My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Sainsbury of Turville, I beg to introduce a Bill to make provision enabling an enforcement notice under Section 19 of the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 to impose a requirement under subsection (2) of that section in relation to a person. whether or not a requirement under subsection (1) of that section is, or may be, imposed in relation to that or any other person. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.

My Lords, there can be no doubt that one of the main obligations of any government is to provide security for their citizens. That means providing protection from crime and the fear of crime. Public protection is one of the central themes of the gracious Speech. It is a key priority for the Government. We believe that public services must improve. That means better healthcare, better transport, better housing and better education. All of that is of little value for our communities, if they do not feel safe.

We have dedicated ourselves to fighting crime and anti-social behaviour since we took office. We make no apology for that. We have made some progress. For five years, crime has fallen overall, and, last year, the chances of becoming a victim of crime were the lowest that they have been since the early 1980s. According to the British Crime Survey, overall crime has fallen 22 per cent since 1997. Domestic burglary is down 39 per cent, and car crime is down 26 per cent. The street crime initiative has reduced the number of recorded robberies in the 10 worst areas by 25 per cent, compared with the same period last year. The safer communities initiative, launched in April 2002. has provided £20 million of extra resources to help local crime reduction partnerships to tackle crime locally.

The introduction of anti-social behaviour orders and parenting orders in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 has been widely welcomed. On 12th November, Mr Frank Whiteley, spokesman on anti-social behaviour for the Association of Chief Police Officers and Deputy Chief Constable of Northamptonshire Police, said:

"Anti-social behaviour is a blight in too many communities and neighbourhoods … The first priority for the police is. to protect the public, and ASBOs can help us achieve that, by setting the boundaries of what is acceptable and seeing that the law is enforced".

We have much more to do. The people who most need the changes are those living in deprived communities and members of the black and minority ethnic communities. Black and ethnic minority people's experience of crime is the same as—in some cases, worse than— that of white communities. Ten per cent of black people are victims of personal crime in a year, compared with 8 per cent of white people and 7 per cent for Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian groups. The fear of crime is substantially higher than for their white counterparts, and not just for racially motivated crime; the rate is almost twice as high for crimes such as burglary. robbery and rape.

When we arrived in government, the view was that crime would rise and there was little that we could do about it. Levels of crime, the argument went. were preordained by economic factors. Over the years, the factors relied on to explain the crime figures changed. Sometimes, they arose from the poorness or the economic situation, sometimes from its strength. Whichever might prevail as the critical factors., the important message was that crime was beyond the control of mere governments. Those predictions were wrong. I refer back to the figures that I quoted.

We will never eradicate crime. Economic and social factors certainly have their part to play in determining who commits crimes and when, but we do not accept the view that there is little that governments can do to reduce crime. By addressing both crime and its causes, we can make progress—progress that makes a real difference to individuals, communities and society as a whole. However, there must be some clear and accepted building blocks in the fight against crime: improved and reformed policing; real partnership between the criminal justice agencies, who must share goals and work effectively together; and a recognition that anti-social behaviour is as corrosive to communities as other crimes. People must have confidence that that, too, is being fought by the state.

The causes of crime must be addressed as well. That requires real partnership, in particular between the criminal justice system and the wider public, private and voluntary sectors. Much crime is now international—drugs, people trafficking and money laundering. International police and judicial cooperation is required to fight crime. Sentencing must focus more on reducing reoffending—on rehabilitation as well as punishment. Drugs fuel much crime. To reduce reoffending, we must address the drug cause of crime. If an offender has been offered and has not taken treatment, he should know that the consequences for him in the criminal justice system will become substantially worse.

The criminal justice system focuses too much on the defendant and too little on the victim. It must be rebalanced in favour of the victim. The court process, from charging to sentence, requires fundamental reform to make it more focused and effective in dealing with crime. It is vital, in reform of the criminal justice system, that certain principles should be regarded as sacrosanct. Those principles—the three fundamental principles on which our criminal justice system is based—are the independence of the judiciary; the presumption of innocence and the principle that a defendant can be found guilty of a criminal offence only when the state has proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; and the use of jury trial as the norm for serious cases. Our reforms maintain those central principles.

Legislation, of course, is only one part of the reform process. It is an important part because it provides a framework, unblocks problems and sends clear messages. Just as important is helping and supporting the people who work in the criminal justice system in the job that they do. We must help them to think and act differently. That is why as much change as possible should go with the grain of those who work in the system. We have crafted our proposals with that in mind. We know that some lawyers have objected to a number of our proposals, but they have broadly supported and endorsed the need for fundamental reform. We hope that we can persuade them that the system can and should change for the better.

