Criminal Justice and Courts Bill
Lord Willis of Knaresborough Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Faulks) (Con)
My Lords, as noble Lords will be aware, the other place was not persuaded last week by the amendment that this House put forward to prevent girls and boys under the age of 15 being accommodated in secure colleges. It voted by a margin of 316 to 194 to disagree with the amendment.
The Government remain of the view that it is not right to prevent girls and boys aged under 15 benefiting from this pioneering approach to educating and rehabilitating young offenders. We are committed to this principle, recognising that girls and younger boys are already safely accommodated together on the same site in both secure training centres and secure children’s homes, which together with YOIs make up the youth custodial estate.
Noble Lords will remember from previous debates that no final decisions have yet been made as to who will be accommodated in the secure college pathfinder that is due to open in 2017. This decision will be taken closer to the time and based on the composition of the youth custodial population. Responsibility for individual placement decisions will remain with the Youth Justice Board, which decides on a case-by-case basis, and is informed by the advice of the local youth offending team, where each young person should be accommodated while in custody. I know that a number of noble Lords remain firmly opposed to secure colleges or, in any event, this secure college. The Government are aware of their concern and respect their views, although they do not agree with them. This amendment is not about secure colleges generally but about under-15s and girls, and I am sure that noble Lords will be focusing on this particular issue.
Noble Lords will be aware from previous meetings that I have held with interested Peers and from discussions in the House that more vulnerable groups—such as girls and under-15s, should they be placed there—will be separately accommodated in smaller living units at the pathfinder secure college, and can also be separately educated. Following earlier discussions with interested Peers, we amended our site plans to provide further protection, and additional and separate outdoor space for the more vulnerable young people accommodated at the pathfinder.
I have also previously made a commitment in this House that neither girls nor under-15s will be placed in the pathfinder secure college from its opening and that, should the decision be taken to place them there, their introduction would be carefully phased. My colleague, the Minister for Prisons, Andrew Selous, reiterated this same commitment to the other place last week. Nevertheless, despite these safeguards and commitments, the Government recognise that some concern remains. In particular, this concern is focused on the potential accommodation of girls and under-15s on the same site as older boys, and how the different groups would be kept safe and their different needs attended to.
To provide Parliament with further reassurance on these points, we are today committing to the Secretary of State laying a report before Parliament, and publishing that report, before either boys aged under 15 or girls are placed in the first secure college where they would be accommodated alongside older boys aged 15 to 17. This report will describe the arrangements in place at the secure college for the detention of girls and under-15s. In particular, it will set out the safeguards in place to protect these groups and the facilities and services available to meet their educational and rehabilitative needs and to promote their health and well-being. This report would therefore include detail on: the accommodation and supervision of girls and under-15s; how they will be educated and the focus of this education; the interventions available to tackle their offending behaviour; the provision for meeting their physical and mental health needs—a particular concern that I know has been expressed in the course of debate—and promoting their emotional well-being; and the safety arrangements at the site to ensure that neither group is at risk of intimidation or violence.
In producing this report, the Secretary of State would consult with the Youth Justice Board, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons and Ofsted. The report would be laid before Parliament and published at least two months before the first occasion on which it was intended that boys aged under 15 or girls were to be placed in the first secure college to accommodate these groups on the same site as older boys.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)
On an important point at this juncture and before he goes any further, will the Minister give an assurance that, when that report is produced, its recommendations will not be implemented in any form until there is an affirmative vote on those recommendations in both Houses of Parliament?
Lord Faulks
No, I will not give that reassurance. I hope noble Lords will none the less welcome this significant commitment, which will provide considerable transparency on the Government’s plans for the accommodation of girls and under-15s in secure colleges. I also remind noble Lords that, in addition to this commitment, there is of course the ongoing scrutiny of secure colleges provided by the inspectorates, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons and Ofsted. In light of this commitment, I take the opportunity to reaffirm that keeping young people safe in custody will be the top priority in secure colleges, just as it is elsewhere. The Government are confident that secure colleges will deliver a step change in the culture and outcomes of youth custody and that, with the right facilities and precautions, both girls and under-15s will be able to benefit from this new approach.
I hope that this further significant reassurance demonstrates the Government’s commitment to protecting properly these vulnerable groups in secure colleges, while meeting their specific needs and enabling them to access enhanced provision. I hope this gives the House confidence not to insist on its earlier Amendment 74. I look forward to hearing the views of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham—and, of course, the views of other noble Lords. I hope that, with the assurances I have given, he will in due course be able to withdraw his Motion to insist on Amendment 74. I beg to move.
