Sitting of 8 December 2004

Preamble
The House met at half-past two of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Salisbury.

General Medical Council: Revalidation of Doctors
Baroness Perry of Southwark Baroness Perry of Southwark asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they have held discussions with the General Medical Council about the council's proposal to remove the right to prescribe from retired doctors.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Lord Warner): My Lords, the Department of Health has worked closely with the General Medical Council over the past four years to ensure that its proposals for the revalidation of doctors both protect patient safety and support the delivery of patient care in the National Health Service. We are well aware of the council's proposal to limit prescribing to those doctors who have a licence to practise, and we fully support the council on this matter.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that reply, but in view of the overall shortage of general practitioners and the huge pressure under which they work, do the Government feel no concern at the loss of this experienced resource? Have they asked the General Medical Council what evidence it has that there are problems with the current system?
Lord Warner: My Lords, the General Medical Council is pursuing this, following an order that was debated in both Houses in 2002. The revalidation process is not age related; it merely requires doctors to demonstrate that they are in current practice and that they have the evidence to show that their registration should be approved on a basis of revalidation.
Lord Walton of Detchant: My Lords, in the light of the Minister's response, does he agree that doctors of any age may undertake the process of appraisal of their clinical performance and revalidation? Retired doctors will retain their right to be registered medical practitioners, but unless they have been revalidated they will not have the right to engage in clinical practice and have prescribing rights.
I confess that next year I shall hope to apply for revalidation, even as a past president. If I fail in that endeavour, does the noble Lord accept that I shall not longer be qualified to minister to any Members of this House who fall sick?
Lord Warner: My Lords, I have just been advised by my noble friend the Chief Whip to sort it out. I am sure
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that all Members of this House will be happy to contribute to the dossier that no doubt the noble Lord will be presenting to the General Medical Council in his application for revalidation. More seriously, his explanation is exactly right, and I could not better it.
Lord Renton: My Lords, speaking as the son of a doctor who retired, I make the point that ours is a free society and people should be allowed to benefit in any possible way that does not ruin them. Does the Minister agree that giving doctors who have retired the opportunity to write prescriptions will not ruin us at all?
Lord Warner: My Lords, I hear from behind me that it depends on what they write. That is, in fact, absolutely right. It will not have escaped the attention of the noble Lord that a lot of change goes on in medication and in the types of drugs that are available. It is important that doctors keep up to date with current knowledge and practice. That is why the revalidation process, which the General Medical Council has been working on for some time, is important. It ensures that patients, even if they are family members of a doctor, are protected by ensuring that their prescriptions reflect current practice and that they are written by doctors who are up to date.
Lord Addington: My Lords, in the revalidation process, apparently doctors must prove that they work with colleagues. Would this always mean another doctor, or would it mean other related professions such as nurses or pharmacists?
Lord Warner: My Lords, the system of validation that is being put in place by the General Medical Council does, I believe, have local appraisers who can work in some of these areas. The details of the arrangements are matters for the General Medical Council.
Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords, is the Minister aware that there has been great ill will in the General Dental Council? I am delighted to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Walton, that retired doctors will be able to remain on the register. However, the General Dental Council has sent letters to retired dentists to say that they are erased from the register, which of course means that there is no difference between the person who has retired honourably and the one who has been struck off.
Is the Minister further aware that in Australia it was decided that retired doctors could no longer write prescriptions, but now, a couple of years later, that decision has been reversed? It has been found that it is desirable to have retired doctors who can write prescriptions.
Lord Warner: My Lords, the arrangements for the General Dental Council are a little wide of this Question. They are, in any case, matters for the General Dental Council, not for Department of Health Ministers. I will certainly look into the Australian experience, but I repeat that the revalidation of doctors is a matter for the

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General Medical Council, and it does take account of the regulations that have been passed by both Houses of Parliament.
Baroness Strange: My Lords, does the Minister agree that this Question is rather unfair to elderly doctors as well as to other elderly people? As one gets older, one finds that retired doctors get amazingly young.
Lord Warner: My Lords, this is not age related. We just want doctors to be up to date with current practice and to be safe to treat patients.
Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior: My Lords, it is well known that doctors are very pushed these days to find the time to practise their skills and knowledge. Indeed, might it not be that a retired doctor has more time to be up to date with the massive armamentarium of pharmaceutical products that are currently available?
Lord Warner: My Lords, I do not think that it matters what age a doctor is: he has to be up to date but he also has to be in current practice, seeing patients and applying that knowledge to patients in a safe way.
Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, can the Minister tell us a little more about the General Medical Council system of validation? When people get to a certain age, they have to take a regular driving test. Will there be a requirement regularly to appraise retired doctors' knowledge of modern medicines and drugs?
Lord Warner: My Lords, I am sure that the noble Lord, like any Member of this House who has a thirst for more knowledge of the detail of the revalidation process, will be able to contact the General Medical Council and have all his questions answered.

Asylum Seekers: Dispersal
2.44 p.m.
Lord Avebury: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Greaves is unable to attend the House today. Therefore, on his behalf and at his request, I beg leave to ask Her Majesty's Government the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper:
Whether the arrangements for dispersal of asylum seekers are operating satisfactorily.
The Minister of State, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (Lord Rooker): My Lords, yes. The National Asylum Support Service (NASS) disperses asylum seekers under powers set out in the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. The Government are satisfied that, while this is a complex and sometimes very sensitive process, the arrangements in place are working well and the performance of the National Asylum Support Service is continuing to improve.
Lord Avebury: My Lords, considering that the number of people in NASS accommodation has fallen
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successively in the past six quarters and that many of the contracts for accommodation taken out by NASS were of a long-term nature, can the Minister say how many NASS dwellings are now vacant? Is it not a scandal that NASS spent no less than £1.1 billion in the last year for which accounts are available—2002–03—yet that expenditure is not subject to parliamentary control?
Lord Rooker: My Lords, the current situation is that NASS is accommodating some 41,000 people, which is 10,000 fewer than the same time last year. The latest figures that I have for empty properties under NASS control is just over 7,500. It is the case of course that many of those contracts were taken out five years ago in 2000. They had to be long-term contracts given the scale of the issue. Frankly, we would be rightly criticised if we had not made long-term arrangements.
Most of those contracts will come to an end in 2005–06. We still have to have arrangements to keep some liquidity in the system. Indeed, the Government would be rightly criticised if they did not have the flexibility of empty properties. However, it is true that there have been too many empty properties because of the long-term nature of those contracts and the fall in the numbers of people claiming asylum and seeking NASS support.
The Lord Bishop of Portsmouth: My Lords, are the Government aware of the strain on local communities and the essential infrastructure services that are required, which is caused by the lack of warning given to those communities of the arrival of dispersed asylum seekers? I am thinking of the experience in Portsmouth of the non-availability of courses in English for speakers of other languages.
Lord Rooker: My Lords, that can easily be corrected. The performance of NASS has vastly improved over the past two or three years in terms of liaison with local communities. People are not dispersed without checking that broadly speaking there is a cluster area and language connections. We have obviously got some areas where sometimes we suspend dispersal for reasons that may be fairly obvious.
In terms of making sure that language courses are available, there are plenty of facilities for that around the country. It may be that there is not a place on a course the day after a person arrives at a dispersal centre, but it is soon made available.
Lord Dholakia: My Lords, is the Minister aware that dispersal policies could be more effective if asylum seekers were allowed to take paid employment while their applications were being considered? Is he further aware that the BMA has now reported that there are more than 1,000 asylum-seeking and refugee doctors on its database? Would it not make sense for people to be allowed to take paid employment rather than rely on NASS to provide assistance and accommodation?
Lord Rooker: My Lords, with all due respect, that is the way to make the asylum numbers go through the

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roof. We all know that. The present policy looks harsh. Sometimes it does not look as though it is common sense because of the nature of the occupations of people claiming asylum. However, if the ability to work was there, it would just up the numbers. We all know that.
It is true that when people claim asylum and the initial questions are asked, their occupation qualifications are not relevant in the main. Therefore, we do not have all that information, but that may have changed in the past couple of years. However, the route to work is successfully to claim asylum. The better route to work is to come here through one of the many schemes that allow people to come into this country for the purpose of work in the first place.
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, reverting to the Question, does the noble Lord agree that the arrangements for the dispersal of asylum seekers could not operate satisfactorily if strict adherence were had for all asylum seekers to the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights?
Lord Rooker: My Lords, with due respect to the noble Lord, I should remind the House that there cannot be a free choice in this. We knew what had been happening: prior to dispersal we were on the verge of a collapse of social services in Kent, East Sussex and some London boroughs. Something had to be done about it. The human rights of the people living in those areas were at risk simply because there was no plan in place, and dispersal arrangements had to be put in place. We progressed from a standing start when NASS was set up in 2000 to the dispersal of tens of thousands of people in its first two years of operation. In the main, it has been a very satisfactory process. However, I do not deny that there have been problems.
Lord Avebury: My Lords, when is the report of the National Audit Office on NASS due to be presented to Ministers, and will he undertake to publish it?
Lord Rooker: My Lords, I do not think that any National Audit Office reports are not published. Whether the report is about NASS or any other matter, there are no secret National Audit Office reports. When we get the report, it will be published. Indeed, I think that it is the responsibility of the NAO to publish the report, and it is our responsibility to answer the points raised.
Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, following on the Minister's answer in response to my noble friend Lord Dholakia, what is the evidence for his claim that the number of asylum seekers would go up drastically if they were allowed to work while their applications were being considered, or is he just looking in his crystal ball?
Lord Rooker: My Lords, from the experience of other countries, and leaving aside all other factors, we know that work is probably the ultimate of the pull factors. We know what would happen: people trafficking is now a multi-million pound business. We are concerned to make
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sure that people fleeing their countries on genuine grounds of persecution and fear are given a warn welcome here and, when they become successful refugees, are settled in as quickly as possible. But the fact is that we know what is happening around the world, and access to work is the ultimate pull factor. We are not going down that road.

Poverty
2.52 p.m.
Lord Roberts of Conwy Lord Roberts of Conwy asked Her Majesty's Government:
What percentage of adults are living in poverty in the United Kingdom.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Hollis of Heigham): My Lords, in 2002–03, 16 per cent of adults in the UK were living in households below 60 per cent median income, before housing costs.
Lord Roberts of Conwy: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for that reply. Does she accept that the proportion of adults of working age and without children who are living in low-income households has been on the increase in recent years? The numbers have increased from 3.6 million in 1996–97 to 3.9 million last year. Furthermore, is she aware that income support for this group has barely kept pace with inflation and is falling behind average wages? Do the Government have any special plans to deal with this very substantial but unfortunate group of people?
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, obviously the Government are concerned about poverty wherever it occurs. However, if we ask who in today's society is poor, it is first of all children, then pensioners and disabled people. Couples come next, followed by those who are the least poor: single people between the ages of 25—beyond student age—and 55. Therefore the Government have rightly focused on those who need our help the most: children and pensioners. Around half in those groups who were in absolute poverty in 1997 have now been lifted out of it.
I accept that it is true that single people who remain and linger on income support will be poor. However, it should be remembered that most single people who move on to jobseeker's allowance will get back into work, three-quarters of them within six months. Those who remain on IS will be poor, and it is often because they have very real difficulties. They may have no educational qualifications. They may well live in inner city areas. They may have substance abuse problems. They may not speak English as a first language. Above all, they may be members of our ethnic minority communities such as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.

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Lastly, they may be former prisoners or have other problems. We are seeking to identify and help people in those groups.
Lord Laming: My Lords, would the Minister be willing to consider whether benefits such as the winter fuel allowance might have a greater impact if they were targeted at those most in need?
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, the allowance is targeted at those most in need. It is targeted at pensioners.
Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay: My Lords, I ask the noble Baroness to step back for a moment to look at the bigger picture of poverty and wealth. Has she seen the report in today's Guardian showing that, on average, the 600,000 richest people in Britain are each three-quarters of a million pounds better off than they were before the Government came to power, whereas the share in national wealth for the poorest has fallen considerably? When will the Government start taking seriously joined-up tax and social policies in order to reduce these gross inequalities of poverty and wealth in Britain?
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, the noble Lord has asked two separate questions. He is absolutely right that the incomes of the top 1 per cent have increased dramatically. However, it is also the case that the position for the bottom 20 per cent of our society has improved dramatically as a result of the Government's policies, primarily because we now have the highest employment and lowest unemployment rates of anywhere in the G7, while youth unemployment has been virtually eliminated.
Lord Marsh: My Lords—
Lord Davies of Coity: My Lords, while recognising that the circumstances are relative, can my noble friend say whether the way in which poverty is viewed is expressed in the same terms now as it was during the previous administration?
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, the figures used to identify households with below average incomes come from the same continuous flow of statistics used by the previous administration. Households with incomes below 60 per cent of median incomes are so categorised. As real wages rise and benefits rise more slowly, by definition the number of people living below that threshold will increase. It would fall only if real wages were also to reduce. The basis on which the statistics are gathered has been continuous.
Lord Marsh: My Lords—
Baroness Greengross: My Lords, in spite of the Government's acknowledged success in alleviating poverty within certain targeted groups, does not the Minister agree that the real problem among older
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adults, and pensioners in particular, is that encountered by women? Do the Government intend to take any specific action to deal with poverty among women, which is very widespread?
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, the noble Baroness is absolutely right, and that is the precise reason why most of the beneficiaries of pension credit are women. As a result, women are seeing increases in their incomes averaging about £40 per week.
Lord Marsh: My Lords—
Lord Redesdale: My Lords, are figures gathered on those between the ages of 16 and 24 who are living in poverty? Can the Minister also say whether there is a particular problem of homelessness among those living in poverty in that age group? People in that age group are on a very low rung when it comes to securing any kind of accommodation. It is a real problem for them.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, the figures that I have show that 18 per cent of people under the age of 24 have below-average incomes before housing costs, but that includes student populations. The poverty that scars is the poverty that persists, and that is not a particular problem of younger people.
Lord Laming: My Lords, does the Minister accept that it is personally offensive and factually wrong to assume that everyone over the age of 65 is dependent on the state?
Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, given that the noble Baroness is not answering that question, perhaps I may put another one to her.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: The noble Lord did not ask a question.
Lord Skelmersdale: In that case, the Minister is not going to answer it.
On Monday I asked the noble Baroness whether the department kept all social security benefits under review, a point which she very naturally did not have time to answer. Is she able to give me a response now, especially in the light of the Question on the Order Paper?
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, we keep all benefits under review. That is why, for example, on Monday the Secretary of State presented a Statement on uprating. Given that we were discussing disability issues on that day, we chose perfectly sensibly not to take that Statement in this House.
Lord Marsh: My Lords, I declare an interest—
A noble Lord: Next Question!
Noble Lords: Oh!

Ukraine: Presidential Elections
3 p.m.
Lord Truscott Lord Truscott asked Her Majesty's Government:
What support they will offer to the Ukrainian authorities to ensure that the forthcoming presidential election will be free and fair.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean): My Lords, we shall send up to 120 short-term and 10 long-term observers to the OSCE election observation mission for the rerun of Ukraine's presidential election, which should be held before 26 December. This represents more than 10 per cent of the 900 short-term and 60 long-term observers that the OSCE has called for and is double our contribution for the original rounds of the election.
Lord Truscott: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that reply. I am glad that our country has met the OSCE requirement to double the number of observers following the last set of presidential elections in the Ukraine. Will the Minister join me in welcoming the package of electoral and constitutional reforms that have been passed today in the Ukrainian Parliament? Furthermore, will Her Majesty's Government use their good offices to ensure that there is no possibility of outside interference in the presidential elections?
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I agree with my noble friend that the constitutional reform changes which have been passed today in the Ukrainian Parliament, the Supreme Rada, are very much to be welcomed. They go a substantial way towards trying to resolve some of the underlying problems which were so evident in the previous rounds of this election. It is very much a matter for the Ukrainian authorities, but of course we support them in trying to run free and fair elections. In particular, we welcome the changes which have been introduced to limit the use of absentee ballots and mobile ballot boxes; we welcome the fact that the media will be freer to report on an unbiased basis; and we also welcome the fact that the Prime Minister will not be able to use some of his executive authority in the way that he was during the run-up to the previous election.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, we welcome the involvement of Britain, multilaterally through the OSCE, in monitoring these elections. Can the Minister say a little more about the involvement of other multilateral organisations, the Council of Europe and the EU, which appear to be playing quite a constructive role in the current delicate situation? Can she tell the House about the delicacy of the links between Russia, Ukraine and the West, which clearly overhang the election process?
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, the primary role in the running of free and fair elections falls to the OSCE. I represented the United Kingdom yesterday morning at the ministerial meeting of the OSCE which took place in Sofia. As regards the attitude of others around the table, it was clear to me that the Foreign Minister of Russia, Mr Lavrov, took a rather different
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view about what had happened in the Ukraine from that taken by, for example, Joschka Fischer speaking for Germany or myself speaking for the United Kingdom. The EU's role has been that of Mr Solana who, together with his colleagues from Lithuania and Poland, has been able to talk to the Ukrainian authorities about the ways in which they might approach running a free and fair election on the next occasion. So it has been primarily the OSCE— but with some help from Mr Solana and others— directly with the authorities in the Ukraine.
Baroness Turner of Camden: My Lords, does the Minister agree that this is a complicated situation? It is not a simple matter of democracy versus authoritarianism; there are ethnic and cultural differences. There are workers and miners in the east who will be concerned—as workers always are—about job security in the event of privatisation should the elections go in a particular way. It is a very complicated situation and a great deal of delicacy will be needed in handling it. Does the Minister agree?
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, the internal politics of other countries will always be complicated. My noble friend is right to point out that there are regional differences within Ukraine as to which candidate they support. However, what is not complicated is the fact that the OSCE produced incontrovertible evidence that the elections that took place were not free and fair. Yesterday morning I heard the representative of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the OSCE refer to the fact that in his view—that is, in the view of the OSCE—the elections had been a question of "premeditated fraud". That is a very big thing for the OSCE to say about any elections and we cannot take it lightly.
Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, in addition to sending many observers—which is a very good thing—will the Minister ensure that the British Council is strongly supported in its work in Ukraine? I am sure the noble Baroness recalls that the British Council has no fewer than five offices in both eastern and western Ukraine. Will she ensure that they are encouraged in their excellent work of not meddling but providing maximum information about good electoral practices, procedures and administration?
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, has said, the British Council does excellent work in this respect. The United Kingdom has provided £3 million to help to create an environment in Ukraine in which free and fair elections can take place. The money is in the form of a bilateral contribution to the elections in Ukraine and is quite apart from the money that we have put into the OSCE's role in monitoring for free and fair elections.
Lord Kilclooney: My Lords, does the Minister agree that telling Mr Putin and Russia not to become involved in Ukraine and at the same time encouraging Poland and the European Union to get involved in Ukraine poses a question of double standards by the Government"? Would

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it not be better that the support given to the elections in Ukraine should come from institutions such as the Council of Europe, of which Ukraine is a member?
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: No, my Lords. It is not a question of double standards at all. The Russians decided to make a declaration about the election in Ukraine at a time when it was obvious that there was considerable anxiety and unrest in Ukraine about the fairness of the elections and before the OSCE had had an opportunity to deliver its opinion. Others, including the United Kingdom, waited for the situation to clarify and to hear what the OSCE had to say. At that point, when the elections had been declared not to have been free and fair, there were interventions from the EU and others. Those interventions were of a very different nature and based on very different evidence.

Succession to the Crown Bill [H.L.]
Lord Dubs: My Lords, I beg to introduce a Bill to make provision about succession to the Crown and about royal marriages. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read a first time.—(Lord Dubs.)
On Question, Bill read a first time, and ordered to be printed.

