Lord Garnier (Con)

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Farmer on introducing this debate and thank him for doing so with his usual calmness and analysis. Every time he speaks on this subject—and he is a renowned expert—the House listens with great care, and we did so again today. I also welcome and congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, both on his arrival here and on his maiden speech. He should not feel in the least bit embarrassed about waiting only two or three days after his introduction before addressing the House. He should have done so on the first day, and on the second and on the third, and I hope that he will on many days after this because, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, so correctly pointed out, he was a judge and will be a Member of this House who will provide great wisdom and analysis and a great sense of justice on anything to which he brings his mind to bear. Whilst I have them sitting there, I want to thank both those noble and learned Lords for helping me, just over 16 years ago, with the introduction of the deferred prosecution agreement. They, as successor Presidents of the Queen’s Bench Division, assisted me in my political guise, with them in their judges’ role, to bring that criminal justice tool into fruition. It seems a little strange that, when I last appeared in front of the then Sir Brian Leveson, when he was sitting in court, he was about 20 feet above me; the layout of this Chamber allows me to be 10 feet above him. I shall savour that. As the noble Lord, Lord Foster, mentioned a little while ago, the Justice and Home Affairs Committee of your Lordships’ House has produced a report on the state of our prisons and, to some extent, it mirrored the report made by the House of Commons Justice Committee. It is fair to say that neither report was complimentary about what they had looked into and found. Equally, it is fair to say that nor did they say anything that we did not already know before. Until prisons become a politically important subject of real and regular interest to Prime Ministers and Secretaries of State for Justice, very little can be achieved, despite the hard work of junior Ministers in the other place and on the Front Bench here. Now, I am a cracked record in human form: for years, I have been complaining about the state of our prison estate, what we do to improve the lives and prospects of those in prison, and the provision of education and employment opportunities for those in and those about to leave prison. We recycle offenders on an alarming scale, into and out of prison and then back again. The reoffending rate varies marginally from time to time, but the general picture is deeply depressing. For a hard-pressed prison governor, a good day is when nothing happens. It is when no one—and by that I mean both prison staff and prisoners themselves—dies and no one gets stabbed or punched; the infrastructure of the prison functions; the movement of people from the accommodation wings to the places where out-of-cell activities are supposed to happen takes place without incident and on time; no one throws drugs over the walls or flies them in by drone; and the provision of food and medical supplies is efficiently administered and delivered without mishap. That is a good day, but they are very rare. Sadly, there are not many good days for prison governors, nor for their staff or for the prisoners and, as I say, this is not a new state of affairs; it will continue, as it has done for decades, under both Labour and Conservative Governments, and it will get even worse as we overcrowd the prisons and create or permit the continuance of squalid and uncivilised living and working conditions within them. They are hopeless places, in so many respects. When I was a Member of Parliament, I once said to a local journalist that obviously prisons should have walls, both to keep the prisoners in and to keep the public out. But those walls should have large windows in them, so the public could see into the prisons and know what is being done on their behalf, and the prisoners could also see out, so they could see there was a community out there that would welcome them back if they were rehabilitated, if they could learn to read and write, if they could get off drugs and if they could become social, employable beings. The local journalist looked at me and said, “You clearly haven’t thought of the public expenditure implications of building all those windows”. I think he was being serious, which is rather depressing. I suffer from analysis paralysis, and I accept that reciting what is wrong is easy; doing something about it seems to be impossible. This scandalous injustice must stop. The tiresome blame game played by successive Governments is unproductive and does us no credit, still less achieves anything. I have recently written to the new Prime Minister and I gave a copy to the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Lemos. I hope that he has read it and I am sure he has; he probably keeps it by his bed and is setting it to music. We do not need, as the justice unions have indicated today in their statement, a royal commission to investigate our prisons and to make robust recommendations. We know what is wrong: what we require is a Government to do something about it. We need determined action, led by a Prime Minister and a Secretary of State who are politically motivated and able to command the system that they oversee to do what is required. Everybody who has spoken has indicated what is required; it just requires leadership and action. I urge the Minister to run round to No. 10 this evening and say that he is ready for action.