House of Commons - Home Affairs

Select Committee on Home Affairs Second Report

Examination of draft legislation

17. As we have discussed in paragraph 8 above, we devoted intensive scrutiny to the Government's draft Identity Cards Bill. We regard this as having been a very useful exercise which identified deficiencies in the draft legislation and contributed to modifications made by the Government to the legislation now before Parliament.

18. In response to a proposal from the then Home Secretary, we undertook to conduct pre-legislative scrutiny of the Government's draft Corporate Manslaughter Bill. This would have been a joint exercise with the Work and Pensions Committee. However, publication of this draft legislation has been repeatedly delayed and it remains uncertain when a draft will be published.

Examination of expenditure

19. The Committee conducts annual scrutiny of Home Office expenditure by means of a questionnaire submitted following publication of the department's annual report, followed by an evidence session with the Permanent Secretary and other relevant officials. In addition, we have pursued in writing with the Home Office specific queries arising from the Main and Supplementary Estimates. We are, as in previous years, grateful to the Committee Office Scrutiny Unit for supplying us with specialist advice on expenditure issues.

Examination of Public Service Agreements

20. Several of our recent reports have contained specific comments on the Home Office's Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets. Our report on asylum applications criticised the Government's targets on processing applications and called for these to be made more challenging, with a reduction in the current relatively high proportion of successful appeals formally included as part of the target.[26]

21. Our report on the rehabilitation of prisoners expressed regret at the decision by the Home Office to reclassify the PSA target of reducing re-offending as a 'standard', committing it simply to maintain existing levels of performance. We also drew attention to the existence of an 'internal target' which does quantify a desired reduction in re-offending levels, and said that it was inherently confusing that the Home Office was simultaneously committed to 'no deterioration in re-offending rates' and to a quantified reduction in those rates.[27]

22. We have explored in oral and written evidence from the Home Office the implications of the new set of PSA targets announced as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review in July 2004.[28]

Assisting the House

23. On 20 December 2004, our report on Identity Cards, and the Government's response, was tagged on the Order Paper as being relevant to the Second Reading debate on the Identity Cards Bill. On 8 July 2004 our report on Asylum Applications, and the Government's response, was debated in Westminster Hall.

Innovations in working methods

Draft sentencing guidelines

24. A major development in 2004 was the commencement of our formal scrutiny of draft sentencing guidelines issued by the Sentencing Guidelines Council (SGC). The Committee will contribute to the formulation of guidelines within the new sentencing framework established by the Criminal Justice Act 2003. This aims to put the sentencing of offenders in England and Wales on a more systematic and coherent basis. By way of preparing for this new role, we took evidence from the Chairman of the SGC (the Lord Chief Justice) in July 2004.[29] We have also recruited a Sentencing Adviser to the staff of the Committee.

25. The first two draft guidelines were published in September 2004. They dealt with Reduction in sentence for a guilty pleas and Overarching principles: seriousness / New sentences: Criminal Justice Act 2003. We produced a report commenting on the drafts in early November.[30] We are pleased with the positive response to this report from the SGC. The final version of the guidelines, issued in December 2004, contains significant revisions arising, in part, from our recommendations.[31]

The Prison Diaries project

26. In our inquiry into the rehabilitation of prisoners we conducted a novel form of direct research. We wished to investigate prisoners' own experience of rehabilitation regimes. To this end, we asked over 1,000 prisoners to participate in a 'Prison Diary Project' in May and June 2004. We wrote to randomly selected individuals in six prison establishments and asked them to complete a 7-day diary of their prison routine. The Prison Service and the Governors of each of the prisons gave their support to the project. A total of 299 prison diaries were completed and returned to us. After allowing for 71 forms that were returned by the prisons because prisoners had been released or transferred, this gave a response rate of 31%.[32]

27. Analysis of the diaries gave us a valuable insight into the number of hours prisoners spend in education, vocational training, rehabilitative programmes, work schemes and leisure activities. The statistics obtained from our project presented a picture significantly bleaker than that provided by Home Office statistics. Over 60% of prisoners told us that they spent no time in vocational training or offending behaviour programmes/drug treatment programmes, 47% spent no time in education and 31% no time in prison work. One in six spent no time during the week in sporting or gymnasium activities or in association. We concluded that "disturbingly high proportions of prisoners are engaged in little or no purposeful activity. … The consequences for prisoners are too many hours 'banged up' in their cells, with an adverse impact on their mental and physical health, and missed opportunities for rehabilitation."[33]

PACE Codes

28. In May 2004 the Government asked the Committee to decide whether proposed revisions to the Codes of Practice under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) should be subject to affirmative procedure (i.e. must be approved by resolution of each House of Parliament) or to no parliamentary procedure. This request followed an undertaking given by the Government in response to the Committee's report on the Criminal Justice Bill in December 2002. The matter at issue was whether or not the proposed revisions to the PACE codes were "of substantial importance or significance", sufficient to require explicit parliamentary approval through the affirmative procedure. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act is the main piece of legislation dealing with police powers and procedures, and setting out the rights of suspects. These provisions are substantially augmented by codes of practice dealing with stop and search; searching of premises and seizure of property; detention, treatment and questioning; identification; audio recording of interviews with suspects; and visual recording of interviews. In our view the Government's proposed revisions to these codes raised issues that merited parliamentary scrutiny. We recommended that the statutory instrument revising the codes should be subject to affirmative procedure, and this was accordingly done.

EU issues

29. There have been significant recent developments within the EU in the field of justice and home affairs (JHA), and it is likely that the Committee will be devoting considerable attention to EU issues over the next few years.

30. In December 2004 the European Council approved the next five-year JHA programme. This follows on from the programme agreed at Tampere in 1999, which was aimed at creating an "area of freedom, security and justice", covering civil and criminal justice, visas, asylum and immigration, and police and customs co-operation. As part of the preliminary consultations on the proposed new programme, the European Parliament's Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs convened a meeting of national parliamentarians in Brussels. The Home Affairs Committee was represented at this meeting through its Chairman.

31. The Committee has agreed to host a conference in London to mark the UK's Presidency of the EU (July to December 2005). This has been scheduled for 24 November 2005. Representatives of equivalent committees in the EU's national parliaments, and of the European Parliament, will be invited. It has been provisionally agreed that the theme of the conference will be "terrorism and community relations".

26 HC 218-I (2003-04), para 146 Back

27 HC 193-I (2004-05), paras 60-68 Back

28 Oral evidence on Home Office Departmental Report: Work of the Department in 2003-04 taken on 20 July 2004, to be printed; oral evidence on The Work of the Home Office taken on 2 November 2004, (HC 1222-i, 2003-04) Back

29 Oral evidence on Sentencing Guidelines taken on 1 July 2004 (HC 844-i, 2003-04) Back

30 Fifth Report of Session 2003-04, Draft Sentencing Guidelines 1 and 2 (HC 1207), published on 4 November 2004 Back

31 The final version is available on the SGC's website: www.sentencing-guidelines.gov.uk. Back