Business of the House: Debate this Day
Lord Grocott: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lady Amos, I beg to move the Motion standing in her name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the debate on the Motion in the name of the Baroness Linklater of Butterstone set down for today shall be limited to four hours.—(Lord Grocott.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Crime Prevention
3.8 p.m.
Baroness Linklater of Butterstonerose to call attention to the case for wider community involvement in determining policies relevant to crime prevention, alternatives to prison and the rehabilitation of offenders, in the interests of public confidence in the criminal justice system; and to move for Papers.
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I am very grateful for this opportunity to call attention to a subject which, in all its complexity, is at the front of the minds of all of us concerned with the quality of life in this country, and as it relates to criminal justice matters in particular.
What lies at its heart is the issue of public confidence in what our criminal justice system is doing to prevent crime, to punish or deal with offenders and, ultimately, to make our country a safe and secure place in which we
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can all live in peace of mind. Confidence is a state of mind which underpins much of what we do and think, and if damaged can be difficult to restore—which is our problem today. But it is vital to a balanced, rational approach to most aspects of life, and none more so than to criminal justice.
I declare an interest as chairman for the past four years of an initiative called "Rethinking Crime and Punishment", which was funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation—of which I am a trustee—and has just published its findings. It was set up because of trustees' concerns that what we are doing in this country to those who break the law has got worryingly out of kilter with what is balanced or rational, to the extent that we are now imprisoning more of our citizens per head of population than any other country in western Europe—44 per cent more than Germany, 52 per cent more than France—while levels of most crime are dropping and the numbers coming before the courts are stable. Worse still, little is being achieved in reducing reoffending, with reconviction rates as high as 80 per cent for the youngest offenders, or even in increasing a sense of security or safety in our communities. We seem to be running ever faster in our use of custody only to be standing still, or indeed falling back, in achieving so little of desired outcomes.
Public confidence is rooted in perceptions of what is going on, and what has become clear is that there is a gap between what the public perceive and the reality in relation to crime. The British Crime Survey earlier this year showed that two-thirds of the public thought that crime had risen a lot over the past year, when in fact it was dropping, and that sentencing was thought to be less tough than in fact it is. That is compounded by the perception of many politicians and sentencers, largely mediated through the press, that what the public want is an ever tougher prison-based approach. However, that is equally removed from reality, as the MORI poll we commissioned clearly demonstrates.
Indeed, that is one of the most interesting findings in the array of more than 60 projects that we have commissioned over the past four years. What has emerged is that the public are much less retributive than is often thought to be the case and prison is not favoured as a means of reducing crime or of changing people for the better. As far as young offenders are concerned, the poll showed that prevention, rehabilitation and education are given a much higher priority than prison. Equally, and unsurprisingly, the public do want wrongdoers to be punished and to make reparation—as an analysis undertaken for RCP by Strathclyde University shows—and they would prefer tougher community penalties that make offenders pay back and learn a lesson, coupled with more prevention.
It must be said that to punish with imprisonment those who are severely mentally ill, who have addiction problems or a significant learning difficulty—as many thousands of people in prison do—but who often receive little or no appropriate treatment, is as pointless as punishing people for the colour of their hair. Noble Lords may have seen the programme on Channel 4 this week, or read the deeply disturbing reports in the Guardian in the past three days, and

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realised that not only is that the case, but that we are asking our wildly overstretched prison services to perform impossible miracles. That is simply unacceptable.
The tragedy is that in the minds of many sentencers, politicians, policy makers and the press, toughness and prison have become synonymous and toughness is the key performance indicator. How often has someone left court with a community sentence but been described in the newspapers as "walking free"? Toughness, or prison, seems to be an end in itself, and the possibilities offered by the alternatives are all too often believed to be inadequate, or are ignored.
How, therefore, do we restore confidence in the system? The evidence is that more knowledge and direct involvement in the process can go a long way towards achieving that, for fear is rooted in ignorance. When the public, politicians and sentencers are better informed, it means that policies and practice, and rhetoric and reality, can come closer together, and the public can get a system that they actually want. A major public education programme is necessary, and RCP has funded several initiatives as examples of that.
It is widely accepted in theory by politicians and sentencers alike that prison should only ever be used as a last resort, and only for those from whom we need to be protected because of the nature of their offending. They also accept that short sentences, in particular, are a complete waste of the country's resources; do nothing for victims; have minimal impact on public safety; have little or no effect on offending behaviour; and further damage the chances of prisoners and their families taking their places as contributing members of society. We should be pushing at an open door, yet the gap between rhetoric and reality remains wide.
One overarching theme which emerged from the findings of RCP was that the way to rebuild confidence is to engage the public more in the criminal justice process at many levels, particularly in the work done by offenders in local communities. Our system does not, as yet, encourage much involvement. How many citizens have ever visited their local prison, let alone engaged with offenders? There is evidence that, given the opportunity, people would welcome it.
The youth offender panels, which were set up by the Youth Justice Board and decide what sort of community sentence or unpaid work should be carried out by first-time young offenders, consist of 5,000 volunteers, a third of whom had never volunteered for anything before. People wanted to be involved. A survey done for us by Ecotec found that large numbers of people were interested in volunteering to help with the education of young offenders. If knowledge promotes understanding, so involvement bestows empowerment.
An opinion poll by MORI done for RCP found that two-thirds of people said that they would be interested in having a say in the kind of work done in their locality, and one-third said that they were very interested. Eight million hours are currently spent on community penalties across the country. How much are any of us aware of what is being done? One
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example is Donna's Dream House in Blackpool, where 100 offenders on community punishment orders spent six months and 4,000 hours of unpaid work to transform a crack den into a holiday home for terminally ill children. As a result, many lives have been changed. including those of several offenders who got jobs in the building trade and others who stayed on to volunteer. That project is well known and is supported by the local community, and a fine example it is.
When local people can see what is going on as a payback to their community and play a much bigger part in the decision making, how much more effective is the reparation and the promotion of understanding and confidence in the system? Reparation through the restorative justice process, with its capacity to bring closure for victims and greater understanding to offenders of the consequences of their actions, must also be developed.
We also commissioned an independent inquiry on alternatives to prison, led by the distinguished retired judge, Lord Coulsfield. He also concluded that community penalties and programmes should be delivered locally, that they should be properly targeted and that the local community should be much more closely involved in their delivery. Significantly, he recommended that judges and magistrates should be required to have ongoing training and first-hand knowledge of the programmes and projects in their jurisdictions, and should have regular feedback on their effectiveness. He also recommended that those receiving community sentences should be "sent down" like those getting custodial sentences, so that the message goes out that they are not being acquitted.
Sentencers are at the heart of the whole process and should engage with the outcomes of the decisions they make. That will, in turn, affect enormously the quality of their decision making. Clearly, there is still much to be done in the expansion and quality of community-based programmes, where NOMS will have a key role, and if sentencers get closer to them, they too will have an impact on delivery. There are significant resource implications, and here lies the real challenge to the Government—whether there is the political will to take this forward.
There is ample evidence that effective projects can significantly reduce crime. The Staffordshire prolific offenders project is one involving probation, police, the National Health Service, a housing association and a local college. It addressed the inter-relationship of drugs and crime, and involved treatment, job training and education as well as increased police surveillance. The outcome from the evaluation was that there was a 53 per cent drop in reoffending, an estimated 4,000 crimes were prevented, and there was a saving of £5.5 million. By any standard that is an impressive result.
I have also met those involved in a similar scheme in Avon and Somerset which has had similarly good results and has been distinguished by the enormous enthusiasm and satisfaction of all those working together on an inter-agency basis. It is yet another positive dimension of these projects.

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What the public clearly said in the polls was that they place the highest priority on prevention, and that the keys to reducing crime, and the three highest priorities, were better parenting, more police and better education. Prison was at the bottom of the list. In other words, the issues reach out and become the responsibility of all of us, not only of those in the criminal justice box.
The preference for dealing with offenders is that they should be made to pay back to the community, make amends to victims where appropriate and demonstrate that a lesson has been learnt. There is not much visible payback possible from a prison cell. Punishment can take a variety of forms, and being challenged to change your ways and even the people you know—if your life has been peopled by other drug users, for example—can be the hardest of the lot. It really is the case that challenge of that kind in the community is absolutely not a soft option. Prison is, since it removes from people any responsibility or decision over their own life.
Can the Minister confirm whether he agrees that the key to community confidence is greater knowledge and involvement, and, if so, how the Government plan to take this forward? Can he also tell the House what plans there are to develop the visibility, effectiveness and availability of appropriate community-based penalties? Can he reassure the House that if the public, as the studies show, really are not as retributive as many have supposed, the Government can shift away from a toughness that equates to prison to a response based more on reparation and payback to the community and the victim? Do they have the political will?
I believe that we all want a system which actively reduces reoffending and treats as well as punishes so that we can at last move forwards towards a safer society in which all our citizens can be free from crime and its causes. I beg to move for Papers.
3.21 p.m.
Lord Williams of Elvel: My Lords, the House will be extremely grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, for introducing this debate, particularly for the way in which she has looked at the community outside prisons to see what we can do collectively to make prison life better. It is only right that this House has an opportunity, from time to time, to express an opinion on what is an important part of our social structure. I say "social structure" because it would be quite wrong to regard custodial sentences merely as a deterrent to future crime or a crude method of shutting people away so they are physically unable to reoffend. If we pretend to be a civilised society and, indeed, to be a Christian society the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury is in his place—we really must look a bit further than that.
Before I get to my main point, I have to declare an interest. My wife is a trustee of a small charity called KIDS VIP. It was set up some years ago to work with the Prison Service and other organisations to sustain
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and develop relationships between children and their imprisoned parents. From there, as its literature says, KIDS VIP has extended its activities to,
"raise awareness of prison staff of how imprisonment affects prisoners, children and …the importance of families to prisons, especially for resettlement".
Before I get to the main burden of what I have to say—the importance of family relationships—I should like to say a quick word about children. If we really want to counter a propensity to crime, we should look after the children of prisoners. It is a well established fact that many prisoners are themselves children of convicted criminals. The cycle repeats itself. At present, some 150,000 children are, in one way or another, affected by imprisonment, but their particular difficulties are apparently not recognised by my right honourable friend the Minister for Children. There is a definition of children requiring special treatment, but it has no place for the children of prisoners. This is not really very good.
The only bright spot is a new project in Glasgow set up by the children of prisoners to help others in the same position. This is an entirely laudable initiative, but should not the Minister for Children be doing something more about it? After all, we are told that childcare is to be at the centre of my party's policy-making in the run up to the general election. Here are 150,000 vulnerable children, about whom, at the moment, nothing is being done.
The main burden of what I have to say refers to the rehabilitation of offenders and the reduction in the rate of reoffending. Let me quote from the evidence of the Prison Service to the Woolf/Tumim report, Prison Disturbances April 1990:
"The disruption of the inmate's position within the family unit represents one of the most distressing aspects of imprisonment, and it is often compounded by a sense of guilt of having let the family down and fear of losing them altogether. Enabling inmates, so far as possible, to stay in close and meaningful contact with the family is therefore an essential part of humane treatment …In addition, though, relationships with the family can contribute very positively on several levels towards the achievement of successful reintegration into society following release from prison".
Both authors of the report—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and Sir Stephen Tumim—agreed with that. In fact, of course, it was no more than an elaboration of what is already in the Prison Rules, established under the Prison Act 1952.
If further evidence is required for the importance of maintaining family ties, research in the United States reported in the Home Office Statistical Bulletin 1999 showed that prisoners who have maintained close family ties were six times less likely to reoffend in the first year after release than prisoners who were released without family support.
So, given the weight of evidence and the general agreement that the maintenance of family ties is an imperative in the reduction in rates of reoffending, it is reasonable to ask, "How are we doing?". The answer is, "Not very well". According to a report from the Social Exclusion Unit of the Home Office in 2002, 43 per cent of convicted prisoners and 48 per cent of remand prisoners lost contact with their families when they

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entered prison. Furthermore, the report goes on to say that only half of prisoners use their minimum entitlement to visits. Finally, the report points out that relationships break up on release, if only because the prisoner does not realise how things have changed for their family while they have been outside the family loop.
So I hope that when he comes to reply, my noble friend the Minister will recognise both the importance and the urgency of the matter—this is the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, made—and seek ways to support the Prison Service in enabling families to stay together as far as is humanly possible. It is, after all, only part of what the Prison Service described in the evidence I quoted as "humane treatment".
If my noble friend is prepared to open his mind on this—as I am sure he is—may I offer some suggestions? The first is that prison officers should understand the importance of visits. At the moment, some do and some do not. The second is to make arrangements for children to lessen the intimidating effects of going into a prison, with proper play areas to allow the adults time to talk between themselves.
The third suggestion is to involve families more closely in the life of the prison, for instance, in initiatives such as the Homework Club at Wormwood Scrubs, where children visit and prisoner parents help them with their homework. That, incidentally, would encourage prisoner parents to improve their education levels, but I leave that aside.
The fourth suggestion is to follow through once the prisoner is released into the community. The first days and weeks are crucial—and the most difficult. The released prisoner needs a home to go to; he or she needs to know how to relate to his or her family so that the family does not break up on release, because times have moved on since he or she served their sentence, and the ex-prisoner does not go on to reoffend.
Those are, perhaps, aspirations, but I do not believe that they are impossible aspirations if we want to be considered a civilised society. There is one particular measure that I have mentioned to my noble friend the Minister. We should at least make a start; I very much hope that my noble friend will accept it and put it into practice. It is this: there should be a standard on provision for and treatment of families at visits at prisons, to be included in prison audit. It is, after all, not much to ask. It does not happen at the moment, but I am certain that family involvement would improve if prisoners felt that their families would be well received and if families felt that they would not be put off. If that were to happen, it is my belief that it would contribute substantially both to "humane treatment" and—a practical point—to the reduction of reoffending.
There is obviously much to be done, as the noble Baroness pointed out. All that we can do today is to point my noble friend to certain things that could or should be done. After that, all we have to say to my noble friend is, "It's over to you".
3.30 p.m.
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, perhaps I may start by giving my pedigree for having the temerity to speak in the company of grandees in this important debate. I was most interested by the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Williams, because in a funny way they tied in with my own thoughts. But, first, as a recently appointed trustee of Crimestoppers, I thought that this debate would give me the opportunity to call attention to a recent development in community involvement concerning crime, which is proving to be remarkably successful. But more of that later.
My second reason for speaking relates to my past experience as a member of the Board of Visitors for six years at Her Majesty's prison, Pentonville. I also served as a governor in what was then known as an "approved school". I used to arrive there in my somewhat ancient car, which I would carefully lock before leaving to attend the governors' meeting. This I did until, one day, a boy came up to me and said, "Listen ma'am, if we want your car, we'll take it. Don't bother to lock it". I never did so again.
All my past experience—and perhaps being a widow of a headmaster of a hoarding school is relevant—tells me that crime is fed by illiteracy. Children who avoid school, cannot read or write and have time on their hands, find it fun to steal. It is fun to become a big wheel in the eyes of your mates by zooming around on other people's motorbikes and/or in other people's cars—and, with a bit of luck, there is a bed to come back to and various options for getting something to eat. Someone in that position probably knows, but at the time does not care, that without being able to read or write he will find a regular job practically impossible to obtain. So the petty crime with which he started off needs very little pushing to turn serious—and so to prison.
As a member of Pentonville's Board of Visitors, I was allowed to go anywhere in the prison, and I could talk to any prisoner. My main occupation on my visits turned out to be reading prisoners' letters to them and, sometimes, helping them to express themselves on paper. Very, very little time was given over to classes where prisoners could learn to read or write. So eventually, the prison gates open and they are free—but free for what? Alas, more often than not, the whole dreary roundabout starts again.
We will never lower the crime rate unless we can catch those wayward children and somehow or other make them aware of the powers of literacy. One further thought: I propose that the time spent at reading and writing classes should be included, when appropriate, as part of certain sentences. I will be interested to know whether the Minister has any reactions to that suggestion.
Today your Lordships are considering ways in which the wider community can influence, be involved and have confidence in our measures for crime reduction and the judicial process. I wish to draw your Lordships' attention to one of the many charitable organisations that struggle along financially to do just that. 'Your Lordships will touch on alternatives to prison, but there

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are many criminals for whom prison is the only possibility—not only to stop them committing crime for the period when they are locked away, but to give the communities relief, freedom from fear, and the confidence that something is being done about crime.
In particular, I wish to draw your Lordships' attention to Crimestoppers, the charity that operates a single national telephone number that people can call anonymously with information about criminals. The people who call are often those who are close to the criminals and fear retribution, but want to do something about the situation, or perhaps those who simply do not want to get caught up in the lengthy processes involved with dealing with the police.
Crimestoppers is extraordinarily successful. Last year, the police gave Crimestoppers direct credit for solving 48 murders. This year, it has been given credit for the recovery of more than £15 million-worth of illegal drugs. That saves the police considerable resources, shortens the time of the investigation and in many cases provides the police with the only clue or item of information that results in success. By being a charity and a volunteer organisation, Crimestoppers maintains integrity. People know that their names and telephone numbers will never be divulged. Thus the organisation cannot claim success stories and does not get the full credit that it deserves.
However, we are allowed to mention one case: that of the horrific serial rapist, Antonio Imiela, known as the "M25 rapist", who is now in gaol having been identified by a call to Crimestoppers following a reconstruction on "Crimewatch", the television programme. The caller made public the fact that she had called Crimestoppers to encourage others to do the same, so that it could be talked about. Six police forces were involved in the investigation, and the man's name did not feature at all in their work until the information was passed to them. Without the call to Crimestoppers, the police said that he would have gone on to commit further acts of increasing brutality. During the series of attacks, many people in the southeast lived in fear. Think what one call did for them—as well as making a huge saving in police resources.
But aside from those operational successes, Crimestoppers achieves exactly the intention of our debate today. The act of calling the Crimestoppers line is a metaphor for the community taking responsibility for doing something about crime. It gives people the power to get the criminal off their backs and make their community safer. That is reinforced by the other work done by Crimestoppers, in schools, on Internet safety for children and by campaigning in communities to encourage people to support the police and become engaged. It is but one example of the ability of volunteer organisations to make a great impact on community involvement, in making this country safer. They deserve the full and active support of your Lordships.
To end on a practical note, the anonymous telephone number for Crimestoppers is: 0800 555111.
3.38 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Salisbury The Lord Bishop of Salisbury: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater of Butterstone, for the opportunity afforded by this debate to consider the wider community's involvement in how policy is shaped in relation to crime prevention, how alternatives to prison are being developed and to consider the rehabilitation of offenders. Those of us on these Benches have, for the most part, a number of penal institutions in our diocese. We have considerable engagements with those seeking to administer justice—in particular with local magistrates. We visit prisons regularly, and not only as visitors but to administer the Church's rights and sacraments to those who seek them.
In this country, we have a large and rising prison population—and largely unseen, of course. There is a great deal of public debate about the need to gain justice for the victims of crime. Much energy in public debate is focused on security, and language about retribution is never far below the surface of what emerges in the popular press.
This afternoon I want to make a tripartite plea that we shift the debate back as far as we can to causes rather than consequences. I want to urge, first, that we commend a degree of moderation in the language we use in relation to crime and its prevention; secondly, that we look carefully at the context in which we speak about the victims of crime; and, thirdly, that we shift the debate from concentration on the boundaries—whether of containment or of prevention—to the positive heart of the matter if we are trying to build a better community.
I start with an icon drawn from the case studies presented in today's Guardian:
"Toni used to watch her mother trying to hang herself and use drugs. Her mother used to batter her with her fists or anything else that came to hand. Eventually, she threw Toni downstairs so Toni put herself into care. Her father was not around much. In fact, her mother told her he was not her father and so she is not sure who he is".
Here is Toni's understanding of life:
"'My view of the world is that we are living in hell and we are all ghosts'.
She has thoughts she can't control and voices in her head. She has been in trouble with the police since she was 11. stealing, terrorising the neighbours, setting fire to things.
Recently, she cut a girl: 'Sometimes I feel I have to cut people up if I don't like them. Sometimes it only takes them to do one thing and, if I don't like it, then I'll have to have a go at them'. She wants help for her mental problems but nobody has ever treated her. It's the same in the prison. 'My view of the world is that we are living in hell and we are all ghosts'".
That is a bleak statement and reveals the shadowlands in which many of those caught up in the consequences of crime find themselves. How can we help make this world real and not a ghost world? First, we need to attend to the language of our debate. I suggest that the tenor of much of our response to crime may fuel the violence of such intrusive acts rather than cool it. We talk constantly of fighting crime rather than containing it. We talk of the police force as a historic—and unthinkingly accepted—title as part of our normal discourse. Recently a notable public figure has talked of "limp-wrested judges" representing a "liberal establishment". My question is

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this: is this kind of language conducive to mature debate, or does it rather use the language of slogan and headline to polarise opinion and to score points? We do not need to score points in this area. This is an area in which our community is judged on its values and on the way in which we treat one another.
Secondly, what are the rights of victims and how are they best protected or extended? Outrage is the natural reaction of a victim of crime, but if that "rage" is given legal expression there is a danger that this expression becomes the template of how we deal with the perpetrator. But can this "rage", however understandable, be the language of the community of which, and in which, both victims and perpetrators are members? What is the best way for victims and perpetrators to build the future of a community together when the perpetrators continue to feel like ghosts?
Thirdly, the debate so often concentrates on boundaries—how we can use prison or its equivalents to contain, and so forget, offenders. How can we build a society in which we use sentencing and prison not merely to contain but to re-energise, rehabilitate and even to socialise? If we think not only about the boundaries but also about the centre and make strong centres, we might well want to build more and better opportunities for education in prisons themselves. I agree with the noble Baroness in that regard as illiteracy is a major stumbling block to participation in the life of our society. We need courses in literacy and in wider education and to provide adequate training. We need to offer much more opportunity for social engagement. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, that contact with family, and especially with children, is a vital factor in continuing to humanise those who are in prison. Family relationships more than anything else are what make people human. I refer to the sense of belonging in a family, of having a place and of feeling that there are people for whom you have a responsibility even if you do not think you do it very well. That, more than any other single factor, will help people feel that they have a place and a worth in the community.
We also need to provide proper housing for those leaving prison and trying to get started again. But perhaps beneath all this lies the opportunity to use periods of prison or periods of containment or periods of probation as an opportunity for the formation of the individual as a person with his, or her, own unique contribution to make and with a sense of his own gifts. How that person will rise to the invitation of his gifts will shape whether he thinks of himself as a ghost. As the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, said, many of those who offend are the children of prisoners and are almost automatically drawn into that kind of criminal and inherited vulnerability.
I end by describing my own experience when I was a curate in Armley in Leeds, where a notable Victorian prison was, and, indeed, is, a significant visual landmark in the parish. A vigorous experiment was undertaken there by a private charity, the Northope Hall Trust, and the Leeds Probation Service. There casework was undertaken during the week by probation officers with
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those whose fathers or elder brothers were in prison. In those days it was almost entirely males who were in prison, approved school or in Borstal. Casework was undertaken with children in the 11 to 13 or 14 age range. The staff ratio was the almost unimaginable figure of rive to eight. At the weekends boys went in groups on residential social weekends with an enormous range and variety of activity, including outdoor activity. Those weekends were enormously successful in preventing those young boys following in the criminal pattern that had been set by their fathers and elder brothers. They did not necessarily stop them being criminalised but they socialised them and made it possible for those people to think of themselves as part of the human community.
Those centres were taken up in the Seebohm report and given the wonderfully unimaginative title of "intermediate treatment centres", thus probably causing them to sink. That is the kind of experiment in socialising which is so important if we are to get ahead of the game and to make an impact before people enter a life of criminal activity. I thank the noble Baroness for initiating this debate. I too very much hope t hat the Minister will tell us how serious the Government are as regards investing in these preventive measures. I know that there may not be many votes to be won in this, but actually if we are serious about the potential of each person who could find themselves drawn into a life of crime and end up populating the prisons, I believe this is one of the investments most worth making. I look forward to the Minister's response.
3.49 p.m.
Lord Chan: My Lords, I apologise most sincerely for not being present for the opening speech, particularly to the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater of Butterstone. I foolishly got trapped in an Underground train and arrived here just in time for this important debate. My contribution is based on public consultation research done by the Sentencing Advisory Panel, of which I have been a member since the panel's establishment in July 1999. By sharing with noble Lords the two independent public research projects, I hope that we will see the importance of community involvement in determining policies relevant to crime prevention, alternatives to prison and rehabilitation of offenders.
The Sentencing Advisory Panel's members include: magistrates and judges; professors of law; senior officers of the police, Prison Service, probation service and Crown Prosecution Service; and three lay members, of whom I am one. A list of organisations concerned with criminal justice is consulted for a statutory period of 12 weeks before the panel publishes its guidance for submission to the Sentencing Guidelines Council. In addition, the Sentencing Advisory Panel has commissioned two public consultations, one on domestic burglary published in 2001, and the other on rape published in 2002.
The first survey of public attitudes was designed to ascertain whether the public agreed on: the factors that aggravated the seriousness of the offence, particularly domestic burglary; what particular features of' the offence and of the offender made it appropriate in the

