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Lord Eatwell: My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord will allow me to intervene. We are all aware of the Chancellor's announcement. Can the Minister say how many new Customs officers have actually been placed in post since the Budget?
Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish: My Lords, I do not have the figure to demonstrate how we are progressing with recruitment of the further 70 officers. However, I have explained that over the next year we will be approaching the total of 330 Customs officers. I am sure that the noble Lord approves of that. Obviously he would like more money to be spent on that. During the 12 months ending on 31st October Customs recorded 2,600 seizures involving 57.5 tonnes of hand-rolled tobacco and an increased quantity of alcohol. We take the trade concerns very seriously. Customs has a forum with the trade called the Excise Alliance which develops co-operative approaches to smuggling detection and exchanges high level information on smuggling and fraud.
There is no official estimate of the extent of large-scale commercial fraud. By their nature such activities are very difficult to quantify, as I am sure my noble friend Lord Northesk, who raised this matter, appreciates. We take it very seriously and continue to combat it. This will be aided by additional staff, numbering some 130, who are also to be deployed under the Chancellor's Spend to Save initiative.
My noble friend Lord Lucas of Chilworth raised questions about "serious crime" smuggling, in particular smuggling related to other aspects of criminality. He told us about matters that he had learnt as a UK delegate to the North Atlantic Assembly. It appears that the majority of revenue smugglers are individuals who simply look for enhanced profit from their illegal trade. Sometimes they work in very large rings, but there is little proof that such criminals are connected with organised crime or drug smuggling. In the words of my noble friend, there is little proof that the money earned from alcohol and tobacco smuggling is being used as nursery funding for other types of criminal activity. We continue to watch this matter very carefully.
At operational level Customs officials have a very good working relationship with their counterparts overseas. That co-operation has led to significant numbers of seizures of smuggled excise goods. We should pay tribute to the work that is done by Customs and Excise officers in protecting society by the investigation of drug smuggling and dismantling the trafficking organisations, which is one of the department's highest priorities. They work closely with the police. A terrific spirit of co-operation is engendered
in the Government's strategy Tackling Drugs Together, to which both we and HM Customs and Excise are fully committed. Of course, Customs also gives high priority to the smuggling of commercial pornography, paedophilia, firearms, endangered species and other prohibitions and restrictions. The resources available to Customs must be balanced between front-line anti-smuggling officers, investigation officers and intelligence staff. Their joint efforts achieve significant results. For example, to date in this financial year about £1.5 billion worth of drugs have been prevented from entering the UK. The other day in the Scottish courts individuals were brought to justice for some very serious drug smuggling.To sum up, we recognise the problems of cross-border shopping and the smuggling that we have discussed this evening. We recognise the threat that that poses to UK revenue and to legitimate trade. Consumers are entitled to benefit from the single market but smugglers are not. I assure my noble friends and other noble Lords that we are determined to pursue them with the utmost vigour and will continue to fight our corner with our friends in the Community. In making his Budget decisions, the Chancellor will balance a whole range of factors. One of those factors will be, as in the past, cross-border shopping, the smuggling of goods and the impact that that has on legitimate trade in this country.
This has been a most interesting debate. Again, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Northesk on introducing it.
Crime (Sentences) Bill
Clause 43 [Power to make hospital and limitation directions]:
Lord Dubs moved Amendment No. 106:
The noble Lord said: I move the amendment tabled in my name and that of the noble Lords, Lord Hacking and Lord Alderdice. The noble Lord, Lord Hacking, has informed me that he is unfortunately unable to be here as he has had to go aborad. He very much regrets being unable to move the amendment. I shall speak also to Amendment No. 108.
At the outset, I should perhaps declare an interest in that I am a non-executive director of an NHS mental health trust in South West London called Pathfinder. That trust has a medium secure unit as part of its provision.
In Clause 43 we are dealing with what has been called the hybrid order; namely, the power of courts to impose a combined hospital and prison sentence. It is that which has given rise to a certain amount of concern. A working group on psychopathic disorder chaired by Dr. John Reid was established by the Department of Health and the Home Office. It reached certain conclusions. It recommended a type of hybrid order. What is now being
Let us take the case of a mentally disordered offender who has committed an offence, who is then given such a hybrid order. He might spend the first three years of an eight-year prison sentence in a secure unit. During that time he or she would receive the benefit of medical treatment. Let us suppose that at the end of those three years that individual is better. Under the Bill, that individual will then have to go to goal and serve the remaining seven years of a 10-year sentence. It is that removal from a secure unit where an individual has had treatment back to prison, or perhaps to prison for the first time, which is the cause of concern.
Let me summarise the concerns. There will be difficulty in establishing continuity of care. A hospital can establish a regime of care continuity. That could hardly survive transition to a prison--at least, not in the same way. Many doctors would be unhappy about transferring an individual back to prison, because prison is not conducive to mental health. Indeed, a person who has got better in a secure unit might well suffer a relapse through being put back into prison.
