Orders of the Day — Criminal Justice Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 22 November 1971.

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Photo of Mr James Callaghan Mr James Callaghan Shadow Secretary of State, Shadow Secretary of State, Member, Labour Party National Executive Committee, Treasurer, Labour Party, Shadow Home Secretary, Shadow Secretary of State for Employment 12:00, 22 November 1971

I suggest that the hon. and learned Gentleman does it when he winds up. He will find that the record for recruitment to the police service happened during the lifetime of the Labour Government when there was an increase in the force of well over 4,000. There has never been such an increase since.

We see how quickly the Tory reverts to type. The Bill bears no relation to anything that the Conservatives said in opposition. To be fair, the Under-Secretary of State did not say it—he was a member of the Wootton Committee—but his leader, the Lord Chancellor, the Prime Minister and the Attorney-General said it in an endeavour to see if they could get a cheap harvest of votes from it.

There is nothing in the Bill with which anybody can quarrel. There will be no Division on it. If I had been at the Home Office, I should probably have introduced something very like it myself. It is unlikely to cause divisions on a party basis, despite the great propaganda campaign, although I suppose that there will be scope for differences of opinion in Committee, probably across the Floor, so to speak, as between members of parties. The Bill has aroused no excitement, very little interest and hardly any comment. I make it clear that I welcome many of its provisions. They can be of value in the punishment and treatment of the offender.

Clauses 14 to 18 dealing with community service are as potentially valuable as anything in the Bill. Certainly I would have wanted to introduce something like them, however unrelated they are to what Conservatives were saying before the election. They propose a new type of non-custodial penalty. It is a very ambitious and worthy idea that those who have done damage to the community should expiate their offence by giving some part-time service to the community. As the Widgery Report said when referring to financial reparation, the simple principle of redress was once the very cornerstone of English criminal law. I see every reason why we should go back to it in this instance.

But the same principle can be used in respect of service to the community. Such service can, as the Home Secretary said, take the form of constructional enterprises for the benefit of the community as a whole without regard to individual reparation—such as cleaning beaches, restoring canals and helping in hospital kitchens—or of acts of personal service to individuals—for example, decorating the homes of elderly people. I agree that there is a very strong case for this sort of provision and I hope that it will be implemented. However, I hope that the people concerned will not just be involved in what might be regarded as menial tasks. One of the most important aspects will be, not just the task offenders are engaged in and not even the social value, but the contact it will enable them to have with people who are not offenders. This is especially true of the young offender who has not become hardened in crime; it can help to link him with the community as a whole.

I accept the general conclusion of the Wootton Report, namely, that it is necessary to link projects with voluntary organisations, that offenders and non-offenders should work together and that offenders should be overseen by the probation and aftercare service. This new type of penalty cannot be a soft option. It will be a great misfortune if such a worthy idea as this is launched in a half-baked way, and that is why the proposal for an experiment is sensible. But I do not know, and the Home Secretary did not tell us, the way in which this work will be co-ordinated. We may well need a special agency to bring together the work of the voluntary organisations, to ensure the proper oversight of the work done by the offender, to ensure that there is a proper flow of work projects, and to see by close links with the local trade union branches, that the interests of paid labour are not prejudiced.

All those things will be important, and I am not sure that the probation service can carry out the kind of co-ordinating and supervising work which is necessary, although we should by all means use it and, through it, the voluntary organisations. It would be a tragedy if the scheme were to fail as it is one of the exciting new and imaginative ventures to emerge from the Wootton Report. It would be very unfortunate if there were a spate of Press publicity in two or three years saying, "These people are not doing their job. They are wasting time. They have not been employed on worthwhile projects." If this scheme is to be an alternative to prison—and it would be wonderful if it were successful—I ask the Home Secretary to take close oversight of it and to concern himself personally with the nature of the organisation set up to run it. It will be as important as the prison service in some ways.