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public's view to impose a custodial sentence; and in what circumstances the public thought it appropriate to impose a community sentence.
One of the key findings of the panel's public opinion research was that respondents envisaged the "typical" or standard burglary as being committed by a repeat offender and having the following features: the theft of electrical goods such as a television or video; the theft of personal items such as jewellery; damage caused by the break-in itself; some turmoil in the house, such as drawers upturned or damage to some items; and no injury or violence, but some trauma to the victim. Those features identified in the panel's public opinion research were very similar to those identified by victims of burglary responding to the British Crime Survey in 1998. The panel therefore accepts that this kind of burglary is reasonably representative of cases coming regularly before the courts.
There is considerable authority from the courts of justice to consider domestic burglary a sufficiently serious offence to merit a custodial sentence. The result of our survey showed that public opinion strongly supported that view. For the standard burglary that I outlined, the sentence suggested by the public for a repeat offender was a three-year term of imprisonment. The survey respondents had little confidence in the effectiveness of community sentences, and did not in general see them as a sufficiently punitive response to an offence such as domestic burglary. The research findings also demonstrated that the public were not familiar with the full range of community sentences, especially those introduced recently through the Criminal Justice Act.
Public opinion research conducted by the Sentencing Advisory Panel on other common offences demonstrated similar findings to those from the survey of victims of burglary conducted by the British Crime Survey. Involving the public in issues of sentencing of offenders not only gives them a voice, but helps them to understand other forms of punishment. For example, curfew orders are particularly suitable for offenders such as burglars because they involve a significant loss of liberty and can be tailored to restrict an offender's movements at particular times of day.
Drug treatment and testing orders are specifically aimed at individuals whose offending is closely related to their serious drug misuse, and involve an intensive treatment and testing regime which is closely monitored by the sentencing court. The National Probation Service also operates a range of programmes specifically targeted at persistent offenders, including burglars, some of which include close monitoring and surveillance of an offender's behaviour in the community. Community punishment orders involve an element of reparation to the community, which can be particularly important in relation to burglary. All those can be given as sentences in their own right or in an appropriate combination. The public needs to know about those forms of punishment and rehabilitation programmes that are an improvement on imprisonment, if applied properly.
The other public survey commissioned by the Sentencing Advisory Panel was a qualitative study on the general public's perceptions of the crime of rape and
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the experience of victims. The overwhelming message is that rape is rape—the victim's sense of violation is just as great whatever her or his relationship to the offender. Although rape by a stranger was seen as a more frightening and potentially dangerous experience, the breach of trust involved in "relationship rape" or "acquaintance rape" made it equally serious.
Finally, wider public consultation on crimes that affect people promotes confidence in the criminal justice system which will not be swayed by media reports of anecdotal cases. I hope that the Government will do more to involve the general public on crime prevention, punishment and rehabilitation of offenders.
3.56 p.m.
Lord Avebury: My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Linklater on the RCP report, and particularly welcome the recommendation that the Sentencing Guidelines Council should look at greater flexibility in sentencing of drug mules. It has always struck me as pointless to hand down seven-year sentences to poor women from the slums of Kingston, who themselves are victims of drug barons. That is a matter for attention that I have argued to no avail with successive prison Ministers over the years. Now that my noble friend and her distinguished committee have taken the matter up, perhaps the Home Office will sit up and listen.
I want to pursue the question raised by the right reverend Prelate of how far the Government are interested in investing in prevention of crime rather than picking up the pieces afterwards. I shall concentrate on one aspect of crime prevention, and urge the Government to do far more before the particular class of offenders that I shall discuss gets into the criminal justice system in the first place.
Since 1997, we have had an avalanche of criminal justice legislation and a huge expansion in the prison estate. If crime and disorder could have been reduced by more and longer prison sentences, or even by the provision of a variety of non-custodial sentences such as ASBOs, the Government would have been able to boast of a great record. But some kinds of offences, particularly those of violence against the person, as reported to the police, have risen inexorably year on year. Instead of concentrating almost entirely on the penalties and how society deals with offenders, we should have put greater emphasis on reducing the number of offences committed.
On the Government's own figures, the cost of alcohol-related crime and disorder is up to £7.9 billion, which is not accounted for entirely by the public disorder that occurs every Friday and Saturday night in just about every town and city of England; it covers also thousands of offences committed by problem drinkers. The damage done by alcohol is greater than that by all other drugs put together, yet it attracts far less attention, even in my noble friend's report, and only a fraction of the resources. But the mindless violence generated by concentrations of drinking factories is a cause of public concern. According to the Cabinet Office's interim analytical report, no fewer than 70 per cent of respondents said that it was a problem

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in their area. If communities were involved in policies relevant to crime prevention, as the Motion suggests, there is no doubt that they would demand action.
The survey came to some other significant conclusions: that drinking is more likely to be associated with violent offences than with acquisitive crimes, that it contributes to violent or aggressive behaviour, that violent incidents where alcohol is involved are more likely to result in more serious injuries and that almost half the victims of violent crime say that the perpetrator was under the influence of alcohol at the time.
Alcohol plays a role in a third of cases of violence between spouses, and the Government's Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy talks about developing "models of care" so that perpetrators and victims of domestic violence receive treatment and help. They want the producers and sellers of alcohol to help convey key messages about the unacceptability of domestic violence and to provide helpline numbers for victims to call. This is typical of the approach to all other kinds of alcohol-related harm as well. The Government will offer limited help in picking up the pieces after the damage has been done and blocking the immediate harm that aggressive drinkers may cause, for example by encouraging the use of toughened glass. But in the main they will rely on the industry, whose products have caused the problem in the first place, to mitigate its effects.
There is nothing in the Government's policies that is likely to have any measurable impact on the level of alcohol-related crime and disorder. They claim that the Licensing Act will have a beneficial effect, but senior police officers, in spite of their reluctance to challenge the Government's political agenda, are increasingly critical of 24–hour drinking and are fearful of what may happen next August when the Act comes into effect. Paul Evans, who has been imported from Boston to tell us how to reduce crime, says he is not sure that it can get much worse—not exactly a sign of confidence in government policy—while the Metropolitan Police says that there will be an increase in "disturbance" and warns that additional demands may be placed on it by having to deal with more intoxicated arrestees. Stephen Green, Chief Constable of Nottingham and lead ACPO spokesman on alcohol, told "Panorama" in June that next year's deregulation could indeed make things worse. He added that residents in other parts of our towns and cities are being deprived of policing, because the officers who should be there are being drained out by the needs of the centre. That is a side-effect of the night-time saturnalia which is bound to increase crime and has been totally ignored by government.
In fact, Ministers seem to be interested in preventing a thorough investigation of the effects on law and order of the Licensing Act, perhaps because they are nervous about what it would reveal. I have been suggesting for the past 18 months that we should be using three indices to measure the changes that occur next August when the Act comes into force: alcohol related attendances at A &E departments—on the lines of the survey by Professor Colin Drummond and others, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which was submitted to the Government in September 2003—crimes of violence against the person and
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ambulance call-outs arising from incidents committed on or in the vicinity of licensed premises. Until recently I had not had a straight answer from Ministers to these proposals. On A&E statistics, the noble Lord, Lord Warner told me last May:
"We will certainly be examining ways in which we can continue to obtain this useful data".
Richard Caborn wrote to me on 17 March, stating that,
"we will be studying base-line data and making comparisons between the effect of current legislation and developing trends to ensure that the new licensing regime meets our expectations with regard to increased public safety and a reduction in crime and disorder. The full extent of our review has yet to he determined".
When I asked the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh of Haringey, when the Government would decide what base-line data were to be used and whether the time remaining before the Act came into force allowed for the collection of sufficient data, he said that he could not give me bland assurances, but now, after all this time, he has said that:
"There is already sufficient baseline data regarding alcohol-related crime and disorder available from the British Crime Survey to enable a thorough review of the impact of the 2003 Act to take place".
The BCS is an utterly useless yardstick, because it deals with the subjective experiences of crime of a random sample of 37,000 people at national level and, as the Home Office acknowledges,
"it cannot tell us what is happening in your local authority or neighbourhood".
Now we shall never be able to see whether crime and disorder increases after the second appointed day in the areas where licensed premises are concentrated, even though in the case of the police and ambulance services the statistics could be provided if the Government asked for them. The Assistant Commissioner for the Metropolis gave me figures for London which I passed on to Department for Culture, Media and Sport Ministers during the Report stage of the Licensing Bill and I have figures from the London Ambulance Service regarding drink and drug-related call-outs in central London from October 2004, which can be produced regularly from the London Ambulance Service computers, if required.
You do not have to be an economic genius to appreciate that if drink costs more, less will be consumed and there will be less crime. Most scientists, other than those funded by the drinks industry, have accepted this since Kettil Bruun's "purple book", Alcohol Control Policies in a Public Health Perspective was published in 1975: and the Government's analytical report acknowledges that,
"there is clear evidence of the links between price and availability and overall consumption, and hence harm".
In the US, there have been several recent studies on the price elasticity of beer, wine and spirits, which showed that for these types of drink, small increases in price led to some reduction in consumption. A survey of the research published by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found that,
"increases in the prices of alcoholic beverages lead to reductions in drinking and heavy drinking as well as in the consequences of alcohol use and abuse. This conclusion concurs with a fundamental law of economics".

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Yet there has been a consistent attempt to play down this functional relationship. Several references to the links and to evidence from Finland, California and Western Australia were erased from the Government's draft analytical report and, in the final strategy, price and availability are said to,
"act in the context of a complex range of other factors that influence consumption (culture, advertising, setting and market innovation …)".
There are other factors involved, but there is no doubt that if the obvious levers of price and availability were applied, alcohol-related crime and disorder, as well as other kinds of harm, could be reduced. The illogicality and perversity of a strategy which deliberately jettisons the most powerful available weapon is breathtaking. It is as if a general were to say that air support, for instance, operated only in the context of operations by infantry, armour and logistics, and should therefore not be called upon at all.
In an Observer article last month, Downing Street was said to have made clear that anyone who opposed Home Office Bills on crime and disorder, or, indeed, ventured to say anything about them, would be painted as "soft on crime" in next year's election campaign. That tallies with our experience in recent by-elections. The Downing Street source told the newspaper,
"we will tell the Tories and Liberal Democrats, "Go on, make our day and oppose them"".
The answer to that is that the Government are soft on the drink lobby and that is one of the reasons why violent crime, as well as accidents and long-term health problems, impose huge burdens on society and hold back our potential.
4.8 p.m.
Baroness Stern: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, on persuading her colleagues to hold this debate and on her excellent contribution. I, too, must declare an interest as a member of the supervisory board of the Rethinking Crime and Punishment Initiative and as an adviser to the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
I support the points already made by noble Lords and would remind the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury that intermediate treatment went on to become a successful policy for juveniles. It kept most of them out of prison and was brought in by the Department of Health at a time when, I think, the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, was running a good regime there.
I express my appreciation that the debate is to be replied to by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who is a Minister in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. According to the website, among other matters, he has responsibility for neighbourhood renewal, social exclusion and homelessness. I assume that means that he works for more neighbourhood renewal but for less homelessness and less social exclusion. All those issues are very relevant to crime, dealing with crime and public confidence that it will be dealt with effectively.
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It is possible that, under those responsibilities, he will find himself disagreeing with the Home Office occasionally. I hope that the noble Lord will not object if I take the liberty of addressing this subject with his particular responsibilities in mind.
I want to talk about rebalancing. We have heard much from the Government about rebalancing the criminal justice system—often, it is claimed, from the offender to the victim but probably, as many people say, from the individual to the state. I want to address three possible and rather different rebalancing scenarios from the ones usually addressed by the Government.
The first is to tip the balance more towards creating social inclusion than towards increasing social exclusion. The criminal justice process cannot help being about social exclusion. It is the use of the law to show society's disapproval and protect society. So people are taken away and locked up in prisons; they get a prison record, which is very exclusionary; they find it difficult to get a job afterwards; their housing prospects get worse; and their family ties are weakened.
Even the non-custodial penalties are severe deprivations of liberty, and the emphasis on them has moved further away from social reintegration—for example, getting housing, a job, self-confidence and a group of non-criminal friends—and towards risk assessment and containment.
But this social exclusionary part of society's arrangements is growing. That is where the action is: it involves more money, more powers, and more and more people. It is a growth area—so much so that some services that should be provided to citizens generally are provided more amply to those who have entered the criminal justice system. The Rethinking Crime and Punishment report quotes an incident where the local authority in Liverpool was driven to ask Liverpool prison whether some places on its prison drug treatment programme could be allocated to non-convicted Liverpool residents in need of drug treatment.
It is not only prison where we see criminal justice growing and controlling access to much-needed social services. The whole business of anti-social behaviour orders has the same characteristics. By now, many noble Lords should have heard of Aneeze. He is famous as, I believe, the youngest recipient of an anti-social behaviour order. Aneeze is aged 11. A Times journalist called him "the youngest social outcast". Noble Lords are not the only people to have heard of him; he is so famous that, according to press reports, his mother receives hate mail from all over the country. It is wasted on Aneeze because he cannot read, but other members of his family can.
It is often suggested, sometimes by noble Lords on the government side, that those like myself who are often horrified and sometimes ashamed by this licence for scapegoating and for creating a band of social outlaws have never ourselves suffered from noisy neighbours, destructive local children, broken car windows, abuse and stone throwing because, if we had, we would surely applaud these measures. That seems to be the conclusion of the Liberal Democrat spokesman on home affairs,

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who has, I am very sad to say, joined the chorus of those who say in relation to this policy that the means justify the ends.
It is an untenable argument to say that those who oppose the measures have never suffered from such behaviour. It is more likely that those who have lived in places where they suffer harassment and disorder know exactly how uncomfortable it is to live in a divided community where permission has been given to stigmatise and hound some of its most disadvantaged and needy members. This is not the kind of community involvement that leads to greater social inclusion and to less crime.
I return to the fate of Aneeze, whose story continues to appear in national newspapers. He clearly has a huge set of problems. From his early years, he needed special help and social support. From the age of six, he was setting fire to things. According to the reports, he received no help, but now, because of the publicity, there is talk that he may be found a place in a residential school in Cumbria. That should have been considered for him years ago.
Therefore, I want to suggest a rebalancing of the system so that disturbed and needy children and others receive the services and help that they need without having to be taken to court, judged to be anti-social and pilloried in public because of what they need. I shall be interested to hear the Minister's views on how far attempts are made to solve the problem, especially in relation to children, before an anti-social behaviour order is applied for.
I move on to my second rebalancing—
Lord Bradshaw: My Lords, does the noble Baroness accept that, in fact, the whole thrust of community partnerships and of the police service is to keep people out of court? Institutions such as Restorative Justice and the work being carried out actively in communities to deal with young offenders are very positive developments. Much work is done before—I think that I paraphrase what the noble Baroness said—the heavy hand of the law is brought to bear on people.
Baroness Stern: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that intervention, and I look forward to hearing whether the Minister agrees with him. I am afraid that I think that there is an enormous gap between the rhetoric and the reality.
I move on to the second element of rebalancing, which is to rebalance the system much more to the local rather than the national, governmental level. Most crime occurs locally and its effects are felt locally. Yet, once the police work is over, local authorities and local organisations normally have no involvement in what happens afterwards, with the noteworthy exception of the very successful youth offending teams.
In 2001, the Probation Service lost its local character. It lost its structural relationship with local authorities and local magistrates and it was absorbed by the Home Office, although the Home Office works through probation boards, which are Home Office appointed. Then, in January this year, the Home
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Office decided to sever the local connections altogether and to bring the whole lot into Home Office management. We expect legislation about that this Session.
In Scotland—here I declare an interest as Convenor of the Scottish Consortium on Crime and Criminal Justice—a similar idea occurred to the Government. They said, "Let's bring together the prison and the probation functions", which in Scotland are carried out by local authorities. They consulted widely and 95 per cent of those consulted said that it was a bad idea to centralise these activities.
On Monday, the Minister for Justice in Scotland announced her decision to proceed in exactly the opposite way to the choice made in England and Wales. The prison and probation functions would not be brought under central control. Instead, the prisons would be put under a statutory obligation to work with local authorities, and the emphasis would be on local working and local accountability.
Yesterday, the Local Government Association in England and Wales issued a statement supporting the view that,
"the successful youth offending team model",
should be extended to the adult part of the system. It also called for local councils to have a properly funded leadership role,
"to co-ordinate and lead the work of these relevant local agencies … to reduce re-offending in their communities".
I should like to hear the Minister's views on a greater role for local government and other local agencies.
My third rebalancing act is to shift as much as possible of criminal justice expenditure, once the requirements of public protection and proper punishment have been met, away from negative expenditure that punishes and contains and towards positive expenditure that invests in the communities which suffer most from crime.
Punishment is very expensive. The annual average cost of imprisonment is £37,305. Much of this money, more than ever before, is being spent on small-time low risk people—people who are addicted and people who are mentally ill. The mentally ill people get worse; the addicted continue to be addicted; and the small-time thieves and other petty law breakers get nothing that deals with their messed-up lives. There is nothing to show for the expenditure.
If, however, there was a choice about how to spend that money, how many communities would buy prison places, knowing that the sentences will be short and that the people will soon be back? If they could have instead, for example, a day centre for people with mental health problems, a state-of-the-art rehabilitation centre for drug addicted women, training programmes—not just for convicted people but for everybody's children—or facilities that renew their neighbourhood, I suggest that few would buy prison places for many of the people from their neighbourhood.
The research by Rethinking Crime and Punishment shows clearly that the public can see the merits of prevention and would like their money to be spent in

