The All Party Parliamentary Group on Penal Affairs
Lord Ramsbotham has had a varied career, after rising to the rank of General in the Army he became the Chief Inspector of Prisons in 1995. This was a post that he filled for 5 1/2 years during which he had a somewhat confrontational relationship with both Jack Straw and Michael Howard. He was appointed an independent crossbench member of the House of Lords in 2005 where his passionate interest in penal affairs could be realised further. He is now Co-Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Penal Affairs and also President of the Koestler arts awards. CR Lord Ramsbotham, tell me who and what is the All Party Parliamentary Group on Penal Affairs? Is it like Select Committees but without the formality? Lord Ramsbotham (LR) All-Party Groups differ from Select Committees as they consist of members of both Houses, and, while minutes of meetings are issued, no official records are published. There are All Party Groups on every conceivable subject, whose meetings are open to the public, particularly those interested in the particular subject. They have to have co-chairs from each House, who, together with the other officers, have to be elected, or re-elected, at a formal annual AGM. The Penal Affairs Group, whose secretariat is provided by the Prison Reform Trust, meets once a month when Parliament is in session. Having incorporated two other All Party Groups, one on Prison Education and the other on Prison Health, one meeting each year is dedicated to those each of those subjects. the Custodial Review
Otherwise the agenda is discussed with and agreed by the officers, but it tends to include an address by the Secretary of State for Justice, or another Minister each year. Recently the Secretary of State asked for a meeting with us following the publication of her recent White Paper on prisons, and, in the run up to the Prisons and Courts Bill, we have had briefings about various aspects of penal affairs and the criminal justice system. The most recent speakers were the Inspectors of Prison and Probation, who spoke to us about where the tackling of reoffending is in the country. All meetings are open to members of the public, and a large number of penal organisations are regular attenders. There is always time for questions, but members get first chance. In sum we try to keep ourselves up to date and provide a regular forum for people interested in penal affairs to come and meet practitioners in the field. CR What is the effect that comes from this exchange of information and opinions? LR I think the people who attend our meetings are better informed, which is useful when amendments to proposed legislation are tabled. We aim to improve knowledge of penal affairs amongst Members so that they can take a meaningful part in debates. My co-chair, Dominic Grieve MP, who was the Attorney General, is very interested in the rule of law and human rights issues. Being a lawyer, he knows about the courts part of the Prison and Courts Bill, and is very keen that we should have a number of meetings devoted to those issues to enable this information to be spread. CR Changing topics: Over the last 20 years, has the prisons system got better or worse in your opinion? LR It’s worse than when I took over as Chief Inspector of Prisons in 1995, which was soon after the 1990 Strangeways riot and the 1991 publication of the White Paper, ‘Custody, Care and Justice’ following the Woolf Report. The White Paper contained 12 priorities that were called ‘The Way Ahead for the Prison Service’ by the then Home Secretary Kenneth Baker. Unfortunately, none of those priorities have been actioned. Instead various Home Secretaries have taken the Prisons Service in various mad directions. For instance, Jack Straw put prisons and probation together under the National Offender Management Service (NOMS). NOMS is nothing more than a bureaucracy in competition with the Ministry of Justice. Thank God Liz Truss has seen through that, and that it is madness to have both policy and operations in the hands of NOMS, to be judge and jury on their own proceedings. She’s broken up NOMS and taken policy back into the MOJ and left Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service with the operational side. Page 8
Mr Grayling was a disaster as Justice Secretary. First of all he destroyed Probation which I think was devastating. I must include my condemnation on the officials who didn’t stand up to him. They must have known it was nonsense to align probation with Department of Work and Pensions boundaries and not stick with its alignment with justice and regional boundaries in the country. Secondly to reduce prison staff numbers by a third was absolutely crazy, and I have often wondered how he was allowed to get away with that? The White Paper, Prison Safety and Reform, which was published last November was a poor successor to Custody, Care and Justice. My experience in the MOD was that White Papers only resulted from a lot of careful research by a lot of people into a lot of subjects. Prison Safety and Reform bears all the hallmarks of having been written in a hurry by one person. It is not a White Paper containing direction that can be turned into legislation, but a series of ideas which, to my mind, were just for consultation. Rather than announcing it as a blueprint for the biggest reform of prisons in a generation I think that Liz Truss should have revisited the 12 priorities of 1991, and that her thinking ahead, should have included unravelling some of the nonsenses introduced between 1991 and 2016. The 1991 White Paper was written following the biggest crisis in the prison system and the marvellous report on it, written by Lord Justice Woolf, is one of the great penal documents of all time. Had successive Secretaries of State built on it, and the resulting White Paper, they could have gone forward, however they didn’t. CR Do we seem to be at a tipping point now?
LR I think that Liz Truss has done two very brave things in the proposed new Bill. First of all she has put herself in the firing line, as being statutorily accountable for rehabilitation. Up to now the Secretaries of State for Justice have only been responsible for housing prisoners. I think is very brave of her to now say, “The buck stops with me, and I should be held accountable.” The second brave thing she has done is to make the Prisons Inspectorate responsible for holding her to account, by inspecting and declaring if prisons are failing and demanding that the Secretary of State for Justice should put it right. These changes give a structure on which to build. My concern is, and