Examination of Witnesses (Questions 520
- 535)
TUESDAY 9 DECEMBER 2008
JONATHAN AITKEN
AND LORD
DUBS
Q520 Mr Heath: Before I ask Lord
Dubs also to comment on that may I put one more suggestion to
you which is that one part of that framework which is not very
often considered is the role of the sentencer in terms of locality
as well. Would your model include some sort of feedback on outcome
to sentencers in a particular circuit or whatever so that they
have a clear idea of the efficacy of their sentencing?
Jonathan Aitken: Yes, you are
taking us off into deep waters here about changing sentencing
policy but there are some signs of hope around. For example, in
Liverpool there is a very good community court and a judge called
David Fletcher.
Q521 Chairman: Which we visited.
Jonathan Aitken: Some of the Scottish
courts are very community minded and some of the pioneering new
drugs courts, which I notice that the Justice Secretary is now
expanding, are effective because they really know their local
communities, they have a continuity of approach to those local
communities and that I think that is a signpost for the future.
I am increasingly uneasy at the way the judiciary are detached
from any kind of community or continuity in their sentencing.
Lord Dubs: May I give a very local
example? I think there is general agreement that the youth offending
teams which have been going since the year 2000 have not all been
wonderful but some of them have worked pretty well and they provide
a local basis. I understand that under the Government's youth
crime action plan there is a possibility of making that even more
local by making local authorities aware of the cost of custodial
places. That is knowledge. If local authorities were actually
responsible for paying for custodial places, I think the local
authority mindset in relation to youth offending teams would be
quite different. Then they would say they have to make it work
otherwise it will cost them money. I would like to see that sort
of approach more. The Government have gone part of the way towards
it but I would like to see them take that further.
Q522 Mr Heath: May I throw in one
suggested impediment to that which came from the evidence which
Mr Straw gave to us which was that one of the arguments for Titan
prisons is that it is easier to get planning permission for three
large prisons than it is for between 10 and 15 small community
prisons. Your comments.
Lord Dubs: I would say let us
see. Getting planning permission can be difficult anyway for prisons
but I am not aware that there is no local opposition to building
small local prisons. I think they have to tackle that one in the
best way possible and not go for Titan prisons; it would be absurd
to go for Titan prisons simply because planning permission is
easier to get that way.
Q523 Mr Heath: Is it a relevant planning
consideration?
Jonathan Aitken: The smaller the
prison, the easier it would probably be to get planning permission.
Experience shows that actually prisons are not necessarily unpopular
with their local communities. They are very often creators of
jobs: they are not dangerous cesspits of violent offenders who
pose a great threat. Those who live close to prisons are often
quite relaxed about them but when it is all new and a word like
Titan is applied to them, I can see the emotional thermometer
will rise.
Q524 Mr Heath: Having lived close
to a lifers' prison which has been there for 350 years or so,
I can corroborate the fact that there is very little actual problem
with the locals.
Lord Dubs: May I just qualify
something I said? There are difficulties about getting planning
permission for any prison but obviously a small local one can
be more acceptable to local people than one of the Titans. I would
think the Government would have enormous difficulty getting planning
permission for a Titan prison.
Q525 Alun Michael: May I ask you
to look at this issue of justice reinvestment in terms of how
you deal with this. It is something which is very easy to recommend.
Lord Dubs made a comment about where the resources are and referred
to local government for instance. We heard evidence recently of
an initiative, which I know from my own city, where it was the
approach of a medic looking at costs to the Health Service which
led to an initiative which actually cut violent crime. If justice
reinvestment is to mean anything, it has to deal with these issues
in a very strategic way, does it not? If you were in control of
all the resources, and Mr Aitken has had that experience for a
time, how would you refocus national investment in the relevant
fields which include prisons but must include as well probation
and cross-departmental resources in fields like health, education
and skills? How would you do it?
Jonathan Aitken: I would not start
nationally, as your question implied; I would start on pilot schemes
locally. I was interested in the material on Gateshead but even
if one took quite a big area like Liverpool and said some of these
justice reinvestment ideas might really work, if there were a
concentrated community effort, what the public would be convinced
by would be if they first of all actually saw a fall in re-offending
and secondly they saw justice being done through community punishments.