English law has never stood still. Its strength has always been its ability to adapt to changing times. Now is the time for change. The people who depend on the criminal justice system and the criminal law are the communities who look to it for protection. We will not compromise the three fundamental principles, but our communities expect a better performing criminal justice system, and they are entitled to it. That is the approach that we have adopted. We have passed Acts to promote partnership and to provide the police and local authorities with better tools to deal with crime and anti-social behaviour. We have passed legislation to reform police practices. We have passed legislation to make it easier to remove from criminals the proceeds of crime. We have passed Bills to fight terrorism. All of those Bills have helped us to progress towards our aims. Now is the time for fundamental reform of the criminal justice system to make it effective in the fight against crime.

I turn first to the Criminal Justice Bill, which is to be introduced later today in another place. The proposals in the Bill will rebalance the system in favour of victims, witnesses and communities and deliver justice for all by building greater trust and credibility. They will address revolving door justice, whereby offenders are arrested, charged and bailed only to commit further offences. The Criminal Justice Bill will reform the criminal trial processes by making changes to the rules of evidence, double jeopardy, juries and appeals. It will put sense into sentencing through comprehensive reform of the sentencing framework. It will introduce provisions to address drug-related and juvenile offending and it will improve the treatment of victims and witnesses.

In all those criminal justice reforms, we aim to ensure that crime is effectively addressed without risking miscarriages of justice. We want to create a system which convicts the guilty, acquits the innocent and reduces offending and reoffending. The courts reform Bill will bring the administration of the courts below the House of Lords into a new, single organisation accountable to Parliament through my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor.

The gracious Speech made clear that the attack on anti-social behaviour will be among the Government's highest priorities in the current Session. Since we came into government, we have focused steadily on improving the prospects of the most deprived communities. Because those communities suffer disproportionately from anti-social behaviour, we have given special emphasis to measures that will help communities to fight back against loutish behaviour in all its forms—whether graffiti, noise nuisance, harassment, abuse, or any of the mindless actions that can make life intolerable for law-abiding people.

The anti-social behaviour Bill that we will introduce will build on well-laid foundations. I cannot yet give your Lordships a definitive list of its provisions, but I expect it to include measures to enhance the use of fixed penalty notices and anti-social behaviour orders; to address the problems caused by the misuse of airguns; further to improve the range of measures available to encourage parents of unruly children to face up to their responsibilities; to ensure that businesses whose activities contribute directly to antisocial behaviour contribute to the costs of policing to which it gives rise; and to improve our efforts to prevent the splattering of buildings with graffiti.

Of course, those legislative measures will not be the whole story. Only by ensuring that they and the measures already in place are enforced vigorously will we achieve success. We are setting up a new interdepartmental team in the Home Office that will bring to the fight on anti-social behaviour the project-focused approach that has already shown its value in the reduction of street crime. The anti-social behaviour Bill will strengthen the armoury of measures available to tackle that insidious problem. The Government will work tirelessly with our partners in the communities to ensure the success of that campaign.

The Government are committed to combating corruption, which, left unchecked, can undermine transparent and democratic government and cause considerable damage to all aspects of commercial and public activity. Our Bill on corruption, based on recommendations of the Law Commission and of the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege will send out a clear message to all sections of society that corrupt practices will not be tolerated. It brings together the various overlapping offences of corruption into a single statute and puts beyond question that the offences cover everyone, making the law more effective and easier to apply.

The publication of the Bill in draft this Session before its full introduction next Session is to enable full scrutiny and constructive discussion. We addressed the ma in international corruption issues in the Antiterrorism. Crime and Security Act 2001 and extended the existing offences overseas. But the existing offences as a whole are in need of rationalisation and modernisation. That is what we intend to achieve.

Tackling international crime and terrorism requires better and faster co-operation with European Union partners. Crime, including people trafficking and drug trafficking, does not stop at national boundaries. The Crime (International Co-operation) Bill will significantly improve our ability to tackle serious crime across Europe. It will implement a number of European Union measures to which the Government have signed up in recent years, including those on the European Union post-September 11th road map or action plan. It will bring down the barriers to successful cross-border investigations and prosecutions. Its implementation of the mutual legal assistance convention, improving co-operation not just between judicial authorities but between police or customs authorities, will be of great importance in the fight against organised crime.

