Imprisonment for Public Protection Scheme

Lord McNally Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friends Lady Burt and Lady Hamwee for securing this debate and pay warm tribute to Sir Bob Neill and his committee. Sir Bob has been a constant supporter of prison reform and that is reflected in this report. I also send my good wishes to the new Prisons Minister, Rob Butler MP, who was an assiduous and thoughtful member of the Youth Justice Board during my tenure between 2014 and 2017.

My locus in this debate is that I was the Minister who took the LASPO Bill through the Lords and abolished IPPs—as we thought. I made it clear that good existing IPPs would be dealt with by various means, including prisoners being able to earn their release through various training schemes and rehabilitation programmes, to which the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, just referred. The truth was that that idea was foiled by the various Catch-22s to which the noble Lord referred, including a lack of resources.

No one has claimed that LASPO denied judges the opportunity to hand down strict sentences—I was pleased to hear the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, refer to this—and the LASPO regime has stood the list of time. What remains is a hangover, which both the Minister who introduced IPPs, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and the Minister who thought he had abolished IPPs, have said does not work as we thought it would and remains a stain on our justice system.

Let me put one shade of doubt into our debate. Throughout my time in the Ministry of Justice, attempts at prison reform were knocked back by 10 Downing Street with the simple message “not politically deliverable”. Throughout this time, we have had to face the problem that both Front Benches have been keen to avoid being outflanked on the right by being seen to be soft on prison reform. I fear that this is still the problem and it will need a great deal of courage to overcome it. This is not a plan to set free dangerous criminals but what a civilised country would do. I hope the Minister has come with a brief accepting the report and committing the Government to legislative action to right this wrong.

As I came into the Chamber, I received an email from the British Psychological Society, from which I shall read only one sentence:

“A resentencing exercise would restore a sense of certainty, hope and fairness: three vital ingredients to behavioural change, engagement with psychological support and compliance with the law.”


This has been an overwhelming message to Ministers. I hope they are listening.

Bribery Act 2010: Post-legislative Scrutiny (Select Committee Report)

Lord McNally Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord McNally (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is always an honour and pleasure to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, with all his wisdom and experience.

On 13 May 2010, I became Minster of State for Justice in the coalition Government, as deputy to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, who was then Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor. In my in-tray when I arrived at the department was a gift from the departing Labour Government in the shape of the Bribery Act. The noble Lord, Lord Bach, had done much of the heavy lifting in this House in delivering the Bill to the statute book and had been supported from these Benches by the late and sadly missed Lord Goodhart and my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford who, happily, is with us today and from whom we will hear later.

It is perhaps not surprising that those who opposed the Act saw the change of Government as an opportunity to push back on bringing the Act into force. This meant a delay in implementation, for which we were criticised at the time. The Secretary of State and I carried out a consultation with a variety of interested parties. We heard all the familiar objections: how burdensome it would be on business, particularly SMEs; how it would inhibit the use of legitimate corporate hospitality; how many grey areas there were between a tip and a bribe; and, of course, the plea that we would lose out to the dastardly French, who would steal all our business by ignoring such Anglo-Saxon sensitivities to the greasing of palms.

That second round of consultation by the incoming Government emphasised the cross-party support for the legislation and its greater acceptance. We took the flak about the delay, and the Act reached commencement on 1 July 2011. I took some satisfaction from reading in the Select Committee’s report that it had received no “major” criticisms of the legislation and that, overall,

“the structure of the Act, the offences it created, its deterrent effect, and its interaction with deferred prosecution agreements, are only some of the aspects which have been almost universally praised”.

We are entitled to ask whether the Conservative Government elected in 2019 would have been as willing as the coalition to pick up the Bribery Act and guide it to commencement. The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, asked some pertinent questions about the role of the anti-corruption champion and rightly questioned whether the Government have the stomach for the fight against bribery. This is, after all, the Government who champion the global buccaneers who will swashbuckle their way around the world with scant regard for the niceties and who are only too willing to act as money launderers to the world, as the noble Lords, Lord Hain and Lord Empey, pointed out.