I personally am in favour of things like what are sometimes called
the orange tracksuits and reinvestment schemes including things
like restorative justice, but if there were a feeling at a local
level you would not necessarily win battles with the tabloid press
but you might win battles with the local media to show you were
actually getting somewhere.
Q526 Alun Michael: May I challenge
you a bit on that? Plenty of experiments, localised interventions,
have worked. Whether it is a question of getting emphasis into
jobs, whether it is a question of intervention with the drug rehabilitation
and so on, we have plenty of things which have worked. There is
no shortage of things which have worked at a local level. What
you find is that most organisations, most people who are dealing
with this field are trapped in a silo of one sort or another.
Surely you cannot start at a local level. You have to start at
a national level and somehow try to break down the silo.
Jonathan Aitken: You can have
a national policy which you are rolling out at a community level.
Q527 Alun Michael: How would you
do that?
Jonathan Aitken: Let us take an
area we were just talking about like Liverpool and say this is
an area where we are really going to have a targeted effort at
justice reinvestment. These labels are perhaps less meaningful
sometimes at national level.
Q528 Alun Michael: Yes, but what
would you do? Would you merge the budgets? Would you put a single
person in charge? Would you enjoin the judges to take ownership
of crime reduction? What would you do?
Jonathan Aitken: I would certainly
make, a high profile chairman and a board, accountable and on
that board should be all kinds of people such as local employers
who on the whole are not very much consulted on the criminal justice
system. The National Health Service, I am afraid to say, often
regards prison as a free good because it can be a dumping ground
for people an NHS Trust is really glad to see handled somewhere
else. You know all about that. One could go down through a great
list of people in a community who pull together with the right
leadership and could actually say "We, the community, are
now reinvesting, acting, really trying as a community to get a
different set of results to the ones we have". Of course
you are right in saying that there have been piecemeal efforts
here and there but I cannot think of any sizeable community where
there has really been good coordination. There are no single magic
bullets here. There are teams which, if really pulled together
well, could do something.
Alun Michael: I appreciate that, but
actually I can think of one thing, which is the comprehensive
spending review in 1997 for 1998, which actually placed a budget
in the hands of the Home Office which was jointly owned by several
departments and which then meant that some money went into local
areas in a way which pulled different budgets together. One of
the challenges for us is to move past seeing initiatives which
have worked or local schemes which have worked on the exceptional
basis to ask whether there are major changes in the way that we
do business as government which would lead to us investing money
more effectively. I am still not quite sure how to get hands around
that.
Chairman: In order to meet your pilot
case would you not have to do a massive devolution of budgetary
responsibility in which several departments were simply told by
the Prime Minister of this great initiative? That as a pilot in
Liverpool, Birmingham, wherever it was, a whole series of departmental
budgets were being devolved.
Alun Michael: Including the prisons in
that region.
Q529 Chairman: Absolutely.
Jonathan Aitken: I do think we
are talking here about devolving prisons and rehabilitation effort
to the community to have real power and real budgetary control.
Also, do not neglect the fact that in America, for example, there
are things like matching grants to communities for voluntary sector
groups or local charities even a Rotary Club which puts money
in to some of these things. We will be winning this battle when
we start to talk in a community about "our" prison,
"our" rehabilitation and at the moment we do not.
Lord Dubs: One must be careful
about one thing and that is that, if one said there was a continuum
from the mental health budget into the prison budget, there could
be a temptation to say mental health covers lots of people who
are not potential prisoners and therefore it would all be dissipated.
It is important that there should be somebody in charge and they
take it at a local level, somebody who would actually make sure
that the mental health elements of this new budget were devoted
to diverting people from custody not for other purposes which
are legitimate but which are more Health Service purposes. It
would require one or two experiments to be set up at a local level
to see whether one can have one person in charge, accountable
locally, who would have the budgetary responsibility to make sure
that mental health and other elements, drug rehabilitation elements,
were all there in a package to use the community justice centre
idea from Liverpool, and see whether one could then set up something
which could be replicated elsewhere.
Q530 Dr Whitehead: May I return to
the question of the public and community? We talk about how the
community might change its views on rehabilitation and prisons
but at the same time that community is also the public and we
heard last week that the public has, among other things, a number
of long-standing misperceptions about rates of crime, severity
of sentence, the role of judges in sentencing and so on. Do you
think that public misperception leads the political parties, for
example, into out-toughing each other in relation to criminal
justice policy? Is there a climate that follows from that which
actually makes it very difficult to implement effective community-based
crime reduction policies?
