POA Circulars
News | 04.05.2010
Address by Nick Clegg MP- Liberal Democrat Shadhow Home Secretary
Following the first “Leaders Debate” screened on the 15th April, members may be interested to read the address made by Nick Clegg MP to POA Annual Conference 2007, which is reproduced below:
NICK CLEGG: Thank you very much for that slightly chilling reminder of what I have been doing the last few years. I heard a complaint earlier that there are just too many guest speakers which aren’t allowing you to get on with your business, to get through the amount of motions you have to get through, so I am very sorry that I am intruding in business. I feel I’m occupying a perilous position between you and the serious work of the Conference. I realise, of course, you gave Gerry Sutcliffe a warm welcome yesterday, and David Davis a warmer one, I understand, so I feel maybe I am on an upward curve. This is new territory for me, I have not come to your Conference before. I am absolutely delighted that you should have extended an invitation to me as the home affairs representative of my party, the Liberal Democrat party. You will have annoyed John Reid in doing so, because John Reid was on his feet this morning in the House of Commons, commenting on the disappearance of these three individuals who have been subject to control orders, and both David Davis and I, as courtesy — Parliamentary courtesy dictates we should have been there to listen to him, ask questions and so on, and instead he had to face our deputies, so he is no doubt even more annoyed with you than he was before, that you have deprived him of the opportunity of doing battle with his opposite numbers this morning.
As I say, I haven’t addressed this Conference before. It reminds me of a story which I always recall with some fear of Clement Freud. I am not sure, if any of you remember him, he was a Liberal MP once, but also a great wit and raconteur — still is. He had been invited there — it is just a great little story about how you can misjudge an audience that you don’t know. He was invited down to Barcelona to talk on the subject of breast feeding which was not unusual. He was a great wit, with a fine line in jokes, obviously was a Freud, I think he was the grandson of Sigmund Freud — anyway he went down to Barcelona. He was a little nonplussed to see, as he was shown into a great hall, probably like this, row upon row of men in business suits, which he thought was an odd audience for a lecture on breast feeding. But anyway he sallied forth, gave some of his smuttiest jokes on breast feeding, and some more erudite Freudian observations on it. It was only when he sat down and returned to the platform that the person who was chairing the proceedings turned to him and whispered, “You weren’t asked to talk on breast feeding, you were asked to talk on press freedom”, and I always worry when I start a speech to an unfamiliar audience that maybe I have completely got my mandate wrong.
Perhaps my most famous Liberal Democrat predecessor in the home affairs brief, Roy Jenkins, he said in 1975 that if the prison population approached 42,000, he said “conditions in the system would approach the intolerable and drastic action to relieve the position would be inescapable.” 30 years later and we have 80,000 offenders crammed into our prisons, per head of population we incarcerate more people than almost any other nation in western Europe. Topping 100,000 in the near future now seems all too likely.
For the vast majority of the population, and I suspect that includes quite a lot of politicians, the overcrowding crisis is just a system of numbers and statistics, albeit rather shocking ones. I know that for you, more than anyone else in the country, it means much, much more. It poses a huge problem that makes your job a great deal harder than it should be, and it impinges in a very real way on how you go about your work. It seems obvious, I understand, that when severely mentally ill individuals come into your prison it makes your job tougher. I understand that when inmates with drug addiction problems come into your prison it makes your job tougher, that when prisoners with alcohol addiction problems come into your prison it makes your job tougher.
I understand that when you are locking up more people in a cell than it is designed for it makes your job considerably tougher and when you are forced to shove inmates from pillar to post, hundreds of miles from their homes, it makes your jobs tougher. Now, all these factors add up to make the work you do all the more impressive — on our behalf, and on behalf of British public, all the more difficult. More than it should be, and more difficult than it need be, and you and your fellow members end up paying a real cost. As you are all too aware — I have heard some discussion about it in the session just earlier — there has been a massive escalation of violence in prison over the last decade. Research I did in Parliament recently — you may have seen some of it circulated in the press — has now revealed there is a violent incident taking place every 13 minutes in our prison estate, either an attack on an officer, a fellow prisoner, or self-harm. A violent incident more than once every quarter of an hour in your workplace is simply intolerable. The number of assaults by prisoners on prison officers has risen from 551 in 1996 to 2,971 in 2005. That is a 500 per cent increase in the last decade, a huge rise.
