Farmer Review

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Wednesday 11th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, on securing his debate and on his introduction of this golden thread: relationships are important if people are to change. That was a strong theme that ran through the rest of the debate and informs the report, which I enjoyed reading. This is been a good debate, with some good contributions; there is not time to go through all of them. I should explain that I am here as a substitute for a sick colleague—my noble friend Lord Beecham has sciatica and cannot move—and so I have come to this with an open mind, because I have not studied this area for a long time. Therefore I found the reading of the report, thinking harder about it and reading more widely round it a useful exercise and a great chance to get away from some of the other more pressing issues that have been occupying me for the last few weeks. When I read all this stuff I did not have the context or the information that was available to others who might have responded. However, I want to make two points that I thought might be helpful.

My interest in prisons came from when I worked in a think tank, when we looked at the concept of restorative justice. I was impressed by that as a way of trying to bring something new into the criminal justice system and give both prisoners and those who have to supervise them something that would work with them and rehabilitate them better. I mention that because the restorative justice approach was based on the idea that there was a missing ingredient in the criminal justice system as it is practised in the United Kingdom, in that the victim has no place. The state steps in and takes over the victim’s interest in the crime that has been committed against them and, in so doing, removes the victim from that. The analysis that was used said that if you brought the victim back in some way, you added a new dimension to the whole process. I can give examples of that to any noble Lords who are interested, because it is an effective arrangement. It is important that this has a much wider application—it is now used in schools and other places—to try to engage those who commit crimes with those who have been affected by them.

The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, are redolent of that. In his analysis, what is missing from the process that we have in criminal justice is the family. If this is true, and if it has any relationship to what was found in restorative justice, that is a powerful ingredient that we need to bring back into the system. We somehow need to find a way to make sure that there is a process that will allow it to feed back in the way it can to reduce reoffending, change behaviour and reduce crime.

We have a problem here. The prisons are in a state of complete crisis. They are chronically overcrowded, understaffed and violent, and the learning and skills work done by 65% of prisons and young offender institutions is rated by Ofsted as unacceptably low. At the end of August 2017, 84 of the 116 prisons were overcrowded, and nearly a quarter of the total prison population is held in overcrowded conditions. As we have heard, deaths have increased, and self-inflicted deaths are up by 64%, while self-harm has increased. There were supposed to be an additional 2,500 new prison officers across the prison estate by the end of 2018. However, the latest figures show that there has been an increase of only 800 additional staff, and we are not seeing the rest. Indeed, there have been reductions in some of the most violent prisons. This review has highlighted the damage that understaffing, overcrowding and violence within prisons does to the ability of those employed in prisons to build relationships with the men—it is mainly men—in their care.

There is a problem here, which needs tackling urgently. The Government published a White Paper about a year ago and accepted that a lot had to be done. There was also a Prisons and Courts Bill around just before the last election, but that got scrapped and was not mentioned in the Queen’s Speech. What will the Government do about this?