Queens Speech Debate - Home Affairs

Speech by Chris Huhne delivered to House of Commons on Wed 25th Nov 2009

I welcome this opportunity to discuss the proposals put forward in this year's Gracious Address. My hon. Friends have already pointed out that the Address is little more than an opportunity for electioneering, and the Government have admitted as much themselves. Much of the legislation stands little, if any, chance of making it on to the statute book, and is heading inexorably towards the wash-up and a soapy consensus. That is not necessarily a bad thing at this stage of a Parliament, but we have seen it all before, too often.

There is to be yet another criminal justice Bill-the 28th, on our count, since 1997-which throws together an essentially random selection of measures as diverse as the DNA database, about which we have just heard in some detail from the Home Secretary, domestic violence, gang injunctions, antisocial behaviour, wheel-clamping, mobile phones in prisons, and air weapons. This is legislation by grapeshot. Never mind the quality, feel the width.

Astonishingly, the proposed Crime and Security Bill will amend an Act that received Royal Assent only 13 days ago. This is swift revision even by the Government's prolix standards. I do not know what the Bill team at the Home Office have been up to, but they are clearly working overtime. In all this helter-skelter activity, and with the Home Office displaying all the symptoms of attention deficit disorder, where is the strategy? What are the Government trying to do? Are Ministers merely indulging in inane activity, like a hamster on a treadmill? I see in this frenetic energy no guiding purpose and no sense of direction. Our criminal justice system is crying out for an approach based on the evidence of what works, yet, once again, we have a Bill that proclaims populist objectives, regardless, in many cases, of the evidence and bereft of strategy.

The evidence suggests that prison should be for serious offenders and serial offences, not an everyday response to low-level thieving and other minor crime. Yet, looking at the big picture, we desperately need a shift from prison to other, more effective measures to stop reoffending. The reoffending rate for young men on their first prison sentence is 92 per cent. Prisons are just colleges of crime, where the young learn better the techniques that we would rather they did not learn at all.

Prisons are full of drug addicts, who should be treated elsewhere, and people with mental health problems whose circumstances are likely to be aggravated by their prison experience. Adopting a problem-centred approach to crime, in which we actually did what worked to cut crime, would do far more to prevent crime and to detect criminals so that they could be caught. That would provide a far greater deterrent than just being even tougher on the tiny minority of criminals whose case ends up in a court conviction. If we take into account the British crime survey figures and those for business crime, plus those for people under the age recorded by the BCS, probably only one in 100 cases ends up in a court conviction. People are therefore unlikely to be impressed by posturing on tougher punishments. In fact, so small is the probability of being caught that it would make precious little difference if we were to promise far tougher punishments.

This is why we need a new approach, with a much greater emphasis on detection. We also need more prevention, involving easy measures such as improving outside lighting, alarms and window locks. We need more detection, to ensure that criminals face justice. The prevention aspect of that agenda alone provides the main reason why crime has fallen further and faster in Liberal Democrat-controlled council areas than in either Labour or Tory-controlled areas. Since the peak of crime, crime in Liberal Democrat council areas has fallen by more than the national average, at 20 per cent. Conservative areas have performed less well than the national average, with rates falling 16 per cent. since the peak. Let us look at violent crime: down 6 per cent. in Conservative areas, but down by more than twice as much-by 14 per cent.-in Liberal Democrat-council areas. We are talking not about small samples, but about quite substantial areas, and what matters is what works. We need a big, strategic shift from prison to policing and probation, because catching more people who commit crime is a greater deterrent than more harshly punishing the few whom we do catch.

One of the biggest disappointments of the Gracious Speech and the Crime and Security Bill is that they represent yet another missed opportunity by the Government to show some real commitment to police reform. The National Policing Improvement Agency should be given a wider remit so that it can commission research into any measures that cut crime, including not only better policing methods, but measures outside the police. Chief officers should have greater discretion to manage their force, decide key staff changes and reward specialism.