We have brought forward a Bill to modernise and simplify our outdated extradition laws. It is simply ridiculous that at the start of the 21st century we are trying to operate an extradition system that is largely unchanged from that of the 19th century. So the Bill will remove fugitives' current opportunities to raise spurious points time and again, which results in some cases taking five years or more to resolve. Such delays do nothing for Britain's standing in the world and are a great disservice to the victims of crime who are denied justice. Within the European Union, extradition will become a judicial matter rather than a largely political process. For the first time, all of our EU partners will be obliged to extradite their own nationals and those accused of fiscal offences.

If we are serious about fighting terrorism and other serious international crime, we must have in place modern extradition arrangements. That includes the European arrest warrant. The European arrest warrant will ensure that we will be able to get those accused of serious crime in Britain back to stand trial within three months. Despite the scare stories emanating from the Benches opposite, no law-abiding citizen need have anything to fear from the European arrest warrant. As the draft Bill we published in June makes clear, there are important safeguards for those here who are the subject of a European arrest warrant.

The issue of sexual offences and the sex offenders register was dealt with in detail in the Statement that was made on Tuesday. With the permission of the House, I shall not say anything further about that.

Since we came to power in 1997, we have been embarked on a methodical process of fighting crime and anti-social behaviour. The result has been an overall reduction in crime since 1997, but there is much more to do. Indeed, it is clear to everyone that the fight against crime and anti-social behaviour is not one to which there are a handful of simple solutions. It is a process which takes time and commitment and an understanding that communities expect us—rightly—to provide the law enforcement authorities and the criminal justice agencies with the appropriate means to fight the scourges of drugs, crime and anti-social behaviour. We hope that the House will join with us to enact those measures to provide the confidence and safety that the people of Britain are entitled to expect.

My Lords, the legislative programme for this Session is indeed dominated by the six Bills from the Home Office and the Lord Chancellor's Department. On listening to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, reciting the huge successes of the Government in sweeping away crime from society, one wonders why they need so many Bills.

It feels as though we are stuck in groundhog day—the ever repeating day that one cannot escape—and facing the same government Bills. Session after Session; the same unwillingness to think through changes before forcing them through another place by guillotine and timetabling Motions and the Government then finding that they need to make substantial changes in this House when the Bill is thoroughly scrutinised, changes that are often made at a late stage.

Surely the Government should have learnt by now that legislation on criminal justice matters is very much a blunt instrument for changing social behaviour. The centrepiece of the programme is yet another Criminal Justice Bill, the 12th or 13th—perhaps unlucky 13—since 1997. Yet the number of offenders brought before the courts has remained static at 218,000 a year. Five years after the Prime Minister said that he would be tough on crime, a crime is committed every five seconds. The number of solved crimes has fallen by 18 per cent in the past five years; street crime has increased by almost a third in the past year.

Rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of victims sounds a laudable objective—who on earth could complain about that?—but it will only work while the system itself is credible. If all it achieves is the punishment of more innocent people, who are then released at some future date to claim compensation for their ruined lives, the Government will have taken a retrograde step back into the 19th century instead of leading us forward into the 21st. In the mean time, it will have done nothing to help the victims of crime.

If the Home Secretary is tempted to be carried away by a desire to appeal to populism and dismisses too lightly the unintended negative consequences of that desire, it is the victims of crime who will suffer. As my right honourable friend Iain Duncan Smith said in another place last week,

"One does not fight crime by undermining the civil liberties of law-abiding citizens while allowing thugs and criminals to walk free".—[Official Report, Commons, 13/11/02; col. 19.]

Overall, these Bills do not offer a long-term coherent strategy to solve the problem of crime. That is what our own policy proposals, which we have been developing and publishing over this year and will continue to do over the following year, would do.

Looking to the detailed proposals in the individual Bills, of course there are many that we will support, and support strongly. If any Bill escapes the trap of groundhog day, it is the Sexual Offences Bill, to which the noble and learned Lord referred briefly. I accept his reasons for not going into detail as we had an opportunity to do so on Tuesday. I simply take the opportunity to repeat our commitment to ensuring that we have proposals which meet the needs of those who are vulnerable to sexual abuse, whether they are those who have a mental incapacity or children. It is something that this House is well able to scrutinise. I was pleased to hear the noble and learned Lord the Leader of the House say that he anticipated the Bill would start in this place.