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that way. I hope that when the Minister replies he will tell me whether he sees any merit in my third suggestion also.
4.21 p.m.
Lord Carlile of Berriew: My Lords, I start by congratulating my noble friend on the excellent way she opened the debate and on the work that she and others have done outside this place in trying to improve particularly the effectiveness of the criminal justice system for young offenders, the group on which I propose to concentrate. Perhaps I may also say what a privilege it is to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, with her profound knowledge of all these issues.
Looking back to, say, 1970, if one were to judge the youth sentencing system by corporate standards I would come to this sort of conclusion: what one might call "Youth Sentencing System Plc" would have gone into administration years ago; the various prospectuses produced by its directors—and notably in political manifestos—would be held up as paradigms of fraud; the directors of the company, by and large, would be serving time for making reckless statements; and we would have started by either selling the system to the French or starting with a new sheet of paper to devise some kind of business that actually produced the product we needed, because it is not.
If I look back at my experience of observing the criminal justice system for young offenders, both as a lawyer and as a politician over those years, I reflect that in the 1970s alarm was being expressed about a prison population of 40,000; in the 1980s about a prison population of 50,000; in the 1990s about a prison population of 60,000; and past the turn of century about a prison population of 70,000. So it has got us absolutely nowhere.
What we have had over those years is mantra after mantra. "Prison works"—rubbish; "We'll cut crime by cutting the causes of crime"—has not happened; and, "The Liberals are soft on crime"—is actually not true at all. If I were to devise a mantra, it would be something like "Cut crime with courage", but I am against mantras because I think they reach utterly nowhere. One decent policy would be worth 1,000 mantras if we could find it.
We all know that—the Audit Commission did some very good work in the mid-1990s that proved it—just as the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, said, prison is very expensive. It is a waste of resources. What is the use of writing a CV on a computer in prison at a cost of £37,305 per year per prisoner if, by spending one-third of that money to prevent that person going into prison, it could have been written at the local further education college? How much better off we would be. What if that person had been on the labour market and not rotting away in a stinking prison cell in one of our appalling young offenders' institutions, so heavily criticised by the Chief Inspector of Prisons—and rightly so?
I should like to suggest one policy which is analogous to the correct policies which, in my view, the Government are following on education. If a school is doing so badly that its managers cannot manage it, it cannot deliver basic education and it cannot produce the social needs which education requires for its area, what do they do? They either close it down or they send in someone else who can manage it. The principle is that no child should be sent to a school which is not going to educate that child. Why on earth are we sending young offenders to young offenders' institutions which are not going to improve them in any material way whatever, but are simply going to send them on to another young offenders' institution a few months later?
I suggest to the Government that it is time that the highest standards were imposed on those institutions so that nobody was ever sent to a place in them unless there was a suitable place for them to be sent to. That would be, at least, a start.
But we should be able to deal with these problems—as the Audit Commission said in 1996—well before young people are ever sent to prison. The evidence is that for every pound spent on preventing crime we save £6 or £7 later on. So why do we not give the public value for money in this area? Why is education in this country so impoverished in its approach to crime? Why are more children not taught in school how horrible prisons and young offenders' institutions are and what happens to them in the zoos that those places can be? Why are they not told more rigorously that the refuge from parenting is not to commit crime and be locked up in a YOI, but to become a better parent and to enjoy the pleasures of being a parent?
Why do we not teach young people more before they leave school about how to approach work? Why do we not teach them about the advantages of creature comforts? My observation of offenders in young offenders' institutions is that often it is the only secure place they have had to sleep for years; that many of them have had no opportunity to enjoy creature comforts; and that they do not have parents who offer them creature comforts. These are all issues that should be addressed in our education system. Above all, why do we not teach them the husbandry of their own money, which surely is one of the fundamental qualities of leading a useful and non-criminal life?
I agree entirely with my noble friend Lord Avebury when he talked about alcohol. Last week I saw the newspapers indulging in a joke of a well known young public figure having what was quoted as "Sex on the beach". "Sex", apparently, is the name of an alcopop drink. What on earth do the alcohol companies think they are doing in diminishing and diluting the sense of social responsibility of young people by giving their drinks names like that?
There is a great campaign by the Government against smoking at the moment. which I applaud, despite my instinct against the tendency to ban everything these days, so beloved of all governments, including this one, although I suspect it is less loved by the Minister than by some of his colleagues. But why do they not give the same attention to cannabis that

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they give to smoking cigarettes? Go and ask anyone working in a mental health ward for young people, a police officer in a police station on a Saturday night, a general practitioner or anyone in a young offenders' institution about the effects of cannabis. I am with the Government on the question of what the police should do about the possession of cannabis. One must be practical. But why do we not have a campaign that points out what all health professionals know to be the truth about cannabis; that it is capable in many vulnerable young people, particularly young men, of causing severe psychotic episodes that lead to criminal behaviour? It far exceeds in dangerousness the repeated use of cigarettes, is more difficult to give up and potentially has just as bad long-term effects.
That is an example that could be used as a real value-for-money exercise in cutting youth crime.
Why do we not try to ensure that mental healthcare is delivered when it is needed? One would be lucky to find a school nurse in every school even now, despite knowledge of their utility, and very lucky to find a school nurse who is able, however good he or she is, to call on high-quality mental health services. In young offenders' institutions, the accepted statistic is that 90 per cent of the inmates are suffering from some current mental or psychiatric issue, call it what one will. That should be dealt with from schools long before they go into young offenders' institutions; and addressed there through community provision.
Why do we not have more experiments like the few so far of putting small police stations in schools, so that kids who want to talk to the police informally about the issues that worry them are able to do so? Where it has been done—including in one school that I know in rural Wales, incidentally, which is a pretty unlikely candidate for that kind of activity—it has worked well and improved relations between youngsters and the police enormously. In that setting, familiarity does not breed contempt, it breeds knowledge, partnership and working together.
So overall, I urge the Minister to accept that complacency on those issues is totally misplaced. We have failed generation after generation of young offenders, because we have allowed them to go in increasing numbers to young offenders' institutions. Let us try to use community initiatives and other imaginative conceptual ideas to try to reduce youth offending, and let us please do it with policies rather than mantras.
4.32 p.m.
Lord Fellowes: My Lords, first, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, for initiating this debate on a subject that I approach as a relative newcomer but on which she is an acknowledged and respected authority, not least because of the admirable report produced under her chairmanship, Rethinking Crime & Punishment. It is also a privilege to follow the powerful speech of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew.
The debate comes at a time when the prison population is at an all-time peak in England and Wales. It comes at a time when public concern about
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crime is matched but not assuaged by the determination of the majority of politicians of various hues not to be seen as "soft on crime". It comes at a time when the cost of imprisonment is between £35,000 and £40,000 a year per prisoner, including the substantial percentage of prisoners held on remand, all too often in worse conditions than those who have been tried and sentenced.
It also comes at a time when figures and percentages are used in profusion by the various protagonists on the subject of crime and punishment to make their case. We know that statistics can be used and misused so easily but I shall try to eschew more than the bare minimum as I venture to reflect—here I declare an interest, having chaired the Prison Reform Trust for a brief three years or so—on whether we can improve what is patently an unsatisfactory state of affairs in our prisons. More than unsatisfactory, it is frequently not decent nor humane and, in the case of remand prisoners, it is unjust.
I took over the chair of the Prison Reform Trust from the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, now our president. It was during his time as Home Secretary that a Green Paper was published entitled, Punishment, Custody and the Community. It contained the following passage:
"Custody is, therefore, a continuum from close restriction to relative freedom. The more severe the restrictions, the more they produce conditions which are different from life outside. They limit the offender's personal responsibility for taking decisions on everyday matters. Imprisonment of any kind restricts individual initiative and freedom of choice. Imprisonment is likely to diminish the offender's sense of responsibility and self-reliance".
It is surely difficult to disagree with those statements.
The central conundrum is this: longer sentences mean more people being incarcerated for longer, with the commensurate cost in the wreckage of family and prisoners' lives, the resulting damage to society and the cost to the taxpayer; shorter sentences are worthless for the offender and the Prison Service because there is no time for rehabilitation, thus aiding and abetting our horrific reoffending rate, especially by young people. Meanwhile, the route to the imaginative and constructive approaches to sentencing, such as restorative justice, to name one example, is closed off to governments by the fear to which I referred earlier of being seen to be soft.
What can be done about it? I said that I would eschew all but the bare minimum of statistics, but I should like to make one evidence-based statement. There is no correlation between a severe sentencing regime and low recidivism—rather the reverse. In Canada and the Scandinavian countries for instance, where the use of community sentences flourishes, the prison population and the reoffending rates are relatively low. I know that it is hard to prove anything when talking of different countries and cultures, but, none the less, I think that that statement merits careful reflection.
Is it too much to hope that an innovative, thoughtful and humane government here might soon conic to the conclusion that the political points to be won by being seen to be tough are dross compared to the long-term benefit for our country of a real, wholehearted attempts

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to rethink our system of sentencing and imprisonment? It should go without saying that I believe in the protection of society from individuals who pose a constant, or even intermittent, physical threat to their fellow human beings. However, all too often, those prisoners are sufferers from mental illness who, if they had been properly assessed, would be securely held while being given proper medical treatment unavailable in prison. To that extent, I welcome the recent adoption of responsibility for prison health by the National Health Service and wish for more power and the necessary money to the NHS elbow.
Beyond that, I believe that there is room for a considerable shift in thinking in government and in the country at large towards the efficient and enthusiastic use of community sentencing. Prison sentences should be the last, not the first resort of the sentencer. The sufferers from the present state of affairs are, in no particular order, the taxpayer, the victims of crime, the prison and probation services, always stretched to the limit and strapped for cash, and the prisoners themselves, especially those on remand or who are mentally ill, women, children and young offenders and, of course, all their families.
However, such a shift requires an equally significant increase in government, judicial and public confidence in the efficacy of community sentences. Given the cynicism about them which abounds and which, I must say, has in the past on occasion been justified, that will not be easy to achieve, but I believe that it can be achieved with the right blend of commitment and leadership.
Much lip-service is paid in this country to such things as inclusivity and family values. I can think of nothing more excluding or destructive of family values than the current way that we administer punishment for crime. This country, with its tradition of justice and decency to all our fellow human beings, deserves better and I think that it would judge fairly and well a government who were brave enough to try to deliver what the country deserves.
4.39 p.m.
Lord Rea: My Lords, it is with some trepidation that I speak in this debate, because I know very little about the workings and enforcement of the law. However, the speeches made by noble Lords so far have greatly helped to speed up my learning curve. My name is on the speakers' list because I succumbed to the charms of the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater; I am sure that I am not the only one.
On reflection, the Motion allows me to look at some health aspects of crime and punishment, where I feel more at home. I wish to concentrate on the mental health of prisoners and the effect of drug use or abuse on the criminal justice system. Mental illness and drug abuse often came my way when I was in practice. For my sins, I am treasurer of the All-Party Group on Drugs Misuse, which is not an arduous task, as we have no money.
Many noble Lords will have seen the series of dramatic articles by Nick Davies in the Guardian this week on mental illness in prison. He quoted a figure
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from a recent report by the Office for National Statistics: 14 per cent of the prison population suffer from a psychotic illness. That is to say, if you take 75,000 as the prison population, 10,000 have such an illness. I found that figure surprisingly high. I would like to know what diagnostic criteria were used.
Whatever the figures, the numbers are much too high. Such people should not be in prison; they should be in a secure psychiatric hospital. The bonus of that would be that prisons would be less crowded and the work of prison officers would be much easier if they did not have to look after people with a psychotic illness. That is not to say that most mentally disordered people are sent to prison, but many prisoners have a mental disorder, quite apart from the fact that many have a low IQ and literacy level. Nor does it mean that they have not committed offences; of course they have—sometimes very severe offences, including violence and murder. They are particularly dangerous because of their unpredictable behaviour. However, the treatment that they receive in prison is often inadequate due to the inappropriate physical setting, the coercive atmosphere, the lack of training of prison staff and a scarcity of health staff, especially those with a psychiatric qualification.
Severely mentally ill offenders land up in prison for two main reasons. First, they cannot now be properly contained by community mental health services. When there was a network of long-stay mental institutions or asylums, the needs of severely disturbed patients were better catered for. The old mental hospitals really did provide asylum for many such patients.
Secondly, there is a dearth of high-level secure units, such as Rampton, in which to treat such people, with resultant difficulties and delays in transferring them from regular prisons. The Government are responding sensibly to the dearth of secure units, but not as fast as many would like. Initially, they used private sector psychiatric units—they still do—not always giving the very best care, but more recently they have been expanding medium-level secure units, often attached to NHS psychiatric units, to which high-level secure units can decant their less disturbed patients or those who responded to treatment.
As the noble Lord, Lord Fellowes, pointed out, prisons now buy in psychiatric staff from NHS hospitals on what is called the in-reach process. Expanding the number of trained staff is the chief difficulty in speeding up the process. It takes a long time to train a psychiatrist or a psychiatric nurse. In those pressurised circumstances, holding existing staff may not be easy. My noble friend's comments on this difficult situation will be very welcome.
Having so many mentally ill people in prison reminds me of the state of affairs in Erewhon, Samuel Butler's imaginary topsy-turvy country, in which sick people were punished and criminals treated in hospital. "Erewhon" is "nowhere" spelt backwards—perhaps the direction in which our prison system is heading, with its relentlessly increasing population.
Mental ill health has its roots in early life experiences. There is little doubt, and it has now been shown by several studies, that high-quality early education pays

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high dividends for future employability, social well-being and responsibility, and reduces the likelihood of mental ill health and criminal behaviour. The creation and expansion of the Sure Start programme throughout the country is one of the wisest steps that the Government have taken. But even more could be done to help parents with children showing early signs of behavioural disorder, picked up perhaps by teachers at school. However, that is a topic for another day.
My second main theme is the part played by prohibited drugs in swelling the prison population. At any one time about 16 per cent of the prison population are there because of drug-related offences—possession, supplying, trafficking or manufacturing drugs. That percentage is much higher than it was 10 years ago when the prison population was much lower. In fact, the number in prison for drug offences is 10 times as high as it was 10 or 12 years ago.
More significant is the proportion of those in prison as a result of property theft to raise money to finance an expensive drug habit. A heroin user, for example, has to find £400 every week. There are no hard figures for the proportion of the prison population in that category, but it is very substantial. In 1999, when Jack Straw was Home Secretary, he estimated that a third of the whole prison population were there because of acquisitive crime to finance a drug habit. Anecdotal evidence now suggests that over 50 per cent of prisoners may be in for that reason. When we had a robbery recently, I asked the police officer dealing with the case what proportion of the thefts with which he dealt did he think were carried out to finance a drug habit. He said that about 90 per cent of thefts were for that reason. That was just his local experience in that area, and it may have been an exaggeration, but it accounts for a huge proportion.
So what is to be done? The introduction of drug treatment and testing orders (DTTOs) was widely welcomed on the basis that "treatment works", but their operation has not been without problems. The National Audit Office and the Home Office have both evaluated the early experience with the DTTOs. Of the 174 DTTO offenders studied by the Home Office, only 30 per cent successfully completed the course. Their reconviction rate was 53 per cent compared with 91 per cent of those who failed to complete their order. Overall, 80 per cent of the 174 offenders were reconvicted within two years. It has not been a signal success. Perhaps my noble friend will comment.
"Treatment works" is a slogan often used, but it is true only if the nature of drug dependency, particularly its relapsing nature, is understood. Many attempts may have to be made, just like giving up smoking. Insisting on abstinence rather than providing maintenance drugs in therapy has very disappointing results. Coercion is not likely to lead to the best possible success rates—a DTTO is a coercive mode of action. There is some evidence that those on DTTOs do not receive the best treatment, such as counselling and social support, that needs to be part of any successful package.
To make a serious impact on the increasing role that prohibited drugs play in swelling our prison population, a more radical drugs policy is required. The problem is not going away; in fact it is growing, despite the £1 billion-plus spent on enforcement of our drug laws.
I echo the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, in hoping that custodial sentences for cannabis offences will become a thing of the past. It is often said that decriminalising all drug use would lead to an increase in consumption. That is not necessarily so. It is possible to regulate the supply of legal substances—tobacco and alcohol come to mind—and legalised drugs could be more heavily controlled than those two substances, which are, incidentally, much more harmful than drugs. There should be no advertising; it should be banned from the outset.
This is not the occasion on which to discuss the details of a licensed regulated drugs policy, but the advances of such a regime, were it to be successfully instituted, must be considered. There would be a dramatic decrease in crime at all levels; there would be relief for the criminal justice system and a steady reduction in the prison population; and billions of pounds of expenditure on the ineffective enforcement of drug prohibition could be saved. There would be an opportunity to tax the drug market, and there would be improved public health and a reduction of the harm caused by drug use, particularly the use of the impure drugs supplied by the criminal fraternity. HIV and hepatitis, spread through the use of shared needles, would become much less common. Lifting the threat of criminalisation would restore human rights and dignity to the marginalised and disadvantaged. The restabilisation of drug producer and transit countries is another important gain that might be achieved. The Economist said in an editorial that legally regulated drug markets were a pre-condition of any hope of a return to stability in those regions—countries such as Colombia, Afghanistan, Burma and Jamaica.
The new policy would have to be brought in gradually. In order for it to be effective, international moves would have to be taken. The United Nations drugs policy, which is staunchly prohibitionist, would need to be revised. All that will take time, but I predict that, in 20 years or so, it will be seen as the only logical way forward. The war on drugs, as fought at present, has been comprehensively lost. It is playing havoc with criminal justice systems throughout the world, something that can be seen not least in our bulging prison population.
4.52 p.m.
Lord Roberts of Llandudno: My Lords, I count it a privilege to be able to contribute in a small way to the debate. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Linklater of Butterstone on initiating the debate. One is always amazed at the width of experience and expertise to be seen in the Chamber. Mine will be just a tiny contribution to the debate.
As part of my study for the debate, I went into the crime statistics for England and Wales. I realised that the police authority that had fewer crimes than any

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other in England and Wales was Dyfed-Powys. I wondered why. Was it because we have two Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament there? Possibly. Or was it because we have there smaller, closely knit rural communities? Is it not part of the answer to the problem that we should have communities in which people know one another and people belong to one another? Sometimes, the people know too much about one another, but there is a sense of belonging in such communities. Many people in such communities are related by marriage, and others are in-comers who are welcomed into the communities because we want to keep the rural communities alive. The great challenge is—somehow or other—to re-establish community life. Perhaps, the communities in our cities will be different from those that we have known, but people can form communities. There will be streets and parts of neighbourhoods in which people learn to respect one another and welcome one another.
I was in Canada for a few months before becoming a Member of the House. I realised that new people coming to Canada were not just tolerated but welcomed. That is the big difference. Wherever they came from, they received a welcome, and people were glad to see them. We must offer such a welcome in our communities.
Part of the welcome can be the local constable. We speak a lot of "the bobby on the beat". It is a fair phrase, but would it not be better to have a constable in the community, someone who knows the community and will be there for a long time? Such a person could share in the proceedings of the local council or other organisations and get to know the people. The secret is in personal knowledge of the community and of the people among whom you find yourself.
There is a story—I am sure that it is not true—about a village in Wales in which electricity had just arrived. The electric milking machine was introduced. On one farm, two cows were talking to each other, after their first experience of the electric milking machine. One asked the other, "Well, what do you think of it?". "Oh", said the other, "I miss the personal touch". Many people miss the personal touch in policing today.
I am indebted to my noble friend Lord Hooson for bringing to my attention an incident that happened some years ago. A chief constable was outlining his plans to revolutionise policing in his area. He said, "We will reduce the number of police officers. We will cover more ground by putting them all into panda cars". A wiser colleague asked, "What about the gossip?". In a panda car, the policeman is not in touch with the people: what about the gossip? The policeman's relationship is not just with a geographical area but with the people of a neighbourhood. What about knowledge of the people and the relationship with them?
We cannot make people good by Act of Parliament. I remember how an old schoolmaster always insisted on that in his history lessons. However, Acts of Parliament can provide guidelines and safeguards. My noble friend Lord Avebury brought up the question of alcohol. I am an old-fashioned Methodist minister, and I would like to ask the Government to think again
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and again. Are they really convinced that 24–hour pub opening will lead to a reduction in drinking and drunkenness?
Then, there is the recent proposal to encourage Las Vegas-style mega-casinos to come to this country. Are such casinos really there for the benefit of the community and for the regeneration of the community, or are they there just to make massive profits—mega-profits—for those who come to this country to set them up? Many people, especially the vulnerable, will rue the day that the legislation was enacted.
The community in which we live is not only a local community; it is a global community. The drug barons of south America ruin the lives of people in Conwy, Ebbw Vale, Cardiff and even in England. It is a world community, and they make their money by selling drugs in our communities. We cannot think that Hadrian's Wall or Offa's Dyke offer protection any longer. The Atlantic itself is known by many people as "the pond" and is easily crossed. The influences go easily from place to the other. Only last week, we were talking about trafficking in people. It is estimated that 700,000 people are trafficked every year. They land in our country. We are part of the global, international situation.
Some people say that we should distance ourselves from Europe or from other international obligations or organisations. That is the language of bygone days—it is rebuilding Hadrian's Wall and redigging Offa's Dyke. That cannot be done. In our villages and cities and in the world community, we must work in partnership locally and internationally or we face total defeat in the struggle for a more civilised, more law-abiding future.
4.59 p.m.
Lord Hylton: My Lords, I join in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, on securing and introducing this full-length debate. She and others have worked very hard to bring the project on Rethinking Crime and Punishment to fruition at an opportune moment. They and their associated organisations deserve our thanks.
I would like to concentrate on just one aspect of this vast subject; namely, restorative justice. I notice that it has only just been touched on. I do so, because I have had personal experience of it at several levels. In Northern Ireland, NIACRO, the organisation working with offenders and their families and for crime prevention, and of which I have the honour to be the president, facilitated the development of local community restorative justice. In Belfast, where that functions, young people are much less likely to suffer beating or shooting at the hands of self-appointed paramilitaries. There is a good chance that anti-social offenders will be reconciled with those whom they have annoyed, or that they will be helped to make some tangible restitution to the community in which they live. Young people are being removed from paths which can lead to the courts and to a lifetime of crime.
At a much more serious level of offending, I have witnessed Crown Court offenders in north London being brought together with their victims in a safe,