A further consideration relates to conditions on release and post-discharge supervision. Arrangements provided by a hospital are normally different from those provided by a prison. There are certain complications, particularly as an individual might be in a prison further away from his or her home than the hospital is. There is also the difficulty of a prison a long way away providing supervision and help on discharge, because of the geography. The hospital could do that better, because the hospital is more likely--not inevitably--to be located not so far away from the individual's home.
Another concern is that as a result of all that, clinicians might well feel that it is so inappropriate to return such an individual to prison that they might keep him or her in hospital longer than was clinically necessary. They would do so from the best of motives: to protect the public and in the interests of the patient's well being, because they might be worried about the possible consequences of sending that person to prison, which it would be in their power to do. If they felt the treatment was over, there would be no choice but to send that individual back to prison.
Indeterminate restriction orders under the Mental Health Act 1983 might result in some of those individuals being held longer than they would be under the determinate sentence provisions of the Bill. So, if we are talking about protecting the public, it does not necessarily mean that the public would be better protected; it just means that the individual might well have a relapse in prison, and would then be released with less adequate supervision than there might be.
The difficulty with the way the Bill is drafted is plain. I think I have explained the difficulties, but so much concern has been expressed by the Law Society, the Royal College, and other organisations working in this field, that it is only right to take their concerns seriously. What the amendments would effectively do would be to give an element of discretion to the doctors in such a
Lord Alderdice: I shall speak to these two amendments and refer also to Amendment No. 107 which is involved in this whole matter. First, I declare a possible interest as medical director of a health and social services trust in Northern Ireland which has mental health facilities although at this stage not a secure unit.
My noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford, on Second Reading, at which I was unable to be present, referred to the difficulties that might arise. He observed that the clause would leave a psychiatrist in the position of a gaoler who determines at what point his patient, who may have been cured of the illness from which he suffered, is sent to prison. The relationship between the doctor and the patient is at the heart of the problem. It may be worthwhile for us to reflect upon the history and background of the notion of the hybrid order.
In 1994 the Reid Committee made the suggestion because of the dilemma in which psychiatrists found themselves in relation to psychopathic personality disorder and offences. The dilemma was that it is not easy to know how far one can modify, change, help, mature, or develop, the personality of someone with such a demeanour. It is difficult in the generality of things. It is exceedingly difficult with any particular individual. So psychiatrists found themselves in the difficulty that if they took on a particular psychopathic personality disordered offender they would be stuck with working with him for a long period of time, although perhaps discovering after six or nine months that they could not modify that person's behaviour: he was not prepared to co-operate; the mechanisms which were to hand were not sufficiently strong, or for whatever.
That led to a dilemma for psychiatrists. If they were to take such psychopathic personality disordered offenders into their care, they might find that they would have someone with them for a long time whose behaviour and personality they could not modify. The bed would then be blocked. They would then be unable to take into their care someone who might well be able to benefit from it. So the suggestion was made at that stage that if there could be some mechanism whereby a patient could be taken on for a period of time, almost, as it were, for assessment to see whether it were possible to do something about him, and, if it were possible, they could continue to work; and if it were impossible, for whatever reason, the person could be returned to serve out the rest of his or her prison sentence.
Two things have happened with regard to the notion of a possible hybrid order. First, it has been suggested that, when the patient is taken by the psychiatrist and some modification has been engineered in his personality, he should subsequently go back to prison.
In extending the notion from the Reid Committee, the first dilemma is that, instead of the psychiatrist working to enable the person to return to the community, he will be committed to putting the person back into prison, where his work will be taken to pieces and the person will deteriorate in the interests of no one. The second dilemma is that the Reid Committee at no time considered that this subject should be expanded to include the whole remit of mental illness.
There are fundamental differences between psychopathic personality disorders and mental illnesses. Clearly, that is not very well understood. That is evidenced by the reply of the Under-Secretary, Mr. Sackville, when the matter was considered in another place. The rationale that he gave--indeed, it was the only example that he gave--was based on a drug trafficker who would normally receive a sentence of, say, 10 years, who was at the time of sentencing suffering from schizophrenia. He suggested that schizophrenia was merely a temporary disorder and that when the person was cured he would return to drug trafficking. That showed little understanding of the mechanisms of schizophrenic disorders or their relationship to drug trafficking.
Schizophrenia is not a single but a whole group of disorders and it is clear that those who suffer from it are not well ordered drug traffickers involved in a criminal conspiracy. They are generally vulnerable people whose life is in a complete shambles. The fact that such an example was given, and that it was the only example given, shows a manifest lack of understanding of the mental illness from which many such people suffer. Such a person would not be a drug trafficker in the sense in which the expression is being applied in the Bill. The kind of disorder from which someone suffers in a schizophrenic disorder is a chronic debilitating disorder from which he is not likely to recover and for which he is likely to need continued care. He will not operate in an organised fashion as a drug trafficker.
To save the Committee's time, I have responded to Amendments Nos. 106 and 108 and also to No. 107--the proposition of the noble Lord, Lord Mottistone, that the notion of other mental illnesses should be
Page 30, line 25, leave out ("is likely to") and insert ("may").
8.15 p.m.
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