As to the Criminal Justice Bill, the Government have made much of their proposals for new sentencing options, those of custody minus and custody plus. Both are interesting, but it will be vital for them to be properly resourced. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer sees them as a cheap way of emptying our overcrowded prisons, he will be sorely disappointed.

Above all, we will need to look very carefully at the points where the Government trespass upon the ancient rights of the subject. Protection of individuals from miscarriages of justice is an essential part of the Government's duty. There will be much debate in this House over any restriction on jury trial; over moves to abandon the double jeopardy rule; and over moves to give foreign police the right to arrest people in this country for activities that are not crimes under British law.

If the double jeopardy rule is abandoned and police and prosecutors know that they can have a second go, that will do nothing to encourage them to ensure that the investigation is competent and exhaustive in the first instance. On the other hand, who can fail to be outraged when a defendant who has been acquitted of an offence promptly presents himself or herself to a Sunday newspaper and sells his or her story on the basis that he or she was acquitted and got away with the crime. That must offend all of us.

Is there not a danger that the proposals on the admission of hearsay evidence put forward by the Government, and the disclosure of previous convictions, will create more unreliable convictions? As Liberty's Mark Littlewood said last week,

"blaming fair trial protections for crime rates is wrong and misleads the public".

Less than 10 per cent of people brought to court are acquitted. He continued:

"The real problem is that in over a¾of all crimes—over 4 million a year—no-one is arrested".

We are very concerned at the Government's recidivism over jury trial. Yet again they are trying to force through Parliament plans to abolish it having been defeated twice in the past. They seek to get round objections now by abolishing trial for a restricted list of offences.

But the Government's principles seem to be grounded on quicksand. The first time round, when they tried to abolish jury trials it was for offences triable either way and for lesser offences; now they have gone the other way and want to abolish trial for the serious offences they list. We shall question in careful detail where is their logic for that shift of ground. To mix my metaphors, is this the thin end of the wedge for an eventual demand to abolish jury trials in further cases?

I listened with care when the noble and learned Lord said that jury trial should be a norm—one of the three key principles that the Government put forward. We believe that it is a norm that should not be breached, and we believe that the Criminal Justice Bill is about to do that.

I should have thought that by now the Government would have taken note of public opinion on this. As the Bar Council's Matthias Kelly said last week,

"People trust juries, and want a justice system which features juries wherever possible".

I turn now to the Extradition Bill and the Crime (International Co-operation) Bill. The Crime (International Co-operation) Bill provides in the main a constructive framework for police and judicial cooperation and we look forward to working with the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, on these matters shortly. We agree that the processes for arrest and extradition need to be more streamlined and effective, but we do not want to give foreign police powers to search and arrest in the United Kingdom except for terrorism offences.

I read carefully the reports today in the press of comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, and others in the Government. with regard to the publication yesterday of the Crime (International Cooperation) Bill. We are concerned that, in hot pursuit, police from the European Union may come into this country armed and will not be under the operational control of our own police forces during the five-hour period. The noble Lord, Lord Filkin, said that there is a quid pro quo and that our police have rights in return, but I do not believe that that is a justification for what is being attempted in the Bill. In particular, the one border more than any other where perhaps one might want the facility is barred to us—that is, the border with Ireland.

We are deeply sceptical about the Government's proposals in the Extradition Bill. We accept that the authorities must have power to detain terrorist suspects in one country for crimes they have committed in another, but we will vigorously oppose any new powers to arrest and deport British citizens for activities that are not crimes in the United Kingdom, and any measures which compromise the presumption of innocence or habeas corpus.

I turn to the anti-social behaviour Bill, which the noble and learned Lord explained in some detail. We have concern that this seems to be a measure simply to seize the headlines. Of course society would like to support action to reduce anti-social behaviour—why not?— but the Government have already had two goes and failed. How can we be sure that they will get it right this time? Or will it be a case for them of three strikes and they are out?

Only 644 anti-social behaviour orders have been issued since 1999, despite predictions that 5,000 would be issued each year. NACRO has just published research into the effectiveness of the orders. It says that they are,

"cumbersome, costly and difficult to enforce".

It discovered that the average order cost over £5,000 to enforce and took more than three months to obtain. More than one-third of the orders were breached within the first nine months. No child curfew orders had been issued at all, despite changes to the law raising the age of' the child on whom they could be applied from 10 to 16 years.

