Lord Oates (LD)

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the excellent, eloquent speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, which I agree with entirely. Today, I want to focus on the justice system and, in particular, the contrast between the crisis in the adult justice system and the many successes achieved by creative policy-making in the youth justice system. The prisons, as we read every day, are overflowing. The courts have huge backlogs, with cases currently being listed as far ahead as 2029 and 2030. Recalls to prison are at unprecedented levels. Some 51,000 prisoners were recalled in the 12 months to March—a 28% increase on the year before. In the January to March quarter, more prisoners were recalled than were released for the first time ever and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, said, many of these cases are not because of people committing new offences; they are people who have chaotic lives after being released from prison and perhaps have not attended a probation hearing or whatever. We really need to get to grips with that. Prisoner releases have become the latest political football to be kicked to and fro. This is a problem we all own; all our parties own it. Over the past decades, we have had a legacy of rhetoric driving up sentence length and prison numbers despite falling crime rates. This has been combined with a failure to build the prison places required to soak up the inevitable outcome of that sort of increase in sentencing levels. But that is not necessary at all. This is not normal. Our levels of incarceration are not normal. We do not have higher crime levels, on average, than most of our European counterparts, yet we are incarcerating people at double the rate of places such as Germany and at an even higher rate compared with the Scandinavian countries. By contrast, the youth justice system is one of the greatest public policy successes of the past 30 years. It is the subject of my Private Member’s Bill, which will have its Second Reading next Friday so, like my noble friend Lady Sheehan, I am taking the opportunity to raise some of the points here, as some noble Lords might not be able to be there next week. When I worked at the Youth Justice Board shortly after it came into existence, the number of children in the juvenile secure estate peaked at over 3,500. In June this year, there were fewer than 350 in the secure estate—a reduction that has been achieved while youth crime has reduced. That is a remarkable achievement by any standard, particularly when the adult system was going in the opposite direction. It was achieved by the creative, innovative policy-making of the 1997 Labour Government in establishing the Youth Justice Board and the youth offending teams. One might have expected the incoming Government to seek to apply some of the lessons of the youth justice system to the crisis of the adult system. Instead, they have chosen to abolish the Youth Justice Board in all but name. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, referred to Treasury old favourites. This is an old favourite of the Ministry of Justice and the Treasury, and it should be resisted. I hope that the new Prime Minister will take a new approach to this.