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It is clear to all of us that within the broad-based concept of liberal intervention is a subset called humanitarian intervention, where, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, indicated, there is a tighter, clearer definition of rules, terms and rationales for intervention. It is around that subset that I express the Government’s support for the approach taken today by my noble friend Lord Soley. It was that subset which the Prime Minister had in mind when he talked about hard-headed internationalism, and which the former Prime Minister, Mr Blair, had in mind when, in that important Chicago speech, which has been mentioned today, he set out criteria.

There are, of course, long historical antecedents on intervention from Gladstone to Palmerston and Don Pacifico, as was suggested. However, this concept of humanitarian intervention is at its core moving towards a doctrine which is not just an optional one of conscience at the one end or national interest at the other motivating us to intervene, but instead involves a set of criteria in a globalised world where these are not interventions of choice but interventions of necessity, either because of the internal threat posed by mass crimes against humanity to the citizens of the state in which we are considering intervening, or because of an external threat that that state poses to its neighbours and to the world, as Afghanistan did when it harboured Al-Qaeda in 2001.

As regards the internal threat, a lot of work has been done to develop the doctrine of the responsibility to protect, and to intervene where a Government themselves have become the source of mass human rights abuses of their people, or at least are failing to protect their people against that. But that intervention, which is humanitarian in character,

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is very specifically motivated by the protection of people rather than by the claim of regime change. This is an enormously important distinction that has been brought out today. We are moving towards a world where we understand that there are circumstances involving external or internal threat to people which merit intervention. Mr Blair’s conditions have been reviewed very well today. Therefore, I offer a slightly separate but overlapping set of criteria against which one might want to assess such interventions: first, that they are rule-based; secondly, that we are willing to sustain them over many decades; thirdly, that they are adequately burden-shared with others to allow us to sustain them; and, fourthly—this is what I think Mr Blair had in mind—that they are doable and achievable and that we will not end doing more harm than good and causing more loss of life.

I should say a word on each of those. First, obviously the most straightforward rule-based approach is where there is an unequivocal resolution of the UN Security Council to endorse an intervention, but we are all aware that sometimes life is not so simple. The case of Kosovo was raised. I believe that in a Written Answer of 1998, the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, said that a limited use of force was justifiable in support of purposes laid down by the Security Council, but without the council’s express authorisation, when that was the only means to avert an immediate and overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe. Such cases would in the nature of things be exceptional and would depend on an objective assessment of the factual circumstances at the time and on the terms of relevant decisions of the Security Council bearing on the situation in question. The argument can be made that Kosovo met those conditions. The intervention, which averted a dramatic loss of life, was followed by a Security Council resolution that endorsed the subsequent military and political arrangements that were put in place.

The second criterion is that any intervention must be sustained. A number of senior British officials have, over recent months, talked of periods of up to 30 years to establish a successful, democratic, freestanding, prosperous and effective state in Afghanistan. Sometimes those statements are a little misunderstood as meaning an open-ended military commitment by the UK for that period—which is not what is meant by that and I devoutly hope is not what occurs. Nevertheless, a role in training and a deep role in development and reconstruction support, at a significant cost to the United Kingdom and others, is likely to be the consequence of our intervention in 2001. While I argue that it is utterly justified by the circumstances that led us to make that intervention, perhaps politicians need to be clearer with each other and with electorates about the fact that these commitments and interventions are rarely short, clean and quickly over in the way that is sometimes implied at the start.

Thirdly, any intervention must be burden-shared. That brings us back to the United Nations and to the importance of trying to do it within a broad and, if possible, universal international coalition. It means that the human and financial costs are shared, and that it is easier to sustain the political will because we

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are all in it together. Fourthly, any intervention must be doable. Sierra Leone was doable. Kosovo was doable. We are going to make sure that Afghanistan is doable. But we are always tempted by that bridge too far to take on operations of such complexity and scale that they do not enjoy the confidence of the military that we ask to take on the task, let alone of public opinion.

