Police and Justice Bill

moved Amendment No. 87: Page 25, leave out line 6 and insert ““and Community Safety”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, in Committee I agreed to withdraw the amendment, encouraged by the Minister who said that during the summer the Government would look in more detail at the proposals of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and that she hoped and expected to table government amendments on Report to address the concerns that had been raised. She also said that, like the Chief Inspector of Prisons, the new chief inspector, not Ministers, would continue to be able to set the criteria for inspections and gave assurance that prison inspection would be based on domestic and human rights standards rather than on service standards or government targets. I was disappointed, first, that the Minister could not meet me during the Recess to discuss the amendments and, secondly, that the government amendments have not satisfied either the proposals of the Joint Committee or the concerns that were expressed or spelt out, and in particular that the Minister’s undertakings are not included in them. Only two of the six guarantees of the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, required by the Joint Committee have been satisfied. Government Amendment No. 93 covers the fact that inspections must be based on visits and government Amendment No. 97 covers unannounced inspections, but none of the characteristics of independent inspection of prisons of the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, has been satisfied; in other words, what I always regarded as the particular strengths of the position of the independent Chief Inspector of Prisons—namely, that you had the right to go anywhere unannounced and the right to set your own criteria, that there would be no reduction in a programme of regular inspections and that you reported directly to the Home Secretary and the public. Those strengths are to be diminished. I have explained before to this House that the inspection of the treatment of and conditions for prisoners is not about value for money. By the same token the inspection of prisons is not the same as the inspection of the management of individual offenders. It is the inspection of a community that is a prison and whether the various parts of it are fit for purpose. The prison and probation inspectorates are currently looking at how this might be done in the same spirit in which the inspectorates have worked together since 1996 on subjects that involve more than two of them. In the case of prisons, this includes health, education, drugs treatment and many other subjects not covered by any of the inspectorates that are subject to this proposal. The new criminal justice inspectorate in Northern Ireland already provides a precedent for what I am saying, leaving prisons out of that merger and contracting the inspection of the prisons in Northern Ireland to Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector—the acknowledged expert. The purpose of my amendment is to save the Government from repeating a failure of six years ago. They have tried to go down this merger route before. This is not a Home Office proposal resulting from a detailed study related to this Bill, but the Home Office putting flesh on the bones of wider direction—merging 11 public sector inspectorates into four—contained in the Chancellor’s 2005 Budget speech. In May 2000 the Home Office tried to merge the prisons and probation inspectorates and dropped the proposal six months later because it realised that it made no sense at all to merge them until the prison and probation services had been merged. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, will no doubt remember having to admit to this House that no one was in favour of that proposal. Now it proposes to merge five inspectorates and five different functions working to three separate Secretaries of State. In Committee the Minister talked about the justice inspectorate, but there is not a single justice system working to a single justice Minister, although I am one of those who think that there should be. Unless and until there is, it seems to me to make no more sense to merge these five different inspectorates than it was to merge the two which at least had to work together on some of their responsibilities. There is also a worrying lack of clarity about when this is to take place. In Committee the Minister told us that the Government would stage the transition of the new inspectorate and not abolish the Chief Inspector of Prisons until they were satisfied that the new chief inspector was ready effectively to carry out the prisons inspection duty. But a week before that the Home Secretary said that the post of Chief Inspector of Prisons would be abolished in March 2008 at the end of Miss Owers’s contract. There is a conflict here and I should like to know which is right. Two weeks ago I was interviewed by head-hunters who are looking for what the noble Baroness, Lady Billingham, described in a previous debate as a superhuman being—the new chief inspector. The head-hunters are looking for someone who can speak with first-hand experience of inspecting 140 prisons, can advise 50 chief constables on personnel as well as operational matters, knows the intricacies of the Crown Prosecution, courts and probation services, is able to deal with three Secretaries of State and 10 other Ministers, can balance limited budget resources between five separate operations each of which has a full programme, has time to read and edit more than 300 reports each year and can carry out the media, official and representational tasks currently undertaken by five people in three ministries. The net effect will be that because no one person could possibly do this the chief inspector will either have to delegate tasks to the deputy currently doing them or take him or her with him to provide first as opposed to second-hand evidence. But this, of course, is the very duplication that the Government say they are trying to avoid. I wish to make two points on the subject of duplication. First, there is no duplication at present between any of the five inspectorates. Any duplication in this area is between the plethora of regulators and auditors, many of them introduced by this Government. Secondly, where is the single immigration regulator, announced in July in the