Lord Dubs: It is certainly more
difficult, given the climate of opinion which some of the media
try to encourage. There have to be equally partial voices the
other way and not so much is being said the other way. There is
always this thing about being soft on criminals and not long enough
sentences and so on. I think it is the responsibility of everybody,
politicians and people in the community, to say that there are
better ways of protecting society by doing it this way rather
than the conventional way. May I just tell you a small story which
shocked me? A police officer in north London said that he arrested
a young man who had actually attacked an elderly woman and she
was left lying unconscious. He went to this person's home and
the mother was there; she was drugged out, there were dog faeces,
there was a disgusting state. He said to me that if the young
man were sent down, which he almost certainly would be, and he
came back to that sort of life, he would go back to offending.
The local community will know that, they will know these situations
and they can be mobilised and public opinion locally can be mobilised
in order to say there is a different way of doing it and they
will accept this as a different way because they will be better
protected in their communities if they go down this different
path. Not easy; I am not saying that it is a doddle. I am saying
that it is possible and the challenge to those people locally
and nationally is to put it over that way.
Q531 Dr Whitehead: Do either of you
think that there is any mileage in the potential for a political
consensus on criminal justice policy and perhaps the creation,
for example, of an independent commission such as is the case
in Scotland? Does it follow from your suggestion of action which
might be taken, as far as public perception is concerned, that
de-politicisation might be an element?
Lord Dubs: There is all to be
gained by seeking to have consensus both politically and in communities
about what one is trying to do and what the benefits are. That
applies locally and nationally. Whether it can be achieved is
more difficult but it is certainly worth trying because then we
can have a more sensible policy developed. It may be too elusive
as an aim.
Jonathan Aitken: Law and order
issues will always be part of the life of politics and especially
in a possible run-up to an election you are going to get all kinds
of things said which will amount to an auction on policies which
involve toughness. I do agree with what Lord Dubs has been saying
about the possibility of winning some of the arguments at local
level and at community level. I am on the whole sceptical about
great neutral commissions. I know that the sentencing commission
idea is out there in play and it certainly would be good to get
guidance which would stop some of the sentencing drift which has
occurred over recent years. In the end, why should politicians
not argue about these issues? The comparison is between national
political arguments and local community arguments. Perhaps the
comparison might be not unlike the atmosphere at Prime Minister's
Question Time and the atmosphere in a quiet thoughtful select
committee. There is something of a much more constructive element
in the latter or in a community debate about what we should do
about stopping re-offending.
Q532 Dr Whitehead: We have been interested
to some extent in who influences whom. Is it, for example, the
case that perhaps the media portrayal of crime and criminal justice
has a substantial effect on public opinion which then is a pool
from which perhaps political parties draw their concerns and disagreements
about criminal justice policy? Do you think there is need for
understanding better what public opinion is on criminal justice
policy and how it develops, particularly perhaps in terms of different
ways of understanding what the cost of the criminal justice system
to the public purse is and where that cost actually falls and
whether the public actually reacts to those sorts of views of
the system?
Jonathan Aitken: Yes, I do agree
with the thrust of that question. The thoughtful view of what
the public will be interested in is one well worth exploring and
on the whole it has been to a certain extent a neglected argument
by the prison and Ministry of Justice professionals. There are
Gallup polls indicating that it is quite possible to convince
a local community that there is a better way of handling certain
kinds of offender other than just shoving them in prison. The
problem is that people want to know what works. There are indications
that community punishments, tougher, more disciplined, more visible,
might be every bit as acceptable, if not more so, than short prison
sentences provided you manage to take on board as a duty to convince
your local community general public that this is a workable and
sensible and positive action and that victims are involved in
that process too.
Lord Dubs: And one which will
make the local community safer. It is not a matter of saying that
we do not care, we have a view about how to deal with prisoners
and never mind about the local community. It is important to say
that it is the safety of people in the local community; what happens
when people come out of custody or are diverted from custody is
important to their safety and that that has to be pretty well
near the bottom line. One cannot change the newspapers and maybe
attitudes in Britain are harder on this issue than they are in
some other countries where the prison populations are not so large
and where it is not such a well publicised issue. I think we should
make the effort with or without consensus.