Will the Government's plans for reducing antisocial behaviour actually work in practice? That is the real question. The major problem is lack of a clear definition of what constitutes anti-social behaviour. It is undesirable and unpleasant, but it is not always criminal.

It is important to tackle the problems of anti-social behaviour, but we need to find the reasons behind it and do something about them. The Government need to look again at how services are provided to children and families who require support before problems escalate and children are drawn into the criminal justice system along the conveyor belt to crime.

What is needed to counter such behaviour is a more holistic approach, combining enforcement with preventive measures tailored to individual local conditions. That way, and only that way, can we hope to get children off the conveyor belt of crime at an early stage.

Finally, I turn to the courts Bill which proposes changes to the administration of justice. Later today my noble friend Lord Kingsland will go into more detail. An efficient court structure is vital if we are to make the criminal justice system more effective and efficient. We shall want to examine carefully the plans to merge the magistrates' courts and the Crown Court into a single new criminal court. It is important that local decision-making is not altogether sacrificed to national control. We would not want resident judges turned into glorified court managers. Above all, we wish to be sure that the changes do not sacrifice effectiveness and fairness on the altar of M r Brown's budgetary diktats.

This vast package of home affairs and legal affairs legislation will need to be painstakingly examined in this House so that the Government's claims can be subjected to proper scrutiny. Where we are convinced that the practical effect of the proposals will work well, we will support them—and support them thoroughly. But we shall not shirk from opposing headline-seeking measures if it is shown that they will do nothing to help the victim and everything to undermine the fairness of our criminal justice system. In seeking rightly to increase the efficiency with which we convict the guilty, we must never reduce the efficiency with which we acquit the innocent.

My Lords, once again we are faced with a number of Bills on criminal justice matters. There seems to be an insatiable appetite on the part of the Government to enact such legislation as an answer to society's ills. We have seen the introduction of criminal justice legislation in almost every Session of Parliament since Labour came to power, even before the previous legislation had a chance to bed down.

Some legislative measures are important and we will support those. Others will require detailed scrutiny to ensure that rights and liberties of individuals are not trampled on beyond that which is necessary. We have moved from the days when the Left and Right fought the battle to claim the high ground on criminal justice matters. The battle now is between liberal and illiberal measures. There must be something wrong when even the Daily Telegraph now stands to the Left of the Labour Party on criminal justice matters. Let me quote from the editorial of 14th November reporting on the Queen's Speech:

"Even worse is the way the Government is prepared to shunt aside anything that stands in the way of this relentless centralisation. There can surely never have been such a comprehensive attack on the liberties and safeguards of the British legal system as that outlined yesterday. The curtailment of trial by jury, the admission of hearsay evidence, the abolition of the protection against double jeopardy, the proposal that previous convictions might be revealed to juries before they consider the verdict; the combined effect of these measures must be radically to rebalance the scales of justice in favour of the state and against the defendant. We will doubtless be told, as always. that this is justified by the need for 'joined up government'. But the whole point of the legal system is that it should not be a 'joined up' agency of the state but independent. It must contain within itself the essential checks and balances on which liberty depends.

All past experience suggests that these measures will do little to reduce crime or enhance the effectiveness of the police but they will certainly increase the risk of injustice. The irony is that all this is being proposed by a government that constantly trumpets its commitment to human rights. For those who value civil liberty, this was a deeply depressing Queen's Speech".

The context in which we operate offers distinct solutions as to how we should tackle crime and criminality. We can stop mugging by locking up all the old ladies, but we do not do that. Instead, we can look at the way in which so many of our young people feel excluded from the process of meaningful citizenship and more purposeful opportunities. Simply relying on the criminal justice process may become counterproductive.

Of course we should be aware of opportunities and threats. For example, no one can dispute that a rising prison population threatens positive initiatives. Equally, we need a commitment to help and reduce social exclusion and crime. It is for these reasons that we intend to challenge the negative and encourage the positive developments, while all the time never forgetting people who would remain at the margins of our society.

On the political front there is now a growing consensus that the "tough on crime" posturing of the past decade has been harmful rather than helpful to the serious debate about crime. Tough talking on crime may well play with some of the electorate but rarely makes for good policy.

We often reflect public opinion in shaping criminal justice policies, but measure this against opinion polls that tell us that the public hold negative views of the system. People's expectations are far too great and the ability of the criminal justice system to deliver is strictly limited. Media hype on crime does not help. We should be talking up and not talking down the effectiveness of non-custodial alternatives to punishment.

