HL Deb 05 March 1969 vol 300 cc149-65

2. 53 p.m.

LORD DONALDSON OF KINGSBRIDGE rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will report on the progress of the reform of the penal system since the Criminal Justice Act 1967; and in particular, to draw their attention to the lack of adequate long-term support for the after-care of prisoners on discharge; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, the Motion which stands in my name on the Order Paper and which I beg to move concerns the second half of the criminal cycle. After the excitment of the trial and the drama and climax of sentence, the prisoner faces months and sometimes years in prison and afterwards the long grey struggle back into acceptance by society, which is often, for very good reasons, not too keen to accept him. I shall try to set out the problems in a wide perspective, and I hope that noble Lords who follow will till in the gaps I shall leave.

We are not concerned here with the philosophical arguments as to the ethics of punishment—which is just as well, because one gets immediately into deep water—whether it is retaliatory, retributive, deterrent, preventive, expiatory, or simply for the satisfaction of an indignant public. We know very well—in fact, my noble and learned friend on the Woolsack reminded us only a month or two ago—that if we were to tie every parking offender to his parking meter and give him 20 strokes with a split bamboo, we should finish parking offences for good. We know, with almost equal certainty, that if we were to adopt the old Roman system of sewing the offender into a sack with a fox and a viper, and toss the bundle into the Tiber—I suppose in our case the Thames—there would be no very noticeable diminution in the incidence of parricide. Luckily, we are not concerned with these problems. We are not concerned with the quality of sentence or the type. What we are confronted with is the standard, workaday, modern sanction of the deprivation of liberty—prison, in fact—bearing in mind that people who go in have also to come out, unless you sentence them all for life.

We are to consider now the problems of prison and after-care. I should not like it to he thought that those of us who interest ourselves in the second criminal cycle are particularly soft-hearted about the first, the enforcement of law and order. We fully share the orthodox conviction that the likelihood of being caught is the best, and probably the only certain deterrent, and that a strong police force with full public confidence behind it is the appropriate means of ensuring this. We are sometimes thought of as soft, but I would claim we have as hard heads as, and noticeably less impenetrable than, those of some of the hawks who have no time at all for this sort of thing.

There is a prerequisite to any prison reform, and that is to get rid of overcrowding. I think that applies to other countries as well as our own. Over this I shall not say very much. I do not want to bully my noble friend, because I know that he and his colleagues are just as concerned, as frustrated and as anxious about this very difficult problem as the most radical reformer. The difficulty is that the attempt to cope with the problem works directly against the crying need to demolish those appalling Victorian barracks which constitute most of our local prisons, occupying valuable and badly needed sites worthy of the Big Five banks, and as wastefully employed.

The nation has not cared enough to make it politically possible for any Government to spend the huge sums of money necessary to put things right, but I hope that my noble friend will be able to tell us that this Government are snowing some courage in trying to remedy the negligence of the last fifty years. To its credit, we can say that the Criminal Justice Act 1967 showed an evident determination to keep people out of prison, either by not sending them there in the first place or by letting them out before their sentence had been completed, if subsequently their behaviour justified it. Their release was to be effected through the system of parole, which was the most radical innovation of that Act, and we shall hear later on from my noble friend Lord Hunt how it has been working. As to the alternatives to prison, I shall discuss them later when we come to consider the facilities for after-care, because the two must inevitably be taken together.

So far as prison reform itself is concerned, there are a number of very important aspects on which there is general agreement. All progress in prison reform depends on classification; that is to say, identifying and isolating the dangerous men and shutting them up securely, so that the less dangerous men—who, of course, are the vast majority of our prison population—can be treated more leniently and humanely, and far more cheaply, in open prisons, or outside prison altogether in hostels or controlled lodgings, with a certain amount of support, supervision and that kind of thing. This was strongly emphasised in the Mount-batten Report, and no doubt my noble friend will tell us what is being done about it.