It seems to me if assault rates on police officers, nurses or firemen had risen so dramatically one can only imagine the political outcry and the headlines in the media, and it would a reaction which would be entirely justified. I believe that the increase in assaults on you and your fellow members should be treated just as seriously and that an outcry about it would be equally justified. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that the blame for this shocking state of affairs is in large part — not totally, but in large part — certainly exacerbated by the crisis of overcrowding. When you lock up large numbers of often violent and potentially violent young men in a space designed for half their number the results are regrettably predictable. It is like blowing into an already full balloon; we all know what will happen sooner or later. Yet the impact is not just to increase the risks of mass violence and rioting, although that is obviously bad enough, but it prevents prisoners being rehabilitated, from being turned away from a life of crime. If prisoners leave gaol unreformed, what follows is a spate of new crimes in our villages, towns and cities, committed by ex-prisoners after release.
This Government’s policy of mass incarceration is, in my view, quite simply making Britain less safe. The prison system we have today cannot deliver what it must; the successful rehabilitation of criminals. Rates of repeat crimes have never been higher either. 92 per cent of all young men given short-term prison sentences now go on to re-offend within two years. That is almost the entire cohort, a shocking and scandalous figure. Nearly two thirds of those released from prison re-offend within two years, up 10 per cent since this Government came to power, and I don’t think — I don’t want to mince my words: this is record of this Government, it is their responsibility, it is a shameful record. And let us also not forget that the economics of overcrowding are based on the sums of the madhouse. Only last week I uncovered some figures that show that it is now costing £1,800 a night to keep some prisoners in court cells, more than a night in a suite in the Ritz in central London.
The cost of keeping prisoners in police cells has already run into the millions. Now, the public rightly expect greater efficiency and an accountability than that. Talking about accountability at the moment you may be aware there is an important bill going through the Parliament, the corporate manslaughter bill. We believe, my party, that the bill should apply to Prison Service.
As things stand if you, individually, had held to be criminally negligent in the death of a prisoner you, and you alone, are personally liable. However, if there are failures higher up the chain, there is no means to hold the service as a whole fully legally responsible. This is unfair, and should be changed so the Prison Service as a corporate body is held accountable for decisions in just the same way as you are held liable on a personal basis. This Government says it agrees in principle but will not sign up to it in practice and don’t take the steps to make the necessary change. We will, I can promise you today, continue to fight this Parliament next week and in the weeks ahead. So the time has now come for us to push for that drastic action that Roy Jenkins spoke of a full 30 years ago.
Such action is so long, long overdue. But my guess is that my drastic action, or what I would suggest is drastic action, is different from what you would have heard from David Davis this morning, and it is different from the measures the Government is proposing. Because the Labour and Conservative parties, in my view, are participating in a Dutch auction over who can promise — not necessarily deliver — but who can promise the most prison places. But do you really believe that their rhetorical promises will provide a lasting solution to the crisis of overcrowding facing the Prison Service today. Let me be clear, I have not come — some of you may disagree with this — to try and outbid them, because I believe theirs is a futile bidding war. I simply do not believe you can build your way out of a prison overcrowding crisis until you ask yourself first why the prison population is rising is as fast as it is.
The 8,000 new prison places promised by Dr Reid will not become available until 2011, by which time every objective observer agrees that on current trend the prison population will have far grown in excess of that additional 8,000. It is like building extra lanes on the M25 motorway; they just fill up when they are built. So my party has a plan of action to meet the crisis in our prison service head on, by stabilising the prison population in our closed prisons, modernising and replacing the older parts of our prison estate and, crucially, using prison as a place to change offender behaviour and so cut the unacceptably high levels of re-offending. What we need is a strategy to make prison work, a new strategy which does not rely on tired old ideas that simply don’t work. Instead we need radical thinking and drastic action.
My party is proposing five steps: first, we must address a question which I know Colin, Brian and others have raised with me on numerous occasions of mental health in prison. Far too many individuals come to prison with acute mental health problems. It is now estimated that one in 10 of the prison population is functionally psychotic. Combined with this, of course, is also accumulating evidence that the primary health trust are not putting mental health at the very top of their priorities because they have so many others to deal with, with increasingly constrained resources. This can only make your job a lot more difficult. I think it is wholly wrong that you and your fellow prison officers should have to deal day in, day out with people with serious mental health problems. That is not your job. So surely, rather than spending millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money in a frantic effort to build prison cells as quickly as they are filled in makes more sense to invest the money in building more secure mental health treatment capacity. This would allow many of the prisoners you presently deal with in your prisons to be moved from the closed estate into more specialised, though no less secure, facilities. The vast majority of mentally ill inmates can be treated and can leave prison to play a full part in society, but only if they receive appropriate care when on the inside.