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structured and facilitated way. The outcomes for both sides seemed to me, as an observer in the same room, to be highly satisfactory, and to justify the time and effort involved in enabling face-to-face encounters to take place. In this case, the offenders had usually served a prison sentence, but yet had been willing to meet with victims.
At local level in England, it is well known that some police services, notably in the Thames Valley ever since 1997, have been using restorative cautioning. This applies to young people, who admit their offences and are then not charged, provided that they apologise to those affected, or that they undertake other kinds of restitution or reparation.
The criminal statistics for 2003 show that some 242,000 people are cautioned each year, including 91,000 juveniles. Thus a large number of 18 to 21 year-olds receive cautions, and, as your Lordships probably know, that is the peak age for male offending. In addition, cautions are applied to many people over 21. Therefore, I would ask the Government the extent to which in England and Wales cautions, final warnings and reprimands are accompanied by restorative conditions such as apology and restitution. Would it not be very helpful if the methods successfully applied to the under-18s were gradually extended up the age range? Modifications of method will probably be needed for older people, but I suggest that there is great potential for crime prevention and for reducing the amount of custodial sentences.
What I have said so far may not have convinced your Lordships of the value and importance of restorative justice. Therefore, let us look at the concept in more detail. It is based on the notion that crime destroys harmony in society. This is obvious in the case of murder, which permanently robs families of beloved parents, spouses, children or relations. It is less obvious but none the less real, I suggest, in crimes such as defrauding the social security system or the Inland Revenue.
Restorative justice then goes on to argue that punishment is important, but it is even more important still to repair the damage done, first, to individuals, secondly, to the local community and, ultimately, to society at large. Offences have a ripple effect, widening from the individual to the whole collective, if only through the fears and anxieties that they create.
Restorative justice uses dialogue and negotiation in order to repair the harm done and to make the offender accountable and responsible for his actions. Therefore, it is based on the needs of all concerned: offender, the victims and the wider society, local and national. It usually adopts a problem-solving approach; for example, in youth or family group conferencing. It mediates between victim and offender. I understand that this process has been successful in the United States, even among prisoners awaiting execution and among the bereaved relatives of murdered people. One aim is to engender in the offender feelings of empathy for his or her victims. This may lead to some sense of shame and to some development of conscience. When such progress
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happens it is a powerful means to reduce reoffending. The benefits for victims can be equally important, giving a sense of closure and the ability to move on in life.
Critics of restorative justice will say that some victims will never agree to meet with offenders. This is partly true, but it is not the whole story. The offender, as I have tried to indicate, has also done harm to society generally. If he is willing to repair the damage and to make collective restitution, he shows a change of attitude and an acceptance of responsibility, which, in turn, should cut down reoffending, whereas punishment alone often does not. We have to remember also that many crimes have no identifiable personal victims. Even in such cases, change of attitude is still possible and efforts should be made to rectify the wrong done. Surely this is much better than punishment only, which may leave the offender sullen and disgruntled, or only anxious to offend more cleverly the next time.
Others may object that restorative justice is very labour intensive, taking up the time of police, courts and other professionals. This again has some truth in it. but I argue that the restorative approach is a good investment of resources, which will yield a high return by reducing reoffending and by lessening the need for long custodial sentences. We all know that recidivism and prisons are vastly expensive, and may compound each other.
Restorative justice has by now been tried and developed in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Norway, Austria, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and to a lesser extent in England and Wales. It is an idea whose time has come. I, therefore, welcome the Government's strategy on this subject, published in July 2003, together with the relevant parts of the Auld report for England and Wales, and the report of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clyde, for Northern Ireland. There is also the EU framework decision on restorative justice.
I must, however, ask what has been the impact of and response to the Government's strategy document? Will resources be made available to develop and to extend restorative justice, both within and outside prisons? Is it gaining acceptance in all the component parts of the criminal justice system? I believe it should become the golden thread running through the whole system. I am glad that youth courts already have power to make action plans for offenders, to impose reparation, referral and compensation orders, together with deferred sentences. Will the Government extend these provisions into higher age ranges of offenders? To do so, would indicate their positive support for this dynamic concept, which, I suggest, can do so much to heal the wounds caused by crime and anti-social behaviour.
5.9 p.m.
Lord Dearing: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for introducing this debate and also for challenging this individual to think about it and to see whether he has anything to say. We shall find out.
When I read reports of violent crime, when I see around me vandalism in our towns—for example, in the railway carriage that brought me here—when I reflect on my years as chairman of the Post Office Corporation where we had a robbery every single day

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at one post office or another, I confess that my immediate reaction is one of anger and a wish to see retribution and protection from those people.
But anyone who sat through or read the debate in this House not many days ago on women in prison begins to substitute those instincts with compassion for the circumstances in which those women find themselves, concern that we have not found ways to help them before they find themselves in prison, and sorrow that we do not have a better answer than prison for them.
Similarly, I reflect on the damage suffered by children who fail, or who we fail in education to lift to a reasonable standard. As a result, they cannot relate effectively to lessons in class. The natural reaction is for them to distance themselves from what is going on, in which they cannot participate. They may show frustration or dysfunctional behaviour, be absent or truant as an escape, be excluded, or turn to petty or more serious crime. I cannot help thinking that I and we have some responsibility for the circumstances in which that child, that young nascent adult, finds him or herself. To a degree, we have to accept responsibility for the situation and for the result of it.
Of course, I have taken some interest in the Government's five-year strategy for education. It gave me great pleasure to read about the emphasis on addressing the circumstances and the education of those who are born into disadvantage. Later, I shall outline half a dozen proposals which derive from the White Paper.
But I share in the general unease about prison as the answer to criminality. The figure of £37,000 a year has been mentioned as the cost of keeping someone in prison. For a young person between the age of 14 and 17, I hear that the figure is much higher—somewhere between £50,000 to £185,000 a year. What good is that when one of the main objectives of dealing with crime is to get people out of crime? But we read that 50 per cent of offenders are found guilty of another crime within two years; for young people that figure is 80 per cent. That is not a good deal. Therefore, I am very much attracted to what other noble Lords have said about alternatives.
My suggestions relate to what has also concerned many noble Lords; that is, dealing with the circumstances which often lead to criminality. My suggestions to the Minister are the following. First, the Government's intention to extend the school day from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. gives a wonderful opportunity for a parent with a child at school to go into the school in the early evening to engage in discussion groups about parenting, to learn from each other and to accept guidance from a discussion leader.
That would be a great accidental opportunity to deal with the major problem of parenting in an unstructured home life, which can so disadvantage those children. Incidentally, by getting an adult into school there is a chance that we shall get those who have failed at school back into learning themselves. There is ample evidence that if the parent is able to
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teach the child or is interested in re-engagement in learning, it helps the education of the child. That is my first suggestion.
My second suggestion is something that I have been on about for some years. We should increasingly see our schools as the natural centres of the community. There is a great opportunity, especially in primary schools, because the mothers nowadays take the children to school. They meet at the school gate: it is not difficult to get them past the gate into the school. My first centre of the community would engage people in lifelong learning, which, particularly in disadvantaged communities, has to be very near and not frightening, but inviting.
Secondly, they can—I suggest, should—be centres for the provision of social and medical services, so that there is a holistic approach to the needs of the child through creation of and identifying schools as centres of the community. Perhaps I may say that the Government's intention to engage in a major school rebuilding and replacement programme gives an opportunity to build that facility into those plans.
Thirdly, I want to pick up on a suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, who, unfortunately, could not be with us, although I may have to modify it in the light of what the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno, said. There needs to be someone—the noble Baroness and I call him or her a counsellor—who is available to a big school or a number of small schools in order to engage with children who show all the identifiable signs of getting into trouble.
I read that four out of five prisoners have been subject to temporary or permanent exclusion from school. That is a clear sign. I read in one limited study that 61 per cent of sons with convictions are the sons of criminals. All the signs are there. If a counsellor is available early, there can be action. If the school is the centre of the community, the services that I have indicated can be pulled together in order to respond.
Again I am learning from the noble Lord, Lord Roberts—I wish that I had an equally good story to that of the two cows—which leads me to my fourth point. We tend to think that the best secondary school is a big school so that it can offer a whole range of vocational and academic learning opportunities. That is a great advantage. But, going back to my post office days, I learnt about the advantage of the personal touch.
The post offices of the world saw immense technological advances in employing machinery in the sorting of letters. Throughout the world, small post offices—with a relatively small number of people who knew each other—became great sorting factories. Whether in Australia, Canada or Great Britain, we had all the industrial problems that flowed from that.
Similarly, in our schools, the personal touch produces milk rather than bile, which is what we can get in areas where there is real social deprivation. I know such schools where criminality is rife in the surrounding area. There may be a countervailing advantage in terms of personal identification; that is, the head knows every pupil, all of whom relate to the

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head of the school. I believe that in the United States there has been a movement in that area. I suggest that it is worth thinking about.
My next suggestion relates to the important and difficult transition at the age of 11 from primary to secondary school, which is where we often lose pupils. Some are way behind in their reading, writing and arithmetic at that stage, but at least they had a chance with their good shepherd, the class teacher. However, they go to the large school, without the good shepherd. It is full of strangers; they are lost, and we lose them for good.
We must think very much harder about the effectiveness of that transition for a lot of our youngsters. Perhaps I may rattle off two suggestions. First, what about an extra year in primary school, if the parents and the child see an advantage in that? It happens in other countries. Secondly, large sixth-form entry schools could have for children who are way behind a small class of, say, a dozen kids, so that they can be given a lot of personal attention. I think they desperately need it.
My time has nearly run out and the Minister has had a note of my little ideas. I believe in giving him no excuse. In our schools, we must take very seriously the problems faced by children. The Government's White Paper, Every child Matters, bears directly on this. We must say, "Yes, it is great to give time to higher education and our most able pupils, but we must be no less concerned about those who are struggling". Their lives and our society will be enriched if we put more resources into their education at the early stages. They will then not go on to a life of trouble, with a high risk of unemployment, ill health and so forth.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for stirring me up on this subject. For me, this is an issue that we need to approach with passion—and with sorrow that we have not done more in the past to help young people overcome the disadvantages with which circumstance has burdened them.
5.22 p.m.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine: My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Linklater for giving us the opportunity to reflect on some of the very important issues arising in this debate. Debates like this are occasions when specialist expertise comes to the fore, and thus a non-expert has to speak with some humility when following such a distinguished list of speakers. We have heard many depressing statistics on crime and punishment, and we have heard eloquently about the many potential methods for ameliorating or resolving the more intractable problems.
I shall concentrate on just one aspect of these problems; that of the plight of foreign nationals in our prisons today. On the whole, foreign nationals are a small group of people in prison, making up 12 per cent of the prison population. But the percentage is rising, with an increase of 152 per cent over the past decade, compared with a 55 per cent increase in the British prison population. The indications are that this is a growing problem.
Such prisoners come from a range of countries, 168 in total. Around half are from the Commonwealth, Ireland and Turkey. Some 60 per cent are incarcerated for drug offences, mainly trafficking, while around the same percentage are serving sentences of more than four years. within this group, the picture for women is of significant concern. Twenty per cent of women in prison are foreign nationals, 80 per cent of whom are there because they have been involved in drug offences. Significant numbers of foreign national children are also held in custody. A Home Office response to a Commons parliamentary Question showed that on 30 April last year, 126 foreign nationals under the age of 18 were being held in custody.
The problems encountered by these groups are predictable yet prevalent. There is the problem of language and the inability to communicate. While prisons with a large number of foreign nationals have official documents in a variety of translations, they are poorly publicised. A number of these prisoners also suffer from low levels of literacy. Thus access, even where available, would not solve the issue of understanding rights or accessing facilities.
According to the Prison Reform Trust, the main problems to do with communication revolve around basic, everyday needs. This can be frustrating for both the prisoner and prison staff. A recent survey showed that staff felt that the language barrier was the main obstacle to working with foreign national prisoners. The inability to communicate can also mean that incarceration over years without regular visitors, as is the case for foreign national prisoners when their families are far from the UK, means that the sole interaction is with other prisoners of their own nationality. That leads to power relationships and leveraging.
The isolation created by the language barrier is compounded by a lack of family contact. In the case of women, where nearly three-quarters of the group are mothers, few facilities are available to maintain links with children. The noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, eloquently described the effect that parent-child contact has on both reoffending rates for prisoners as well as on the well-being of children. While we welcome the efforts of the Prison Service to negotiate contracts for reduced-price telephone calls for these prisoners, it is not provided automatically and, to date, there has been little take-up of the facility.
Isolation can also compound mental health problems. We know little of the effects of this on foreign nationals as the statistics are neither accurate nor across the board. We do know that of a total of 94 suicides last year, eight were from within the group of foreign nationals. That is almost 9 per cent.
Cultural and religious issues also have a bearing on the alienation experienced by these prisoners. The Chief Inspector of Prisons noted in her report of a prison where foreign nationals make up one-quarter of the inmate population that this group felt that there was a,
"lack of empathy for them and, occasionally, significant aggressive behaviour towards them".
So what is to be done? We know that the Prison Service is committed to ensuring that all prisoners are treated with respect and decency, but the evidence does not always bear that out. We need a clearer understanding of the scale of the problem of foreign nationals in our prisons. At the moment the statistical information is patchy, there is a lack of standardisation of needs or of minimum provision, little staff training, and accountability is variable.
This may be the time for us to formulate a Prison Service policy to deal specifically with a needs-based strategy for foreign national prisoners rather than relying on a range of race relation policies, which to date has been the norm. Such a strategy should establish minimum standards and consistent working practices against a backdrop of the improved training of staff working with these groups.
On the subject of education and training, and given what we know of the language gap for these prisoners, one area where community involvement could be significantly enhanced is that of assistance in English language training. At a minimum, we could provide for the acquisition of life skills on release, which would lead to greater economic emancipation.
We welcome the Home Office Early Removal Scheme which allows foreign nationals serving fixed-term sentences to be eligible for deportation up to four and a half months early, but by itself that is not enough. We need more imaginative solutions, such as detention in the home country, community sentences in the home country, and enhanced family contact. That really should be a priority.
This is a particular group of people who, if one were to go by public attitudes as described in parts of our media, should be deservedly forgotten. After all, one might see in parts of our press questions as to why we should spend public resources on those who come into the country wilfully to do harm. The answer of course is that it is a measure of our attitude to crime and punishment. It must be our acceptance of responsibility, our respect for human rights and, above all, our compassion which guides good practice towards these people.
Even if their experience of our country is to be one of imprisonment, let it be one that is laudable.
5.30 p.m.
Lord Northbourne: My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Baroness on introducing this very important subject.
Perhaps I may enter into a short personal debate and cross swords with the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, on the subject of giant schools being open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. I believe that these would cut out parents and families. The 10.5 million children in this country cannot be brought up entirely by the state and we must continue to work to empower, encourage and enable
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parents and families. I hope the noble Lord will consider building that thought into his plans for the future.
Lord Dearing: My Lords, as I saw it, it was an option rather than a requirement.
Lord Northbourne: My Lords, I start my contribution to the debate by asking the Government what they think prison is for. Perhaps I can focus the question a little more and ask them to what extent they think it is for retribution, deterrence and protection of the public, and to what extent they think it is for the rehabilitation of offenders with a view to reducing reoffending. I believe that the latter objective is by far the most important. It has been the objective to which most speakers today have addressed their remarks.
I shall restrict my short contribution to two aspects of the matter. The first aspect concerns the whole process of release—both preparation for release and on-going through care after release—and, as some of your Lordships will not be entirely surprised to hear, the second aspect relates to the importance of parenting in this context.
As to the question of release, research funded by the Prison Release Trust and carried out by Joanne Sherlock draws attention to the problem of prisoners who are parents—and, of course, a large number of young offenders in prison are parents—and suggests that until at least 2002 the arrangements for dealing with, helping and supporting prisoners to prepare for release and reintegration with their families could have been kindly described as a "shambles". Since then, the Government published a report in July this year on the issue of support for prisoners as they go out into the world. It is to be hoped that the report will be taken very seriously.
I should particularly like to discuss the idea originated by David Ramsbotham that every prisoner should have a portable personal plan rather like the one that children are now supposed to have in school. This would be compiled on the basis of a prisoner's health history and personal history and, much more importantly, on the basis of his discussions with appropriately trained counsellors. Such counsellors would need to identify a prisoner's problems, ambitions, abilities and prospects because unless they and the prisoner know where they are trying to go and whether the plan is realistic, it will not be possible to train prisoners in any meaningful way for what is going to happen in their lives when they come out of prison.
If the plan is totally unreasonable—for instance, a prisoner may wish to become a fighter pilot or something like that; and I have had a child tell me that, and a most improbable one it was—then there must be a role for such counsellors as are available to try to persuade the prisoner and guide him towards a plan that is likely to succeed. If the plan pursued is unachievable, a prisoner will fail to achieve it and revert to crime.
Research shows that the next stage, which is mentoring as the prisoner reintegrates into society—or, as it is sometimes now called, through care—is hugely important. About three or four years ago I studied a

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project on Exmoor where prisoners volunteered to be exposed to outdoor activity of a strenuous kind for an intensive period of about six weeks. There was a great deal of argument about whether or not it was doing any good and so the Probation Service put in hand a survey, which took into account not only that project but three or four others as well. It was found quite clearly that the prisoners who went through the activity programme and received through care, mentoring, when they went back into the community were successful, and those who did not go through it were not successful.
If we want a Prison Service which will prevent prisoners from reoffending we will have to make the relatively small investment of ensuring that their exit from prison is planned, realistic and mentored, and that they receive for a certain period of time the support they need.
I move on now, briefly, to the role of parenting. Some of your Lordships will know that this is not the first time I have thought about this particular subject. I am extremely braced to hear that the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation research shows that, as reported in the paper, 57 per cent of parents think that better parenting would reduce the number of people in prison in this country today. I am absolutely convinced that they are right.
Further research by a man named Deforges has recently been published. It has revealed an absolutely clear picture that the quality of parenting in the home has a major influence on a child's success in school, and that at the primary level the quality of parenting in the home is more important for the child's outcomes even than the quality of the school itself. So the quality of parenting, enabling children to acquire the literacy to which the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, referred, is a major issue. It is the key to employability and keeping them out of crime.
The issue of parenting hits this subject in two ways. First, we should be thinking about helping prisoners' families—that is, the prisoner who has a child and the partner or the mother of the child—to understand the parenting and relationship problems which arise for both the man in prison and the family outside the prison. Both their lives have changed and they have got to acquire not only ordinary parenting skills but the skills to cope with reintegration. I am told that very often reintegration is the moment at which the relationship breaks down.
It does not need to be so. We can teach and learn relationships today; we can learn how to communicate today much better than we knew how to in the past; and we can teach parenting. We can help those who want to learn to acquire the skills and the knowledge that they need to become good parents.
The other aspect of parenting is the longer-term issue of getting fewer people in prison and overall, fewer criminals, the issue to which the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, referred. There is no doubt that better parenting will lead to more children who have more success in school, more ability to integrate, more ability to control anger and more of all the things that make them more likely to be good citizens and more
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likely to be employable when they grow up. Of course, that is a long-term investment and I know that governments do not like long-term investments, but if we do not do something. we will be in trouble and the price keeps going up.
I urge the Government to look seriously at providing universal parenting education and support, and universal and effective teaching of relationships in school by teachers who are well trained to do the job.
5.41 p.m.
The Earl of Listowel: My Lords, I rise to speak for the four minutes permitted in the break. I am deeply disappointed that I appear to have omitted to put my name on the list; I thought that I had done so last week. Clearly, I am taking too much on at the moment.
I feel very angry with myself because I feel passionately about the issues which the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, is addressing, and about the value of her work and of Rethinking Crime Punishment. I welcome the process that that report has set in motion. I also praise the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation trustees for making the decision to invest £3 million over four years to stimulate debate among the public, particularly in the groups that are most affected by crime and punishment, to make them think about effective approaches to dealing with crime.
Yesterday I listened with great interest to the leader of that project when he spoke to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Penal Affairs. In particular, I noted what he said about parenting—to which my noble friend Lord Northbourne has referred. Parenting support for the transition from primary school to secondary school seems to be somewhat overlooked. The leader of the project said that that issue needs more consideration because children are getting lost at that point. He also made the point that if we do not wish children to be kept in custody or the mentally ill in prison, and if we wish drug-users to be treated outside prison, we will need somewhere to do that work. Sometimes that will require not a prison place but some form of residential setting. I may be able to return briefly to that point at the end of my speech.
A documentary was recently broadcast on the Channel 4 "Dispatches" programme entitled, "Profiting from kids in care". It was an example—a case history or microcosm—of what may be happening on a larger scale. The undercover journalist observed one of the workers saying, "That girl deserves a good smack in the gob". If I remember correctly, she also called her an "ugly bitch". But that girl had called the worker a bitch and had been very difficult to manage.
The next scene took us to a room upstairs where the girl was being very violently, but verbally, attacked by a boy in the children's home. There was no intervention for a couple of minutes, but then one of the workers went towards the two children and the attack ended. The worker said that the next time it happened, she would not intervene, and that if the girl were attacked again, she would not protect her. The childcare expert commenting on the programme said that the worker should have intervened.
It is easy to judge people working in those difficult circumstances, but when one thinks how poorly trained and supported they are, one understands to some extent why they respond in such a way. As I have said before, it is, as the Government recognise, essential to train and support these frontline staff in their daily work with these troubled individuals.
This report is to some extent achieving a similar function, by helping to inform debate and helping us to think more carefully about how to respond to those who sometimes behave very provocatively. In the case of the girl in the children's home, I understand that an alternative approach might have been to have her take part in a group with other children in the home, to ask her about the meaning of her behaviour and to seek to understand the background. We know that 60 per cent of children who go into care have been abused. Ten per cent go into care because their families have broken down; 68 per cent are suffering from mental disorders; and 63 per cent are suffering from conduct disorders.
My time is up. We need to respond in a thoughtful and considered way. This report has aided the whole of society to take a more considered approach to this provocative behaviour.
5.46 p.m.
Lord Dholakia: My Lords, a few weeks ago we had a debate about women and prisons. The Minister was so impressed by the contribution of your Lordships' House that he said that he would like to lock all the Home Office Ministers in a room and make them read that debate. If he has not already done so, will he add this debate to that exercise and, using the prison jargon, throw the key away until the Ministers come out screaming, with some fresh thinking on this important subject?
I add my thanks to my noble friend Lady Linklater for introducing this important debate. She is a trustee of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and has done much to raise the level of debate about prison and alternatives across the United Kingdom. This is timely because much of the discussion of such matters has been hijacked by those who see only tough custodial sentencing as a means of reducing crime and criminality.
Today's debate has demonstrated that there are no easy solutions to the complex social problems that contribute to our criminal justice system. But one thread is common among the contributions that we have heard from so many distinguished noble Lords. It confirms that social exclusion, reflected by factors such as unemployment, discrimination, poor skills, poor education, poor housing, family breakdown and poor mental and physical health, contributes to criminality.
I am aware that previous debates have reflected the wider background of the role of the criminal justice system. This is not surprising because the slogan, "Tough on crime", reflected among the tabloids and politicians, has singularly failed to address the issue of
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wider community involvement in determining policies relevant to crime prevention. We need to raise the profile of alternatives to prison and how they can assist the rehabilitation of offenders. Public confidence is, and will be, shaped by the leadership that the Government provide on this issue. We need to talk up, not down, how such alternatives can help. Today's debate has helped us all in that exercise. The report, Rethinking Crime & Punishment, has confirmed that much of the public and political mood on criminal policies continues to be conditioned more by gut feeling than by the results of effective research. The Home Office should take serious note of this evidence-based report for tackling crime.
No one underestimates the effect of crime on our communities. There is a widespread public perception that society, particularly the younger element, is becoming increasingly lawless. That is not borne out by statistical information. There is a drop in a number of the categories of crime. We must therefore recognise that the relationship between perception and reality is far from simple. We can add to this the factor that not all crimes are reported. All the slogans, such as "Prison works" and "Tough on crime", have failed to stem the problem. Much of the problem that we are faced with arises from an over-reliance on prisons as a way of dealing with offenders, instead of assisting with reforms.
I have no doubt that prison reinforces criminal behaviour and destroys many of the supporting ties which may assist in a person's rehabilitation. How else can we explain that we have the largest prison population in western Europe, and that more than 60 per cent of them reoffend within two years?
Then there is another scenario. Let us consider some of the tabloids: we are repeatedly bombarded with stories about how our society has gone soft on crime and that we need tough measures, including much longer prison sentences. Is it not evident that the Government have swallowed this argument with increasing emphasis on tough new legislation? Again, how else can we explain the recently announced eighth annual programme of legislation? On every previous occasion, we were told that there would be effective measures to tackle crime, yet we keep getting more of the same every year.
I suspect that the ability of the criminal justice system to influence crime is fairly limited. For this reason, we must seriously look at far-reaching changes which should not ignore the economic and social benefits to our society.
It is true that lately there is a renewed emphasis on tackling crime which makes less use of courts and prisons. The Youth Justice Board is a good example. I also look forward to the Government's youth justice Bill, which will contain greater restrictions on the use of custody and measures to increase the credibility of community sentences for young offenders. The community response has been very encouraging. Crime