Motion A1
Elections: Alternative Vote System
Lord Willis of Knaresborough Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Lord Willis of Knaresborough
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what they estimate will be the cost of a general election held under the alternative vote system.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, the features and associated costs of holding a general election using the alternative vote system would broadly be the same as under the existing system. A notable exception to this is the count, which, depending on the extent of preferences expressed by voters, could take longer and lead to some additional costs.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
I am grateful to my noble friend for that interesting Answer. There is undoubtedly a polarised debate about the future of our voting system. However, does my noble friend agree that it behoves politicians in both Houses of Parliament, particularly Ministers, when making statements to base them on facts and not simply make them up to further an argument? Will he state quite clearly today that there is no requirement in the legislation and no estimate in the Government's plans for any additional costs for electronic voting or electronic counting? Can he bury that argument?
Lord McNally
My Lords, reading very carefully, I say that we have no current plans to introduce electronic counting for the Westminster parliamentary elections. The Government have made no estimate of the costs of electronic counting for them.
Social Mobility Strategy
Lord Willis of Knaresborough Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord McNally
My Lords, on the last question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Martin, I will certainly take that excellent suggestion to the House authorities. If we are going to lead by example as far as the Civil Service is concerned, as my right honourable friend said, we should also do so in the Palace of Westminster. As the noble Lord said, we see excellent craftsmanship at work in many parts of this building. To enable young men and women to obtain skills here would be a good example.
I also agree with the noble Lord on his first question. I always thought that the fall-off in apprenticeships in the 1980s was a waste and that we have had to make a great effort to catch up. It was a loss of real skills. The old apprenticeship scheme was a very valuable part of the skills base in our society. We are only just beginning to put that back. I agree with the noble Lord that there must be both on-the-job training and the use of the full benefits of further education. Another part of the strategy is that the study of an apprenticeship should have, where it merits it, academic recognition to allow somebody to go on into higher education. This is something that we are going to press with the authorities.
Lord McNally
I listened to the Statement at the other end. Local authorities across the country are making cuts and it is very easy for people to leap up and say, “How does this strategy match what is going on?”. This strategy is trying to deploy the fewer resources we have in a much more focused way. We are going through a period of economic difficulty and it will be easy to pick up on the impact of the various changes, but today we have laid out a strategy that focuses resources on the most needy and addresses some of the issues that have been identified as causing a lack of social mobility. What we cannot do is return public expenditure to the level at which it was being run by the previous Administration—who were, as the noble Baroness knows, planning to make cuts as well.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
Does my noble friend agree that this is a highly important issue and social mobility is something which nobody on any side of this House or in another place has solved for a great number of years? It behoves us to find practical solutions to the issues rather than simply throwing insults across the Chamber. Today I received a letter from a parent in Greater Manchester who informed me that it previously cost 60p each way per day to send his two children to sixth form in Oldham. The fact that concessionary travel for 16 to 19 year-olds has been removed means that it now costs £3.90 each way per day. Is that what we believe to be increasing social mobility?
Lord McNally
No, it is not; but I thought that my noble friend was moving away from that kind of question when he opened his remarks. Funds being targeted at the neediest families will also address problems of travel. I am not standing here saying that there are no cuts or difficulties. I am saying—and I welcome my noble friend’s idea that, at least on some of these issues, we might try to establish a cross-party consensus—that the roots of social mobility have puzzled us as a society at least since the war. I believe that what my right honourable friend has given today, partly building on some of the work of the previous Administration, is a clear sign that we—rather like the Attlee Government after the war, who also faced very difficult economic situations—are not abandoning the causes of welfare reform, work reform or social mobility, or putting them to one side during difficult economic times.
Defamation Bill [HL]
Lord Willis of Knaresborough Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Willis of Knaresborough
My Lords, it is with a sense of pride and a little humility that I rise to speak in your Lordships' House for the first time. I must confess to a little trepidation at having to follow the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. I hope that it will not be necessary, but if it is, I hope that he will defend me on some future occasion.
To be able to contribute to this Second Reading debate on the Defamation Bill, which was introduced so expertly by my noble friend Lord Lester, is a huge privilege, although when he invited me to speak, I little thought that the cast he would assemble would read like a Who’s Who of legal nobility.
I have no noble pedigree to bring to the House, although I follow in the steps of the first Baron Knaresborough, Sir Henry Meysey Meysey-Thompson, who was also a Liberal MP for the town. However, having opposed Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill and joined the breakaway Liberal Unionist Party to form an alliance with the Conservative Party, he lost his seat. Indeed, Knaresborough has a tradition of being associated with some rather awkward politicians. The early Lords of Knaresborough include Hugh de Morville who, having been granted the Honour of Knaresborough in 1158, went on to plot the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket before fleeing back to Knaresborough for safety. I notice that there are no Bishops on their Benches today. It was not surprising therefore that King John, who loved hunting in the forest of Knaresborough, took the title Honour of Knaresborough for himself in 1210, some five years before he signed the Magna Carta.
