Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Knight of Weymouth
I support the amendments in my name and that of my noble friend Lord McKenzie. There is not much that I want to add to the excellent case made by my noble friend. In some ways, I want to echo the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Newton. These are two advisory bodies affecting disabled people and there are some fairly standard questions about both of them that it would be useful for the Minister to answer. How are the bodies being replaced? How much money, if any, is being saved by their abolition? Given that these are advisory committees made up of people with disability, rather than people who might describe themselves as experts in matters of disability, how will the Minister ensure that the voices of people such as my noble friend Lady Turner, who spoke of her own experience of being disabled, are heard and that people’s experiences of the transport system in relation to the disability living allowance are properly heard by Ministers as they make their decisions?
More specifically, I note that the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee has as its aim that,
“disabled people should have the same access to transport as everybody else”.
On its website, it says:
“We want this to happen by 2020”.
Why not let it run on until 2020, when it thinks that it might have achieved its aim? Why not give it that target and that very clear end date? The chair of the committee, Dai Powell, in response to the announcement by the Government that, under the Bill, DPTAC would be abolished, said:
“I and the Committee consider there is still so much to be done, the transport system is still inaccessible to many people, and we have more work to do with our stakeholders (not least the Olympic Delivery Authority)”.
If the Minister is not willing to be as generous as 2020, would it not be sensible at least to be clear, here and now, that he will not use the powers that he is seeking in the Bill to abolish DPTAC until after the Olympics? Then at least it could continue the good work that it is doing with the ODA to ensure that the Games and the Paralympic Games are successful and accessible for people with disabilities.
Finally, in respect of the Disability Living Allowance Advisory Board, clearly the Minister shares our concerns that consultation is important and has been consulting over the changes to disability living allowance to create the new personal independence payment. However, is the normal, statutory consultation process enough? Is he getting consistent expert advice from people with disability, given how regularly problems around DLA are in the news? Within the last month we have had the Public Accounts Committee report on 16 December, which said that the appeals procedure needs improvement. Already this month we have had reports that the new payment may be in breach of people’s human rights. Clearly, as we move from one system to another, there are going to be sticking points and difficulties. It would seem sensible for the Minister to seek advice from the advisory board that he has at his disposal to try to iron out some of those difficulties as we move from one system to another. If, after that, he thinks that he can make a good case for getting rid of the board, perhaps he should seek to do so at that point.
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, I should like to say a few words about these two amendments. In so doing, I declare my interest as a recipient of disability living allowance. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, had very much hoped to be present to speak to these amendments this afternoon but, sadly, she is not well and very much regrets that she cannot be here. However, she has asked me to say that she would like to be associated with my remarks.
The Disability Living Allowance Advisory Board seems already to have disappeared. Its website has been removed and the telephone numbers associated with it are now being answered by other DWP staff. This might be thought to be jumping the gun somewhat. DLA, as we know, helps many thousands of disabled people with the higher cost of living as a disabled person, but, as we have heard, the Government have announced that they wish to make significant changes to the benefit. The June emergency Budget announced plans to cut working-age DLA expenditure and case load by 20 per cent. This would represent well over 360,000 disabled people aged 16 to 64 losing their disability living allowance. The Government opened a formal consultation on this proposal in December, but have indicated that they are considering extending the changes to children and to people over 65, potentially affecting many more thousands of disabled people and their families. However, the consultation is full of inaccuracies. One example is the repeated claim that there is no process to check that awards remain correct, but the DWP can require a review with an independent medical adviser of any DLA award at any time. The Disability Living Allowance Advisory Board would, of course, have been able to advise the department on this issue, had it been asked.
The October spending review also made it clear that the Government want to end mobility payments to disabled people in residential care. This has been particularly controversial. Not enough detail is yet available on this proposal, but the DWP has already had to recalculate its figures on how many disabled people will be affected. Originally, the Government suggested that it would be about 50,000 people, but they now suggest that it will mean 80,000 disabled children, adults and pensioners losing benefit. One might have thought that, in the context of such significant DLA reform, an independent expert advisory body would have been useful to the Government and could have helped to ensure that reform was effective. Instead, it is apparent that the Government made their DLA pledges without expert support or full consideration of the impact. An adequately resourced DLA advisory board properly involved in policy development could have saved the Government some red faces. Axing the body risks undermining the Government’s ability to understand the benefit and provides ammunition to those who suggest that the Government’s plans are unfair. The inaccurate statements and the need to revise figures on the numbers of people affected only add weight to the belief that quango reform has been botched, as the Public Accounts Committee has suggested.