I would point out that "classification" is a perfectly simple word but a very difficult act, and it is essential that there should be some research and follow-up to see that the classification which is done is correct, because if it is not we get nowhere. This is a very difficult subject. Another matter on which all informed opinion is agreed, I think, is the question of regionalisation, which we have put forward for many years, and it is very good to see a beginning with four prison regions and eight probation and aftercare regions within them. These two things, classification and regionalisation, will, I think, ensure that in the first place no man is sent very far away from his home, and secondly, we have a new structure whereby the whole range of prison conditions are available in each region—from the maximum security, through hospital types like Grendon, open prisons, industrial centres, work camps, and the whole range of what is now fashionably called non-custodial treatment", which means hostels, lodgings, and so on. This would make possible experiments—which have not yet, I think, been tried in this country—in weekend detention; work in a penal centre while living at home, and other variations in the custodial and non-custodial prison system which have been tried elsewhere.

We then come to the question of work and pay, and this is a subject in which, for the last twelve years, have been meddling. We have agreement by everybody, but we have not seen very much pro- gress. Ideally, every man should work the kind of day he would work in a factory, under similar conditions and pressures. And he should be paid the proper trade union rate for the work, if he can stand up to it. The advantages are increased self-respect; better work habits; something put by for when he comes out; a contribution to the State's expenditure upon keeping him inside; something put aside for his wife, and a stamped insurance card. As my noble and learned friend knows, that is still a great source of grievance, and I hope that something is being done about it. Not a great deal has been done about these matters. I hope that my noble friend in his reply will perhaps tell us something of the new industrial prison shortly to be opened at Coldingley. For example, will more realistic wage rates be paid there? And might it not be possible, with the help of the trade unions (which I should dearly love to involve, and which I feel would not need much pushing), to encourage the men who work to become union members so that they would have a smooth passage into work when they leave prison?

One appreciates that work and pay are not the answer for everyone. There are many men in prison who will never learn to work properly and who will never stick to a job for any length of time. These men, according to what one thinks, need more harsh treatment or adequate psychiatric treatment. I myself would prefer the latter, but there are those who are not amenable to ordinary industrial conditions, and I will try to say a word about them later. For the rest, in spite of the great difficulties, I believe that if the Home Secretary were to say, "Draw me up a five-year plan at the end of which every man in prison for six months or more, who is capable of doing a job, will have a job and be properly paid for it", I believe it could be done.

The third point is the maintenance of the family tie. There is nothing inconsistent in a life of crime with a happy and united family—in fact, it may be the one good element in a sadly delinquent whole. Any prison welfare officer will tell you that the man who has the best chance of coming through is the man with a wife and family to go back to. Therefore, the authorities should bend every effort towards fostering and preserving this link, giving equal priority to it with security. This is the one field where the authorities have failed signally. The very fact of imprisonment works violently in the opposite direction. Inarticulate men and women, restricted letters, curtailed visits, appalling journeys for the wife and family, bad visiting conditions, overworked welfare officers—all militate directly against the tender plant of family affection. Although there is some voluntary work being done in this field, not a great deal of initiative to use it has come from the Department. The Prison Department is often unfairly blamed through no fault of its own, but I have never been able to find an excuse for its seeming indifference to the prisoner's family.

I shall say little about juvenile delinquency, which deserves a debate to itself. The picture of detention centres is a rather unhappy one, with re-conviction rates unduly high, especially for the juniors. The Howard League has set up a working party under Professor Gibbens to examine the Borstal system as a whole, and I am glad to say that the Prison Department is co-operating fully. The question of borstal after-care I leave to my noble friend Lord Longford who has deserted your Lordships' House in order to exercise his Godly optimism in a youth advisory centre where I understand he is getting a great deal of advice. We look forward to hearing what he has to say out of his wide experience. I do not intend to say much about women and girls who create a small but extremely acute problem in this field. They account for no more than 800 of our prison population, less than 3 per cent. of the whole. They offer a suitable field for intensive research, especially from the angle of psychiatry, since the proportion of psychiatric disability is high among them. I am glad to say that the Prison Department has now agreed to turn Holloway into a psychiatric prison hospital, a decision which will be applauded by all concerned.