Home Office paper Fair, Effective, Transparent and Trusted, to sit? Is this to be a fifth inspectorate? Is it to be included in the proposed merger that we are discussing? Is it to take over the responsibilities of the inspectorate of prisons listed in the Bill? Is it to be the independent monitor required under the optional protocol and not included in the government amendments? If so, will that independence satisfy the joint committee of the United Nations? The disastrous introduction of the National Offender Management Service should have provided a salutary lesson on the dangers of introducing theories before they have been properly thought through and evaluated. The Minister has talked about a joined-up offender management demanding a new type of inspection. However, less than half of the 80,000 in prison are serving sentences that include probation supervision, and less than half of the over 250,000 offenders in the hands of the probation service have come from prison. Therefore, only a minority of offenders are subject to the main direction of NOMS. By the same token, only 20 per cent of police time is connected with the criminal justice system, with the remaining 80 per cent being devoted to the prevention of crime; and yet there is no definition in the Bill of what community safety means. In July, the National Audit Office published a paper called Wider Lessons for Public Sector Mergers of Regulatory Agencies. There are 15 recommendations, one of which does not apply to this merger because it is about retirement pay. As far as I can see, however, all the other 14 recommendations have been ignored. I will quote just two: "““Base the decision … on a balanced judgement of whether the projected benefits justify the costs of carrying out the merger””," and, "““Ensure there is a plan to mitigate the risks of disruption to business as usual and the interests of stakeholders””." In the case of the inspection of prisons, the stakeholders include the public. It is no good assuming that what is proposed is do-able because some of what is being done should not be done. In the case of the prisons inspectorate, I ask what should not be done. I have to admit that I always overspent my budget every year, because I could not do what was required of me with what I had been given. Now there is to be less with which to do more, so the business is to be disrupted. I explain that by the fact that there are to be transitional costs of some £2.2 million, which are to be taken out of the existing inspectorates’ budgets, and that means that what they will be able to do will be reduced. In addition, the prisons inspectorate is now to be required to inspect prison cells, court cells and transport. If it has to do that it needs extra resources, but if it is not given the resources it will have to cut down the existing programme, which is not something that the public would welcome. The prison system is, as we all know, in crisis. In Committee, the Minister described it as being ““of superb construction””. Well, that construction has proved unequal to the task, and in addition the director-general has admitted in public that several thousand prison officers are corrupt. Throughout my time as chief inspector, my chief concern was that there was a difference between the facts that I was disclosing in my inspections and the data given to Ministers by officials and official sources. Both I and my successor have commented on this many times, largely on the grounds that you cannot make sound decisions based on fudged and inaccurate data. Let us just look at the last inspection of Pentonville, quoted in the most powerful article by the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, in the Observer on Sunday. He quoted the lack of basic requirements, including vermin infestation and complaints about assaults and bad treatment of staff. He did not, however, mention one other complaint that the inspector mentioned, namely that the food ran out during lunch—the only hot meal of the day. For me, the two worst aspects of the report were, first, that there was no supportive first-night strategy, and night staff did not know the location of new arrivals, which suggests to me that all is not well about suicide prevention despite the assurances that we are given. Secondly, unemployed prisoners, who represented half the population, had only an average of 2.5 hours out of cell, while employed prisoners were out for about seven hours. The average across the prison was five hours, which is far less than the over eight hours that the prison was reporting. I mention that because I wonder whether under the proposed new regime those sorts of uncomfortable details will be allowed to be published. As a soldier, I learnt that at times of crisis the one thing that you need above all is timely, accurate information. The current crisis has come about in part because the Government have failed to listen to timely, accurate information provided by their one independent and objective source—the independent prisons inspectorate. But you don’t shoot the messenger just because you don’t like the message. All Members of this House admire not only the Minister’s ability but also her unswerving loyalty to her party’s line. Never having been a member of a political party, I speak as an informed member of the public, knowing that what is being proposed is, as has been said to me in a letter, nothing more and nothing less than dangerous nonsense whose practicalities and consequences have not been properly thought through. Were I the Minister, particularly at a time of crisis such as our prisons are going through now, the last thing that I would want to lose would be my one source of objective, independent information. Protest though the Minister undoubtedly will, a Deputy Chief Inspector of Justice, Community Safety and Custody (Prisons) who is subordinate to a chief inspector, subject to the direction of 13 different Ministers and required to have regard to such aspects of government policy as Ministers in three separate ministries may direct, simply is not as independent as the current stand-alone Chief Inspector of Prisons. I repeat sentiments that the Minister will recall were expressed from every side of the House in Committee, in the hope of preventing the Government from committing an act of wilful and unnecessary destruction of a beacon of our criminal justice system. I beg to move.