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prevention has become the focus for a more general effort to reduce the opportunity for offending. We all welcome initiatives such as alcohol and drug awareness programmes, as mentioned by my noble friend Lord Avebury, and improvements in safe and sustainable housing projects.
We must continue with the priority being given to crime prevention and the schemes for diverting as many young offenders as possible from the criminal justice system. There is nothing soft about this. More importantly, after all these years, it is also a realistic appraisal of the very limited contribution which the courts and prisons can make in reducing crime.
We must build a strategy on what works. The main aim must be to reduce our prison population to a level where it is possible for rehabilitation programmes to work effectively.
I am puzzled that alternatives to custody are seen as a soft option. That is what the Government said about my party in recent by-elections. I have no doubt that they will regret this approach. The alternative to a custodial sentence is not a soft option. It is a tough but effective way in which we can address issues confronting local communities. Let us take ASBOs as an example. We are all sympathetic to people whose lives are blighted by antisocial behaviour, but the question we ask is simply this: would the widespread use of ASBOs address the problem satisfactorily? Such orders can be an entirely negative response to local concerns because they do nothing to change the behaviour that causes distress and offence. They will have the desired effect only if they are used in conjunction with more constructive measures for dealing with nuisance behaviour.
How do we tackle the behaviour of a young person if the parents are unable or unwilling to take responsibility? ASBOs can act as a sanction, but we must also address issues behind such behaviour. If it is drugs, then drug treatment services need to be involved.
For every £1 invested in tackling drug-taking in the first instance, we save up to £5 in the criminal justice system later on. That makes sense, because legislation at its best is only a limited instrument with which to seek greater social justice. It must be accompanied by other measures that help address the offending behaviour. But I fear that ASBOs, if not properly monitored, could adversely affect some groups in our community more than others.
When we look around us, what do we see? We see the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, those who have never worked, those who are stopped and searched, those who have left penal institutions, the under-achievers, the truants from schools. I suspect that these young people will feature prominently when we take stock of ASBOs.
In a few years' time, we will wonder how we created this anomaly, where society punishes those who need the most help. It is not being soft; it is being tough, sensible and effective in dealing with such behaviour. When we have a record prison population, it is difficult to give much thought about resettling prisoners. There is plenty of evidence to demonstrate the importance of
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resettlement to those who are released from prison. A recent Home Office study demonstrated that offenders who underwent basic skills training offended at a third of the level of those who did not. Help with employment and training, accommodation and maintenance of family ties also make a very significant contribution.
The Government do not have the capacity to deliver on this point. This is where volunteers and voluntary organisations play a crucial role, but they are starved of resources. We must ensure that voluntary organisations receive adequate recognition and funding.
I declare an interest: I am president of NACRO, and year after year I have seen such organisations working with limited funds but delivering far more than what the Government can achieve on their own. Volunteers play a crucial role in strengthening our communities. We cannot and should not keep them out of discussions about their involvement in tackling criminal behaviour.
A couple of years ago, I was invited to a project in the West Midlands. It was designed to mentor those who were cast aside by society as failures. When I left that project, a number of youngsters who had been considered failures received a piece of paper admiring their contribution to the project and what they had achieved. They had never had any success in their lives before, and there were tears in their families' eyes.
When we carried out a survey of NACRO's volunteers, we found that they are not middle-aged, middle-class or middle-minded. More than half are under 26; a fifth are black or Asian; eight per cent consider themselves to have a disability; nearly a tenth are ex-offenders; and nearly a fifth are parents. That is a tremendous recognition of their contribution. Our conclusion is simple: there is no such thing as a stereotypical volunteer. They represent the community in which they live. They do not wish their lives to be blighted by the disadvantages which their communities suffer.
It is time we recognised this; it is time to ensure that they have an ownership of and involvement in project work. More importantly, they must be involved in how crime is being tackled in their area. That must include spending plans as well.
In recent years, the problem of prison overcrowding has been getting worse rather than better. That is because more people are being convicted in the courts, and a higher proportion of them are being sent to prison than hitherto, and partly because prison sentences are, on average, longer. We have a dilemma. Calls for stiff punishments for serious crime are not necessarily in conflict with a wish to see fewer offenders in prison.
During his time as Secretary of State at the Home Office, the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, probably achieved the right balance. But the often exaggerated language tends to create a climate in which it is more difficult for the restrained message to be heard.
The report Rethinking crime & Punishment, published last week, confirms that the public attitude is not as punitive as we assumed. Prisons must be for those whose offending makes any other course unacceptable and if all other avenues have failed. Even

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then, it is important that those who are sentenced to custody should not be in prison longer than is absolutely necessary.
The alternatives to custody have been spelt out in today's debate, for which I again thank my noble friend Lady Linklater.
5.58 p.m.
Baroness Seccombe: My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater of Butterstone, for securing this important debate. It seems to recur with some frequency, both in this House and in a wider context. That is not to say that I do not welcome this opportunity to speak on this topic—far from it. But it seems clear that each time we talk about prisons, crime prevention and rehabilitation, nothing much has changed and there are still huge problems with the current system.
I must admit that when I first looked at this question, I was not sure what the noble Baroness had in mind when she called for wider community involvement in determining crime prevention policies. However, all this became much clearer upon reading the newspapers this morning. It seems that David Blunkett is today making a speech at the Clore conference centre at the British Museum on this very topic.
We all know that community policing restores public confidence and that seeing police on the beat does wonders for those neighbourhoods where people may no longer feel safe. Unfortunately, seeing a local bobby on the beat is rather a rare occurrence in many places these days and, sadly, faith in the police is at an all time low.
Other community initiatives such as victim offender mediation or victim offender meeting seem to work. A scheme such as this allows the offender to acknowledge the harm done to the victim and gives the victims, if they so wish—and that is vital—a chance to express the feelings that the offender has caused both to themselves and to the community. Such meetings are also a good way to educate victims about the justice system and allow them to take an informed decision regarding their involvement in this process.
The Home Secretary has launched a new action plan called "Together We Can" and a "guide to neighbourhoods" programme at a cost of some £4.3 million which, it is claimed,
"will enable community organisations to learn from each other about the best ways to engage with local and central Government and get their view heard".
I look forward to hearing the results of those initiatives and the pilot scheme.
However, I fear that I am drifting from the point of the debate and return to the question as posed by the noble Baroness. As I have said, more police on the beat and restorative justice are to be welcomed, but we feel that that may be where community involvement in such matters is most useful. We on these Benches still feel that the best way to restore public confidence in the criminal justice system is to ensure that if judges and magistrates feel that a prison sentence is the
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appropriate punishment to fit the crime, that is what must be given. Conversely, we also want judges and magistrates to impose a community sentence if, when looking at all the circumstances, that is what they feel is right.
I can draw on my own experience of over 30 years on the Bench. My colleagues and I spent much time considering all the options outside prison before imposing a custodial sentence. We were only too mindful of the havoc that a period in prison can cause for the dependant families left to cope. I can tell your Lordships that whenever as chairman of the Bench I had to explain to a defendant that the sentence was to be one of imprisonment, I could always feel my heart beating faster, and I went home saddened by imposing what we felt was the right and necessary decision.
We have always acknowledged the importance of having custodial sentences available when appropriate, and for the protection of the public. We continue to do so. With regard to the views of the noble Lord, Lord Chan, my personal view is that burglary is a form of assault. We must never forget that some people never get over burglars entering their home. The problem at the moment is that the Prison Service is under such strain because of overcrowding that it is increasingly unable to provide the structure for rehabilitation within a custodial sentence that we would all wish to see. The Government's answer is to extend the early release scheme further and further rather than address the very real challenges faced by those who manage our prison estate.
What do the Government's own statistics tell us about the overcrowding in our prisons? It was reported by the BBC in February this year that our prison population had reached a new high. It then stood at 74,543, which was near to capacity. The Prison Service at that point was facing a situation in which there were only 600 gaol places left and was considering the possibility of keeping extra prisoners in police cells. At this point, the Prison Reform Trust stated,
"the news that prisons were on the brink of safe overcrowded capacity should set alarm bells ringing for the government".
Yet on 19 November, the prison population stood at 75,145, so clearly the problem is getting worse—and it seems that the Government are doing nothing to help the situation.
Let me continue with more statistics. The number of prisoners in England and Wales has increased by more than 25,000 in the past 10 years; the number of women in prisons has more than doubled in the past decade; and the records show that on 19 November this year there were 10,838 under-21 year-olds in prison.
So what does all that overcrowding mean? On a practical level it means that over the past year more than half of all prisons have been overcrowded and that at the end of May 17,000 prisoners were doubling up in cells designed for one. On a financial level, the statistics are also illuminating for the period 2003–04. As many noble Lords have said, the average cost is £37,305 to keep just one person in prison.
To summarise the situation, our prisons are overcrowded, the number of women and young people in prison is going up dramatically and it costs huge sums of money to keep the system going, without actually making any improvements. Prisoners are just shuffled around the system to make room. They cannot settle into a routine, finish a retraining course, complete an education course or seek proper help for addiction to drugs. My noble friend Lady Trumpington vividly described the importance of literacy. I do so agree, as I was always horrified by the number of defendants who were unable to read the oath.
It is little wonder then that the statistics for reoffending are so high. Prison is currently not getting a chance to work. Current research by the Prison Reform Trust shows that around 59 per cent of prisoners are reconvicted within two years of being released. Clearly, this vicious cycle of reoffending must be broken. However, we on these Benches do not feel that the way to do that is simply to go along with the Government's early release scheme. That is not the answer to overcrowding in prisons. It is a temporary measure which ensures that criminals are back out on the street without the care that they should have had in prison and without the time for rehabilitation, as the noble Lord, Lord Fellowes, said.
In conclusion, we feel that community involvement has an important place in the criminal justice system. However, there are other and better ways to increase public confidence in the system as a whole. Alternatives to prison may well be appropriate for offenders who are women with young families or those involved in petty or non-violent crime. However, for other offenders, prison may be the only answer. Half of all crimes in Britain are committed by the same 100,000 persistent criminals. Prison is an effective and appropriate disposal if it is given a chance to work.
Clearly it is essential to increase the proportion of the prison budget that is spent on education and rehabilitation, and to make certain that there are sufficient, suitable and humane places within the prison estate to ensure that the judiciary is able to exercise its sentencing role without feeling inhibited by the lack of custodial places available.
This has been a fascinating debate, and I have much enjoyed all the well-informed and caring contributions from round the House. Now, like other noble Lords, I look forward to hearing the Minister's response.
6.8 p.m.
Lord Rooker: My Lords, I shall make my initial response to a point that the noble Baroness has just made, before I come on to the formalities. I certainly hope that when she was on the Bench she was not sending people to prison for short periods of time. That is waste of time, provides no work or rehabilitation whatever and gums up the system completely—and everyone thinks that they have done a good job because they have sent someone to prison. It is an absolute waste of time, so I certainly hope that she was not guilty of that when she was on the Bench. She may have experience
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that I do not have—but I cannot resist making that point, because it saves me from making it later on in answer to the debate.
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, the Minister must excuse me for interrupting, but is he aware that a magistrate is unable to send a person to prison for more than six months?
Lord Rooker: My Lords, therein lies the problem!
Noble Lords: Oh!
Lord Rooker: My Lords, hang on. One of the issues is that short sentences are an abject and complete waste of time. They do not do any good at all for the system or the people concerned. Let us get that clear.
I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, on securing the debate. I shall try to address the terms of the debate as printed on the Order Paper as our discussion has gone very wide of them. I thank the noble Baroness and recognise on behalf of the Government the work of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. We also appreciate the work of the independent inquiry commissioned by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation chaired by Lord Coulsfield. I have certainly looked at that and read the executive summaries of both reports. The messages are very similar and are certainly ones that we want to take on board.
I freely admit that I shall not be able to do justice to all the issues raised in the debate. As I say, I shall try to stick closely to the relevant issues: community involvement in determining policies relevant to crime prevention, alternatives to prison and the rehabilitation of offenders. The noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, referred to education and her work with Crimestoppers. She was quite right to read out the relevant phone number. My noble friend Lord Williams referred to family contact. I shall try to comment on that. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury mentioned the use of language. That is a very important matter. The noble Baroness, Lady Stern—agree with much of what she said in this regard—referred to tipping the balance towards social inclusion rather than exclusion. I support the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, who referred to working with children before anti-social behaviour orders were imposed.
The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, made an incredibly powerful speech. That speech, along will all the others, is worth reading. He spoke in a positive, challenging fashion. The noble Lord, Lord Fellowes, said that we needed to ensure more public confidence in community sentences. That is a fair point to which I hope to return in a moment. Getting the message across in that regard is a key element in winning public confidence. I shall disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno. If anyone thinks I shall suggest that 24–hour drinking and casinos are the answer, they have the wrong Minister.
The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, referred to Restorative Justice. I shall address aspects of that matter. The noble Lord, Lord Dearing, indicated that as he had kindly

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provided me with his speech earlier in the day, I must answer the five points that he made. The noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, stumped us in that foreign nationals are not mentioned on the Order Paper. However, I shall ensure—I do not normally do this but I must do so on this occasion, as I did some three years ago when I replied to a long debate on prisons as a Minister at the Home Office—that a compendium letter is sent out to noble Lords covering all the points that I do not cover today. I have separated all the notes that I have received in the past three hours into a pile on which I can comment and a pile that I shall not get anywhere near using. However, I shall do my best.
First, I want to make some general points about the work of the Home Office. The two reports I mentioned will certainly assist our work. I make that absolutely clear. We will use the reports. They will assist us to increase public confidence. The general public know very little about the criminal justice system. They do not come into contact with it and therefore it is a mystery. There is no question that they gain false perspectives from the tabloids. We hope that the public will gain confidence in community penalties.
We must better promote what is already taking place. An enormous amount of work is taking place and as I realised in preparing for the debate—one can get out of touch when not dealing with issues on a daily basis—we are not telling people about it. We must do much more work in that regard. I refer to our work to rehabilitate offenders, to tackle drug problems, to assist offenders to obtain employment and to the robust nature of community sentences for both young and adult offenders. I want to highlight the encouraging progress we are making in reducing reoffending as shown in the latest reconviction rates published last week.
We have a large reform agenda underway that will take us further in our drive to prevent crime and reduce reoffending. This includes the implementation of the new National Offender Management Service and the introduction of the Generic Community Order and Custody Minus. There will, of course, be many legislative opportunities to discuss these issues in the long parliamentary Session that we are entering.
I want to stress the Government's commitment to dialogue, consultation and the involvement of local people in the work of the criminal justice system. That is why, as I say, the reports are doubly helpful. The Home Secretary has described civil renewal and community engagement as a partnership approach to delivering public services, and this includes criminal justice reform. We do not see community engagement as an optional extra: it must be a thread that runs through all we do in explaining and running the criminal justice system to make it more civilised. We certainly cannot claim that we have a success on our hands and that we can export our prison system to the rest of Europe as we have the worst record in that regard—I make no bones about that. For many people civil renewal is not significant new work as much is already happening, but we know that this needs to be shared. That is the point of explaining what is going on. It needs to be promoted and developed across the
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country so that we get a positive focus for the criminal justice system and people understand that it is a seamless system from beginning to end, and one that they can trust.
Good examples of recent community engagement initiatives include the involvement of volunteers in the Circles of Support and Accountability projects where local people both support and monitor sex offenders. That is a somewhat different headline from the normal headline, which I experienced when I was in the other place, of "local people shun paedophile". That is the normal headline. I refer to the establishment of a community liaison group in Reading, a joint prison and probation project, working with partners and engaging local people in dialogue as offenders renovated a local park. That was a real bonus as people saw what was happening as regards alternative approaches to offenders.
We are building on firm foundations here. A great deal of good work is being undertaken around the country. There is a tradition of local involvement in the work of the correctional services that we are learning from and developing. Youth offending teams have more than 10,000 volunteers working on referral order panels and with young offenders. There are 1,800 members of independent monitoring boards involved in the scrutiny of the work of prisons and more than 600 members of local probation boards. We have an impressive range of activities by volunteers and mentors working alongside offenders in prisons and the community, supporting and monitoring their activities and making a significant contribution to our work to reduce re-offending. We value and appreciate the commitment and the enthusiasm of these volunteers who bring a different perspective. They provide offenders with a different kind of relationship and make a significant contribution to the work of the state and the statutory sector.
We also have more than 5 million hours of unpaid work undertaken by offenders subject to community sentences as well as reparation work by prisoners benefiting a whole range of local communities. In addition to the Home Secretary's comments, today the Prime Minister announced a clean-up campaign to start in February and March so that more local people from a range of communities can have a say in the kind of work they want to see offenders doing.
Work with victims is important: we want to increase their satisfaction. A recent survey by MORI showed that 85 per cent of victims surveyed who were seen by probation victim contact officers were very or fairly satisfied with the work of those staff. That is a fairly high percentage. Early findings from Restorative Justice approaches that bring together victims and offenders—we have heard much about that—indicate high satisfaction levels. We see this as an important area for further development that should contribute to an increase in public confidence.
Our success in encouraging community engagement has also received international recognition. I am not familiar with the project I am about to mention, but a UK project, the Birmingham Neighbourhood Safety Project, was awarded this year's European Crime

