Mr.
Hanson: I can give the hon. Gentleman an assurance that
the National Offender Management Service has given its full agreement
to the proposals in the order.
Mr.
Burrowes: I am grateful for that assurance; I would not
wish to distinguish between support in principle for the order, which I
am sure is shared across the services, but the pressures on the
probation service need to be put in context. When the implementation
effects of the order are reviewed, careful account needs to be taken of
the impact on the probation
service. The Court
Service is also concerned about practical matters. Has there been a
proper assessment of the impact on courts? Listings are often full, and
breach courts in particular carry a heavy work load. Is there a clear
understanding of the impact that the measure will have on those
courts?
The is also
an issue concerning those who will be responsible for the review of
community orders. Does the Minister anticipate that reviews will be
conducted personally, by the magistrate who passed the original
sentence or one of their benchmen, or will another magistrate do it?
The burden might fall on lay magistrates. Professional magistrates or
district judges might be preferred when it comes to undertaking
reviews, which may be of concern to lay magistrates, who may end up
feeling that they are not at the forefront of the implementation of new
measures. The order
might have an impact on the criminal defence service. The explanatory
memorandum indicates that some
cases “may qualify for
legal aid subject to the”
interests of justice test. Given that
legal aid is restricted to cases in which the restriction of liberty is
foremost, it would be interesting if the Minister gave examples of when
such cases will arise. In what circumstances will cases involving
community penalties attract legal aid? Will the duty solicitor
arrangements be amended to enable duty solicitors to take account of
the reviews? Has there been an appropriate assessment of the impact and
costs of such an amendment?
Article 4(6) deals with cases
in which the matter would need to be adjourned to deal with community
order non-compliance. The question is whether that might itself make
legal aid appropriate, and whether it would be appropriate in practice
for there to be early disclosure of reports not only to the magistrates
but to the previously assigned defence solicitors, so that to avoid any
unnecessary adjournments, applications for legal aid could be made to
ensure that progress with that case was made quickly.
In
conclusion, the real issue is about ensuring that the community orders
work properly in order to give the public confidence and to ensure that
offenders are rehabilitated. It is, however, important to take full
account of resource allocation and the impact throughout the criminal
justice system. When the reviews are more widely implemented, they may
expose problems with the early implementation of requirements on
alcohol treatment and curfew orders. The Government must be properly
equipped to tackle them and to ensure that, when the prison population
is rising, the urgent need to make community orders effective is
met.
2.51
pm David
Howarth (Cambridge) (LD): The hon. Member for Enfield,
Southgate mentioned lay magistrates, and I suppose that in the
interests of openness, I should declare that my wife is a lay
magistrate. Evaluation was mentioned, and I hope that the Minister will
cover it. I hope that the evaluation will take into account the views
of lay magistrates in the Liverpool experiment especially, which would
cover the point that the hon. Gentleman made about the place of the lay
magistracy in the system, and whether they feel that they are being
displaced by professional district judges. I hope that they do not feel
that way. I am
disappointed that the full evaluation is not available and will not be
until October. The Minister will correct me if I am wrong, but I
thought that the point of extending the range of pilots was that there
were not enough cases going through the system in Liverpool and Salford
alone to provide evidence to conclude accurately whether that form of
review worked. I thought that that was the main reason why the pilots
needed to be extended. If that is true, it may indicate bad planning by
the Government on the number of courts needed to evaluate the project,
but nothing more. I should not read anything more sinister into the
situation. Certainly, at this stage I should not follow the hon.
Gentleman’s lead when he talked about a postcode lottery. The
project is still part of a pilot whose aim is to work out whether that
particular way of operating works.
My other
point relates to what the hon. Gentleman said about resources. It
relates also to the way in which the pilot itself will be evaluated.
The Liverpool and
Salford courts operate quite differently. The Salford court is a more
traditional magistrates court set-up, whereas in Liverpool there are a
number of new and experimental elements, which are well worth studying.
I wonder whether the extra courts that are being introduced will follow
the Liverpool model in which, for example, there is a problem-solving
approach to sentences, so that before a community order is chosen, all
the people concerned discuss what the right order would be. If they get
it right, the success rate of the order is affected; in fact, that
situation may have a bigger effect on success than the review itself.