Walking through the Lobby yesterday, I noticed a copy of Magna Carta on the wall. It reminded me of the 34 years I spent teaching and my first post teaching history at Middleton County Secondary Boys’ School in Leeds. The head teacher, who was more renowned for his discipline than his educational philosophy, insisted that the boys must learn the lessons of Magna Carta to remind them of the freedoms and rights we have won to secure their future. Today’s debate is a timely reminder of that duty and why the Defamation Bill is of such profound importance.
Clause 29 of Magna Carta states:
“We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right”.
Yet so abused have our libel laws become that justice and right are constantly being denied to a wide spectrum of individuals and organisations who wish to question the truth, interpret the facts or comment on what they believe to be right. What is more, the ideal that,
“We will sell to no man … either Justice or Right”,
has become a cruel parody where the UK has not only become the world capital for “libel tourism”, with other Governments like the United States passing laws to limit damage to their citizens, but our citizens are increasingly being silenced by the cost of defending even the most valid of expressed opinion, with only the bravest of defendants risking their livelihoods to fight for justice and right.
It is noteworthy and laudable that much of the recent push for libel law reform has come not just from writers, media editors and lawyers. Ben Goldacre, Simon Singh, Peter Wilmshurst and Henrik Thomsen are clinicians and scientists, and it is the medical and scientific world that has recognised that there is no greater public interest in free expression than the ability, in good faith, robustly to criticise medical claims whether they be from homeopaths or big pharmaceutical companies.
This Bill, as my noble friend has said, is largely a consolidation effort. It attempts to clarify and bring up to date what my noble friend’s explanatory notes describe as,
“a history of piecemeal and incomplete reform ... over the course of seventy years”.
As such, it deserves the support of this House.
Indeed all three major political parties at the recent general election backed the Libel Reform Campaign led so ably by Dr Evan Harris and by Sense about Science, an organisation founded by my noble friend Lord Taverne and run by the resourceful and energetic Tracey Brown. All concerned welcomed the coalition Government’s announcement in the Queen’s Speech for,
“Legislation ... to restore freedoms and civil liberties”.
This Bill is the first test of that commitment.
However, without wishing to be contentious, I hope that my noble friend would agree that the Bill is capable of improvement as it goes through this House, and I should like to suggest a couple of areas. The appalling abuse of our libel law by NMT Medical Incorporated in the United States to silence the legitimate criticism of Dr Wilmshurst over its STARFlex device for closing holes in the heart is a clear example of why more needs to be done to prevent the so-called “chilling effect” of our own laws. Nor is Peter Wilmshurst’s case unique. Some 10 per cent of all libel actions in the UK over past six years have involved scientists or academics. The costs of defending and especially of losing an action can be devastating. So I ask my noble friend: should companies and associations even be able to sue for libel? They cannot do so in other jurisdictions. Surely they should rely on malicious falsehood only?
Finally, there is growing evidence that scientists are finding difficulty having articles which have been subjected to assiduous peer review published in serious journals. Fiona Godlee, the current editor of the British Medical Journal, has made the point that she is frequently in receipt of letters from lawyers for pharmaceutical companies threatening legal action if criticism of a treatment or a trial is not toned down. A journal cannot risk its viability on a lengthy trial against a complainant with deep pockets, and so the article must be altered or rejected. So we have more chilling of scientific debate. Yet we do not know how many drug scandals are out there, such as the suppression of research data by Merck on the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx.
What we do know is that we can better protect public interest if properly peer reviewed academic and scientific work was considered to be qualified privilege and thus intimidatory actions could be struck out at an early stage. I appreciate that a journal could rely on the statutory defence set out in Clause 1, that it had acted responsibly, but a defendant would still have to prove that in court, with all the financial risks involved in taking a case to a final hearing where that question is determined. Being able to rely on an a priori defence of qualified privilege would short-circuit the process, as well as having the huge benefit of incentivising journals to use the highest possible quality peer review, and making it clear to writers that only by choosing peer reviewed publications would they gain protection as well as credence for their work.
In ending, may I say how grateful I and indeed my family have been for the courtesy and kindness extended to me during my induction and introduction to the House, and I thank in particular the staff for their patience and support. I thank also your Lordships for your patience during this, my first humble contribution to your proceedings. I trust that the Government will heed the wise advice of my noble friend Lord Lester and make this Bill part of a process to renew our defamation law.