The police contract-lifetime employment, now for 35 years, a single point of entry and pay linked to seniority rather than to talent or effort-should be urgently reviewed, as successive reports from inspectors of constabulary have pointed out. It was right to make a bonfire of the central targets and controls that have been introduced since 2002, but it was surely wrong for the Home Office not to cut back on the data requirements and red tape that went with that central control regime. It was surely wrong, too, to fail to put in place stronger local governance arrangements to pick up where Whitehall's meddling left off.

Chief officers must be responsible for operations, they must be independent and they must be operationally independent, but strategy and priorities must be determined by strong and representative police authorities that speak for their people throughout the force area. There should be better consultation at local, basic command unit or operational command unit levels, because that matters; but the real locus of accountability is where the money is decided, at police authority level, and only more powerful accountability will drive up policing standards towards the best.

Detection rates, even for violent crime, vary from 34 per cent. in the worst performing force, the Metropolitan police, to 67 per cent. in the best performing force in England and Wales. That is not an acceptable variation, and the public should not accept it. However, the Government have run away from the debate at the first whiff of gunshot from their own, Labour, councillors, and the official Opposition have proposed a system that makes strong men blench. One elected sheriff, in a multi-ethnic and diverse area such as Greater Manchester or the west midlands, would be a disaster, as the sheriff would be elected while ignoring the vast majority of his or her voters. That way lies insensitive policing, random stop-and-search and the Brixton riots. Without such reform, the measures heralded in the Gracious Speech are just tinkering around the edges. We need stronger local governance, but it has to be right and it has to be representative.

Even where the Government are faced inexorably with the need for reform because of court judgments, they manage to botch their response. Let us look at the DNA database. Of course, DNA should be used in criminal investigations, no one denies that; and it will go on being used. Forensics should be better supported than Ministers' reorganisation of the service suggests. However, the Government's proposal-a six-year period holding DNA even of innocent people-is still an extraordinary response to the European Court of Human Rights and to the age-old principle of British justice that we are innocent until proven guilty. Just under 1 million innocent people-I think that the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, who is not in his place, said that the figure is 750,000, but my information from a parliamentary answer of 15 October is that it is 986,000-now have their DNA on the database, yet 2.3 million people who were convicted before DNA was routinely collected do not have their DNA on the database. No wonder the effectiveness of the database is steadily falling.

Liberal Democrats favour instead a simple rule: if someone is convicted, their DNA will remain on the database; if they are innocent, it will not. By contrast, the Government's illiberal proposal is likely to be struck down again by the European Court, as it is not a proportionate response to a problem, and it still intrudes on the right to privacy guarded in the European convention on human rights.

The Labour Government's inadequate proposals on the DNA database are entirely typical of their approach to crime and civil liberties. Ministers have ignored the evidence of what really works to cut crime, but they have still managed to trample civil liberties underfoot. It is shocking, for example, that only one in five hospitals is providing the anonymised data that allow police to target violent hotspots and cut woundings by 40 per cent. In the case of Cardiff, that is clearly shown not in anecdotal evidence of the sort that the Home Secretary gave us on the DNA database, but in peer-reviewed, solid academic evidence of the type that he unfortunately proved rather too dismissive of in respect of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

The reality is that Ministers repeatedly come here with proposals that scythe away at the right to protest, the right to know how people have died at the hands of the state, the right to jury trial, the right to express oneself in a public place, the right to know what one is charged with when detained for up to 28 days, and the right to leave one's own home if a Minister decides otherwise in a control order. Rarely has so much that is so precious been sacrificed so enthusiastically on the altar of ineffectiveness.

That death of civil liberties by a thousand small cuts is precisely why Liberal Democrats have put forward a coherent and comprehensive Bill for repealing intrusions into hard-won freedoms. It is called the Freedom Bill. It proposes a reduction in the period of detention without charge from 28 days to 14 days. It advocates the abolition of the illiberal and discredited control orders regime-which, according to a recent front-page article in The Daily Telegraph, the Conservatives oppose. I was surprised to see that, given that whenever the measure has been up for annual renewal they have repeatedly refused to join us in the Lobby to show their opposition.

Our draft Bill also advocates renegotiating the unbalanced US-UK extradition treaty, with particular relevance to the current case of Gary McKinnon, who suffers from Asperger's syndrome; scrapping the illiberal and expensive identity cards scheme; and rolling back the surveillance state by curbing the use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, rather than removing the checks on police use of that Act, as the Conservatives propose. Only by putting together the cumulative losses of freedoms can we dramatise the effects of this Government since 1997, and indeed of the last Conservative Administration. The Freedom Bill is a key priority for us.