In that, I argue that, as has been said today, Darfur posed a situation where the prospect of direct intervention to end the terrible killings that were going on in that region was properly resisted by British and other western politicians. It ultimately was not doable. The prospect of putting a British expeditionary force, with perhaps American and other European allies, into a landlocked region of Sudan the size of France with no obvious logistics and support systems available, against the overt hostility and military opposition of the Government in Khartoum, was not a plausible route to pursue, despite the dreadful things that were happening in Darfur. Instead, we were required to go through the painstakingly difficult, preposterously extended and still not ultimately successful effort to build an international coalition and to secure the support of China for more effective sanctions and pressure on the Government. We continue with that. The killing, fortunately, has gone down to a much lower level. We cannot pretend that we are not tempted. How much more difficult this is than the easier pulling the trigger on an intervention might have seemed; but ultimately we will conclude that, for all its difficulties, this is the correct way to proceed.

That brings us to the great gap between soft and hard power. At the hard power end, when it is doable and meets that test, it has all the clarity and cleanness of going in, sorting out the situation and changing the situation on the ground in a dramatic way. Soft power is just that; often just too pliable, too soft, too putty-like in its ability to change the behaviours of Governments in their international relations and in how they behave towards their own people. We will hear increasingly from both sides of the House the discussion about how we develop something between soft and hard power. What range of instruments is available to us which, through international coalitions and having the will of the international community behind us, allows us to pressure Governments more effectively to moderate and change how they behave?

When we make an intervention because we believe that we have answered correctly the questions that we have posed ourselves—even there we move first from the pre-emptive phase where we want to apply soft power or harder forms of it to make an intervention unnecessary—we move to the next phase, which is peacekeeping. The need to strengthen UN and AU peacekeeping capabilities to give them the means to act effectively is an enormous challenge for all of us. Sierra Leone has been mentioned as a success. We should remember the circumstances under which that British intervention took place. The UN force there had not been sufficiently strongly armed to do the job. It had essentially been routed at the time the UK deployed. The UK was brilliantly able to restore order and allow a strengthened UN force to take over again.

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In East Timor, an Australian expeditionary force under a UN mandate initially established order before UN peacekeepers could take over. UN peacekeepers are lightly armed and are usually unable to undertake much offensive action.

Even when they do take over in the next phase, we are seeing the difficulties of mobilising a force for Darfur and the difficulties of even beginning to plan a force for Somalia. We have huge challenges of training, equipment, cost, mobility, and shaping the kinds of forces that these operations need. At one end, they need highly mobile forces that are able to undertake offensive activity if necessary and, at the other end, given that these wars are in countries’ population centres, there is the need for police capabilities, normally of an armed Carabinieri kind, which can keep peace in refugee camps and can keep ethnic groups from each other’s throats. Those are skills that often soldiers do not have but police forces do. As we work our way through the mechanics of intervention, we can see that there are a lot of capabilities and issues that we have not adequately addressed if we are to do this on an international basis.

Thinking about moving beyond the intervention, I will quote from the Prime Minister’s speech earlier this week, in which he argued that it is not just a matter of military intervention and peacekeeping but whether afterwards we have sufficient commitment to and vision of a recovery and reconstruction effort, and whether we have sorted out how the UN can be the fulcrum of an international effort to engage in that. He said:

So we have our work cut out for us if we are to go beyond the doctrinal conditions for intervention to creating the means, institutions and processes to deliver on stabilisation and nation-building, where we need to do it.

Finally, I look forward to the debate next week on our Armed Forces. I suspect that we will discuss a situation where there is a great fear that too much is being asked of our Armed Forces and that our investment in them and the support we are giving them are insufficient to the growing challenges we are putting their way. I suspect we will hear some voices say that we should, therefore, retrench and pull back from the activities we ask our Armed Forces to undertake. I suspect that from some of those same voices we will hear a caution about nation-building,

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the long commitment that that takes and the implicit romanticism of the idea that you can stand up other people’s nations for them.