The Minister for Disabled People has now convened, as we have heard, a new expert panel to help to design a different DLA assessment procedure and to facilitate a new stakeholder group on DLA reform more generally. I believe that the work of these groups could have been informed, if not led, by the advisory board, possibly, as has been suggested, in a revised form, and I hope that the Government will reconsider abolition.
On Amendment 34, DPTAC has a strong record of bringing about change in a considered and measured way. Its influence can be seen across all forms of transport, from bus design specifications to guidance for the aviation industry. By recognising the constraints and characteristics of transport industries, it has been able to win over those in that sector who might otherwise have been resistant to change and it has ensured that the transport needs of disabled people are better met. For example, features that we now take for granted on buses today, such as colour-contrasted handrails, bell pushes that can be reached by passengers in wheelchairs, clear information displays and so on, were all introduced as a result of the work of the committee. The DPTAC spec, as it came to be known, was a standard accessibility specification for the bus industry and to this day remains a central part of the Public Service Vehicles Accessibility Regulations.
Of course, one cannot make a case for retaining a body on the basis of past glories alone, but in recent years the Department for Transport has, I am sorry to say, lost its focus on transport and disability issues, as witnessed by the complacent attitude that it has adopted towards the development of so-called shared surface schemes, in which pedestrians are expected to take their life in their hands and mingle indistinguishably with motorised traffic as all pavements and security barriers are dismantled. This has come about as a result of the closure of the specialist unit in the department, which had for 20 years led on these policy issues and provided secretariat support to DPTAC.
Crime: Youth Crime and Antisocial Behaviour Commission
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Wakefield
My Lords, the centres of Wakefield and other towns and cities in Yorkshire are at present prime focuses for urban and social renewal, but are being hampered by the sort of anti-social behaviour that we have been hearing about. In the light of similar situations, does the Minister agree with the Justice Committee of the other place that there is a need for the development of community based services to prevent potential offenders entering the criminal justice system and thus divert them from offending?
Lord McNally
My Lords, I regret to say that that is still under review as far as the responses are concerned, but I hope that my replies have indicated that the whole thrust of the policy is one of localism and local community involvement, and a real attempt to avoid sending young people into custody.
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, the commission’s report states that the Crown Court is unsuitable as a venue for justice involving young people. Can the Minister say whether the Government will accept the commission’s recommendation that prosecutions of all young people under the age of 18 should be heard in the youth court?
Lord McNally
I am afraid I cannot give that guarantee because certain crimes that are committed by people under the age of 18 should go to the Crown Court.
Criminal Justice System
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, on bringing this subject forward for debate. After his magisterial address, which covered the ground so comprehensively and with such style, one is tempted to give up at this point. I fear that I shall inevitably repeat many of the points which the noble Lord and the noble Baronesses, Lady Kennedy and Lady Linklater, have touched on. However, I hope that I may be able to shine a sidelight on at least one or two of the points which have been, or will be, made by other noble Lords. All the same, it is probably a good job that I come relatively high up in the batting order, or there really would be nothing left to say.
This is the second debate we have had on this subject in the space of three days in your Lordships’ House, the other being specifically on the Government’s policy on prisons. Both are extraordinarily timely in that, as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, has just suggested, we are witnessing a conjunction of circumstances which mean that, if we play our cards right, we might—just might—have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get off the treadmill of penal policy which has been taking us nowhere for the past 15 years.
It would not be difficult to demonstrate that the system is not working and needs to be reformed. Indeed, the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, has amply demonstrated this already, and I am sure that other noble Lords will do the same. This week the Prison Reform Trust published its latest prison fact file. Nearly every page contains examples of how the system is not working. I do not wish to weary the House by labouring the point, I simply mention the following sobering statistics. As the prison population accelerated after 1993, reoffending rates worsened to the point where two-thirds of prisoners are now reconvicted within two years of leaving prison. Sixty-six per cent of people entering prison serve less than one year. They leave after a few weeks or months, homeless, jobless, out of touch with their families, further in debt and ready to offend again. It is little wonder, then, that 61 per cent of them are reconvicted within a year of being released.
In 2008, 74 per cent of children reoffended within a year. In fact, every time a person is sent to prison, he is more likely to reoffend on release. In one sample, 25 per cent of those with no previous custodial sentence reoffended. After one previous custodial sentence, this figure jumped to 40 per cent, and so on until 76 per cent of those with 11 or more prison sentences offended again. This seems to me to give the lie to those who say that the increased use of prison is responsible for the reduction in crime which has undoubtedly taken place in the past couple of decades. At best, prison is a short-term expedient, just as a credit card is a short-term solution to debt, but it catches up with you in the end, with interest.
