Huhne on Crime and Punishment

4.27.00pm GMT Wed 25th Feb 2009

• [Feb 24]: Chris Huhne (Eastleigh) (LD): I HOPE that all of us, in all parts of the House, can agree that crime is too high, and that violent crime is a continuing and real concern. I hope that there is, therefore, a consensus on the ends, but where there is clearly not a consensus is on the means.

This debate should, in our view, be about what works. There is a clear pragmatic principle, but sadly it seems that the debate is not about that. Both the other parties are locked in a populist battle about punishment-about who can be tougher, who can promise longer sentences, and who can lock up more people. The Government have criminalised a generation of young people. We lock up more young people than any other country in Europe. In 10 years, the number of 15-to-17-year-olds in custody has risen by 86 per cent. Our overall prison population has doubled, and it is also the highest in Europe. The average Crown court sentence has risen from 22 months to 25 months since 1997.

At the same time, we have clearly succumbed to legislative diarrhoea, with 3,600 new criminal offences and 66 new criminal justice Bills. Bills are being used to send signals like press releases. Do we really need a new offence of setting off a nuclear explosion? Would not murder, or even criminal damage, have been sufficient? Is it any wonder that all who try to make the criminal justice system work, from police officers through barristers to judges, are mystified by the results of this legal whirling dervish?

The message from those on the Conservative Benches is not that the Government's toughness has failed but that it has not even been tried, which is extraordinary. The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) says that he wants "at home ASBOs" for young people, so that they can be marched off and put under curfew. As we have heard, those powers are already on the statute book to cover night-time. If I understand the hon. Gentleman correctly, he wants to extend them to cover all time other than time at school. He wants a presumption that everyone carrying a knife will suffer a custodial sentence. Let us leave aside the completely implausible cost of that proposal.

The hon. Gentleman says that cautions should not be issued in cases that would include harassment and assault without injury. He wants to curb bail so that more people would wait in cells before trial if they pose a risk to public safety. Such a broad definition would surely encapsulate most car drivers. More people would effectively be found guilty until proved innocent.

Philip Davies: The hon. Gentleman has talked of the number of people whom we lock up in this country. For every 1,000 crimes committed in this country, we lock up between 12 and 13 people. Can the hon. Gentleman name any other country in the world that locks up fewer people than 12 for every 1,000 crimes committed?

Chris Huhne: The hon. Gentleman knows that there is a difference between my party and his on whether it is more relevant to give the figure relating to the population which is always given in international comparisons, or to scrabble around for a figure in an attempt to persuade us that we are not punitive. The embarrassing-

Philip Davies rose-

Chris Huhne: Let me answer the hon. Gentleman's point before he intervenes again.

The embarrassing evidence for both the Government and the official Opposition is that punitiveness does not work to cut crime. For those who like simple correlations, a rise in the prison population against the recent fall in overall crime looks persuasive, of course, but the comparison does not look so persuasive when we note that the only country in the European Union where crime has risen since 1988 is Belgium. Everywhere else crime has fallen, including in the UK. In Denmark, there was a 9 per cent. fall in crime and a 9 per cent. cut in the prison population, and Finland offers a similar example. Outside the EU, in Canada there has been a 17 per cent. drop in crime with incarceration rates broadly stable.

David T.C. Davies: Does this not actually prove the point of those who say that prison works? Lots of people go into prison; lots of people suddenly decide it is not a good idea to commit crime; therefore, the number of crimes committed goes down and the prison population falls because there is no need to lock as many people up. That is why prison works, and prison is a bargain for the taxpayer.

Chris Huhne: The hon. Gentleman has clearly not been listening to my speech, and I suggest he studies it in Hansard tomorrow, because I have given him a lot of international examples of where there are falling prison populations combined with falling crime. That evidence presents a real problem for his argument.

Of course the criminal justice system matters. It matters if it stops reoffending, but ours does not-at least not adequately. Of the young men whom we lock up in prison for the first time with sentences of less than a year, 92 per cent. go on to reoffend-prisons are, frankly, colleges of crime. A former Conservative Home Secretary, David Waddington, said that prison was "an expensive way of making bad people worse."

We should use non-custodial means of dealing with young and first offenders far more, not because we are soft, but because it works. The Matrix Knowledge Group recently found that seven alternatives to prison were better value for money for the taxpayer in reducing reoffending-and I always thought the Conservatives were keen on better value for money.

Philip Davies: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that the number of people who commit crimes after being sentenced to prison for less than a year is very high, but will he concede that the longer people spend in prison, the less likely they are to reoffend? For those who spend more than four years in prison, the reoffending rate drops to about 35 per cent. Is not the answer, therefore, that these people should spend longer in prison, rather than less time?

Chris Huhne: I take it the hon. Gentleman is not making an application to join his party's Treasury team, because if so, he would suffer severe embarrassment on account of that suggestion; if he were to work through the public expenditure costs of what he appears to be suggesting, he would have to put up taxation enormously.

The truth is that as the Home Office's own sponsored research has shown, there is "no firm evidence regarding the extent to which raising severities of punishment would enhance deterrence of crime." Excuse the bureaucratic language, but let me translate: this is Home Office-sponsored research that says punishment does not work to cut crime. Of course, there must be prison for serious offences and for serial offenders, but what matters most in cutting crime is detection. We could introduce sharia law in this country, but we would not cut crime if the detection rate did not improve.

