Title (Hansard, 15 June 1972)

§ Sir Elwyn Jones
We cannot allow this Bill to leave the House without first acknowledging the valuable contribution which has been made through every stage of our consideration by the Minister of State. We are grateful to him for his patient listening and his occasional agreement to accede to some of our proposals.
For my part, I want also to express my gratitude for the outstanding participation of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Dulwich (Mr. S. Silkin), and my thanks to my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Dell), whose 1982 ringing tones on suspended sentences will echo in our ears for many a day.
We on this side of the House welcomed and supported the Bill, while we subjected it to close examination. Its principal provisions have been based on the Widgery and Wootton Reports. In that connection, I want to make it clear that anything that I said, when we were discussing life imprisonment, about the Criminal Law Revision Committee and its work was in no sense intended to underestimate the immense value of the work of that committee or to suggest that it was in any way laggard or remiss in its dedication to the task that it voluntarily undertakes.
So far as the Bill reflects the approach of keeping out of prison those whom protection of the public does not require them to be there, we welcome it. The provision for community service orders is perhaps the most hopeful feature but, like the provision for day training centres which is also welcome, its success will be dependent on the resources that the Government make available to make them work. The portents that they will be ample enough are by no means certain. However, we shall keep a watchful eye.
Where the Bill falls short is in failing to take effective steps to end the roaring inflation in the number of prisoners now overcrowding our prisons. I make no apology at this hour for repeating again the words of Lord Justice Lawton: Loss of liberty is an inappropriate, useless and expensive sanction for about three-quarters of those who now find themselves in custody. At the end of the day, partly because of the abolition of the mandatory provision with regard to suspended sentences, the dismal prospect is that the prison population may well be larger than it is now, and it cannot be ruled out that the Bill will aggravate instead of remedying the present crisis in prison administration which has been illustrated by the recent troubles at Brixton.
Equally disappointing is the failure of the Bill to tackle the deplorable state of the law and practice with regard to bail and custody.
However, having said that, while I am bound to say that the Bill does not rank in significance with the major Criminal Justice Bills of this century, we welcome it so far as it goes.

§ Mr. Dell
This is the first Criminal Justice Bill with which I have ever had any contact in Committee.
I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for West Ham, South (Sir Elwyn Jones) for his kind remarks about myself. May I say, especially in view of what was said earlier, that throughout the Bill I have found the company of lawyers entirely tolerable. Indeed, I have found among lawyers, at any rate on my side of the House, a remarkable capacity to be convinced by the evidence.
The Minister of State has listened to me courteously but has, unfortunately, been too infrequently convinced. In Committee I put forward an idea about the way in which the community service order should be administered. The hon. and learned Gentleman found that controversial and thought that it was unlikely to be accepted. I understand that since then, in some wise legal journal, which unfortunately, I have not seen, there is comment on this proposal of mine and it is considered to be an interesting idea, so perhaps we may some day return to it.
The Minister will understand that I have mixed feelings about the Bill. I regard it as an important aspect of penal policy to get down the prison population. I do not think that it is any credit to this country that we use imprisonment so much more than most other Western European countries.
The hon. and learned Gentleman accused me earlier of pulling a figure out of the air in respect of the mandatory suspended sentence. At any rate I think he must acknowledge that I showed how small a proportion it would require of those currently receiving mandatory suspended sentences to receive sentences of immediate impirsonment to have a substantial effect on prison receptions. I assure the hon. and learned Gentleman that when he reads Hansard—I am sure that he reads my speeches afterwards with great attention—he will see that I made no confusion between prison reception and prison population.
This is a Government decision which the country will have cause to regret. I regret that included in a Bill which has so much that holds out the potentiality in 1984 the future to reduce the prison population there should be this one major fault which, as far as I am concerned, outweighs any merit in the rest of the Bill.

§ Mr. Carlisle
May I say to the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Dell) that if I misheard what he said I apologise at once. I know that he fully appreciates the difference between prison population and prison reception. I thought that he had moved from one to the other, but if he says that he did not I accept it.
I thank the right hon. and learned Member for West Ham, South (Sir Elwyn Jones) for the kind words that he said about myself. I have been grateful throughout our proceedings on the Bill for the constructive and thorough manner in which it has been studied by both sides of the House and I am particularly grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman and those who were his colleagues on the Committee for their approach to it.
Like all Criminal Justice Bills, it is a certain amount of a patchwork. It has various different provisions which are picked up and are necessary to be reformed and come to light as the years go by, but there are clear themes running through the Bill. It contains many major provisions.
Firstly, it gives a more central position to the compensation of the victim in the sentencing policy of our courts. I believe that that will be welcomed. As the right hon. Gentleman said, it has several new and major experimental provisions. I hope very much that the provisions for community service and for the day training centres will come to be used widely by the courts when the facilities and resources are available and when those powers are available for use by the courts. The Bill also has the original provision for criminal bankruptcy.
The Bill removes what I have always believed was wrong in the 1967 Act, the mandatory provision concerning suspended sentences. It provides, for the first time, for probation and after-care committees to provide hostels. I believe that this will prove a major advance in the establishment of probation hostels for 1985 adults in this country. I have no hesitation in saying now what I said on various occasions in Committee, that I believe that ultimately that may be one of the major provisions of the whole Bill.
The right hon. Gentleman said that he regretted that the Bill did nothing about bail. I draw his attention to the fact that it provides, for the first time, the power for probation committees to set up bail hostels, and power for the Home Office to grant aid them.
The right hon. Gentleman made only one remark that I could not understand. That was when he spoke of the "roaring inflation" of the prison population. I do not take the credit for it, but the fact remains that the prison population today, 38,200, is very nearly 2,000 less than it was two years ago. Curiously enough—I was about to say, "One of the few things", but perhaps I had better not—there has certainly been no inflation in the prison population during that period.
The effect of the Bill will be to help to keep out of prison those who can be more successfully, adequately and affectively dealt with by other methods. I commend the Bill to the House.

§ Mr. John Roper (Farnworth)
The Minister of State drew attention to the fact that the Government has not yet been able to inflate the prison population. Unfortunately, in so far as the Bill makes provision for ending mandatory suspended sentences, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Dell) has shown, the Government are now taking action to add the prison population to the list of all the other things they have inflated during their period of office.
The figure of 2,000 extra prisoners produced by my right hon. Friend indicates the prison population that is to come. Therefore, while there are many things in the Bill which can be welcomed, there is an unfortunate, serious and fundamental flaw, in that prisoners as well as other items will be inflated by the present Government.