Contribution
My Lords, it is a very special privilege first to have listened to the speech of my noble and learned friend Lord Leveson of Liverpool and now to have the chance to add a few remarks. I wish first to convey the apologies of my noble and learned friends Lord Burnett and Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers. Events elsewhere have detained them, and they are unable to be present, but I have that pleasure.
It is now more than a quarter of a century ago that, as what I still think of as youngish judges—though, alas, no longer so, I think I can safely say—we started to work together with responsibility for the circuit system and, in particular, for the way in which criminal justice was administered by the courts under the leadership of that great Chief Justice, Lord Judge. Lord Judge would have been especially proud and delighted to have been here today because he would have seen this as an inevitability.
Like Lord Judge, my noble and learned friend Lord Leveson had enormous experience of the common law across all its aspects, but particularly in criminal justice, and he brought that experience to bear both in trials and on appeals, and, as importantly, in the leadership he gave in the successive appointments he held to improving the criminal justice system, and in the many reports and reviews he has conducted to that end. But his experience is much wider. I have not the time to go through it all, but one particular example occupies the time of your Lordships’ House from time to time, and that is his work as the Investigatory Powers Commissioner. He is a man of enormous talent and will bring huge benefits to this House.
I need have said none of that, because the proof of what he will bring is in all your Lordships’ expectations, which were amply justified but which, modestly of course, he said he was a little worried he might not live up to. His mastery of the criminal law and the criminal justice system is enormous. Indeed, I found over that quarter of a century that I almost always agreed with everything he said. I can take the opportunity of saying so today because I do not wish to add to, and could not possibly improve upon, his analysis of the difficulties facing the criminal justice system.
Like other noble Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for obtaining this debate and for the many speeches that have been made about what needs to be done. The list is almost endless. I want to address one overarching problem, and that is what we can best do with what money we get.
I recall some years ago that this was exemplified by the first matter we have to address, and that is rigid discipline over money—no doubt noble Lords will fear that I have gone over to the Treasury’s side, or should I say the dark side? But it is important to have discipline. In the last Labour Government in the early 2000s, I remember that when reforms were thought of, you had to prove what effect it would have. This was then checked by the Home Office. There was something called the Home Office model, which showed that if you created an offence, it would need so many more prosecutors, so many more judges, and so many more prison places.
I deeply regret that we do not do the same now on the most important aspect, which is at the heart of today’s debate: the massive increase in prison sentence lengths of which everyone has spoken. The first thing we must do is bring back a fiscal discipline so that we know what money we have, because only with knowing what money we have can we do things properly. The late Lord Judge and I were bitterly critical of the constant increase in sentence lengths without consideration of how this was to be paid for without either putting prisoners into squalid conditions or cutting the really good things that are done in prison—in particular, education. That is the first fundamental question. We need to work out what we can pay for with the money available.
The second fundamental question is then to explain to the public what we are capable of doing. This is a shared endeavour of us all because we cannot go on as we are. It seems to me that we must return to, first, truth in sentencing. If the judge says, “You get five years and you spend half of that in prison and half in the community”, that is what we should deliver, but we have had to go away from that because we have not told the public the truth—that there is only a limited amount of money available and we can do only so much with it. I hope this fundamental question will be grappled with by us all.
I warmly commend the Government on what they have said about IPPs. It has taken huge courage and a sense of justice to do it. The greater task ahead is to adopt the same attitude to explaining to the public that if this is the money available, this is all we can do, prison sentences must come down and we must use prison spaces more effectively, and they will be better for that. That is the next task facing this Government.