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Prevention Award at a ceremony earlier this week. An independent evaluation found that the project contributed to an overall fall in crime of 14 per cent in the communities concerned, with youth crime falling by 29 per cent.
As I have said, we need to build on all this good work that is going on around the country. The criminal justice programme of reform builds in community engagement in our work to prevent crime, on police reform, in the work we are doing to increase the diversity of the judiciary and the work of local criminal justice boards to increase public confidence in our work.
I say "in our work"; it is a sign of immaturity and lack of confidence in what someone is doing when, because they might not agree with what their opponents are doing, they have to use the shorthand of accusing them of being soft on crime. When I talk about "our work", it is the work of Parliament. We are all one society here, representative or not. This House is certainly far more representative of society in this debate than the other place; those who have been in the other place know that to be the truth.
The establishment of the National Offender Management Service also offers a new opportunity to consider how we engage with our criminal justice partners, the sentencers and local communities. High on the agenda is work with sentencers; that is very important. The kind of speeches that Ministers and others who are leaders make are important, so that sentencers get the right message. Anyone who wants to track speeches and comments and then have a look at what has happened to the prison population in recent years will sometimes see a correlation that we wish was not there. It makes sense for us to work towards more local people being aware of the work of the criminal justice system and the contribution of prisons, probation and the youth offending teams. In relation to sentencers and community involvement, a lot of good practice and innovation is already around across the country. We have to share that.
I am never going to manage all the points now, but I shall do in due course. The noble Lord, Lord Williams, asked about visitor and family centres. Some 112 prisons have access to a visitor centre at present. The running cost for each centre remains a matter for each establishment. There is no doubt that they are an enormous benefit to the prisons concerned. There may be good reasons why those prisons that have not got them do not do so, but 112 is about three-quarters of the 130–odd prisons.
The noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, asked about literacy and offending. There is significant research into the links between low literacy and numeracy and youth crime. That is a key issue. The Youth Justice Board has spent £40 million in the past three years introducing and enhancing basic skills within the young offender institutions. There is a roll-out of the "national plus" scheme for improving reading and writing among young people in custody. Work is under way; it has to be evidence-based, of course.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury asked about investing in prevention of youth crime. In addition to what I have just said, the Youth Justice
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Board has a £10 million investment in prevention programmes, through the youth inclusion programmes, to catch young people early—"catch" in the sense of doing something with them. Recent spending review settlement will increase the youth inclusion programmes to the most needy estates across the country.
The right reverend Prelate raised issues about restorative justice programmes. Work is undertaken, even at an early age. Someone else asked about this. My answer ties up with the ASBOs. We do not automatically issue the ASBO, but get some work done first. That is also the case prior to cautions and final warnings. Work is to be done of a positive nature, because we see its benefit. Restorative justice came on to my radar only about four or five years ago. A friend of mine who was a magistrate in the south-east listened to the former chief constable of Thames Valley at a large conference arid, was seized by the idea. I have shared a platform with him since, and know how people feel; I felt the same on that occasion. That massive contribution needs explanation and information, so that it builds people's confidence. Nothing can be done without that.
I was asked about how prisons look after young people with serious mental health problems, and i am conscious that I cannot do justice to any of the three articles that appeared in the Guardian. I read one case this morning, and knew what was going to happen before I got half way through. It was tragic the way that the service failed that young person. The failure beggars belief, but one could see the thread of what was happening. There has to be an answer to that.
The Youth Justice Board has secured agreement through the Children Act—it got Royal Assent just before the Queen's Speech in November—that prisons must be part of the local area child protection agreements, soon to be known as the local safeguarding children boards. The Youth Justice Board also promotes the need to see young people who are offenders as children first and offenders second. The priority one gives is important in making sure that the real issues are dealt with. Those issues are not always the crimes that have brought people to the attention of the authorities.
The noble Baroness, Lady Stern, asked me about ASBOs in relation to young people. ASBOs on youth must be issued in conjunction with the youth offending team to ensure appropriate prevention interventions. The ASBO penalties have to be advised by the wider youth prevention schemes, or they will be breached. At the moment, about 50 per cent of ASBOs on youth end up being breached; there has been a significant rise in custody as a result. That is being analysed, as it is a serious issue, through the Youth Justice Board.
The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, asked about police in schools. The Youth Justice Board and the Department for Education and Skills have rolled out a safer schools initiative, in which police officers are based in schools. I do not know how far or how many, but it has obviously got beyond a pilot programme, which I hope is good news.
My noble friend Lord Rea asked several questions. I have some figures on one of them and will use them if he does not mind; I will address all the other issues

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in a letter. He asked about drug treatment and testing orders. In 2002–03, there were 6,000 orders. That doubled to 13,000 in 2004–05. The real issue is what happens afterwards. Research has indicated that the longer offenders remain in the treatment, the more likely they are to reduce their levels of offending and drug misuse. Evaluation of the three drug treatment and testing order pilots found that, on average, offenders committed 75 per cent fewer offences while on the order and reduced their spend on drugs by more than 90 per cent.
The two-year follow-up reconviction study—my noble friend asked about it—found that there was a significant reduction in the average number of convictions per year in the two years following the order in all three pilot sites. The study also found that offenders who completed their orders—it was only 30 per cent—had a reconviction rate of only 53 per cent, compared to 91 per cent for revokees. I emphasise that. The figure is significant; keeping them on the order is obviously the key element.
My noble friend asked me about mental health in prisons and on probation. In summary, in terms of all the figures that I have, National Health Service mental health investment is expected to reach £20 million a year by 2005–06. That means that, within the next three years, an in-reach type of service will be available in every prison in England and Wales. It will not happen tomorrow, but within three years.
The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, asked about final warnings issued and accompanied by a restorative justice reparation. The Youth Justice Board sets targets for youth offending teams to provide a restorative justice intervention for all final warnings where appropriate. Current data suggest that, in most parts of the country, that target is met.
I am conscious of the fact that I have not even got to the summary of some of the responses that I wanted to make but, as I have said to everyone who has spoken, we will analyse the contributions. They have been incredibly useful. The debate has highlighted the important role of local communities, so its focus has widened. We could not have a narrow debate; in some ways, the subject goes with the debate that we had on women in prison the other week.
The Government's reform agenda includes working to get appropriate, consistent and well-targeted use of sentences, through the Sentencing Guidelines Council, and will provide sentences with credible alternatives to custody. I was conscious of the recommendations that magistrates and judges go to see what happens with community sentences and follow that up. I know that that happens, but it is highlighted in the reports. I want to stress that for some dangerous and serious offenders a prison sentence is the only option that will protect the public. In some ways, when you ask, "What's the purpose of prison?", that is the answer. It is a last resort, for those who have to be incarcerated for public safety. It must be a last resort. We believe that short sentences do little to reduce offending but that they disrupt ties with the community. You cannot do any
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work in prison to help someone who is there for a short time. The chances are that they will be moved anyway during that period.
We must have an effective criminal justice system. We must act and be seen to act on behalf of all the people whom it serves. In this case, in order to obtain wider public confidence on new alternatives to prison, I believe that the better way forward is to help those who have offended not to re-offend and to focus on community engagement, so that people have some knowledge and will feel that they have ownership of the system. Let us face it, the previous way forward has not exactly worked with blinding success, has it?
6.31 p.m.
Baroness Linklater of Butterstone: My Lords, I sincerely thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this extraordinarily interesting and important debate. We have heard eloquence and expertise. There has been real knowledge in the breadth of subjects that we have covered. I am so grateful.
I am particularly delighted that both the noble Lords, Lord Rea and Lord Dearing, were prevailed upon—indeed "charmed", as the noble Lord, Lord Rea, said. It showed how very important it was to widen the debate to those whose expertise is outside the box of criminal justice and that noble Lords were here and participated.
I should say to my noble friend Lord Carlile of Berriew that if the mantra is not enough, it is a good start to say, "Cut crime with courage". We should remember that. I was particularly glad to hear the Minister say that he would take on board the issues raised by the reports and thank him especially for that. That was music to my ears. I had a peculiar feeling that everything he said echoed what I had said. When I said that we should be pushing at an open door, I hoped that there would not be a black hole on the other side, but that the rhetoric would meet the reality. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Vaccination Programme
6.33 p.m.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts asked Her Majesty's Government what they propose to do to increase the level of public trust in their vaccination and immunisation programme.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, the trigger for my decision to ask this Question was the Government's sudden decision in August this year to introduce a new five-in-one child vaccine called Pediacel. Pediacel replaces the four-in-one vaccine previously used and adds polio to the diptheria, tetanus, pertussis and haemophilus influenzae type B—HIB—vaccine. The other critical by-product of the introduction of Pediacel has been the withdrawal of the preservative thimerosal which consists of 50 per cent ethyl mercury.
The withdrawal of a toxin as potentially harmful as that contained in thimerosal from infants' vaccine, however small the amount contained therein, is a

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positive development on which the Government are to be warmly congratulated. However, I am not clear as to why this step was taken, if one is of a cynical turn of mind, in early August during the holiday season when minimum press comment could be expected.
The withdrawal of thimerosal from vaccines in this country has been widely advocated over the past decade, but until now it has been resisted by the Government. It has already been withdrawn from almost all child vaccines in the USA and has even been withdrawn from animal vaccines in that country. A sizeable proportion of European countries have also discontinued its use. Those who have advocated the withdrawal of thimerosal have done so on the grounds of a possible relationship between the ethyl-mercury in thimerosal and ADD, which is attention deficit disorder, ADHD, which is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and autism in susceptible predisposed children. As long ago as 2000 the Committee for Proprietary and Medicinal Products of the EU recommended that manufacturers move to thimerosal-free vaccines. It is good that, albeit four years later, the Government have implemented that recommendation.
Most recently, a study by Doctors Hornig, Chian and Lipkin of Columbia University, published online on 8 June 2004 in the Nature publication, Molecular Psychiatry, indicated that postnatal exposure to thimerosal can lead to the development of autism-like damage in autoimmune disease susceptible mice. This reinforces previous studies, such as the works of Dr Mark and Dr David Geier, showing that a genetic predisposition in combination with certain environmental triggers can cause an increased risk of an adverse reaction.
To a Written Question I put down on 22 January 2003, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, the Minister's predecessor, answered that,
"there is no evidence of harm from thiomersal contained in vaccines. Therefore, the CSM advised that the benefits of immunisation with thiomersal-containing vaccines outweigh any potential risks of vaccination".—[official Report, 22/1/03; col. WA 101.]
Such responses exemplify the Government's reaction to the thimerosal debate over the past two years. Until August this year the Government gave the impression that it was much ado about nothing and there was no reason for thimerosal to be withdrawn. In August, at the height of the holiday season, thimerosal was suddenly withdrawn.
Whether thimerosal does have an effect on certain autoimmune disease sensitive infants may be proved or disproved in times to come or there may never be a conclusive result. But what does matter is that the Government should maintain the highest degree of transparency and openness in their communications with the public in this important and sensitive area.
That leads me to the crux of what I wish to raise with the Minister this evening. Transparency and openness are themes on which this Government have placed great emphasis. In such circumstances it is rather strange, therefore, that the Government's vaccine programmes have so often seemed to be carefully shrouded. Communication concerning the MMR vaccination
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and its possible side effects has been ineffective. I respect the decision of the Prime Minister to avoid disclosing whether his own newly-horn child had been given the MMR jab. I accept that this is a sensitive issue. All of us, including the Prime Minister's children, are entitled to privacy regarding our medical history. But, given the controversy surrounding MMR, that refusal to answer was bound to impact upon public confidence in the vaccination policy as a whole. There is hard evidence to prove that, for a number of reasons, including the one that I have given, the level of public trust has dropped dramatically.
In some areas of London less than half the children have been immunised with the MMR vaccine. Kensington and Chelsea recorded an uptake of only 49 per cent. Figures from the Department of Health show that the number of children given the MMR vaccine by their second birthday has fallen to 80 per cent. Epidemiologists suggest that the required level for the population to be safe from an outbreak of measles, mumps and rubella is set at 95 per cent.
Equally ham-fisted was the Government's decision to release information to doctors about the introduction of Pediacel well before any public announcement. Unsurprisingly, the news leaked out and, again, the public and the media felt bypassed and, rightly or wrongly, were suspicious that the Government had something to hide. In reaction to the headlines which followed, the Government countered one scare by starting another scare, stating that children would be in great danger if they were not given the vaccine. This neither convinces parents to give their children the appropriate vaccine nor helps establish public trust in the programme. If the Government, through the Minister, express surprise at the growing public distrust in their vaccination programme I hope that these brief examples will help to show how this has come about.
I appreciate that the Government face a complex set of issues in this matter. Scare stories in the media are not unknown and the last thing that any of us wants is to trigger a reaction among the public that discourages essential vaccines from being taken. However, transparency on such issues is essential, as public confidence in vaccination policy will inevitably dictate how widespread the use of the vaccines will be. For it is only natural for the parents of a newly born child to be concerned about the impact of the injection of single vaccines, let alone multiple ones.
Government health Ministers, medical experts and many doctors have warned about the dangers of parents conducting their own research and drawing their own conclusions. However, parents are bound to search for alternative information when they feel that the Government's policy lacks credibility. Information about vaccines and drugs is now available from thousands of sources on the Internet—some of them undoubtedly reputable and informative, but some of them no doubt unfounded and damaging. The NHS has a useful immunisation information website with fact sheets which cover both the practical and medical implications of each vaccine and answer some frequently asked questions. While that is all highly

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commendable, the fact sheets, for example, give no trial or clinical data. Such data as are referred to in the fact sheets are never disclosed.
There is also the problem of the perceived independence, or lack of it, of the NHS—a large bureaucracy with its own agenda. One wonders whether it can ever win the full confidence of the public. Therefore, I believe that there is a case for considering the establishment of an independent institution to evaluate research, issue appraisals and secure full disclosure of clinical drug trials.
Several experts, including Dr Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet, have suggested the creation of such a new body—the national agency for science and health, called "NASH" for short—which would evaluate scientific studies and provide impartial guidance. It would mean that research findings would be free from the influence of industry, and scientific outcomes would be free from political considerations.
In proposing the creation of such an independent national body which focuses on the accuracy of medical research, it is possible to draw on lessons learnt in the development, structure and experience of organisations that already exist in this country as well as overseas—most notably in the United States.
The Food Standards Agency is a good example of an independent watchdog body within this country. Although it is only four years old, it has begun to build an impressive reputation for independence. The FSA, government-funded though it may be, operates at arm's length from the Government. It is free to publish what it wishes and has no requirement to report to a particular Minister.
The FSA's key principles are: first, to put the consumer first; secondly, to be open and accessible; and, thirdly, to be an independent voice. A wealth of information about the FSA is readily available to the public. The introduction to the FSA's Strategic Plan 2001–2006 states that its central aim is,
"to be trusted as the UK's most reliable source of advice and information about food".
The Strategic Plan goes on to say on page 5:
"The Agency aims to be candid where there is doubt; when decisions need to be made on the basis of incomplete information we will explain both what we know and what we do not know, and what we are doing to decrease the uncertainty".
That approach appears to be light years ahead of the Government's communication policy on science and health. If it is agreed that public confidence is a matter of significant concern for the Government when it comes to the nation's food, surely the nation's health and science policy deserves at least equal scrutiny.
A more precise example exists in the United States, where the Institute of Medicine (IOM) provides science-based advice on matters of biomedical science, medicine and health. Its website explains:
"The Institute provides a vital service by working outside the framework of government to ensure scientifically informed analysis and independent guidance. The IOM's mission is to serve as adviser to the nation to improve health. The Institute provides unbiased, evidence-based, and authoritative information and
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advice concerning health and science policy to policy-makers, professionals, leaders in every sector of society, and the public at large".
The aims, priorities and remit of the IOM appear eminently sensible and they could form the basis of a model for such an institution within this country.
In conclusion, when he comes to reply, no doubt the Minister will point to the Government's plans to merge the Medicines Commission and the Committee on Safety of Medicines next year. I understand that that will see new arrangements for those employed in the licensing and safety of medicines, enforcing full declaration of financial interests and debarring from the commission anyone who has personal interests in the pharmaceutical industry. While that is unarguably a positive step, it appears to be one with a narrow objective; namely, to allay fears over potentially unethical relationships between industry and medicines regulators. However, I am advocating the creation of a much broader advisory body. independent of both industry and government.
NASH would end the culture of secrecy. The establishment of a body of scientists and specialists, independent from the Government, to evaluate research, promote openness and influence health policy would encourage renewed trust among the public. It would also help to remove the concerns that have led many to lose confidence in the Government's vaccination policy. The nation's health demands no less.
6.45 p.m.
The Countess of Mar: My Lords, I must apologise to noble Lords and to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, in particular for not having put my name down for this debate, and I am very grateful to have this opportunity to speak in the gap.
For many years, governments and scientists were trusted implicitly when it came to the matter of deciding what was best for public health. We are all used to having vaccinations against numerous diseases endemic in the UK and when we wish to travel abroad. That trust continued until the first cases of disability caused by whooping cough vaccines came to light. Parents fought a long and painful battle to win recognition, and then compensation, for their damaged children.
I propose to confine myself to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine that is currently causing angst among parents. It is a fact that rates of diagnosed autism in pre-school and school children have increased exponentially. In Scotland, the past 10 years have seen a fourfold increase to 3,400 diagnosed cases.
Even before Dr Andrew Wakefield published his now notorious paper in 1998—which, incidentally, did not establish a link between autism and MMR vaccine but one between autism and inflammatory bowel disease— parents were making an association between vaccination and a change in their children's development. Their fears were dismissed. That is not an uncommon phenomenon in the medical or scientific professions. Perhaps I may say, cynically, that I speak from huge experience.
When the pressure becomes too great, the Government and their advisers retreat behind the curtain of epidemiological studies. Without concurrent clinical studies, I have concluded that they are the medico-scientific equivalent of the parliamentary filibuster.
In the Lancet of 20 July 2002, Chi-Tai Fang and Wen-Yi Shau wrote that,
"the validity of observational research depends on the validity of existing knowledge about the cause of the studied disease. In other words, causal association cannot he established by data from observational research alone. Supportive evidence from experimental research, including basic science and randomised trials, is essential rather than optional for causal inference in medicine".
They have expressed concisely what I have been trying to convey for years.
The parents of autistic children are crying out for proper clinical studies to be conducted in order to underpin or disprove the epidemiological findings. Why have Ministers consistently refused to ask for such research to be commissioned? That is the very first action that Ministers should take to restore public confidence in infant vaccination unless, of course, they have a very good reason for not doing so. If there is a reason, the public should be told.
Will the Minister confirm that manufacturers of single measles, mumps and rubella vaccines have been instructed not to market within the UK and that, if any of their single vaccines are found here, they will lose their licences? If it is the Government's intention to eliminate these diseases, are they going to gain or lose public trust by taking such draconian measures?
Will the Minister also say how many of the combination of measles, mumps and rubella components in the live vaccine actually seroconvert at the first inoculation? I am aware that unpublished evidence shows that in more than 50 per cent of cases at least one component does not seroconvert. This is a serious failure and I cannot help feeling that somehow, so far as concerns MMR, we have all been betrayed. There are some parents with extremely sick children out in the world, and they need to be listened to and not swatted away like flies.
6.49 p.m.
Lord Jopling: My Lords, I am grateful to have an opportunity to speak in the gap and I want briefly to raise one matter which is of great concern to me. I refer to the danger in the United Kingdom of a terrorist attack using smallpox as a biological weapon. During the Committee stage of the Civil Contingencies Bill, I moved an amendment in your Lordships' House in which I tried to strengthen the nation's preparation in the event of a situation as horrific as smallpox being used as a biological weapon. I am appalled at the very low level of preparation.
I asked a Written Question last July about how many people in the emergency services had been vaccinated to deal with a smallpox attack. I was told then that throughout the whole of the country only 141 doctors, 126 nurses, 19 scientists and six ambulance staff have been vaccinated to deal with
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that. I was told, and I have since told your Lordships, that in the United States 40,000 emergency service workers have been vaccinated.
In talking to the Department of Health, I was told that there is a reluctance among people in the emergency services to be vaccinated. They have a low level of trust. That is largely because of the side effects of smallpox vaccination. I am hound to say that .1 do not remember much concern about that when I was young.
I was told that the side effects of the smallpox vaccination can be significantly alleviated using what is called vaccinia immunoglobulin (VIG). That significantly reduces the side effects of smallpox vaccination. The Government have a large stock of smallpox vaccination shots, which are held in preparation for a terrorist attack using smallpox. The Minister will recall that I have asked questions over the past few weeks. On a rough calculation of how many people might need to be treated for the ill-effects of smallpox vaccination, it would be necessary for the Government, with the stock they already hold, to have 10,000 VIG shots available to deal with those side effects.
However, I find the Government have none or virtually none of these at the moment. In an Answer to my Question, it appeared that they were just starting a programme to acquire VIG stocks. I do not suggest for a minute that my Question caused that. However. I think that it is gross negligence that the Government in a complementary way with their basic vaccination shots have not acquired adequate numbers of VIG shots to deal with those side effects.
The Government are now in the process of getting bids to acquire those VIG shots. I ask the Minister: why have they not been acquired? Why, when they have been acquiring basic vaccination shots, have they not acquired the VIG shots? I think this is gross complacency by the Government and I should like an explanation from the Minister.
6.53 p.m.
Baroness Barker: My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord. Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbots, for intoducing the debate. I also want to thank him for very succinctly putting an end to a puzzle. Since I read the title of the debate I have tried to work out why he wanted to discuss the subject. He gave a very clear explanation.
I have chosen to address the topic in a slightly different way, but I shall come back to some of his arguments because I think they are very important.
I have to begin by declaring an interest. I am an employee of Age Concern England. That may not seem immediately relevant, but I assure noble Lords that it will be. I took this issue of public trust rather than the efficacy of the vaccination as being at the heart of the debate. That led to my finding some really fascinating and interesting publications on the Internet, as the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said.
What are the factors that determine public trust in government policy? As the noble Lord pointed out, one of the key factors is access to information by the general public. The Guardian very helpfully this week listed 10 health websites one can go to to obtain health information, such as the National electronic Library for Health, the Hi Quality website, which was launched on March 2002 by the Centre for Health Information Quality, which is a division of the Help for Health Trust. That is designed to help raise standards of Internet health information and to give guidance and tips which enable people to make judgments about the credibility and quality of health information.
The Research Councils UK website was launched on 1 May to provide information on the work of the Research Councils, including the Medical Research Council, the SERC and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. There is an unparalleled wealth of information available. However, there are no means of enabling people to evaluate the quality of the information which is put before them. Therein lies one answer to restoring trust.
It seems—not least from listening to the "Today" programme and its seemingly weekly stories on yet another piece of health research—that the Government, and perhaps scientists too, have not yet fully woken up to the extent to which individual patients believe themselves to be far better informed than in the past and the extent to which that knowledge has undermined the assumed authority of government and, indeed, of healthcare workers to pass on information. We are a long way away from the time when doctors and scientists were seen to be the deliverers of authoritative information.
It therefore seems to me that we have gone past the point when it is acceptable for government to communicate merely the conclusions of research studies. We are now at a point where it is essential that the methodology of research is communicated. The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbots, was absolutely right when he cited the announcement on 9 August of the move to the combination five-in-one vaccination. Against an unparalleled scepticism on the part of individuals about MMR, this simple announcement was made, smack in the middle of the school holidays when the people who should be its targets were away, that this would change.
From my reading of the literature, the work of the different agencies, for example the Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, which regulates vaccines and the Health Protection Agency, which monitors the incidence of infectious disease against vaccine take-up, is more widely available. Why do we have two separate bodies; how do they work together; and do they use the same epidemiological information? I accept that the Government have, to some extent, moved—not least in the yellow card system whereby a range of health professionals can report apparent adverse reactions to immunisation; and that is to be extended to individual patients and parents. How will patients—and I think for that read "parents"—be
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informed of their rights to be involved in making contributions to that important epidemiological information?
In the South East Thames Region of the NHS, a new system is in place to investigate vaccine safety. It is a system whereby hospital admission records are linked electronically to data about vaccination from child health and GP records. How will that system be evaluated and are there any plans to roll it out across the rest of the country?
In this country, vaccination take-up in general is high. That is a product of three factors. The first is years and years of public health information campaigns. The second is easy availability and low cost. There is perhaps something that the Government need to analyse in terms of generational difference. People of a certain age have a common experience of seeing people who had contracted polio. They had an immediate understanding of what vaccines were about. Small children grew up knowing about the work of Dr Salk. I suspect that there is now a generation of parents for whom that is not necessarily an immediate part of their experience. Their scepticism is therefore likely to be higher.
I do not want to repeat the statistics about the take-up of MMR given by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, but launching the one-in-five vaccine against the backdrop of such deep scepticism seems almost inevitably to lead to the Government knowing that a large percentage of parents in some areas will opt out of vaccination altogether. That will result in children having less disposition to immunity.
In the face of that, do not the Government see that there may be a case for adopting single vaccine immunisations, while ensuring that they are tightly monitored and controlled? They could set up a control group to test the efficacy of that control group. As far as I understand it, at present, there are no data on the efficacy of single vaccines. Do the Government plan to carry out research about the prevalence of mumps among students? We now have a cohort of people who have not been immunised against that condition.
In the short time available to me, I want to respond to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, about the independence of research. I find myself in some disagreement with him if he believes that taking research wholly out of the NHS will increase its credibility. I listened to what he said about the independence of research in the United States of America. I am not convinced that independence is necessarily any higher in the USA, because so much of the research is privately funded. We know from the work of the Health Select Committee in your Lordships' House in 2002 that that does not necessarily raise its credibility. Also, I would fear the lack of accountability that comes with taking research out of the NHS.
The noble Lord is right to stress to the Government the need for strict transparency. We need to push the Government on how they will engender trust by enabling individuals to evaluate the efficacy and quality of health information. Will that be an integral

