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Baroness Masham of Ilton: My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Stern for her timely Question. For many years I was a member of a board of visitors—now called independent monitoring boards—at a young offender institution. The appalling situation of the racial incidents at Feltham young offender institution has sickened me and is one of the many reasons why the robustly independent voice of prison inspectors should not be endangered with plans to create a merged inspection team, covering the whole criminal justice system. To put a racist skinhead with a history of violence alone in a cell with an Asian inmate seems more than unwise and for prison officers to handcuff a young man and smear him in boot polish is bullying of the first order.
I read in the press that two Home Secretaries failed to act decisively on lay visitors' concerns about frequent suicide bids, squalor and mismanagement at Feltham going back to before 1996. I take it that the lay visitors mentioned were members of the board of visitors who, each year, send a report to the Home Secretary.
It is most frustrating for members of monitoring boards if their concerns are not adhered to. The boards are made up of a variety of people, many of whom are magistrates who give their time freely to try to see that all is well at the prison establishments that they serve. They do rota visits and interview inmates and can pick up all sorts of worrying situations and vibes. It is of the greatest concern if there are cover-ups and if inmates, many of whom are the most deprived and difficult members of society, are put at unnecessary risks from other inmates and bullying prison officers.
Prisons cover so many different categories of person: remand prisoners; murderers, drug addicts; alcoholics; women; children; babies; burglars; driving offenders; rapists; fraudsters; sexual offenders; young; old; disabled. In fact there can be anyone from all parts of the world. There is the prison estate, the closed and open establishments, education and health. The prison inspectors have a great deal to inspect if they are to do a thorough and comprehensive job.
The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, has warned that the scale of inspections of individual prisons could be reduced if a merger takes place of the whole criminal justice system. She said, and I agree, that it is a "critical human rights safeguard" that the prison inspectors have the ability and resources to go
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into any prison at any time without warning and that they remain sharply focused on inspecting individual places of custody. There is so much to cover.
Crime reduction and community safety are of vital importance, especially now that we must put up with increased drug and alcohol abuse in the community, but prisons are a different matter. The one category that perhaps should be brought in closer to the prison inspectorate is the probation service, as this would help with rehabilitation in the community as regards, for example, tagging and community work. A close link with prisons would be useful, but the inspectorate for prisons must be independent above all else. I hope that the Minister will give us a satisfactory reply tonight.
Lord Acton: My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, on asking this key question. It gives me enormous pleasure to pay special tribute to my noble friend Lord Merlyn-Rees, for he is the ultimate forefather of the Chief Inspector of Prisons and the prisons inspectorate. It was he who, in November 1978, set up the May committee of inquiry into the organisation of the Prison Service. The May committee reported after the general election of 1979, and in April 1980 the Conservative Home Secretary, Mr William Whitelaw, accepted its recommendations for an inspectorate of prisons. He later announced the appointment of the first HM Chief Inspector of Prisons.
The initial 1981 report of the Chief Inspector of Prisons gave a succinct summary of the May committee's deliberations and recommendations about prison inspection, which are still highly relevant. His report said:
"The Chief Inspector was a member of the Prisons Board and inspections were therefore performed as a management task with correspondingly limited terms of reference, and reports were presented to the Board: they were not published. May saw a need to separate the inspectorial from the management function and to promote openness, as the means of providing an independent and authoritative check on the work that the Prison Service did on behalf of the public".
I particularly stress those words,
Those are the words from the beginning. The Chief Inspector went on:
"Thus in paragraph 5.61 of their report the Committee concluded 'we have no doubt both that the Prison Service would benefit from and that public sentiment requires that . . . the Prison Service should be opened up to as wide an audience as possible. We therefore think that there should be a system of inspection of the Prison Service which . . . should be distanced from it as far as may be practicable'".
"The committee went on to recommend that the Chief Inspector be a Crown appointment answering directly the Home Secretary with a small staff of appropriate experience, and proposed that their reports be published".
The Home Secretary gave the chief inspector terms of reference, and in 1982, the chief inspector and the terms of reference alike were enshrined in an amendment to the Prisons Act 1952, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, reminded us.
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The pith of the amendment was that the chief inspector was to inspect prisons and, in particular, report to the Secretary of State on the treatment of prisoners and conditions in prisons.
The system has now worked splendidly for a quarter of a century. When one reflects on the era of the late Judge Tumim, of Sir David Ramsbotham and now of Anne Owers, they have more than passed the May committee's test of,
They have reported fearlessly on the treatment of prisoners and conditions in prisons and have been a shining example. Indeed, on 28 June last year, my noble friend the Minister, in reply to a question about Anne Owers said that,
I believe that she spoke for the whole House.
However, storm clouds are gathering over the chief inspector. In another place, in a Question for Written Answer, Mrs Curtis-Thomas asked,
"what assessment has been made of the possible merits of a merger between the inspectorates of constabulary, prisons and probation?".
Paul Goggins, the prisons Minister, answered:
"The Government will consult early in the new year on more coherent arrangements for the end to end inspection of the criminal justice system. There is recognition of the need for inspection to better reflect the way services are delivered and to ensure a user perspective is properly built into the process".—[Official Report, Commons, 15/11/04; c.1105W.]
I suggest that the present system of prison inspection is not only coherent but admirable. The user perspective of the prisoners is admirably built into the process and nothing should be done which would, to use the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, dilute or erode the present time-tested system.
I hope that during this consultation the Government will ask three key questions. How would merging the prisons inspectorate with other inspectorates improve the inspection of prisons? How would merging the prisons inspectorate with other inspectorates improve the lot of prisoners? Above all, is not there a danger under both heads of a grim deterioration?
Lord Mayhew of Twysden: My Lords, I hope that I may be permitted to intervene briefly in the gap. I have two reasons for wanting to do so.
First, I knew Judge Tumim for very many years, and I have known for a number of years General Ramsbotham. Neither of them could be said to have been drawn from the ranks of the anarchist hard left. They were drawn from the ranks—which thank goodness are fairly plentiful in this country—of people of utter determination to do their jobs fearlessly, and people of courage and integrity.
My second reason is that I have learnt in a lurid career the importance of perception, and the way in which it can take root and become just as important,
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if not more important, than reality. If Her Majesty's Inspector of Prisons is to be merged with other inspectorates of the criminal justice system, and if he or she is to report to an official rather than the Home Secretary, the perception will be that this is a deliberate downgrading of that function and that it derives from the discomfiture of the executive at the trenchant terms in which successive inspectors have expressed their anger at
I hope that the Minister will find time to say whether she accepts that those perceptions will arise, and if so, what steps the Government can possibly take to dispel them.
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