. When the Home Secretary was quoted the other day as being surprised by the scale of the problem, someone said to me, "Where has he been?" The fact that a lot of crime arises from feeding the drugs habit is well known. When new Labour brings us a tsar, we see how much the political tables have been turned. Tsars used to be people who were murdered by communists. Now they are people whom new Labour
wishes to appoint. The responsibilities and powers of someone with such a grand title have not been vouchsafed to us.
We want serious research into the problem, and consideration of drugs policy away from the political atmosphere of the last Parliament and the general election, in which any suggestion of significant variation on present policy was regarded as a weakening. None of the parties has all the answers and there is uncertainty about the effects of policies. There is considerable difference of view among professionals. We want serious research, hard-headed debate and Government backing nationally and locally for co-ordinated strategies to deal with drugs problems. Measures that look simple and attractive can easily go wrong. Mandatory drug testing in prisons seems a wonderful idea until we discover that it encourages people to shift from cannabis to harder drugs because the harder drugs are more difficult to pick up under the mandatory testing programme. We should beware simple solutions.
The Home Secretary will also face challenges on other issues. We shall challenge him on some of the issues not covered in the Gracious Speech. Legislation is desperately needed to regulate the private security industry. Such measures would be welcomed in many parts of the House, and the police would like such legislation in place soon.
We welcome some of what the Home Secretary has said on immigration and asylum policy, but we are not yet convinced that he will do enough to deal with the problem of families being divided by the harsh application of immigration law. We await his further announcements with particular interest.
We shall look carefully at the Home Secretary's plans to speed up the youth justice system and to deal with anti-social behaviour. We very much welcome his commitment to bring the European convention on human rights into British domestic law. I took a Bill through the House on that subject about 15 or 20 years ago. Some conversions take a long time. In those days, the idea was bitterly opposed by Labour, but I genuinely welcome the Home Secretary's stance. We hope to assist on that. We also welcome what he has said about legislation on racial attacks and racial harassment.
The handguns issue will remain a free vote issue for my right hon. and hon. Friends, as it was in the last Parliament, although the Home Secretary may find my party working together to press him on compensation. If he creates a new compensation requirement, we shall seek, as we did on the previous legislation, to ensure that those who are affected by legislation that is in no way their fault have proper compensation provision.
We shall oppose the amendment tabled by the official Opposition. We do not want a return to the measures set out there.
"Education is still a major area for concern as it was last year. Privatisation has produced less prisoners being educated for more money . . .
The press release accompanying the board of visitors report on Wandsworth prison in April says:
The closure of some work shops and the cut back and deterioration in the Education Department has created a situation where during 1996 more and more prisoners spent 19/20 hours locked in cells."
"The Report complains about the reduction in the number of staff and services caused by budget cuts. One part of the prison which houses sex offenders has had its staff cut from 70 to 50, the Probation Department has had its numbers cut from 14 to three and the number of classes run by the Education Department has been halved."
I should add for fairness that the press release continues:
"On the positive side, however, the Report commends the prison's Drug Strategy and the refurbishment of A and B Wings--two Victorian 'slopping out' wings--which were only recently closed and which the Home Office had threatened to re-open if overcrowding demanded."
If overcrowding continues, we shall have to reopen wings that have not been adequately refurbished.
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