So we will listen carefully to the Minister’s response. The Committee has rightly pointed to the slow progress of bribery investigations and prosecutions and rightly asks how the Government intend to bring a sense of urgency to implementation and enforcement. It is encouraging that in Transparency International’s 2020 report, Exporting Corruption, the UK is one of only four countries, along with the USA, Switzerland and Israel, cited as active enforcers of anti-bribery measures, but the report also finds that active enforcement has fallen off since 2018 and there is real danger of us falling out of the top group—as my noble friend Lord Stunell indicated. Key to avoiding that slide will be ensuring the availability of funding for the Serious Fraud Office to pursue serious cases and ending the delay in bringing forward prosecutions.

There is also the general responsibility to prevent economic crime. The review that we are considering today states that

“the new offence of corporate failure to prevent bribery is regarded as particularly effective”,

and Transparency International UK has called for the Government to extend the “failure to prevent” approach used in Section 7 of the Bribery Act to corporate criminal offending in economic crimes such as fraud and money laundering—I was pleased to see the noble Lords, Lord Hodgson and Lord Gold, lend their weight to that, as well as my noble friend Lord Stunell.

Bribery is often seen as a victimless crime where one man’s bribe is simply another’s facilitation of the wheels of commerce. It is not. It is corrupting to both ends of the transaction. It distorts the benefits of the free market by preventing the best product or service being provided for the best price. It diverts resources from the needy to the criminal and inflates the cost of development. The Select Committee is in our debt for pointing the Government in the right direction in updating the Bribery Act for the new circumstances we face in the decades ahead. We are grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, and his colleagues for their work.

Northern Ireland: Defamation Act 2013

Lord McNally Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stewart of Dirleton (Con)]

My Lords, as I say, the matter is a priority for the Northern Ireland Assembly. There are discussions between it and the UK Government, albeit that I am not aware of their specific focus regarding defamation. It is a pleasure to reply to the noble Lord; I followed him in this place as I followed him at the Scots Bar, and it seems not too long ago that he and I were sweating over our books in Parliament Hall in preparation for our exams.

[Lord McNally (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I declare the interest that I was the Minister who carried through the 2013 legislation as Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice. I am pleased to have heard how well it has worked, and I pay tribute to Simon Singh and the late Lord Lester of Herne Hill in helping me to get that legislation through. I want to put a thought to the Minister. As he rightly says, this is a devolved matter but, remembering that it was the DUP that blocked the legislation last time, does he not think those who are most committed to the union would have a really vested interest in demonstrating that Northern Ireland was in step with the rest of the United Kingdom in important legislation such as this?

[Lord Stewart of Dirleton (Con)]

In my view, my Lords, commitment to the union is not best expressed by railroading the devolved Assembly into a particular course of action.

Probation Services

Lord McNally Excerpts

Monday 15th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Keen of Elie [V]]

The dynamic framework anticipates that we will be seeking the provision of rehabilitation and resettlement services from the voluntary and charitable sector, with the other services brought within the National Probation Service.

[Lord McNally (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I am sure the Minister would agree that one man’s U-turn is another’s development of policy. I welcome the proposals from the Government. I am very proud that I was part of helping to create the National Probation Service, but, going forward, we have to give the service parity of esteem with other parts of the criminal justice system; it has never had that parity. Along with that, I would press the Minister, particularly at the present time, to consider a strong recruitment drive for the probation service among black and ethnic minorities to deal with the overrepresentation we have in the criminal justice and prison system, particularly among young people; they badly need mentors whom they can recognise and work with.

Covid-19: Prisons and Offender Rehabilitation

Lord McNally Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, between 2010 and 2017 I spent seven years at the Ministry of Justice, first as Minister of State and then as chair of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales. I visited many prisons and young offender institutions and never left any of those bodies without a sense of awe for those who work in them, doing a difficult and sometimes dangerous job on behalf of us all.