Is it intended that the extra courts will follow that
approach? The
Liverpool court follows a very interesting community restorative
justice approach, in which offenders pay back to the whole community by
getting engaged in a local project such as helping to clear out a
canal. I would like such an approach to be extended and developed
further, and to bring the community into the choice of penalties, which
would be a way of reconnecting the public with the criminal justice
system. Is that approach intended to be used in all the courts in the
proposal? The
Liverpool court deals with the review process first, by using a
mentoring system. In appropriate cases the offender is allocated a
mentor, who helps to get them through the community order. That might
have an impact on the success rate of the community order, which is a
separate matter from the review process
itself. Secondly, in
tackling the breach of orders, the Liverpool court has its own
dedicated security force from the local police, unlike many magistrates
courts where a private security firm carries out court security. The
personnel of private security firms are not police constables, so they
are not in a position to execute an order of the court in respect of
people who breach their orders. A big advantage of the Liverpool court
is that its own dedicated police force can very quickly execute orders
against people who breach orders, which in itself might affect the
success rate, independently of any other aspect of
review. How do the
Government see the pilot? If they think it is about extending the
number of areas that follow the initial way of doing things and the
idea is to have as many examples of that as possible, it makes sense
for them all to do the same thing because if they are not, one cannot
tell whether that particular way of doing things has worked. They must
all be comparable. That is one possibility, in which case the extra
elements should be employed in all the courts, including the Salford
court. However,
the Government may want to compare the full-scale approach of the
Liverpool court with the more minimal approach to reviewing community
orders, in which case at least some, although not all, of the extra
courts being given this power should follow the Liverpool route. All
the extra elements in the Liverpool way of doing things have resource
implications, as they all cost money.
I was
disappointed that the only costs mentioned in the explanatory
memorandum were what were thought to be the very low costs in respect
of the criminal defence service. If there is to be a proper evaluation
of the Liverpool community justice centre approach, at least some of
the courts that are being brought on line
under this order should get more resources so that they can follow the
same full-scale approach. If they do not, we will not be able to
evaluate the Liverpool experiment. I hope it is a success, and is seen
to be so, and can therefore be rolled out in the rest of the
country. I
have no objections to the order and I wish the experiment well but I
want the Government to be clearer about precisely how they will carry
out the
evaluations. 3
pm
Mr.
Hanson: I am grateful for the speeches by the hon.
Members for Enfield, Southgate and for Cambridge. The hon. Member for
Enfield, Southgate is aware that there are a number of pressures on the
criminal justice system at the moment. He rightly mentioned that we
have a considerable prison-related pressure at the moment and we are
looking to develop further uses of community penalties. The development
of the models that we have from the two pilots and the extension of
those pilots to the 11 new courts are a way in which we can in the long
run provide a better way of managing community penalties which will
result in fewer breaches and fewer people being recalled to prison.
That should help alleviate the prison population pressures, but it is
also a holistic approach to looking at the offender and his particular
needs. I
accept from both hon. Members that there is concern about the
evaluation process to date. I have already said, openly and honestly,
that in my eight weeks in this post, and having agreed to table this
order several weeks ago, I wanted to have the evaluations completed,
published and before the Committee today. After tabling the order there
were difficulties in producing the evaluations to a standard that the
Committee and the House would expect. I have therefore decided to
publish them later but I have told the Committee, openly and honestly,
that the evaluation at a parochial level has been very positive. If
either hon. Gentleman wished to talk to anybody involved in these
schemes they would hear nothing but positive feedback for
them. I
give the commitment again today that the evaluation process, which has
taken longer than initially planned, will be produced and reported on
formally, and I will lay a copy of the report of the evaluation in the
House of Commons by October 2007. The Committee can hold me to that by
means of parliamentary questions and other mechanisms if it so wishes.
The evaluations have concluded to date, so it is difficult to add to
the points that were mentioned about involving magistrates. My
understanding is that the magistrates have been involved. They have
been consulted. They have given their feedback and their views will be
taken into account in the final evaluation and conclusions.
This is an
innovative and complex proposal, but I am confident that the success to
date has been proved. I need to have a formal standard evaluation
document produced so that I can table it. At this stage, regrettably,
we are not in a position to table that document.
The hon.