Against that, as we grapple with a global society where other people’s problems are our own problems, where terrorists can find sanctuary in Afghanistan, where illegal migration from failing and failed societies can cause huge difficulties, where failed societies harbour not just poverty but breakdowns of public health and other issues that impact on all of us, from these Benches you will hear the argument that humanitarian intervention with clear rules built around an internationalised effort to achieve the goals that we mutually set ourselves will become more, not less, important as we seek to build a world of justice and opportunity for all and, equally, a world where those of us living in rich societies believe that our Governments, our Armed Forces and the institutions we have created, such as the UN, work not just to help the world’s poor and those living in weak countries, but to offer protection for a 21st-century global society where no problems can be kept out any more by old-fashioned borders alone.

2.32 pm

Lord Soley: My Lords, I am grateful to everyone who has taken part in this debate and particularly to my noble friend the Minister for his thoughtful comments. If, as a by-product of this, I have enabled him to withdraw temporarily from the brutal interface between politics and the media, I am glad that I have provided that service to him. Maybe I should organise a debate involving the noble Lord, Admiral Lord West of Spithead, and I might be able to offer help to all those who have not had training in the brutal area of politics that people such as me have had for many years. In particular, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bew, for his kind remarks. Not everyone refers to my—I am not sure of the right word—activities in Northern Ireland. However, he did that in a generous way, although it has not always drawn that much attention.

This debate has to continue; it is very important. I deliberately did not come up with conclusions, because at this stage it is far too early for them. We know the road on which we are setting out. That point was made by a number of noble Lords today and by the Prime Minister, by Tony Blair and by the Foreign Secretary in his speech in Bruges. The debate will continue, it must continue and it is so important. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Prisoners: Work

2.33 pm

Lord Dubs asked Her Majesty’s Government what is their policy on work opportunities for prisoners.

The noble Lord said: My Lords, I am delighted to have the opportunity to open this debate on work opportunities in our prisons. We have a prison population that is too large and I do not believe that the British people are more criminally inclined or less moral in

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their standards than people in other European countries; but that is not what this debate is about. Every prisoner will eventually come out. How we treat them in prison must affect how they will behave on release. I want to focus on the 30,000 or so long-term prisoners serving sentences of four years or more—some of them life sentences and some on indeterminate sentences.

In some prisons I have seen prisoners doing nothing for almost 24 hours a day, lying on their bunks, frustrated and resentful in a way that is not conducive to avoiding their reoffending when they come out. Training and education in prisons are good. I was talking recently to someone involved in a training and employment programme led by the National Grid. It is excellent work, but it is for prisoners who are shortly to be released. I am concerned about those who are not—those who have a long period in prison, who will come out in the end—and how we can better handle them. There is a better way forward than what we are doing.

There is a difference between badly paid work that is only an obvious way of keeping people doing something and proper work that gives those doing it a sense of self-respect and worth. Nothing I say is intended to be a criticism of prison officers who do a good job in difficult conditions, but there are serious problems in the present system. The pay of £10 to £15 a week is low; there is little incentive to work and, after all, prisoners may say when they get out that crime pays better. Low pay means no experience of paying tax, national insurance, budgeting or supporting their families. Most prisoners have had little or no experience of real work and there tends to be a “cash in hand” culture in some of their backgrounds, and although they are not actually given cash in hand in prison, it happens in effect—and that can hardly discourage the illegal economy in the country.

Some prisons have public-private partnerships with private companies supplying equipment and effectively using prisons as cheap labour for menial tasks. That, again, does not add to prisoners’ self-respect. What are prison workshops for? Are they to enhance future employability or just to keep prisoners occupied when they are out of their cells?

The Prison Service sometimes subcontracts with outside employers, but the prisoners are employed by the service and have no real relationship with the business and do not feel responsibility or commitment. There is not a normal employer-employee relationship. The prisoners do not have any experience of competitive work. After all, people outside work in competitive situations. It would be better if work in prisons reflected the real workplace experience outside. Real work is surely about an involvement with the job and the employer, social status at work, career progression and workplace development.

In contrast, work in prisons is often desultory, with curtailed hours and interruptions regarding security or the regime. Unlike outside, work in prisons often involves poor-quality machinery. The productivity can be affected by interruptions and prisoners are uninvolved in the development of the products that they produce or in creative inputs to their work.



