Victims and Prisoners Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Garnier

Committee stage
Tuesday 12th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

I am most grateful to my noble friend. I will have to check tomorrow morning the Hansard report of where I had got to in my speech; I have a suspicion I was in the middle of a sentence in which I was just about to say exactly what my noble friend said—but I am grateful to him, because he was able to say it so much more eloquently than I would have done.

We are in the position with criminal justice and sentencing that we were in the first decade of the 20th century with Dreadnought building. If the Germans have five, we must have six. If we have six, they must have 10. If they have 10, we must have 15, and so on —and guess what? You get 1914.

Here, we are dealing with adult, mature politicians who take instructions from editors and proprietors. Yet, if they bothered to ask the public—and occasionally the press do ask the public—they would find that the public are not nearly as keen on longer sentences or on IPPs as they might think. Had they been braver and bolder—as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, would have us be—perhaps we would not have arrived at where we are.

I regret that I have spoken for far too long in Committee, but over the last 25 years this issue has really annoyed me. I am so grateful to the Prison Reform Trust, of which I too am a trustee, for its assistance in trying to restrain my enthusiasm and, at times, my anger about this subject and for providing me with the information and the assistance which I hope have to some extent informed this debate. There is not a single amendment on the Order Paper this evening which does not deserve the gravest consideration of this Committee and the urgent action of this Government.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it was a real privilege to witness that exchange and I think we are getting to the heart of why we are all here and are so passionate about this. I have a couple of short clarifications, because at this point by the time I get to my amendment on re-sentencing there really will be nothing else to say; I am rewriting my speech rapidly every time everyone speaks.

When I first heard about the indefinite sentences that were associated with IPPs—when they first came out in that arms race to prove how tough we could be on law on order—I was horrified. I was delighted when the noble Lord, Lord Clarke, abolished them; I thought that was it, because I was not in Parliament and not following. I went into prisons as part of work I was doing with an educational project called Debating Matters Beyond Bars which encouraged prisoners to debate and could not believe it when I discovered that, despite the sentences being abolished, there were still IPP prisoners.

In fact, I told the prisoners in my own characteristic way that they were wrong and that IPPs had been abolished and could not still exist. So I was determined once I got in here to at least discover what on earth had gone wrong. I cannot bear it, now we are tackling the issue, that, even though the sentences have been abolished, they will still exist when we have finished dealing with this Bill. It seems abhorrent.

I wanted particularly to back up the mentoring proposals from the noble Baroness, Lady Blower. If you talk to any families of IPP prisoners, or IPP prisoners themselves, they know that they have been destroyed and damaged by this sentencing regime. They are not gung-ho about it. They do not just say, “Release us, we’ll be fine”. What they would really gain from is mentoring. It is the kind of creative solution that would help us support the re-sentencing amendments. This is the kind of support that people will need.

It was hard not to shed a tear at the very moving speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, who said that many of the people whose mental health was suffering had been destroyed by IPPs. But we should also note that it could well be that their mental health is not permanently damaged by the ongoing psychological uncertainty, anxiety, torture and so on. We need a combination of the mentoring scheme and a recognition of the fact that the sentencing is, to be crude, literally driving people mad—and the sanest person would go mad. You do not necessarily need medication; you need compassionate, grown-up intervention and support. In that sense, I support all the amendments in this group and all the others, but I really think that, for want of a better phrase, we have to be the grown-ups in the room now and try and sort this out.

Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Garnier

Report stage
Wednesday 5th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise in support of Amendment 168AZA. The noble Lord, Lord Swire, has explained why it is a very modest but important part of this discussion.

One reason why I think there is substantial public support for the Bill, at least in terms of the headlines and broad brush strokes, if not the detail—we have heard from the wide range of amendments the potential problems when looking at the detail of the Bill—is that people feel as though things are out of control. That is viscerally expressed by people seeing the boats arriving. The difficulty is that, in a discussion—even in this Chamber, but certainly beyond this Chamber—about what is really going on, many people feel as though they are confronting smoke and mirrors. They do not know who is here and under what status they are here.

I said at Second Reading—or at some stage, anyway—that many people feel as though they are being gaslit. When they raise concerns, they are told—as we have just heard a bit of—that these are trafficked people and victims. One reason why I support the amendment introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, a moment ago is that I feel that the terms “asylum seeker” and “refugee status” are being sullied by being used in a way that is unhelpfully broad and vague, often quite promiscuously and illegitimately, in order to say to the British public, “What are you worried about?” The problem is that the generosity of spirit around refugees is being tested, to say the least.

Therefore, we need to have a sense of proportion and to know what is going on. It is quite straightforward: we do not, which means that people bandy around emotive headlines and accusations against the British public—often unfairly—as though they are all xenophobic, they do not care, and so on. Also, quite grand statements are made. I think people want to know very clearly who is here illegally and in what category they are here.

I commend the noble Lord, Lord Swire, for making the point that it is the obligation of this Government—or a Labour Government or any Government—to know who lives within our borders. If you do not know, then you do not have national sovereignty. You cannot run a country in which you say, “Oh, sorry, it is too difficult to know”. Anyone who says, “Find out for yourself” has not tried. We have all tried and we want to know that the people who run this society do know and therefore have a handle on it.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, before I speak in support of my noble friend’s Amendment 168AZA, which I supported also in Committee, I want to make two very quick points about Amendment 168 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker. I entirely sympathise with the sentiments expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, but it strikes me that there is already a responsibility on the National Crime Agency to tackle organised crime of all types, not just immigration crime. I think we go a step too far if we legislate the internal administration of a police authority. There can be a debate and a disagreement about whether that is right; and perhaps the supporters of Amendment 168 are making a rhetorical point, and I can accept that; but I just caution against passing legislation that imposes a duty on the National Crime Agency that already exists.

Turning to Amendment 168AZA, I complained in Committee that, absent this information, we had government by guesswork, and government by guesswork is not a very attractive way of running anything, let alone an immigration system. For some of the reasons advanced by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, a moment ago, ignorance creates suspicion, and suspicion leads to poor community relations and general dissatisfaction in the way in which the governed look at the governors. So I urge my noble friend on the Front Bench to provide us with a convincing response, which I have not yet heard; nor have I been given any information by any Minister since we last debated this in Committee. It cannot be suggested that the Government do not like annual reports. One has only to look at Clause 60(1):

“The Secretary of State must, before the end of the relevant period … prepare and publish a report on safe and legal routes by which persons may enter the United Kingdom”.


The detail of what that report is supposed to contain each year is set out in Clause 60(2), and it has to appear within six months of the Act being passed.

The information that we think should be made public and brought together in a single annual report is set out in proposed new subsections (a) to (e) of our amendment. Proposed new subsections (b), (c), (d) and (e) cover information that is available somewhere in the government system: some clever person can press a button and the numbers will come spewing out—easy. I accept that counting the number of illegal immigrants in the United Kingdom presents one or two more problems, because not every illegal immigrant is going to present himself at a counting centre; however, they can make an intelligent estimate.

I ask the Government to condescend to move a little bit towards us and provide the public with the information they feel they need to see and which the Government must know in order to run a sensible, humane and legitimate immigration system. That is all this is about, so let us get on with it.