Member for Cambridge mentioned the differences between Liverpool and
Salford. There are qualitative differences in the way in which
Liverpool and Salford operate. Salford is developing a community
justice approach within a traditional magistrates court and the 11
extensions that I have announced as part of the project today, in
Bradford, Birmingham, Devon and Cornwall, Hull, Leicester, Merthyr
Tydfil, Middlesbrough,
Nottingham and London, will be on the Salford model rather than on the
Liverpool model. But it is an organic process. We will evaluate,
monitor and look at how we can develop the schemes and operation still
further. Some of the
schemes in Middlesbrough, Nottingham, Devon and Cornwall and Bradford
are now up and running. Additional resources of some £1 million
have been put in place to help establish those schemes and get them on
their feet. We will monitor those schemes in due course and look at how
we can develop the evaluation for the longer term and potential further
expansion. For me and for the Government, this is about preventing
reoffending. It is about looking at the difficulties that people on
community sentences face, to see whether we can help them through that
period, so that at the end of it they have completed their sentence in
a positive way with the support of the court and have looked at any
holistic issues, such as drug and alcohol problems or even attendance.
I hope that that will be of benefit. I hope that Opposition Members can
accept those comments in the spirit in which they are
made. The question of
probation resources was mentioned. The hon. Member for Enfield,
Southgate referred to yesterday’s report from the chief
inspector of the probation services. I will not hide from the fact that
some comments in that report raised some potential difficulties down
the line about how prison pressures and other pressures are impacting
on the probation service. Over the 10 years that my party has been in
government, resources to the probation service have increased by 70 per
cent. I accept that the prison population has risen, causing an ongoing
impact on probation services. I am confident, as is the National
Offender Management Service, with the support it has given to the
pilots and to the order, that it can cope with that demand and ensure
that there are the proper resources to meet the needs of the probation
service on the issues before the
Committee. I repeat
that one of the key things, although it can be resource-intensive, is
supporting people through the court assessment process. That can save
resources in the long run by preventing people from breaching
probation, returning to prison and serving sentences with all the
inherent difficulties that that creates for prison populations. Most
importantly, it could prevent the potential damage to the
individual’s long-term ability to avoid reoffending. All of this
is ultimately about trying to ensure that people in my constituency,
Cambridge and Enfield, Southgate do not face crime from people who have
been in the system and then
reoffend. The
National Offender Management Service was mentioned and I want to
confirm again that it is fully supportive of the community justice
programme team. Indeed, we have given a small amount of funding to the
probation service to cover additional costs in those areas. When the
evaluation takes place in due course, we will be able to look at the
difficulties that may be
experienced with probation resources and that should be taken into
account before we have any wider
roll-out. The hon.
Member for Enfield, Southgate mentioned the complex and difficult issue
of what happens when an offence is committed in one area but the
offender lives in another. I would like to reflect on that and respond
to him in writing after the Committee. I hope that it will not force
him to oppose the order. It is a complex issue that we are grappling
with as part of the evaluation process that we are going through. I
will write to him about the detail when we have reflected on it. It is
an issue that we are aware of. We have discussed it internally and are
coming to conclusions. However, with respect to the Committee, I do not
wish to commit to a particular policy when we have not yet considered
it because of a number of issues. The hon. Gentleman also asked why it
is taking so long to get to where we are, which the hon. Member for
Cambridge also touched
on. The power has so
far been given only to community justice courts, and on the basis of
the evaluation, we will be taking decisions in due course on whether we
want to add to it. As hon. Members will know, there are resource
implications to do with the review process and probation reports, and
the extension to Crown courts and other courts will depend on available
resources. We must look at how we can work that through in due
course.
The hon.
Member for Enfield, Southgate asked whether offenders have access to
representation and legal aid. The reviews under section 178 are not
hearings. Offenders will not normally have legal representation in
them, because they are reviews of an existing sentence before the
court. If an offender appears before a review and his progress is
satisfactory, that will be a matter for general discussion. If,
however, the performance is unsatisfactory, the court will adjourn the
review to allow breach proceedings to commence. At that stage,
individuals before the court will be able to instruct a solicitor, and
if they qualify for legal aid they will be able to make an application
accordingly. The review is a process that will, I hope, lead to
satisfactory reviews that show an interest by the court in the progress
of the offender. If the offender finds themselves in difficulty, legal
representation is to be included.
I have touched on this point
before, but I should like to clarify the matter. Both hon. Gentlemen
reflected on whether magistrates felt that the new system was a threat
to them. Magistrates are fully involved in the new projects, and have
been involved in the evaluation, and I will certainly be happy to meet
any organisations representing magistrates to obtain their views if
they feel unhappy about progress to date.
If there are further points, I
shall happily try to clarify them, but I hope that there is general
support from the Committee and I commend the order to
it. Question put
and agreed
to. Resolved, That
the Committee has considered the draft Community Order (Review by
Specified Courts) Order
2007. Committee
rose at ten minutes past Three
o’clock.
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