Prisons (Property) Bill

David Nuttall Excerpts

Friday 14th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) for bringing forward the Bill. He is my parliamentary neighbour and does a fantastic job in his constituency, as I know all too well. That has been emphasised today not only by the quality of his speech, but by his introducing such an important measure, which many of my constituents will consider long overdue, as will many of his. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most of my constituents probably think that the measure is already in place and would not imagine that there is still a need to legislate for something that most people think common sense dictates should happen anyway. It is therefore my great pleasure to support my hon. Friend today. You, Mr Deputy Speaker, as a renowned parliamentarian, will know that for that reason I do not intend to speak for too long in supporting the Bill.

I do not want to cover the ground my hon. Friend has already covered, because I think he set out perfectly clearly not only the problem and its impact on victims of crime, but how wrong it is that people can be given property that they should not have had in the first place. I will move on to some of the other points that I am not entirely sure he has considered in the Bill, but which might be considered in Committee. I want to raise some of these issues because, before we talk about destroying property that gets into prison in a way that it should not, we really need to look at how it gets into prisons in the first place. If we want to tackle the problem of people having mobile phones, drugs, weapons—whatever it may be— in prison, it is important that, rather than focusing on what we do when they are caught with them, we look at what we might do to stop them having them in the first place. Surely that would be better all round.

Obviously, as I am sure we are all aware, there are a number of ways that contraband stuff can end up in the hands of a prisoner. It can often be brought in by people visiting the prisoners. It is sometimes secreted in deliveries sent to prisoners, for example in books and other kinds of merchandise. Unfortunately, it is sometimes brought in through the collusion of prison officers themselves, something we always need to be mindful of.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

My hon. Friend says it can come inside books. The search procedures must be seriously lacking if that can happen.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend might well be right. That is the point I want to get to, because although I absolutely support what the Bill would do, I contend— I hope that the Minister will pay some attention to this—that we absolutely need to do more to stop such material getting into prisons in the first place, and perhaps the Bill can be amended in Committee to reflect that. Some of the checks are not what they should be. For example, there are what are known as BOSS chairs in prisons—body orifice scanners—that are used to try to stop prisoners bringing stuff into prison with them at the time they are sentenced by secreting it in ever more ingenious and, it seems to me, painful ways. The prisons have these body orifice scanners to try and detect that, but occasionally they will not be working properly or have not been working for a few months and no one has bothered to have them repaired. Alternatively, the prison officers may not have confidence that the scanners can pick up everything that they should. We should do much more to stop the stuff getting through in the first place.

Things also get into prison by being thrown over the wall for prisoners to collect on exercise. Lots of prisons have nets to stop that happening, but the nets should be more extensive.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) on doing so well in the lottery to get a private Member’s Bill so high up the list; perhaps he should participate in other lotteries and then have millions to spend on good causes.

I also want to congratulate the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright), on his promotion. It is a pleasure to speak in a debate to which I know he will reply. I am grateful to him for asking me to speak on Disraeli earlier this year. It was a great pleasure, but I shall not talk about the late Earl of Beaconsfield today.

With this Bill, I want to go back to first principles. As a House, we should always be careful when we do anything that undermines the rights of property. The foundation of our state is the right of property—the right of people to enjoy the property they legitimately own. We can go back to the Magna Carta of 1215 when it comes to the right of people not to have their property taken away without proper process.

It is very easy, in looking at prisoners, to say that they have given up all their rights, so they do not have this right either. It is a very tempting argument and in some respects it is true. It is justly part of the punishment that some of prisoners’ rights are taken away. In my view, it is right for them to lose the ability to vote in general elections. It is a right that they have lost, by the will of Parliament, and it should remain lost to them. It gets more complicated, however, when it comes to things that they are sometimes allowed to have and sometimes not allowed to have. What we do not want is a prison regime that is fundamentally arbitrary, in which a prison governor can decide that he will allow a prisoner to have a mobile telephone at one moment, but then change his mind the next moment because the right circumstances have not been met. It is, I believe, the case that many people in prison are not as educationally advanced as many people in the House of Commons, so they might not fully understand the regulations that apply to them or be able to cope with the differentiations that might apply.

As a starting-point—here I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh)—I believe that we should always be enormously careful about extending the powers of the state to do something, and we should be particularly careful where there is cross-party support. In that case, there is often a popular view that it is right to do something and people find it very hard to object to it, but that is because they have forgotten the first principle that they should have borne in mind at the beginning of the process. My starting point, then, is general suspicion of extending the powers of the state and general suspicion of undermining the rights of property.