Q533 Chairman: Both of you have argued
that at local level much more can be achieved to get a debate
around what works and what makes people safer. Do you think that
at national level you just have to surrender and accept that politicians
will always feel impelled to accuse each other of being soft on
crime, will always feel a necessity to hold to a position which
looks highly punitive even though at the same time they may be
trying to do some other things, as most Home Secretaries have
sought to do, to combine a punitive stance with developing some
other kind of measure? Is it something which real political leadership
could overcome or is it just inevitable?
Lord Dubs: Real political leadership
should make the effort. It might not be successful, but it would
be much better if one had an approach both at a local level and
at a national level and the arguments would actually be similar.
The argument should be that we want our country to be safer, we
want people who have been in custody when they come out to be
less likely to re-offend and we want people to be diverted from
prison because they would be less likely to re-offend. One should
try it nationally as well. I am under no illusion that it is very
difficult and might not work but the reward is so important that
it is worth having a go at it.
Jonathan Aitken: The most interesting
political figures will make their own weather and change the climate
of that weather. That is leadership. There is an inevitable tendency—and
I was in this House for 23 years and was as guilty as anybody—to
get into what I sometimes call the "rent-a-quote" reaction,
particularly on law and order. You are asked to condemn some crime
of violence and rightly you do so but sometimes in language which
is very emotive and very instant. I dread to think, if I were
recording my own parliamentary sins, the times as a young Tory
backbencher I might have said "Lock `em up and throw away
the key" or "Life sentences really must mean life".
I can hear those distant echoes in my head as a repentant memory.
You can convince the public and particularly the local community
public that if you are really interested in what works, what prevents
crime, what makes communities safer, yes, you can win that argument
and one of the reasons you can win the argument is that everyone
knows that the present prison system is failing very badly in
the area of repeat offending.
Q534 Mr Tyrie: You began by talking
about rehabilitation, illustrating what was needed by referring
to the low literacy levels and drug problems in prisons. Do you
think that there is more that could be done to create effective
incentive structures for those working in prisons to improve the
performance of their prisons with respect to indicators such as
those? Might they be financial incentives? Might they be incentives
so people recognised that one prison was more successful than
another prison down the road? Can one find a way of creating a
competition for better practice within the Prison Service for
this sort of thing?
Jonathan Aitken: I am one of the
few ex prisoners who have some quite warm things to say about
the Prison Service. My honest impression is that it is a fundamentally
decent service run by people doing a very difficult job under
impossible conditions very often, or near impossible conditions,
and they do it well and fairly. You have opened up a very interesting
area about how to encourage good practice, good performance inside
the staff of a prison, starting with governors. I do not know
when a governor was last recruited from outside the Prison Service
but a very long time ago. I do not know when staff in prisons
were properly encouraged either financially or by recognition,
honours systems, awards. These are very, very few and far between.
I have an interesting engagement tomorrow to speak to the staff
at Brixton prison and I think they would be very pleased to hear
that a House of Commons committee would even ponder on the idea
of incentives and rewards for prison officers; that is a really
interesting road. I would suggest that one of the ways to go down
that road is by opening it all up a bit. At the moment this is
the most introverted world at both management and staff level.
If you could only get new blood into the Prison Service and get
new practices and management thinking. It is a very stultified
risk-averse system; I do not just mean the risks of anyone escaping,
I mean the risk of taking some sort of innovation and steps and
good practices. It is almost always stifled at the moment. I think
your ideas are well worth developing.
Q535 Chairman: The Committee is intending
to have an inquiry into the work of prison officers and the Prison
Service and what you say is very relevant.
Lord Dubs: I have more limited
experience of this except my first constituency had Wandsworth
prison within it which at that time was an extremely tough establishment
and acknowledged to be so. Over the years I have met some very
enlightened prison governors and some of them are really being
innovative and really trying to make the regime in those prisons
better in the full sense of the word. There is a mood in the Government
and so on that they are trying to get a better type of prison
governor, a more enlightened type of prison governor in place
in prisons all over. One needs more of them and that is a positive
thing.
Chairman: Lord Dubs, Mr Aitken, thank
you both very much indeed for a very interesting session.
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