A month ago Sir Bob Neill, the chairman of the Justice Committee in the other place, called for the immediate publication of contingency plans to deal with what he called the

“potential hotbed for viral transmission”

in our prisons. The reason we are having this debate today—and that the noble Lords, Lord German, Lord Naseby and Lord Harris, have opened with such passion—is that there is a growing feeling that Ministers in the Ministry of Justice are not up to responding to that call for action. The Minister will be aware of the briefings that noble Lords have received from Nacro, the Prison Reform Trust, the Howard League, the Quakers and others. It is impossible to cover all their concerns in a two-minute speech, so will the Minister deposit in the Library a comprehensive response to the concerns raised in those briefings by these expert organisations?

Will prison staff and prisoners now be given the testing and safety equipment to manage the threats of the coronavirus safely, as is happening in hospitals and care homes? Will the Secretary of State take one of the Downing Street press conferences, accompanied by the head of the Prison Service, so that he can explain to the media and the British public what is happening in our prisons on his watch? Unless we hear an “action this day” response from the Minister, there is a very real danger of prisons being added to the list of too-little-too-late responses that have blighted this Government’s record in response to this pandemic.

Queen’s Speech

Lord McNally Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, one of the great traditions of this House that the noble Lords, Lord Parkinson and Lord Davies, will quickly become aware of is that when the Government plan to do something ever so slightly dodgy, they send along the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, like the village policeman, to give one of his, “Move along: nothing interesting to see here” speeches. That only underlines a worry I have which was brilliantly exposed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, my noble friends Lord Tyler and Lord Wallace of Saltaire, and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. It is It is the grave suspicion that a Government who campaigned on “taking back control” will use the proposals for a constitution, democracy and human rights commission to claw back to the Executive the powers they have lost in recent years to Parliament, the courts and the individual citizen. Indeed, the Conservative manifesto was very clear about its intention to clip the wings of individuals or institutions who frustrate or slow down the revolution on which we are about to embark. This House has a special duty to safeguard our democratic freedoms and civil liberties from the abuses of what the late Lord Hailsham described so magnificently as our “elective dictatorship”.

Today I will concentrate on another matter, which the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, has prepared for me. Another of our great institutional bulwarks against political abuse and one of 19th century liberalism’s greatest gifts to our 21st century democracy is a Civil Service that is recruited on merit and politically neutral. I was one of the early political appointments when the system of political advisers was introduced by the Labour Government in 1974. My own experience of public servants during five years in the Foreign Office and No. 10 from 1974 to 1979 and during the seven years I spent in the Ministry of Justice between 2010 and 2017 was of their dedication and commitment, which I held in the highest regard.

Of course it is necessary to bring in new skills and fresh thinking to our public services, but we should not have to find out the hard way that simply rubbishing the Civil Service and bringing in “weirdos and misfits” is not a solution to the challenges that face us. We will not get the response we want from our public servants by belittling them or claiming that there is some miracle cure for real or imagined shortcomings that is ready to be applied. The truth is that many of Dominic Cummings’s saner aspirations can be found in the 1968 Fulton report, yet in No. 10 we seem to have reached a stage similar to that depicted in “Little Shop of Horrors,” where Dominic Cummings is ready to gobble up the Northcote-Trevelyan principles and 150 years of good governance.

I hope that Mr Cummings has read and digested the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, which puts strict limitations on the role of political appointees such as himself in relation to civil servants and that he understands and respects the specific protections and safeguards for public servants contained in that Act. Certainly, it is the duty of both Houses of Parliament to scrutinise proposals for Civil Service reform and that must include Mr Cummings appearing in person before the responsible committees of both Houses. Prior to that, the Prime Minister, as Minister for the Civil Service, should make a Statement to the House of Commons explaining the extent of the powers Mr Cummings enjoys and their compatibility with the existing rules covering the powers of political appointees.

For those of us who were hoping for a period of tranquillity following the recent turmoil, I fear that the gracious Speech contains too many threats to our freedoms for that to happen. As for Mr Cummings, I recommend a reading of the lives of Robespierre and Trotsky, with their reminder that revolutions have a habit of devouring the revolutionaries.