Criminal Justice and Police Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 8:43 pm on 2 April 2001.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Lord Elton Lord Elton Conservative 8:43, 2 April 2001

My Lords, it was in 1984 that I took through your Lordships' House the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill, or PACE. It was quite an interesting experience because a general election had been called--how things change!--halfway through the procedure for that Bill in the previous Parliament. When that Bill fell, your Lordships had gone through virtually the whole process of the legislation. So I took it through the House for a second time on what one would have thought was common ground, yet a host of amendments were tabled. At the end of the Bill's passage, I believed that we had a landmark piece of legislation and that at last we had put everything to bed: the system was there; it would work; and criminals would be detected, arrested and put into smoothly-functioning prisons where they would be reformed before they were turned out again. I did not feel quite so confident about the prisons because I was the Minister in charge of them and I knew that they were not achieving that aim.

However, I should not have been so green about the other aspects of the effects of that Bill, because my previous position had been a short-term appointment in what was then the Department of Health and Social Security. During that time I was introduced to a particular form of intermediate treatment called the "Norfolk trail", and discovered that the rate of re-offending for children who had been through that process was between 16 per cent and 20 per cent lower than the rate for those who were sent for custodial treatment. That started me off on a trail that I followed enthusiastically when I left government. However, I did not leave your Lordships' House. I found that we were on a sort of "legislative treadmill"; indeed, one got to recognise the spokes as they came round. We have had main programme legislation on criminal justice themes on 26 occasions in this House since PACE went through. There has been no dramatic improvement in offending rates, or in rehabilitation since that time.

I am speaking here tonight in recognition of the fact that this is a rag-tag of a Bill. I cannot make a coherent speech, but one can do very effectively what my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding did about a piece of it. I should like to sign up to every word that he uttered on the subject of the animal rights business. I have been encouraged in the theme that I seek to address because we are at the end of this Parliament, and we have a different view of the Government from what we had at the beginning. As a result of my experience at the Department of Health and seeing the "Norfolk trail", as well as further investigations, I invested much of my time and enthusiasm in, first, chairing the Intermediate Treatment Fund and then, out of its ashes when it was demolished by my right honourable friend, Virginia Bottomley, at the department, I chaired the DIVERT Trust, which was aimed at giving children what the noble Lord, Lord McNally, called "hope"--in other words, some hope in life.

I do not believe that we have achieved that aim. However, I should like to commend what the Government have achieved in the way of setting up the youth offending teams and securing a genuine form of co-operation across different services that, in my day, were more accustomed to bickering than co-operating. That is a welcome move. But what made the defeat of my parliamentary House of Commons colleagues in 1997 a little more bearable than it otherwise would have been was the enthusiasm with which Mr Jack Straw and his colleagues in another place supported the complaints made by myself and my noble friends here against the developing Conservative policy of those days of locking up an increasing number of young people, and giving the voluntary agencies a diminishing amount of core funding to enable them to provide the hope that such youngsters were not getting from the state system.

The fact that they had been so vociferous and effective in resisting such measures--for example, the institution of secure training centres in the last years of the previous Parliament--made many of us feel that a little benefit might be derived from the change of party in power. The first indication that that was not going to happen was the confirmation of the contracts for the building of all the secure training centres, followed by the continued diminution of the paying of core funding to the voluntary agencies.

I am on my feet this evening because I wish to remind your Lordships now--as, indeed, I did at the end of the previous Parliament and at the beginning of this one--that children starved of love will not grow up into whole and effective citizens, unless something is done to replace it. Children brought up without hope will turn vicious. There are two clauses only in the Bill that deal with young people. However, all old lags have been young lags previously. One of the disturbing findings of the report in 1994 of the Audit Commission entitled Misspent Youth, which was a seminal paper and one that I commend to your Lordships still, was that young people were not growing out of crime at the rate that they formerly were. If we do not get the young people before they become criminals, it will become impossibly difficult to control them when they are criminals.

In 1996, the audit office reported that only 3 per cent of all the crime by young offenders ever resulted in arrest. I set that against the moving and well informed speech of the noble Earl, Lord Rosslyn, from the Cross Benches. An enormous amount of police effort and other effort is deployed to catch 3 per cent of the people responsible for crime. Of those 3 per cent, 1.8 per cent were cautioned and 1.3 per cent were charged and summonsed. Of that 1.3 per cent, no fewer than a quarter of the cases were discontinued or dismissed.

We are spending over £1,000 million a year on that effort and it is producing a ridiculously small result. Yet we think that by heaping statute upon statute upon statute upon statute we shall resolve the problem. We shall not. We shall not catch them. We shall catch only 3 per cent of them. We shall not reform those whom we catch. We shall reform perhaps 10 per cent. We must get to them first. It is not very cheerful for me to say to your Lordships, "In large part I think that you are wasting your time", but, in comparison with what we might be doing, we are.

If only these vast resources and these skilled and trained people were devoted to finding children destitute of love, who have been taught in schools with no proper discipline. Children rebel in order to discover where the parameters of proper behaviour lie. If they are not stopped when they reach them, they will go further. Proper discipline in a school is vital. If they do not feel that they have the respect of their contemporaries, they will seek to achieve it. If there are no legitimate ways to achieve it because the resources are not available to enable them to do so through sport, music or public works, they will do so through crime. Having been defined as someone's brother or sister--some known person--he or she will suddenly become the hard man who has been caught by the police, or better still the clever guy who got away with it. There will be more of them.

I shall not delay the House longer except to say that I feel passionately that if whoever sits behind the Green Box on the other side of the Chamber after the next election does not seize the point that we have to get to people before they go wrong rather than remedy them afterwards, your Lordships will waste another Parliament and further damage will be done to our society.