House of Commons Hansard Debates for 8 Jul 1999 (pt 19)

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Jack Straw): It is a privilege to speak to these amendments. The House is broadly agreed about the principles in this part of the Bill, although there are substantial disagreements about how the proposals might operate in practice.

One of the few benefits of being in opposition--there were very few, and I do not recommend it--was that one was able to think about particular institutions in greater depth than one can manage when in government. Along with right hon. and hon. Friends and people outside the House, I paid particular attention to the profound defects of the youth justice system. My hon. Friends the Members for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson) and for Stretford and Urmston (Ms Hughes) have referred to the current arrangements for dealing with young offenders. To call those arrangements a system is to offer them greater dignity than they deserve.

The system is inadequate. It lacks coherence, speed and a connection between the commission of an offence and the correction and punishment that would make it clear to the young offender that the offence should not have been committed and secure some possibility that reoffending would be avoided.

The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) referred to the Scottish example. The Scottish children's panels have been operating for about three decades. They are criticised within Scotland more than they are admired outside--that is always the case. None the less, when I visited Glasgow to look at the operation of the panels, everyone to whom I spoke was in favour of the system. When I consulted my colleagues in the parliamentary Labour party on that matter, I wrote to all of them asking--without leading the answers--what they thought about the youth justice system. It was significant that all the replies of Members representing Scottish constituencies supported the principle of children's panels. Those Members pointed out that some changes might be made, but that the principle was sound and it was working. However, every Labour Member representing an English or Welsh constituency said that those youth justice arrangements were not working and needed to be changed.

We considered Scotland, and some of my colleagues travelled to New Zealand to examine its arrangements for family conferencing. As the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Sir N. Lyell) mentioned, several of us have studied carefully the

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considerable innovations in the Thames Valley police district, under the leadership of the chief constable, Charles Pollard. We tried to distil that experience to ensure that we developed it against the background of the operation of the English and Welsh legal system, and in order to introduce proposals that would bring into the law those principles of restorative justice--they are contained in part I of the Bill.

I will deal with the specific criticisms that the scheme is too inflexible. I do not think that it is, but I shall answer the point. We are not dealing merely with yet another disposal for the existing youth justice courts; we are dealing with a wholly new approach to young offenders. Although I hope to convince the House, especially sceptical Opposition Members, that the disposal has inherent flexibility, it is inappropriate merely to offer this disposal on a menu of others--alongside fines, conditional discharges or anything else.

We want to change the way in which youth offending is corrected, which brings me to the point made by the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison). Those Members of the House who have had experience of working in the youth courts--as I did many years ago--or of observing the youth courts, as I did much more recently, will realise that the most disturbing fact about the current operation is that the young offender is, at best, a spectator in a theatre where other people are the actors. At worst, the young offender is wholly detached and contemptuous of what is going on.

We have had a high-flown debate. I was interested to hear the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway) speaking in Brechtian terms of alienation. He was right to do so, because that is exactly what we witness in the theatre of the youth courts. I have been in youth courts where the young offender was talked at, talked across and talked about, but never talked to. The young offender was never asked to engage his or her brain as to what he or she had done, or why--and, above all, why he or she hurt the victim of that crime. Indeed, under the current system, after the young offender has heard everyone else talk about him or her, he or she might be forgiven for thinking that there is only one victim--the young offender. Often, his or her sense of injustice at being caught and at appearing before the court is reinforced by the excuses that are trotted out on his or her behalf.

Sir Nicholas Lyell: It worries me that what happens in court under the system that will be produced by the Bill will not be so very different from what happens at present. I should be grateful for the Home Secretary's comments on that matter. The young offender will be engaged--rightly so--on the occasion when the restorative aspects of the Bill come into effect. After pleading guilty, the young offender will be sent off to the panel and the panel will then engage him. However, the Home Secretary seems to be confusing those two aspects--I am sorry to use such a harsh word as "confusing". We want to make the point that although restorative justice is extremely valuable, it is too valuable to be used in every case; the courts should be allowed to decide.

Mr. Straw: I do not accept that. I shall deal with the inherent flexibility of the system in a moment. If the right hon. and learned Gentleman had his way, he would be correct in saying that the court procedures, prior to the transfer to the panel, would be similar to current

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arrangements. The similarity would reside in the fact that, in every case, the court would have to go through the often time-consuming and, in many cases, unnecessary process of seeking a pre-sentence report. That takes up time and, I regret, does not necessarily leave the court any the wiser. Under the Bill, where other conditions are satisfied and the court decides that neither an absolute discharge nor a sentence of immediate custody are appropriate--or that in some cases, as I shall explain, even if the offence is an imprisonable one, a sentence of immediate custody is not available because of the operation of other provisions--clause 1 will operate automatically to secure a transfer to the panel if the offender pleads guilty. That will help to reduce the time taken in the theatre of the court.

An inherent feature of the arrangements is the long-standing policy of successive Governments and courts of encouraging those who are guilty to plead guilty. To conclude the formal part of the court process by a reference to the panel should act as further encouragement.

Opposition Members have questioned the flexibility of the proposed scheme. I accept what right hon. and hon. Gentlemen have said about the inflexibility of the unit fine arrangements introduced under the Criminal Justice Act 1991. Indeed, other parts of that Act were inflexible. Extraordinarily, I did not protest at the time, although I was doing other things as a member of the Opposition Front Bench. However, I should have protested had I noticed the extraordinary inclusion in the 1991 Act that previous convictions should not be taken into account. It would have been eccentric for even an old Labour Government to introduce such a measure, but, given that the original policy was published when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, I feel that it should be regarded as an abberation.

Sir Nicholas Lyell rose--

Mr. Straw: I will give way to the right hon. and learned Gentleman. As the former Solicitor-General, he may have been the author of that abberation.

Sir Nicholas Lyell: I am grateful to the Home Secretary for giving way. My intervention will be very brief.

I am certainly not the author of the abberation. I am afraid that it was deep within the psyche of the Home Office at the time. The judges then construed it in a way that saddened many of us, and they did not get the Home Office out of its hole; in fact, they dug it into a deeper hole, and we had to get it out of the hole later.

Mr. Straw: That may or may not be the case, but I do not recall seeing a Home Office civil servant moving the Second Reading of the legislation that began as the Criminal Justice Bill in 1990. My former constituency neighbour, now Lord Waddington--who was not seen as being on the soft side of the Tory party--was the Home Secretary of the day. Wherever the idea came from, Ministers had clearly discussed it collectively at some length, and had agreed on it. It was not a minor matter. It was not an issue like that involving the Passport Agency, which Home Secretaries may be forgiven for thinking has operated reasonably well for some time--while it is operating well, that is; not otherwise. However, we will not pursue that little excursion.

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The circumstances with which the Bill deals are very different from those provided for by the Criminal Justice Act 1991 in regard to unit fines. Flexibility is inherent in the Bill in its present form. Referral will be automatic when there is no absolute discharge or immediate custody. I draw hon. Members' attention to clause 8. There is considerable flexibility in what is actually contained in the contract of a young offender. It certainly does not say, "The case will be transferred to the panel, and this or that must happen." Subsection (2) states:

"The terms of the programme may"--

not "shall"--

"include provision for any of the following".

The subsection makes provision for

"the offender to make financial or other reparation to any person who appears to the panel to be a victim of, or otherwise affected by, the offence".

That amounts to a financial penalty, which the panel can impose, while taking more account of the resources of the young person involved than a court might.

The clause requires offenders to attend

"mediation sessions with any such victim or other person".

It requires offenders

"to carry out unpaid work or service . . . the offender to be at home at times specified in or determined under the programme"--