There is, of course, an exception. Going right back to the Magna Carta again, people’s property can be taken away if a proper process is involved, if the system allows it to be taken away and if the approach is fundamentally just and proportionate. To quote the Magna Carta, it says that “no free man” shall have certain penalties applied—and, of course, by their very definition, prisoners are not free men; that is the whole point of them being in prison. The definition of a free man in the Magna Carta is, of course, completely separate from our modern understanding, but I think a brief foray into the feudal system would be unhelpful on this occasion. Here, it is perhaps more interesting to look at the language literally rather than to apply a mediaeval interpretation of “a free man”. The limitation on the protection of property is that it is the protection of the property of a free man, and for many centuries the state has taken upon itself the right—to some extent, the obligation—to take away property from people as a form of penalty for their misbehaviour.

We then come to the question of whether the penalty is appropriate and suitable or unduly harsh in relation to what the prisoner has done. There are some categories where it will be incredibly easy to determine that. As we have already established, something that is a criminal item of itself can be taken by the police—although that is a different procedure—and destroyed by them. Fortunately, it will not be the case that a prisoner who is found with a stash of heroin on him will get it back at the end of his sentence, only to be arrested by the police and have it taken off him again. That would create a bureaucratic muddle. Of course, it would not necessarily be heroin—it could be any number of other illegal substances—but because some Members probably know more about illegal substances than I do, I shall stick to heroin for the time being.

Then there is the question of armaments. Some of us remember the break-out from Brixton prison when Lord Baker, I believe, was Home Secretary. Some IRA prisoners smuggled in a gun in the false bottom of a shoe. Had it been found, as it should have been, it would have been confiscated and undoubtedly not returned. However, there are grey areas. What if a prisoner has a replica gun? Replicas may be legal in the outside world, but they are obviously not encouraged in prison because they cause a certain amount of confusion, especially if they are good replicas. Prison officers would fear that a good replica might be a real gun. You would have to be a brave soul—and I know that you are a brave soul, Mr Deputy Speaker—to be certain that a replica gun was genuinely a replica, and would not actually fire. Although replica guns can currently be confiscated, it seems to me quite sensible to destroy them as well.

[Mr Nuttall]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

It would be an honour.

[Mr Nuttall]

I am not sure that it is right for them to be destroyed. There are many reasons for which guns can be legally held in this country. Surely if a gun were capable of being used, it could be sold and the money sent to the victims of crime.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I thought that a replica gun might not be of enormous value, and that it might therefore be easier to destroy it. Let us, however, take the example of a set of 18th-century duelling pistols. I do not know whether those crop up frequently in prisons, but they might. They are not very effective, the gunpowder that is required for them has got a bit damp and the flint does not work perfectly, so they are not necessarily enormously dangerous items, and they are legal to hold in the outside world. My hon. Friend is right, however: if these were found—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

As always, it is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), who gave this matter some historical context while putting forward cogent arguments against the hypothecation of taxes, which I am sure will have been heard on the Treasury Bench. He also highlighted the one area where there is a difficulty with the central thrust of the Bill: the impact on prisoners held on remand. There is a debate to be had on how we deal with that category of prisoner.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) for bringing the Bill before us and I congratulate him on his success in the private Members’ Bills ballot. He was not, in fact, all that near the top of the ballot; some outside the House may think that he came just after my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell), who presented the previous private Member’s Bill, but I think I am right in saying that my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey was 11th out of the hat. It is a great testament to him that he has persevered and not given up.

The situation is somewhat unusual in that we are in the happy position—I hope—of being able to shepherd not one but two private Members’ Bills through the House in a single Friday sitting. That may be approaching a record, even if it does not actually break one. I do not want to take up all the time available because I want to hear from the Minister, who I am sure will give the Bill the Government’s blessing.

Many of my constituents will be surprised that the loophole that the Bill addresses exists at all. They will be amazed that contraband seized from prisoners has to be given back at the end of their sentences, but such is the state of the law at the moment. The Bill proposes to change the law so that smuggled items, whether mobile phones or other things, that are confiscated do not have to be returned to inmates on release.

The items come in different categories. In its “Conveyance and Possession of Prohibited Items and Other Related Offences” document, the National Offender Management Service helpfully categorises items according to seriousness of offence. List A items are drugs, explosives, firearms or ammunition, or any other offensive weapon. I think we can all be satisfied that those are rightly put into the most serious category. List B items are things such as alcohol, mobile telephones, cameras and sound recording devices, or the constituent parts of those items, such as SIM cards, mobile phone chargers and so on, as well as other computer-related equipment such as discs, data sticks and memory cards. List C consists of things such as tobacco, money, clothing, food and drink, letters, papers, books, and tools.