I turn to the stronger powers to tackle antisocial behaviour that have been suggested. It is a real and pressing problem across the country, as we all know from our constituencies. It can blight people's lives to live near or next to a family from hell. We will examine in detail the measures that the Government have brought forward in the Crime and Security Bill, and we will deal with them on their merits. Again, however, the strategy is far from clear.

We would instead introduce new community justice panels and positive behaviour orders and increase the use of acceptable behaviour contracts, while reserving antisocial behaviour orders as a last resort. There is a real problem with ASBOs at present, because they are honoured mostly in the breach. They are not used as a last resort, and they are not enforced properly. In response to the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies), who mentioned custody, ASBOs should be part of a graduated response to a problem rather than something that we go to early in the process, which merely brings them into disrepute. We would also pilot a youth volunteer force, to make engagement with the community more attractive to young people and to bridge the divide between young and old people. Activities could include the restoration of sports facilities or environmental projects, providing people with skills for the future.

I turn to immigration, which was an important feature of the remarks of the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) in particular. The Government have squandered opportunity upon opportunity to reform what is a broken system. The draft Immigration Bill is the ninth immigration Bill since 1997. If they were going to simplify the system all along, why have they used eight Acts to make it so complicated that the long-awaited and much lauded simplification Bill is now only ready to be published in draft? Their inability to tackle the issues involved simply beggars belief.

The debate on immigration should be based on the evidence of benefit to this country, not on scaremongering about British jobs for British workers or on whipping up yet more anti-immigration rhetoric. The abolition of exit checks by the Conservative Government, followed up by the Labour Government, means that we still have no idea how many people are in this country illegally. Nearly 2 million short-term visas are issued every year to students and others, but we still cannot check whether they have been respected by seeing whether the people who have been issued with them have left the country, as the UK Border Agency is still only able to check 60 per cent. of exits from this country. The Liberal Democrats would immediately reinstate exit checks, so that we could at least grasp the extent of the problem and ensure that short-term visas were respected. We would create a new national border force with police powers, so that our borders were properly controlled.

I did not hear anything from the Conservative Benches, or indeed the Labour Benches, about the benefits of legal migration. With a quarter of the doctors and half the nurses in London having been born overseas, the NHS would collapse without migrant workers. Migration must be able to respond to the diverse needs of different regions and industries, and a blunt cap on immigration of the sort proposed by the Conservatives-without any number attached to it, we note-would frankly be a Soviet-style response from a dynamic market economy such as that of the UK. Would we really refuse to allow Manchester City to sign Robinho at the transfer window because a cap had been reached, or refuse to allow some City of London firm to hire someone who could help create jobs for British people by bringing a skill that was not already available to us? That is just simple populism, not sensible policy.

North of the border in Scotland, even Conservatives want more migration and a larger population. In the south-east of England, by contrast, we are talking of desalination plants to provide fresh water, which clearly shows that we are reaching the environmental limits of population density, because such plants require fossil fuels to heat the water to evaporate the salt.

The Liberal Democrats would ensure that immigration works in the interests of the UK by creating a regional points-based immigration system, giving greater weight to skills and regions that need migrants and less to those that do not.

The home affairs aspects of this Queen's Speech are nothing new: yet more legislation, thrown together in a haphazard manner and designed only to attract headlines rather than tackle meaningful reform an any issue, from policing to civil liberties, immigration and the DNA database. This Government have created 3,600 new criminal offences since 1997 and we are still counting-such criminal offences as the creation of a nuclear explosion, as if murder and criminal damage were not enough to meet the contingency. We have seen sheaves upon sheaves of new Bills. If law was the answer to problems, we would have none. However, law is rarely the only answer, and sometimes not even a partial one. It is high time the Government concentrated on evidence and delivery rather than new Bills. If they did so, Britain would be a better place with a substantially lower crime rate.

Available online at:[http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmhansrd/cm091125/debtext/91125-0012.htm]