Before I leave the matter of prisons altogether, I wish to congratulate the Prison Department on its success in raising the level of recruiting for prison officers. I have been greatly struck, at the psychiatric prison at Grendon, by the very high level of prison officer, many of whom are young and comparatively new to the Service. It has often been said that the Prison Service should be more intimately involved in welfare work. At Grendon it is very involved, and many of the officers carry on a good relationship with the men after they have left prison by letters, by visits and by telephone communication. This is a valuable support to people when they leave prison.

I should like to know whether there are signs elsewhere of the prison officer gradually changing his main function from that of custodian to that of friend and adviser. No development could be more hopeful for the future of our prisons and our prisoners. We know that prison ought to provide treatment as well as custody, but no one can really tell us precisely what treatment there should be. The prerequisite of any treatment, however, must be the patient's readiness to receive it, and this is not likely to be achieved in an atmosphere of hostility. It may be said that prison is a punishment and that guards should not be social workers. I reply that the punishment is the loss of freedom and that custody, so long as it is effective, is no more so for being harsh. A vigorous start in devising and applying treatment has been made at Grendon, with which I am proud to have been closely associated since it opened seven years ago. We have made enough progress to justify a Grendon for each of the four prison regions, and I hope that this is in the Department's forward planning.

I must remark on the setback which the more progressive individuals in the Prison Service have experienced from the implementation of the Mount-batten recommendations. There is an eternal conflict between rehabilitation and safe custody, and a swing in one direction is inevitably a swing away from the other. Now that the rash of conspicuous escapes and the attendant publicity which bedevilled the former Home Secretary's early months in office has paled somewhat, I hope that we may see the pendulum swinging back again.

I turn to the area of most controversy, and of least agreement; namely, the alternatives to prison and the provision of after-care. There is here a curious paradox. The difficulties in prison reform are largely financial and administrative, but there is a great deal of agreement as to what should be done. The trouble is that to do it will cost many millions. And a nation that cares more about three hens to a cage than three men to a cell is not likely to rush into spending the vast sums of money required for this particular reformation. In the field of after-care the sums involved are quite small, but people have little clear guidance as to what ought to be done. There are no objective standards except perhaps the very crude one of "keeping out of prison", and it is extremely hard to devise any others. But there are so many people we do not know how to deal with—the tragic fringe of the mentally disturbed who trudge disconsolately from mental hospital to prison and back again; the epileptics whose percentage among the criminal population is far higher than in the outside world; the homosexuals and other sex offenders; the drug addicts, the alcoholics, the regular drunks, the plain inadequates. We do not know whether to group them together or to mix them up, to use force or persuasion, drugs or psychotherapy. What we do know is that, whatever their past, they still have a future and, unless we can find a way of helping them, it will be a very unhappy one and a great nuisance to society.

Nobody really knows, for example, what to do with the regular drunks, but my noble and reverend friend Lord Soper and his colleagues are trying to find out and are making some progress, about which we shall be hearing a little later when he comes to speak. What people do not seem to realise is that there is no point in finding out how to keep petty thieves or regular drunks or anyone else out of prison unless, when you have found out, you do it. And if you do it, you have to pay for it and go on paying for it for ever. You can save two-thirds of the cost by containing these men otherwise than in prison, but you have to put your hand in your pocket for the first one-third of the operation, otherwise nothing happens at all.