Of course society needs to be protected from the anti-social behaviour of the few. Tackling this is high on the agenda of both the Government and local agencies. We can criminalise anti-social behaviour but it has little effect on the perpetrators. In essence, local partnerships together with local communities should be encouraged to identify local problems, develop strategies and action plans and evaluate their interventions to inform future practices. On-the-spot fines look attractive, but a good citizenship programme is more effective than any criminal sanctions imposed. The threat of custodial penalties has little effect on those who are socially excluded.

Let us look at some facts—and these are government figures. Ex-prisoners commit around I million recorded crimes each year—roughly one-fifth of the total—at a cost to society of £11 billion. Prisoners tend to come from and return to socially excluded backgrounds. Prisoners are 13 times more likely than the general population to have been in care as children and 14 times more likely to be unemployed. Some 60 to 70 per cent were using drugs before imprisonment. More than 70 per cent suffer from at least two mental disorders. Over half of male prisoners and more than 70 per cent of female prisoners have no qualifications at all. The vast majority have reading, writing and numeracy levels below those expected of an 11 year-old. The reconviction rate is running at nearly 60 per cent over two years. Almost half will be returning to prison in this time. We need to tackle the real causes of crime; that is, poor education, housing and employment prospects. This is where our measures should effectively be directed.

The provisions of the Queen's Speech relating to criminal justice contain a number of helpful measures together with others which are of serious concern to many who are concerned with the quality of justice. The Government's overall aim for the criminal justice system is described in the Queen's Speech as,

"to reform and rebalance the criminal justice system to deliver justice for all and to safeguard the interests of victims, witnesses and communities".

There is no doubt that in the past victims have all too often been insufficiently supported, informed, helped and compensated by the criminal justice process. But we must remember that it does no service to the victim if the wrong person is convicted of the offence.

We are concerned, for example, about the proposal to inform juries of the previous convictions of defendants. There are some limited circumstances in which defendants' past behaviour can be of genuine evidential value—for example, if it shows a unique modus operandi which is also part of the current offence—but in most cases telling the jury of past convictions runs the risk that defendants will be convicted because juries are thinking of what they have done in the past, even though the evidence that they committed the current offence may be thin. That is a recipe for injustice.

The proposal to abolish the double jeopardy rule in cases of serious crime is also a matter of concern. There are exceptional cases in which the emergence of later evidence shows with scientific certainty that a previously acquitted defendant must have committed the crime, the most obvious example being DNA evidence. But few cases are as clear cut as this, and there is a real danger that abolishing the rule could have oppressive results by hauling individuals back before the courts because of new evidence which is far from clear cut. Changing the rule could also provide a disincentive to the police and Crown Prosecution Service to get things right first time round.

We broadly welcome the proposal on sexual offences, including the redefinition of a range of offences and the tightening up of arrangements for sex offender registration.

We also fully support the Government's continued resistance to the dangerous arguments of those who argue for public disclosure of sex offenders' identities and whereabouts in a process of so-called "naming and shaming". There is no doubt that this would lead to vigilante attacks and drive offenders to ground. thereby increasing rather than reducing risk to the public. We agree with the Government that the better approach is increased supervision, treatment and multi-agency work with sex offenders to increase the safety of the public.

The proposal to introduce a new indeterminate sentence for serious violent and sexual offenders is welcome. This will enable such offenders' progress to be regularly monitored and reviewed during a prison sentence so that they can be released when, but only when, it is safe to do so. However, there is a strong responsibility on the Government to ensure that offending behaviour and treatment programmes are available to all prisoners in these categories, so that they have the opportunity to progress to a stage when they are safe to release under supervision.

I must emphasise that indeterminate detention is justifiable only because the offender has already committed a serious offence against the person and the available evidence shows that he or she poses a future danger to the public. Such powers of indefinite detention cannot be justified for individuals who have not offended. We therefore hope that when the Government bring forward their mental health Bill they will listen to the overwhelming weight of opinion from professionals in the mental health field and drop their proposal for the indefinite detention of non-offenders with serious personality disorders.

In principle we welcome the new "custody plus" sentence, which will ensure that short-term prisoners receive supervision on release. At present short-term prisoners receive little in the way of rehabilitation while in prison and do not receive supervision when they leave. Not surprisingly, they have a high rate of reconviction and they are responsible for much of the high volume crime, which is so distressing for many people on the receiving end. If "custody plus" is to be successful, it must be backed by resources, both for Probation Service supervision and for voluntary agencies to provide the help with accommodation, employment and mentoring which can make such a crucial difference to the likelihood of reoffending.