These items are not always smuggled in in the ways that we have heard about so far—brought in by visitors, by the prisoners themselves, or sometimes, sadly, through the corruption of prison officers. Back in 2006, the director general of the Prison Service, Mr Phil Wheatley, gave evidence to the Public Accounts Committee, in the course of which he explained that in spite of all the security that prison authorities put in at the entry to prisons, there is sometimes little they can do to prevent items from getting into the prison. He gave an example:

“one of the things we found recently was a dead pigeon”.

One might think, “A dead pigeon—there’s nothing unusual about that, it’s just fallen out of the sky,” but in fact it was, he said, “stuffed full of contraband.” That demonstrates the resourcefulness and ingenuity that is sometimes used in getting contraband into our prisons. As my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) said, the way to deal with the problem of things being thrown over the walls may be to extend coverings over open areas and put in netting. The first thing to do is to make it more difficult for these illegal items to get into prisons in the first place. As he observed, it is a problem not only in this country but throughout the world.

Once these items find their way into our penal establishments, the problem then arises of what to do with them when they are confiscated. I am concerned about the cost of this to the public purse. My hon. Friend commented on reports in the newspapers earlier this year about the lightning raids that were made on some of Britain’s prisons in the north-west of England, when hundreds of items were seized, including 322 mobile phones, 201 SIM cards and 308 chargers, leaving aside the 371 pints of hooch. I hope that the illicit alcohol was thrown away, but all those mobile phones, chargers and SIM cards would have needed to be stored somewhere. At a time when, as we all accept, public resources are extremely scarce, it cannot be right that NOMS is put to the trouble of having to retain these items indefinitely.

My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) enlightened us on one of the problems—I had not come across it before—namely communal wing mobile phones. The difficulty with such phones is that no one owns up to their ownership, so it is impossible to find out to whom that item should be returned.

Notwithstanding the views of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset on the hypothecation of taxes, I think the public would appreciate the justice of the situation if the proceeds from the sale of confiscated items, perhaps as a result of an auction, went towards the victims of crime and a charity that looks after them. I appreciate his point that we might reach the happy state of affairs whereby there is so much money in the fund that we will not know what to do with it, but I hope that our efforts to cut down on the amount of contraband will mean that there is less of it about and less of it to sell, so perhaps the fund will not have a surfeit of money after all.

I hope that one of the Bill’s consequences will be fewer mobile phones entering prisons. My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey mentioned the fact that nowadays mobile phones are much more than a means of communication. In fact, I would go as far as saying that they are, in all manner and means, mini-computers. They do much more than simply transmit messages. As he said, they often have recording devices and can record videos and take photographs. They are of great value, and if they were confiscated they could raise a considerable amount of money for the public purse, regardless of what we decide to do with it.

Another way that I would like us to clamp down on contraband—this is my own pet scheme—is by increasing the sentence. If a prisoner is found to have arranged for contraband to be brought in, increasing their sentence would, I think, be met with widespread public approval.

I want to deal with a specific point and hope that the Minister will touch on it. Clause 2(2) provides that the operative clause, clause 1, should not come into force until such day as the Secretary of State may order it by statutory instrument. Since my arrival in this place, I have discovered that, sadly, dozens of Acts of Parliament and sections of Acts of Parliaments, having passed through all the procedures of this House and the other place, sit on the statute book without ever being brought into force. When I read clause 2(2), it set alarm bells ringing. I sincerely hope that the Bill does not become one of those pieces of legislation. I hope that the Minister will reassure the House, notwithstanding clause 2(2), that an appropriate statutory instrument will be brought forward at the earliest opportunity, so that this valuable Bill can be brought into force as soon as possible.

In conclusion, I support the Bill entirely. I think that it will make sense to most people outside the House. It cannot be right that prisoners’ ill-gotten gains are returned to them, because they should never have had them in the first place. Many people, both inside and outside this House, feel that far too much time and attention is paid to the interests of prisoners. The Bill will go a small way towards redressing the balance. It will affect only a small number of people, because the vast majority of people in this country will never be in prison. However, it sends out the message that we are on the side of the victim of crime, not on the side of those who choose, of their own free will, to break the law. If the spoils of prisoners’ activities can be sold for the greater good, so much the better. I am delighted to support the Bill, I wish it well in Committee and I hope that it receives a Second Reading. I look forward to hearing from the Minister.