In 1967 the responsibility for aftercare was given to the Probation and After-Care Service, and in doing so the Government accepted an obligation to ensure that permanent support was provided to a certain proportion of our popu- lation which is incapable, without some help, of standing up to life and most of whom, without such support, will go back to prison. The Probation Service, with the voluntary movement, have to deal with this problem, but they must have money to do it. I do not know whether the Governments in power when this change was taking place—first Tory, then Labour—had a true realisation of what they were letting themselves in for; in other words, the continuing nature of their commitment. I do not believe that they did, which is why I am labouring the point to-day.

The whole after-care movement to date has been a series of unplanned experiments, prompted usually by the compassion of private people, run on a series of shoe-strings and leading to divergent and untested conclusions. Now that the professional element of the Probation Service has been introduced we can look for more orderly progress, and I hope to hear more from my noble friend Lord Wells-Pestell about the contribution to be made by the Probation Service. By nature, though, things will not go smoothly. Certain things seem to work for some people, but not for others. For instance, certain types of inadequate, petty offenders seem to keep out of prison and even to go to work, if they have the support of a family atmosphere and a skilled social worker, such as is found at Norman House or the Langley Houses; but another man will prefer to live on his own and will respond to the help of a club like the Circle Club in Camberwell or the Anchor Club in Leicester. Other people need to be put in touch with an associate or a steady friend who keeps contact with them, but as soon as they leave hostel or club or friend they seem to revert to the normal failure rate of well over 50 per cent.

It is perfectly clear that what we need is a number of varied experiments—hostels, clubs, associated schemes, et cetera—all trying in their different ways to find out how to help the different groups of people. To some extent, this is happening on a modest scale as a result of a combination of the Probation Service with the voluntary movement, with the support of the trusts. Goodness knows!, my Lords, what we should have done without the trusts. Their role has been crucial. But they are quite clear what it is: it is to initiate experiments, so that effective methods of help can be found and proved. But it is not to finance such things as a continuing need, which they regard as the duty of society itself. Usually they grant finance for three years.

It is my duty as Chairman of NACRO, which is the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders and which combines under its umbrella over a hundred voluntary associations working in this field, constantly to be pressing trusts to give money to this or that voluntary effort. I have become increasingly aware that for each project that turns out to be successful, I have really made an indent on the Government for the same amount in three years' time on a continuing basis. But this has not yet been recognised, and the result is that many of the most hopeful experiments in this field are facing closure, or are staggering along from hand to mouth in a way which makes constructive work almost impossible.

I think we must face the fact that there are two kinds of money required: first, research and development money, some of which at least can be provided by the trusts and private enterprise; and, secondly, continuing support into the indefinite future of projects which are successful. As to the first, although private money will always provide a part of research and development costs, we must, I think, here demand some help of an official kind. Just to test the willingness of the Government to accept this obligation I will issue the following challenge. I will stake my reputation—not, I admit, playing for very high stakes—that we will raise from voluntary and charitable sources £50,000 a year for five years, if the Government will provide a similar sum.

We could administer this from NACRO, using it for three purposes: to help start new ventures; to keep in existence ventures which have proved themselves and which are running out of their initial funds; and to reduplicate proved ventures in other areas where they seem to be needed. But even this will not get us very far unless continuing, long-term support is assured for those ventures which seem to be successful. After a trial period such projects should become the responsibility of a Government Department equipped to give such support. My noble friend Lord Simey, in the debate on this subject which he initiated 18 months ago, suggested the Ministry of Social Security, but it seems to me that the proper Government Department to look to is the Home Office. I hope that my noble friend Lord Stonham will tell us that this is an agreeable suggestion.

We are not asking for very much, but it will be a figure which rises year by year as satisfactory methods of care and help—hostels, clubs, supervised lodgings, associate schemes, et cetera—are worked out. But if we can demonstrate that the after-care provisions contain prison-prone people more cheaply and humanely than prison itself, then the gain in economy and humanity is so obvious that, now that we have not only a Chancellor who has been Home Secretary but also a Home Secretary who has been Chancellor, I cannot believe that my noble friend will fail to persuade his distinguished colleagues to provide the comparatively small sums needed to turn this service from a sketch into a reality. I have left out a lot, but I hope that noble Lords who follow will fill in the gaps and will range widely. I beg to move for Papers.