If we take the British crime survey definitions of crime and add in crime against young people under 16 and business crime, we can see that about one crime in 100 leads to a conviction in a court of law, and that is nothing like enough-I hope that the hon. Members for Shipley (Philip Davies) and for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies) agree. Detection rates of recorded crime have fallen back from 34 per cent. at the end of the '80s to 28 per cent. according to the latest figures. We can all agree that we need to cut police bureaucracy and to use more information technology, but anyone who thinks that they are the real or only problems has not studied the sharp differences in detection rates between police forces. Even for crimes such as violence against the person, to which the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell has rightly been drawing attention, detection rates vary from a low of 36 per cent. in the case of London's Metropolitan police to 67 per cent. in North Yorkshire. Of course, rural areas are easier to consider in this regard, but even like-with-like comparisons show big gaps in performance: Merseyside and Greater Manchester police manage rates of 54 per cent. and 50 per cent. respectively, which are far higher than the figure for the Metropolitan police.

What if we narrowed the differences with best practice? Some 400,000 more crimes would be detected if the average detection rate were close to that of the top 10 per cent. We need more police on the beat, which should be done by curbing prison costs and by scrapping the identity card scheme. Equally important, at a time of scrimping on budgets and real hardship for so many families, is the need for better and more effective policing.

Mr. Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con): Is the hon. Gentleman as concerned as I am that over the past three years the proportion of police officer time on the beat has shrunk from an extraordinarily low 15 per cent. to 10 per cent? The level is decreasing rather than increasing.

Chris Huhne: I certainly wish to ensure that police forces try to get as many officers in the front line, doing what the public want them to do, as possible. I believe that there are a set of answers on that issue, one of which is cutting bureaucracy and reducing the amount of time that officers have to spend repeating tasks that they have already done when they take their original notes.

May I discuss the broader question of how we improve efficiency? The Government had an answer in their Police Reform Act 2002-to set targets for everything that moved. That had some brutal impact, but the benefits of Gosplan-style centralism were always overestimated by the Labour party and only ever work in the most unsophisticated economy. Then we had the Green Paper, which sensibly suggested getting rid of targets and establishing serious local accountability instead. Unfortunately, the Home Secretary has now bottled the local accountability, so we are back to the system we had before 2002, which was found to have failed. What is it in the Government's view that will drive up police performance if it is not genuine local accountability? At least both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives agree on accountability, although we feel that the Conservative proposals are dangerously Napoleonic and Caesarist, and we would prefer a more pluralist and British model. I would be happy to give way at this point, but I see that no hon. Member wishes to intervene.

Strong local accountability would ensure a focus on improving performance on key local priorities and it would mean holding police officers to account. It is not in the interests of the vast majority of hard-working officers that a small minority of passengers go undisciplined, yet one would conclude that it is from the tiny number of police officers who are dismissed from their force under one incapability procedure or another. Those serious issues of police reform are ones that both the Government and the official Opposition, when they were in government, have run away from-one saw that in the Sheehy report in 1993 and in report after report by Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary. One of its more recent reports in 2004 said that we needed a

"fundamental review of concepts such as the single point of entry to the service, the 30-year police career and the current non-transferability of training, skills and qualifications".

If we are to remodel the criminal justice system on what works, it is inescapable that we must also invest more in the practical research that can test scientifically what works. The National Policing Improvement Agency should be given a wider remit and should aim to do for policing, and, indeed for the wider criminal justice system, what the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence does for medicine. We should also put public faith back into the crime figures by ensuring that we do not have repeats of today's rather unedifying spat between the Conservatives and Labour on whether or not the British crime survey or the recorded crime figures are correct. Let us make the Home Office statistical unit part of the Office for National Statistics itself. Let us make detection rates as well as crime figures available at ward level, so that people can see police progress as well as what the problem is.

Keith Vaz: We have discussed statistics, how many police officers have gone on the beat in the past 10 years and the statement from the chief constable of Gloucestershire that he will have to lose 60 police officers. These figures ought to be independently monitored, so that we have a proper set of statistics to debate.

Chris Huhne: I entirely agree with the right hon. Gentleman. We should try to ensure that the debates in this Chamber are about real differences of views, values and approach, based on the evidence, and are not extremely arid exchanges about which figures are right and which are wrong. We faced exactly this sort of problem in relation to economics in the 1980s, because when the Conservatives were in power they proceeded to change the unemployment figures time after time and it was only when the figures were put clearly under independent control, out of the hands of Ministers, that some restoration of public confidence in those numbers took place.

Let us end centralised targets and give local police authorities far more power. Let us head young people off from the criminal justice system early on, rather than have it come down on them with its full weight and turn them into lifelong criminals. Let us use community justice panels to decide how the punishment should fit the crime. The truth is that the Government have run out of ideas and are merely serving up another knee-jerk reaction of populist punitiveness. They no longer have any serious proposals to improve policing, even though the need to do so is manifest. The official Opposition look like reheated leftovers from the Blairite heyday: tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. What we need is a real change, a new approach and what works.