If we go back to first principles, it has to be admitted that the point at which to make the greatest impact on these problems may have less to do with the criminal justice system than the social pressures which lead people into and trap them in a life of crime. The proportion of prisoners who were taken into care as a child, truanted from school, ran away from home, were homeless or have used drugs is up to 30 times that of the general population; 71 per cent of children in custody have been involved with or in the care of the local authority; 40 per cent have previously been homeless; 23 per cent of young offenders have learning difficulties; 36 per cent have borderline learning difficulties; and half all offenders are at or below the level expected of an 11 year-old in reading, 65 per cent are below that level in numeracy and 82 per cent in writing.
Sentencing has very little impact on factors such as these, except perhaps where the child’s situation has been aggravated by sending a parent to prison. All the same, when sentencing offenders, we should constantly have in the front of our minds where the problem really lies and be trying to address that, as opposed to going through the mechanical ritual which sentencing so often degenerates into. Seven out of 10 prisoners suffer from two or more mental disorders. It therefore seems obvious that one way of tackling the problem of prison overcrowding should be the creation of more mental health facilities—not necessarily custodial—rather than prisons. Crime reduction strategy should focus on factors such as these, rather than increasing sentences, which seems to have all-too-little effect.
The most important factor in preventing reoffending is what happens after the sentence. Does the offender have a home or a job to go to, and other forms of support? These are also matters for the community at large, not just the criminal justice system. That system, especially prison, often only makes things worse. It stigmatises people so that it is harder for them to find a job afterwards. Hardened criminals are hardened in prison. It separates them from people who might be a good influence and herds them together with others like themselves with too little to do, often introducing them to drugs. There is a high incidence of bullying and self-harm, and there are too many suicides—often by young people.
It would be easy to conclude that the system was broken beyond repair and that we were locked into a cycle of rising prison numbers, leading to the building of more prisons, which are already oversubscribed by the time that they are built, and in turn to another round of prison building and so on. If we follow the analysis of Professor Nicola Lacey of the LSE in her recent Hamlyn lectures, it may be that regularities about the political economy and social culture of our society make it difficult to escape from this “prisoners’ dilemma”, as she calls it. Why else would we have rates of imprisonment more like those of eastern Europe than those of our western European neighbours?
However, after listening the other evening to the reflections of Dame Anne Owers, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, on her nine years in that job, one has to draw a more nuanced conclusion. There has been progress—patchy, to be sure—and there is more prisoner activity, education and rehabilitation, but that remains extremely fragile and could easily be set back by savage expenditure cuts. Where better to make cuts than on prisons? As she said, imprisonment is loved but not prisons. What we need are savings, not cuts, reinvested in putting the escalator into reverse so that it starts going down, rather than relentlessly upwards, for a change. In this, reducing prison numbers is the key. Custody should be reserved for the most serious cases of danger to the public. Community measures are generally less costly and no less effective, and ideas of restorative justice, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, pointed out, which has also been shown to reduce reoffending, enable the victim’s perspective to be taken on board.
I have long wondered why we do not carry out research into the systems that they have in places such as France and Germany, which put so many fewer of their criminals in jail. Would our penal policy not be informed if we knew the solutions that they have found for their criminals that we are obviously not finding? What do they do with the people that we put in jail but they do not? The answer to these questions would be highly informative as we move forward with penal policy.
This is where we have the historic conjunction of circumstances that I referred to—tenuous but discernible —that might make this possible. We have an economic crisis that creates a paramount need to make savings and trumps penal ideology. We have a Government with a secure parliamentary majority who are determined to make savings, and a Secretary of State for Justice who understands the folly of the treadmill that we have been on and the opportunity that the economic crisis gives him.
The coalition’s programme for government said that the Government believe that we need radical action to reform our criminal justice system, and that this means introducing more effective sentencing policies as well as overhauling the system of rehabilitation to reduce reoffending and to provide greater support and protection for the victims of crime. They promise to introduce a rehabilitation revolution that will pay independent providers to reduce reoffending, with the costs met by the savings that the new approach will generate in the criminal justice system; to conduct a full review of sentencing policy to ensure that it is effective in deterring crime, protecting the public, punishing offenders and cutting reoffending; and to explore alternative forms of secure, treatment-based accommodation for mentally ill and drug-addicted offenders. This is talking. It reflects many themes that the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, alluded to. I hope that the coalition will be up to it, and that it will enjoy bipartisan support from the Opposition and not be torpedoed by being dragged back into another round of the perennial auction staged by the parties in recent years to outbid one another and show who can be toughest on crime.
Lord De Mauley
I respectfully remind noble Lords that contributions are time-limited to nine minutes and that when they overrun they are denying time to other noble Lords.