I am dubious about the provision to the effect that 50 per cent. of the costs of the scheme will be borne by local authorities. In a scheme of this sort, which clearly will save the State a lot of money, it is asking too much to expect local authorities to bear 50 per cent. of the cost, especially if they are dealing with people who are not local residents. I should have thought that 75 per cent. was the sort of figure that we should offer in a case like this. I would not boggle at the thought of the State carying almost the whole of the cost. I hope that the Home Secretary will look at this matter again.

The Home Secretary is right to propose an entirely new form of order as opposed to the proposal in the Wootton Report for giving magistrates the dual opportunity of either imposing a new order or extending an existing order. I agree with the Bill and I am against what is said in the Wootton Report. As this is a new system and it concerns an important matter, it should be treated as such.

I am glad that the Home Secretary had something to say about the probation service. I yield to no one in my admiration of it. However, I should like to feel that it is as closely integrated as possible with the rest of the services dealing with the treatment of offenders. At a time when the prison service is slowly lifting itself out of the rôle of simply locking people up and then unlocking the doors and adopting a new attitude, it would be a great misfortune if it were to feel that a new and imaginative task was to be given to the probation service and it was to be responsible for carrying out the other and less rewarding tasks. It would create a division between the two.

I recognise the reasons which led the Wootton Committee to turn down the idea of the prison service handling this, but I should like to see us develop over a period of years a situation in which the prison service and probation service grow closer together. I know that this suggestion may cause some controversy—but then, why not? I should like to see the two services grow closer together instead of being further and further apart. They have been moving in that direction; some members of the probation service have been working inside prisons. I welcome that. Anything which could bring the two services closer together so that the treatment of an offender is regarded as one from the moment of conviction to the moment of his finishing with the law in any capacity would, I believe, be of benefit both to the services and to the offender.

The probation service, if it is to have these tasks thrown on it, must be treated with generosity, and I was glad to hear what the Home Secretary said. The whole essence of the Bill in practice will mean allocation of sufficient resources to enable the job to be done.

We welcome the fact that the Bill gives some recognition to the victim of crime. That is in the proposals for compensation in Clauses 1 to 9. This principle that the victim of crime is recognised will be widely accepted. The Howard League for Penal Reform and N.A.C.R.O., the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, say: It is simple justice that offenders should not benefit from the proceedings of their crimes. My doubts are not about the principle but the practicability of it. I shall not trouble the House with it now, but this will be developed in Committee. As regards the provisions for bankruptcy orders, this will be largely window dressing, I am afraid. I doubt very much whether there will be much in this matter of criminal bankruptcy, or that it will have more than a cosmetic effect.

On the question of the firearms provisions, I have a feeling that this is what I would call a cosmetic provision, that the maximum sentence for the use of firearms is increased. During the lifetime of the Labour Government the maximum was increased for certain offences to 14 years. I should be interested to know whether the Under-Secretary could tell us how many sentences of 14 years have been passed since that provision was introduced. I think there have been very few. I doubt whether the proposal to change 14 years' imprisonment to a life sentence will make very much difference, and, frankly, this is what I would call a cosmetic proposal rather than one which will be of real significance in the fight we are conducting in this matter.

As regards suspended sentence, dissatisfaction with that has been growing. I think the Bill is moving in the right direction. I was interested in the figures in page 5 of the Wootton Report, which points out that after the introduction of suspended sentences the number of people who were given fines dropped rapidly. In other words, in 1967 those fines amounted to 21 per cent. of the whole of those convicted of indictable offences; in 1968 they were 13 per cent.; and in 1969, 13 per cent. A reasonable deduction from this, though no one can prove it, is that the courts have used the suspended sentence not only to scale down prison sentences but also to scale up fines, as it were, and, as it were, have said, "If it is a choice of imposing a fine or a suspended sentence we will impose a suspended sentence." They have upgraded the penalty, in my view, against the intentions of Parliament, because that was not the intention when the suspended sentence was introduced. Though nobody can prove this, it seems likely from this drastic fall in the number of fines imposed. I agree entirely that in the future this should be optional instead of obligatory. We shall have to watch and see the result. In 1967 nobody could foretell what was likely to arise. Did the right hon. and learned Gentleman? We must give him full credit if that is the case.