3.16 p.m.

LORD SANDFORD

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson of Kings-bridge, has set us an important and timely but difficult task. It is important and timely, because people are anxious to know who is winning the war against crime. It is difficult because none of the relevant reports on the Prison Service—from the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, from Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary of the Provinces of England and Wales, or the latest Criminal Statistics which cover the period of 1968, with which we are concerned—is available to us. Incidentally, there has been no report at all since 1965 covering the Probation Service, and, in passing, I should like to suggest that it is time we received an annual report on the work of the Probation and Aftercare Service, in view of its much increased responsibilities. We are therefore all the more grateful to, and in the debt of, the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, and his officials in the Home Office for their full and prompt replies to the Questions that I asked, which were published in the OFFICIAL REPORT last Thursday. These give us some of the background facts and figures.

In my remarks, I should first like to touch on a number of specific matters arising directly from the operation of the Criminal Justice Act 1967, and then to say something rather more general about each of the three arms of the whole penal system. Here I shall not follow exactly the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, because I think it is helpful in a debate like this to regard the Probation Service, the prisons and the police as all forming an integral and complete penal system.

First of all, on matters arising directly out of the Criminal Justice Act, I turn to the suspended sentence. Is it not now clear that Members on all sides of your Lordships' House were right, during the passage of that Act in 1967, to urge the Government to allow more discretion to the courts than they have done over the use of the suspended sentence? Apart from the constitutional impropriety of the Executive interfering unduly with the Judiciary, there are always practical objections to trying to tie down the courts too much by Statute. In fact, we see now that the courts did not need any urging in this matter. They have welcomed the introduction of the suspended sentence and are making greater use of it than the Act obliges them to do. But further discretion is needed, because the use of the suspended sentence on a large scale deprives a great number of offenders, who could do with it, of the attention of the Probation Service. Compared with a probation order, a suspended sentence affords no discipline and no correction to an offender. Compared with a prison sentence, it carries with it no substitute for a spell of supervision after release. Surely, therefore, there is a strong case for the courts to have discretion to combine a suspended sentence with a probation order—and I shall be interested to hear the opinions of other noble Lords, and especially the views of Her Majesty's Government, on this point. I believe it is a discretion which would be welcome to magistrates and to probation officers alike.

I turn now to follow the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, into the question of after-care, and particularly those innovations arising directly from the Act. I have not a great deal to add because the noble Lord has covered the subject so thoroughly and knows so much more about it, but I was heartened to see from the reply given to one of my Questions the response there has been from the voluntary bodies to the call for hostel provision for discharged prisoners. I think that to have doubled the number of places available in the space of two years is a very creditable achievement—

THE MINISTER OF STATE, HOME OFFICE (LORD STONHAM)

More than that.

LORD SANDFORD

—bearing in mind the difficulty of commending this kind of thing to public opinion. My own impression, from being a member of my own county's probation and after-care committee, is that Her Majesty's Government are adopting a more flexible attitude to the award of grants, though it perhaps may be true, as the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, said, that they are still not over-generous. In passing, however, I should like to express the hope that Her Majesty's Government may be persuaded to give the same encouragement to the provision of more places in other probation hostels—in probation hostels for adults and in those for offenders convicted of being drunk and disorderly.

LORD STONHAM

My Lords, would the noble Lord clarify that point? Because we bear virtually all the costs of the probation hostels as such—almost the entire costs. Will he say what he means by indicating the kind of additional help he wishes us to give?

LORD SANDFORD

I was hoping that there would be more encouragement from Her Majesty's Government for the provision of more probation hostels, because I think these have a more significant part to play in the whole penal system than has yet been accorded to them. Specifically arising from that, we should be interested to know what progress there has been towards providing hostels for those convicted of being drunk and disorderly.