However, the "custody plus" sentence contains one serious risk: that courts will find it an attractive proposition for offenders who now receive community sentences. In a borderline case, magistrates and judges may currently opt for a community sentence rather than a short prison sentence with no post-release supervision because they feel that community supervision will do more to steer the offender away from crime. If in future they have the option to impose a short prison term plus a period of supervision, they may be tempted to opt for prison sentences in greater numbers. It is therefore crucial that the sentencing framework contained in the Criminal Justice Bill, including the guidance drawn up by the new sentencing guidelines council, strongly dissuades courts from passing short prison sentences.

The proposal to empower magistrates' courts to pass prison sentences of up to 12 months is likely to prove a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it will reduce waiting times on remand if offenders who would otherwise have been committed to the Crown Court are dealt with by magistrates instead. On the other hand, in some cases magistrates may pass prison sentences of nine or 12 months where Crown Courts would have imposed a community sentence or a shorter prison term—something which not infrequently happens now when magistrates commit offenders to the Crown Court for sentence.

Here again, the strength of the restrictions placed on the use of prison sentences in the new sentencing framework is of the greatest importance. It is also important that Ministers continue to argue strongly and publicly for a reduced use of custody, thereby reinforcing the recent welcome comments by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, on the evils of overcrowded prisons.

We will look carefully at the provisions of the antisocial behaviour Bill. There is an important place for fixed penalties for low level criminal behaviour. They avoid unnecessarily dragging minor offenders before the criminal courts, relieve the police and CPS of paperwork, save court time and avoid unnecessarily giving a criminal record to those involved in low level misbehaviour. There is a good case for using fixed penalties for a wider range of offences, including those of minor dishonesty and damage to property which currently clutter up magistrates' courts. However, we need to ensure that the range of behaviour, which is covered by fixed penalties in the Bill, is not unreasonably wide and disproportionate to the seriousness of the behaviour which is penalised.

Above all, it is important to recognise that law enforcement has only a limited impact on anti-social behaviour. Measures such as neighbourhood mediation, developing well structured youth activity programmes and the "acceptable behaviour contracts" pioneered by local authorities such as Islington are likely to be more effective in changing behaviour than any number of changes in the law. This is where we need to develop a strategy on the causes of crime, and put less emphasis on "tough on crime".

My Lords, I rise to welcome the provisions of the gracious Speech in relation to home affairs and criminal justice matters.

At the beginning of the 1960s I joined the police service as a young man Since then I have listened to people saying how much better life was in the "old days", whenever that was. Like taxes and death, crime will always be one of the certainties of life. I saw my task for 35 years as being to reduce the effectiveness of criminals, either by preventing offences in the first place, which is the ideal, or by detecting the offender and bringing him to justice, thereby deterring him and others in the future from embarking on such antisocial behaviour.

As a society we have not succeeded in persuading that small number of fellow citizens that crime is wrong. Parents have failed; teachers have failed; the police have failed; the courts have failed; and the criminal justice system has failed. We live in a society where standards have fallen dramatically: authority is no longer accepted; the elderly in many cases are not treasured; young children are not cherished; and Parliament and politicians, unfortunately, are not respected.

The question is: does it always have to be like this, or is it possible to bring about a change and, more importantly, does that need more legislation? I have continually heard that the criminal justice system is unfair; that it favours the rich; that it favours the criminal; and that it ignores the victim. I have to say that I have some sympathy with that view and that is why I welcome the provisions in the gracious Speech.

I believe that we can turn things round, but it requires a cultural change—a cultural revolution, if you like. We did it with smoking and we did it with drink driving. There seems to be a perception that we have great difficulty in controlling crime and yet if we look at the British Crime Survey, crime has reduced by some 23 per cent since 1997. Overall, of course, that is the problem. Recordable crime may well be reducing in many areas, but it is the quality-of-life issues—which do not figure in the statistics—that are often the problem. These are the very matters encompassed in the term "anti-social behaviour".

I have spent most of my working life dealing with this type of behaviour. It is almost exclusively the domain of the young. We do not hear of sadistic senior citizens biting off ears in brawls; we do not hear of "graffiti grannies" spraying the bus stand; we rarely hear of middle-aged muggers snatching mobile phones. But, of course, those of mature years are not immune from committing crime—no, no. Paedophilia is well known to continue into old age; fraud and corruption is invariably the province of the middle-aged; and, as we know, perverting the course of justice can even infect Parliament—even your Lordships' House. But we are talking about the type of anti-social behaviour which prevents the elderly and law-abiding citizens from going onto the streets at night, the drunken yobbery which frightens people and their families.