Second, there is a desperate need for coherent strategy to deal with drugs. I hear David Davis talked about this, this morning. This means we must similarly expand secure residential drug treatment. It is an open secret; all you know it better than I do, that our prisons have a massive drug problem. It is not a criticism of you, it is a criticism of this Government’s failed drugs policy. You are picking up the pieces of a failed national drugs strategy. Drug addiction, we know, lies behind so much criminality, yet there is no coherent strategy to tackle it. What we are proposing, in common with others, is an expansion, dramatic expansion, of secure residential drug treatment facilities to help tackle addiction.
Again, it is not your job to try to coax drug addicts away from their addictions — you are going to have a job enough to do that with the smokers, who are no longer allowed to smoke in their cells. As to secure mental health facilities, this approach not only makes the public safer, since it will help cut rates of repeat crime, it will also save the taxpayer money, by reducing the number of offenders who repeatedly occupy expensive places in our prisons in pursuit of their drug habit.
Third, we are making a radical promise on sentencing. We are proposing, and I accept it is not uncontroversial, that there should a presumption — not a total ban, but a heavy presumption, against prison sentences of less than three months. Your members across the country tell me, time and time again, that it is simply not worth sending someone to gaol for no more than a few weeks because you don’t get sufficient opportunity to work with them to change their behaviour. Now, where they are appropriate, for instance, non-violent offences, for non-violent offences we need to extend the use of noncustodial sentences as an effective alternative to prison. We need to consider ways to make community sentences more visible and rigorous in order to foster public confidence and make it clear that by working in the community offenders are making reparation to their communities, paying back to their communities and to their victims. It need not be a soft option. But when we send people to prison we should do so with the aim of not only punishing, of course, and putting them out of harm’s way, of course, but also to take the time to change their behaviour and so escape the dismal cycle of repeat crime.
Fourth, the Liberal Democrats believe education and training should become compulsory in all prisons. We should look to triple the number of paid work schemes in prison available to prisons approaching their release date. This will not be easy, but I have seen, in numerous visits to prisons, that it can be done. Quality paid work, such as the excellent national grid scheme in Reading gaol, which I visited last month, should and can be expanded through other parts of the prison estate. Offenders earn money to tide them over the crucial days and weeks after release, learn new skills, and so help turn themselves away from repeat crime. The re-offending rate in the national grid scheme is now a mere 7 per cent. We should work to make that the rule rather than the exception. Also on our proposals, a proportion of the money earned before release would be donated to a consolidated victims’ compensation fund. It seems to me just right that there should be a link between the work of offenders in prison and the compensation received by victims of crime.
Fifth and finally — you might be relieved to hear — we must start renewing the infrastructure of our oldest prison. Many of our prisons, and many of you work in them, are Victorian era relics ill-suited to modern prison life, a fact that I know you are much more aware of than I am. Crumbling bricks and mortar from a bygone era are not the best environment for you to do your jobs in. I see no good reason, never have, why the Government should not commit to a prison replacement building programme, so that the oldest prisons can make way for new facilities that are fit for purpose. I have heard excuses before: it is complex to find other sites, what do you do with the old sites while you build the new one; these are not insuperable problems; they have done it in other countries, we can do it here. Because we need prisons that are modern, that are well equipped, that are not overcrowded; in short, prisons that allow you to get on and do your jobs on our behalf. This need not cost the taxpayer a penny. Many existing prisons are in prime real estate locations, particularly in London, and could easily be sold for a considerable profit. Indeed, the Home Office’s own figures which I have extracted from them show the estimated land value of many existing prisons would comfortably cover the cost of building replacement facilities.
There are many other urgent issues that need to be addressed. The legacy of the foreign offenders scandal still lives on with you. There are far too many foreign offenders languishing in our prisons when they should have been allowed to go home — many of them want to go home — a long time ago. Or the scandalous neglect of the plight of many women prisoners as highlighted in the landmark recent report from Baroness Coulston. But I have tried to highlight today those steps I believe to be the most pressing of all. Prison reform has rarely been as near the top of the political agenda as it deserves, yet if there is any silver lining to the fact that the prison overcrowding crisis has now burst on to the media and headlines in the way that it has is that the public and the press are finally looking for new answers. The future of our whole criminal justice system depends on your work and on us leading a search for new ideas, instilling effective, compelling proposals for reform. I have visited a good number of prisons across the country over the last 18 months since I have been doing this job, and I have been struck by just how many good ideas are already out there. In prisons up and down the country I have spoken to countless prison officers with brilliant ideas they are keen to put into practice themselves. The Government needs to listen and learn from you, and others, who know what works on the frontline. In my view, not least having heard some of your deliberations today, they ignore you at their peril. Thank you very much for listening to me. Applause