Turning now to parole, I would point out that this is one of the main innovations of the Criminal Justice Act 1967, and as the Chairman of the Parole Board will be speaking later in the debate I need say little except to remark that I hope that the weight of responsibility that this system lays upon the Probation Service will be borne in mind. It is far greater, I would suggest, particularly in these early stages, than for any other class of offender. I would also remind your Lordships that there are other classes of offenders who during the passage of the 1961 Criminal Justice Bill were thought to merit compulsory after-care but for whom the necessary regulations have not yet been brought into force. Their needs—or, rather, the needs of society in relation to them—should be balanced with the demands of this new parole system.

Now I should like to turn very briefly to the Prison Service, and acknowledge the breathing space that the enactment of the Criminal Justice Act 1967 seems to have given to that service. The suspended sentence seems to have led in 1968 to a welcome reduction in the prison population in England and Wales of about 3,000, or 10 per cent., at a time when in Scotland, where this section of the Act did not apply, the prison population continued to rise. But, my Lords, it was only a small respite and it looks like being a temporary one, for the latest figure for the prison population in England and Wales is again rising. Here again, as the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, said, is a long-suffering service, badly overstretched. We still have 6,000 prisoners or more sleeping three in a cell—crowded conditions under which the effective reform of offenders and the constructive employment of prisoners is extremely difficult to organise. All the more credit to those concerned, not the least the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, himself, for what has been achieved—and I am sure the whole House looks forward to hearing more from him about that anon.

Now I turn to the Probation Service—and I wish I could have left most of these remarks to my noble friend Lord Hamilton of Dalzell, who is able to speak with much more authority than I can on this subject but who, alas!, has to be elsewhere to-day. At the end of 1966 the policy of Her Majesty's Government was set out in these terms: The Probation and After-care Service must continue to grow if the many demands made upon it are to be met". We were told that it was a service that lay at the heart of the Government's developing penal policy. These are the words of the right honourable Roy Jenkins in his foreword to a Report on the Probation Service issued in 1966—and since then, as I say, we have had nothing further of a comprehensive kind covering the work of the service.

Eighteen months earlier than that, in 1965, a policy of reaching a strength in that service of 3,500 had been affirmed. It was also stated that there was to be a regular review of this recruiting objective, to take into account a number of uncertain and variable factors. Among those factors was thought to he the volume of crime. That, in 1966, rose by 11 per cent.; there was a welcome pause in 1967; and it is now rising again, between 6 and 7 per cent. Another factor was the use of voluntary after-care. That has risen by 50 per cent. Another factor was the demands likely to be made by magistrates for social inquiries by probation officers. That has risen by 20 per cent.

In view of those factors, I think we are entitled to ask the noble Lord what has been the result of the regular reviews that have been going on since 1965 into the question of recruiting to the Probation Service. What adjustment has there been to this objective of 3,500 by 1970? The official response—the only response that we have had, so far as I am aware—came from the noble Earl, Lord Longford, on November 29 last year, at column 220 of Hansard, when, so far from reporting an increased rate of growth to a higher figure to match the growing demands being made upon the Probation Service, he had to admit that even this original objective of 3,500 by 1970 would not be met on time—in fact, not at least until 1971. It is small wonder, therefore, that we see another service grievously overstretched, with wastage remaining as high as it was three years ago. It is small wonder that the service is unable to give of its best and that promising experiments, where they can be carried out, can hardly, if ever, be carried through.

I turn finally to the Police Service—the third and, in my view, the most important arm of the whole penal system. It is important because almost the only certain fact in penal affairs is that what deters and checks most the man who is bent on crime is the fear of being caught, and it follows that the success or failure of any penal system in combating crime depends more than anything else on an effective police force—and I imagine that no one would dispute that. No one, I believe, has more effectively expounded that proposition than the noble and learned Lord who now sits upon the Woolsack. He expounded it in 1961 in an earlier debate here on the penal system, in what, so far as I can recall, was his first major speech in your Lordships' House. I have often since then been grateful to the noble and learned Lord for the clarity of that memorable speech and for establishing so firmly in my own mind this truth: that the deterrence of the potential criminal by an effective police force is the keystone of the whole penal system.