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As I have said, the subject of this debate is the work opportunities for the 30,000 or so long-term prisoners. They cost the taxpayer £120,000 each for a four-year sentence. All too often such persons remain unemployed for the rest of their lives after they are released. They are supported by taxpayers, they probably have no pension—and what about support for their families?

We want a leap of imagination as regards work in prison. We need to change the culture. I am not for one moment arguing that prisons should be privatised. That is nothing to do with what I am saying. What I am saying is that prisoners should be directly employed by social enterprises and business, not by the Prison Service. If that were to happen, the taxpayer would benefit, there would be increased revenue, national insurance would be paid, prisoners would have a decent income, victims would benefit from charitable donations out of prisoners’ earnings, the prisons would benefit from productive prisoners who were purposefully employed and easier to manage, and the prisons would have additional income. Importantly, the families of prisoners would benefit—a source of income would come from the prison to the families and that would help in better relationships, financial support and self-respect. Proper work with income would provide an opportunity for savings and contributing to pensions. Prisoners employed in this way would work under trade union conditions, so there would be no argument about whether work in prisons denied work to people outside.

In the recent past I have visited Coldingley Prison, where there is a social enterprise project of the sort that I have described called Barbed. It is a graphic design studio run by the Howard League for Penal Reform and it is a model for what could be done. The people involved in it are all long-term prisoners. One said to me that coming to this enterprise unit was, “The best thing that’s happened to me in prison”. That is quite a big statement. I sat watching a group of about six prisoners, and noble Lords should bear in mind that these are long-term prisoners. They had computers and were preparing a pitch for a job in the competitive world. They discussed how, as a team, they would pitch for the job and allocate the tasks among the different prisoners in the group. For all the world, one might have been in a design studio somewhere in London: the atmosphere was the same, yet these people were in prison for a long time.

The Howard League treats those prisoners as employees. They pay tax and national insurance and they have a pension plan in the same way as other Howard League staff. The studio is absolutely a proper business. I have had my business cards designed there and, indeed, if any of your Lordships have any printing requirements, I should like to channel them in that direction so that the group can put in a competitive bid. It is a proper business and there is no do-good element. The prisoners each make a voluntary contribution to Victim Support. I believe that this should be seen as a pilot or model to be followed by other employers. The way forward is clear

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and I cannot see any argument against it, although there are one or two difficulties that I should like to mention in closing.

I understand that the Prison Service will not allow real businesses to employ prisoners because, it says, employment law might interfere with the right of governors to govern. Perhaps I may repeat that so that there is no misunderstanding: it is alleged that employment law might interfere with the right of governors to govern. If that is the case, surely we are caught in a dilemma which should not exist. If we are trying to run our prisons in the best way possible to protect and benefit society, surely prisoners should have real jobs and the argument about employment law should be overcome.

I give another example. Apparently, Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs will not take income tax from prisoners because, it says, they are not employees. We can all dance on the head of a pin but I wish that some officials would stop doing so. It seems to me a very clear proposition: let us see how we can get into our prisons social enterprises that will employ long-term prisoners directly, give them the sort of income that they would get outside, minus certain allowances, and make their pay pensionable, with national insurance contributions, and enable the prisoners to support their families. Surely, as regards long-term prisoners, that is the best way to run our prison system. To get there, we need only an act of political will and a leap of imagination. My noble friend who will be responding to the debate is not short of political will or leaps of imagination. I wait to hear what he has to say.

2.43 pm

Lord Ramsbotham: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, on obtaining this debate and particularly on highlighting one of the many problems faced by prisons, which I believe would benefit from the leap in the dark that he indicated—a more visionary and forward-looking approach. I support the case that he has made and I welcome his description of the work at Coldingley.

I also welcome the involvement of the Howard League for Penal Reform, which, for several years, has taken a strong line on this issue, particularly marked by a document that it published in 2000 called Rehabilitating Work: What are prison workshops for?. It contains a number of recommendations which are as valid now as they were then. In line with what the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, said, it is interesting that the introduction to this document starts with a 1990 quotation from the Scottish Prison Service:

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