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part of the legislation that will follow the publication of the public health White Paper? If we are to restore trust and confidence, that is key.
7.4 p.m.
Earl Howe: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Hodgson has put his finger on some issues of very considerable public importance and I for one am grateful to him for giving us the opportunity to debate a topic that is never far from the newspaper headlines and not infrequently dominates them.
The key word in his Question, as he emphasised, is the word "trust''; and it is right that we should acknowledge as a general backdrop to this debate two recent trends. The first is the growing propensity of patients and the public to abandon the kind of unquestioning trust in politicians and doctors that was typical 40 or 50 years ago, although trust in doctors remains a whole lot more buoyant than trust in politicians. The second is the growing tendency for the lay patient to regard himself as an authority in his own right on matters medical, however ill-informed he actually is. So for a politician—I am not making a party point—to step forward and assure the public of the safety of this or that is almost bound to be greeted by instant suspicion, if not instant rebuttal, no matter who that politician may happen to be.
The debate about the safety of MMR has suffered from that kind of blanket mistrust and pressure group assertiveness, which have served to make it that much more difficult to achieve balance and clarity. Before pursuing that thought, I should perhaps make my own position clear. I do not dissent—I do not believe that any of us sensibly can —from the view of the World Health Organisation that, after the provision of clean water, vaccination is the most effective health intervention known to man. No vaccine can ever be totally safe but, in general, the risks associated with being vaccinated are infinitesimal compared with the risks of not being vaccinated.
I believe that we can say unequivocally that MMR has a proven track record of safety and efficacy over many years and I am a firm advocate of it. I am also a firm advocate of all other vaccines administered under the NHS including, let me say now, the new five-in-one vaccine introduced a few weeks ago for diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, hib and polio.
However, none of that can obscure the separate but parallel issue of whether the public's mistrust of what they are told about vaccines is in some way understandable. Earlier this year, the Lancet published a case-control study drawn from a large number of records from across UK general practice that showed that the hypothesis of a link between the MMR vaccine and increased risk of autism or other pervasive developmental disorders has no convincing evidence to support it. Of all the studies published on the issue, that one, funded by the Medical Research Council, was by common agreement one of the most authoritative to date. The results showed that 78 per cent of cases diagnosed with a pervasive development disorder had
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been given the MMR vaccine, but a slightly higher proportion of controls, 82 per cent, who had received the vaccine did not have a disorder.
Authoritative the study may be, but are the parents of autistic children convinced? They are not. The reason that they are not is very simple, and was alluded to by the noble Countess, Lady Mar. It is that conclusions drawn from statistics and percentages are no substitute for conclusions based on direct observation of real children. Rule one in the art of medical diagnosis is always supposed to be, "Listen to the patient". In this case, it is, "Listen to the parent". The questions that parents want the researchers to ask are: what is wrong with this child and why did this child change from being healthy to being autistic?
Epidemiology has its place, but it is a blunt tool when it comes to reassuring particular individuals about why they or their children are suffering. Parents of autistic children do not feel that their worries are being treated with due respect and seriousness. They point to the tenfold rise in autism since 1988 and say that the only way that we shall be able to determine the causes of autism is by examining children who are autistic. Until now, none of the published studies has done that.
Meanwhile parents' anxieties are fuelled in other ways. Earlier this year Professor Jeff Bradstreet delivered to the vaccine safety committee of the Institute of Medicine in the United States a paper which purports to show two things: first, the presence of the measles virus in the cerebrospinal fluid and brains of children with autism; and, secondly, the toxic role of thiomersal in the autoimmunity and neurodevelopment of individuals with certain genetic characteristics. I am in no position to judge the merits of that paper, except to say that, for parents of autistic children, it is couched in terms that appear almost bound to perpetuate fears rather than to allay them.
One positive development in recent months has been the enhancement of the yellow card scheme to allow for direct reporting by patients. Potentially, the piloting of different ways of reporting adverse reactions holds out not only the prospect of providing more data to researchers but, perhaps equally importantly in the context of this debate, also the promise of a much higher level of confidence and trust among patients. One of the main complaints of the mothers of autistic children who believe that vaccinations were implicated in their children's autism was the failure, as they saw it, of the yellow card system. It would be helpful to hear from the Minister how well the pilot is proceeding.
I know all this about the parents involved because I have met some of them. I can tell the Minister that they are not fanatics; they are perfectly reasonable, intelligent people. I welcome much that the Government have clone to try to allay their concerns about vaccine safety but I would only add, in the gentlest way, that perhaps it is in the Government's interests to look also at some of the things that I have been talking about, so that the deep anxieties of these individuals no longer boil to the surface, as they have had a habit of doing, thus causing alarm among a much wider public.
As it is, rates of MMR take-up in London are only 70 per cent, with the figure as low as 62 per cent in south-east London. That is clearly a serious situation. A measles epidemic over the next few months has been predicted as highly probable. One can only hope that, as in previous years, the prediction is not borne out by events. The new programme of PCTs offering MMR jabs in schools is an excellent initiative. As an aside, the immunisation targets for GPs, although perfectly laudable on one level, do not help to build confidence in vaccines, in a prevailing climate of suspicion.
I hope that the Minister will tell us that the uptake of the new five-in-one vaccine has been universal. If it is, the Department of Health has escaped disaster by the skin of its teeth. By that I mean simply that the manner of the vaccine's announcement in August was so disorderly and ill managed as to have risked undermining its credentials from the word go. Only the reassuring intervention of Dr David Salisbury from the department restored a measure of equilibrium. But the episode brought home to many of us that the lessons of MMR have, sadly, not been fully learnt. I am sure that in hindsight the communication strategy would have been handled differently, but the fact remains that it is no use wishing away or ignoring the public's suspicions on such matters because the suspicions are there.
I am wholly persuaded that the new vaccine is safer and better than its predecessors. I am afraid that a lot of nonsense is talked about the risks of overloading babies' immune systems with an excessive number of viral and bacterial challenges. An understanding of the underlying biological science is one of the things that must be promoted if the battle for public trust is to be won. It is no wonder that Dr Salisbury was quoted as saying that the conflicting views about thiomersal had left parents feeling like,
"ping pong balls being batted between experts".
His clear view is that the dangers of thiomersal have been seriously overstated. With due deference to my noble friend, I respect that opinion absolutely.
The principal benefit of the five-in-one jab is not so much the removal of thiomersal but the introduction of acellular pertussis and the replacement of a live polio vaccine with dead virus. There is a lower chance of an adverse reaction to the vaccine, not a higher one. Nevertheless, perhaps it would have been better to have introduced the vaccine in an even greater spirit of openness; for example, by allowing public access to meetings of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. Understandably, many questions were asked about the vaccine's safety record. Although the Government have provided largely reassuring answers, the Canadian experience may not have been quite as benign as has been made out because of possible widespread under-reporting of adverse reactions. I should be delighted if the Minister could knock that story on the head.
My only other point relates to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). Last month the Minister made a welcome announcement to
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promote even greater transparency in the regulation of all medicines. There are much tighter rules on conflict of interest for the chairman and members of the new commission, and a greater role for patients and the public. Pharmaceutical companies are being encouraged to be more open with their clinical trials data. All of that is good. But my noble friend has posed some good questions about regulation and independent advice.
One idea that the Government might consider is whether in the specific context of new vaccines NICE could be given a role in the evaluation of safety. In my judgment, NICE has gained a very wide measure of public confidence in the way that it works. It already evaluates safety issues in the context of new interventional procedures. So the principle of NICE, as a non-partial body, examining the safety of new vaccines would not be a radical departure. If it served further to reassure the public, as I believe it would, that could only be positive.
I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, that communicating with the public on the benefits and risks of vaccines—NICE has learned to communicate particularly well—is a sine qua non of a less frenzied and more measured climate of public debate, a state of affairs most earnestly to be desired.
7.17 p.m.
Lord Warner: My Lords, this is an important issue, which the Government take very seriously. I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving us an opportunity to set the record straight on a number of areas, particularly where he was not altogether fair in his presentation of the Government's position—I hope that he will appreciate that later. I was grateful for the extremely balanced contribution of the noble Earl, Lord Howe, and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Barker. It is slightly surprising that two of the six speakers did not manage to put their names down to speak. I will certainly read the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, with interest. I do not accept his criticism and I have nothing much to add to the full information given to him in our Written Answers. I will deal with the points made by the noble Countess, Lady Mar, in my remarks on MMR.
In the past 200 years the two most significant contributions to better health have been clean water supplies and vaccines; both have saved millions of lives throughout the world. That is why the immunisation programme in this country is key to the continued health of children. Parents' trust in immunisation is crucial for its success. Diseases such as smallpox and polio used to cause illness, disability and death. Because of vaccination, smallpox has been eradicated from the world. Polio has been eliminated from Europe and most other parts of the world. In my youth, polio was one of the scare concerns of many parents.
Even though smallpox and polio have been consigned to the history books, we accept that we cannot rest on our laurels. We continue to review our immunisation programme to see how it can be improved. Noble Lords will remember clearly the growing problem that we had

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with meningococcal C infection in the late 1990s. That terrible illness causes permanent disability and, all too frequently, death. Meningitis was the commonest infectious cause of death overall in children aged one to five in the UK.
The UK was the first country to introduce the meningitis C vaccine—in 1999. That was the result of collaborative research and work in this country. That research ensured that the vaccine was effective and had an excellent safety profile. It is worth bearing that bit of very recent history in mind. Parents all over the country welcomed the initiative, as it offered protection for their children against meningitis, the disease that, parents continued to tell us. they feared the most. As a result, cases of meningitis C have plummeted by over 90 per cent and continue to decline.
I accept totally that, if parents lose confidence in the safety of vaccines or underestimate the seriousness of the diseases, those diseases can and will return. In recent years, Ireland, the Netherlands and Italy have suffered from outbreaks of measles. In each outbreak, children have died. The UK has been more fortunate. There have been no childhood deaths in the UK from acute measles for over 10 years, but recently we have had to deal with inaccurate media-driven stories that have done much to make parents question whether to have their young children vaccinated.
It is not just Ministers who say this; it is worth reflecting on some of the independent research published by a number of groups on the MMR story. The King's Fund stated in its study on MMR and the media that,
"Arguably this is a case of media coverage affecting public behaviour in ways that may increase rather than reduce health risks".
A report from the University of Cardiff about the media coverage of the purported link between MMR and autism showed that the media coverage was,
"unintentionally misleading in creating the impression that the evidence for the link was as substantial as the evidence against it".
A study from the University of Birmingham found that,
"The media have been a particularly important, largely negative, source of information",
particularly on MMR. That is not the Government's special pleading; those are the views of people who are independent of government and who have examined what we have had to contend with.
Given those quotations, it is hardly surprising that there is uncertainty in the mind of some parents. The decision to vaccinate a child should be straightforward. The benefits that vaccines bring to children enormously outweigh any risks. I was grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, for his brisk dispatch of the idea that babies cannot cope with combined vaccines. That view is plain mistaken. Despite the anxieties that some parents have expressed recently, the vast majority choose to have their babies vaccinated. More than nine out of 10 infants complete all their immunisations by their first birthday. More than eight out of 10 children receive a dose of the combined MMR vaccine by their second birthday. Although the MMR figures are lower than the ideal,
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MMR uptake has risen in three of the past four quarters. That can be happening only because parental confidence in vaccine safety is returning—perhaps not as fast as we would like. We want to work hard to make sure that that trend continues.
I shall say something about what we are doing to improve patient confidence. In order better to understand parents' concerns about immunisation, the department commissions surveys every six months, involving about 1,000 parents of young children. The in-depth interviews with each parent help us to know the real concerns of parents and what they need to help them make decisions about vaccination. One clear message from parents is that they want clear, factual information. We are trying hard to meet that need by producing a wide range of resources, such as leaflets, factsheets, and websites. All of the material that we produce is tested first with parents to make sure that it meets their needs.
In all that work, parents have consistently told us that they have a high level of trust in primary care staff—the practice nurses, GPs and health visitors who are the frontline staff who play a crucial role in implementing any of our immunisation programmes. They are the professionals with whom parents can discuss their concerns and who provide advice on what is in the child's best interests.
We need to ensure that health professionals have the information resources that they need to carry out their work. Every year, the department carries out a survey of health professionals, just as we do with the parents. We give seminars to health professionals all over the country. I shall give the House some idea of the range of that work. The Department of Health has issued over 12 million leaflets and factsheets directly related to the immunisation programme. Our websites received over 20,000 hits and received 2,000 questions from concerned parents so far this year, all of which have all been answered. We have given presentations at nearly 50 seminars for health professionals and for parents. We have done a lot of work in that area.
We also want the public to be able to access the expert advice on which we base our work. Both the independent—I stress the word "independent"—Committee on Safety of Medicines and the independent Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation do much to ensure that their work is available to all by publishing information about their activities on their websites. We are working all the time to see how we can bring more of that work into the public arena.
The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, suggested that decision making on vaccines should be transferred to an independent body similar to the Food Standards Agency. We do not accept that. I do not have time to go into all the arguments, but we have great confidence in the MHRA and the Committee on Safety of Medicines. It is independent and has served this country well. As noble Lords have acknowledged, we are doing much to improve the perception of transparency and the reality of that transparency. There are changes taking place in the regulatory environment that involve restructuring the Committee on Safety of Medicines and tightening up the approach, to ensure that its advice is

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seen much more to be impartial and entirely transparent. I am unconvinced, as a result of the work that we have been doing—it is one of my ministerial responsibilities—that setting up a further independent body would change the minds of concerned parents in the way that has been suggested.
The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, raised the subject of thiomersal. It is important to state clearly again the fact that the MMR vaccine does not contain thiomersal and never has. You cannot use thiomersal in live vaccines, and MMR is a live vaccine. Thiomersal is a preservative that has been widely used in vaccines for over 60 years. It is added in very small amounts to vaccines to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination, particularly in multi-dose vials where repeated doses are withdrawn, once the vial is opened.
There have been numerous studies. I do not have time to go through all of them, but I will give the House the references. I am happy to write to all noble Lords with the data. A major study in Denmark examined the question, and the Committee on Safety of Medicines has considered the available evidence. Work has been done by the European Medicines Agency. The United States has had a major review of all the evidence. The World Health Organisation is clear on the issue. The overwhelming finding of all that work by independent bodies is clear: all the evidence on the safety of thiomersal in vaccines has been thoroughly investigated, and the consistent message is reassuring.
However, from September this year, we accepted that the vaccines offered in the current routine childhood immunisation programme should not contain thiomersal. We switched to new vaccines in September because they contained a slightly safer form of the polio vaccine—an inactivated polio vaccine—which replaced the oral polio vaccine that had been used for many years. There is a very slight risk—about one in a million—of the oral polio vaccine causing a condition known as vaccine-associated paralytic polio. That slight risk does not occur with the inactivated polio vaccine that we have used since September.
Despite all the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, about what we were up to in the summer, that is the straightforward explanation of the change. We had hoped to present it to health professionals in a more orderly way, but the story broke in a particular paper—very inaccurately. As happens in life, we had to deal with that as best we could. It happens sometimes. I recognise the helpful comments of the noble Earl, Lord Howe, about the contribution of Dr David Salisbury. It was a major contribution and it helped to settle matters down. Thankfully, parents do not believe everything that they read in the newspapers. The story died within a few days and all the information that we received from around the country is that the new vaccine has simply replaced the old one.
I do not have time to respond to all the points that were made. I shall briefly turn to MMR and autism. Experts from around the world, including the World Health Organisation, agree that there is no link between MMR and autism. It is true that there has been a steady increase, as the noble Countess, Lady Mar, mentioned, in the number of children diagnosed with autism since the mid-1980s. An MRC report on autism found that the increase was likely to be due to raised awareness of the condition, particularly among health professionals and parents, combined with a wider definition of autistic spectrum disorders.
The MRC has already supported a number of significant projects. In February 2002 the Government committed a further £2.5 million to the MRC for autism research. We are working on this particular area. It is also true that single vaccines in the MMR area can be imported from abroad unlicensed. It is the duty of the MHRA to assess the safety and efficacy of any applications for importing unlicensed vaccines into this country.
That is the best that I can do in the time available in responding to those issues. This has been a helpful debate in many ways. It has given me the chance to put the record straight on a number of issues. I shall certainly consider very carefully the points that I have been unable to deal with in responding to the debate and I shall write to all noble Lords on those points.
House adjourned at twenty-nine minutes to eight o'clock.

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  EU Constitutional Treaty
  The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean)
  My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr Jack Straw) will today lay before the House Command Paper 6429, containing the final text of the EU Constitutional Treaty signed by heads of state and government in Rome on 29 October. Copies will be placed in the Library of the House and the Printed Paper Office. The final treaty can also be accessed on the FCO website:www.fco.gov.uk.

  An Explanatory Memorandum will be laid with the Command Paper. The White Papers (September 2003 Cm5934 and September 2004 Cm6309) give further information about the Government's negotiations on the text, and explanation of its contents.

  Armed Forces' Pay Review Body
  The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (Lord Bach)
  My right honourable friend the Minister of State for the Armed Forces (Mr Adam Ingram) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement:

  I am pleased to announce that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Defence has appointed Mrs Alison Gallico, Professor Derek Leslie and retired
  WS 56
  Air-Vice Marshal Ian Stewart for a 3-year term of office as members of the Armed Forces' Pay Review Body, commencing March 2005. These appointments have been conducted in accordance with the guidance of the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments.

  Housing Investment in the Regions
  The Minister of State, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (Lord Rooker)
  My right honourable friend the Minister for Housing and Planning has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.

  I am announcing today the publication of a consultation paper concerning the regional split of funds for housing investment by local authorities and housing associations allocated through regional housing pots.

  The Sustainable Communities Plan introduced new arrangements for allocation for mainstream funding to support housing investment. Under these new arrangements allocations are increasingly being directed to address strategic regional priorities based on advice from regional housing boards.

  The split of such investment funding between the nine English regions has for many years been allocated on a largely formulaic basis. The paper seeks views on our proposal that the split continues to be made on a formulaic basis, but the formula itself be simplified and linked more directly to the Government's housing objectives and associated public service agreement targets on balancing supply and demand (PSA5) and on decent homes (PSA7).

  Consultation will run until 4 February 2005. Copies of the consultation paper have been made available in the Libraries of the House and it is available on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's website.