In that same speech the noble and learned Lord reminded us that almost every kind of criminal weighs up his chances of getting away with it before setting out upon and committing his crime. That moment, when he is weighing up the chances of getting away with it, is the moment at which we want to see the main deterrent, the deterrent of a strong, vigilant and mobile police force, operating upon him. If it fails to operate at that point and the criminal goes on with his crime, the courts, the Probation Service, the Prison Service and the police themselves are faced with ever more confident criminals on an ever-rising tide of crime which overwhelms the best efforts of all of them. This flood of crime makes futile all the reforms and the refinements which we all want to introduce into other parts of the penal system. None of the fine schemes which we all applaud and which the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge, outlined to us can prevail against it.

My Lords, at the end of 1967 we were well poised for almost the first real breakthrough since the war in the deterrence of criminals and the treatment of offenders. The noble Lord, Lord Stonham, would, I know, be the first to agree that a great deal of the credit for that was due to my noble friend Lord Brooke, whose measures taken when he was at the Home Office had been maturing and bearing fruit over the previous few years; and I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, would be the first to agree that it would be hard to find another Minister of State at the Home Office better able than the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, to make the most of his heritage.

In 1967, if I may remind the House, we had the largest increase ever recorded in one year in the provincial police force; we had the largest increase since 1947 in the Metropolitan Police. That year, 1967, had seen the number of offences known to the police ceasing to rise. That is the sort of news that is welcome these days. In the Metropolis crime was actually falling; the clear-up rate had risen for the second year running, although it was still under a half; deaths on the roads were significantly down; the prison population was about to go down. All these hopeful trends, all these expectations, are now in jeopardy thanks to a blunder of quite classic dimensions by the noble Lord's colleagues a year ago last January—the January before last—when by a deliberate act of policy they checked the growth and development of the police force even though the force was then 15 per cent. to 20 per cent. below establishment.

As a result of that blunder, police strength, which had increased by 4,124 in 1967, increased in 1968 by a mere 139–139 compared to 4,124 the year before. As a result of that, the increase in indictable crimes, which as I have said was checked in 1967, has started to climb again: 6.9 per cent. up in the first nine months of 1968 compared with the first nine months of 1967. We are back once again in the vicious spiral of rising crime. I cannot bring myself to blame the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, for any of this. I am sure that he must have striven as hard as anyone could have done to avoid making such a false economy at such an untimely moment. One would like to think that the noble Earl, Lord Longford, and the noble and learned Lord who sits on the Woolsack, whom the whole House know to be such ardent penal reformers and whom we know to be so conscious of the cardinal role of the police, might have been able to prevail on their Cabinet colleagues to be less short-sighted; but, alas! they also failed.

My Lords, there are only three spheres in which Her Majesty's Government have a unique and undisputed responsibility in our affairs. One is defence, another diplomacy and the third the maintenance of law and order. Nothing in the Kingdom can prosper unless law and order are maintained; freedom and prosperity and much else are put in jeopardy if they are not. That is why it is right to regard the police as the primary social service; that is why, as the noble and learned Lord has often reminded the House, that the police are the keystone of the whole penal system. No other service in the country can play its full part unless the police can play theirs and law and order are maintained. No other part of the penal system can function unless the police deter the potential criminals before they even begin. Ever since the war, most Governments in most countries have grappled, with usually indifferent success, with growing lawlessness and increasing civil disorder. The present Government in this country had had a very fair measure of success in 1967 and they had the chance of exploiting it and making a real breakthrough in 1968. They cannot easily be forgiven for having had that chance and for having let it slip through their fingers.