We need to take the streets back. That is what we pay the police to do, so we must give them the powers and our support. But their leaders, in turn, must remember that they are not social workers and get back to enforcing the law. They must have the will to confront bad behaviour, such as urinating in doorways, drunkenness and swearing, and throwing down litter and chewing gum. This does not necessarily mean that people have to be arrested or even summonsed. I do not want to live in a police state. But what the police need to do is at least challenge such behaviour. Unfortunately my recent observations tell me that the police are doing so less and less. I say that with reluctance.

Last month, for example, I was walking past Horseferry Road Magistrates' Court and saw five uniformed police officers standing outside talking. Perhaps they were waiting to give evidence. I had walked 100 yards further down the road when a youth of about 19 rode past me on a cycle, on the footpath, almost knocking me down. It was the kind of behaviour that we have probably all witnessed from time to time. I turned round with a wry smile, knowing that he was riding towards five uniformed police officers. Imagine my astonishment when I saw him continue on the footpath directly past the police officers without one of them taking the slightest bit of notice. What kind of message does that send out? He should have been stopped and ordered to use the road, as the law requires. That is the least that the police officers should have done.

I mentioned those facts last week to a provincial chief constable. He said that he thought it was peculiar to the Metropolitan Police. I wish that that were true, my Lords.

Fixed penalties for such bad behaviour will be a godsend to busy police officers. But their leaders, chief officers, must ensure that they enforce the law. It is also an ideal task for street wardens and community support officers.

Moving to the general principle of re-balancing the criminal justice system, this is not a new campaign. Perhaps I may quote a former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police:

"What we know about trials in higher courts doesn't justify any complacency. Indeed, there is one fact I can mention which should be enough in itself to justify some kind of enquiry. This is the rate of acquittals … The English criminal trial never decides whether the accused is innocent. The only question is whether, according to the rules of evidence, the prosecution has proved that he is guilty—and this is not at all the same thing.

"There must be a failure rate—we can't always expect to convict the guilty or never to prosecute the guilty. But in my opinion a failure rate of one in two is far too high".

He then went on to talk of some defence advocates. I quote:

"We see the same lawyers producing, off the peg, the same kind of defence for different clients…witnesses suddenly and inexplicably change their minds. Defences are concocted far beyond the intellectual capability of the accused. False alibis are put forward. Extraneous issues damaging to police credibility are introduced. All these are part of the stock in trade of a small number of criminal lawyers. The truth is that some trials of deliberate crimes for profit—robbery, burglary and so on—involve a bitter struggle of wits and tactics, between the detective and the lawyer!"

Sir John Stevens? The noble Lord, Lord Condon? The noble Lord, Lord Imbert? No. Those are the words of Sir Robert Mark, who was commissioner in the 1960s, in his Dimbleby Lecture almost 30 years ago!

I make no apology for quoting his words. They illustrate that there has been, certainly during my many years of police service, an ongoing debate—quite rightly—-on the efficacy of the criminal justice system in its efforts to protect our most vulnerable citizens from violence. I, for one, welcome the provisions in the gracious Speech dealing with double jeopardy and court procedures; indeed re-balancing the justice system itself. I believe that they go some way towards giving more support to the victims in society and I welcome them unreservedly.

My Lords, first, I effusively apologise to noble Lords and particularly to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, for not being present when he opened the debate. A sequence of unfortunate accidents prevented my arriving in time.

I must declare an interest. It seems to be implied by some commentators that opposition on the part of lawyers to forthcoming legislation which we have not yet seen will be due to the fact that the changes affect their personal financial interest. I declare an interest. Forty years of my life were spent, as a young man, defending, and, as Attorney-General, prosecuting, in the courts of this country, although, having retired 17 years ago, I cannot be said to have any interest in what is to happen in the future.

My opposition, like that of my profession, is due to anxiety about what may happen to justice. It is nonsense that double jeopardy, or the revelation of an accused's previous criminal record, or the abolition of jury trials in certain cases will affect the interests of lawyers who prosecute as well as defend. If, as I have read, this approach is acclaimed as a reform of the judicial system, it is in fact nothing of the kind. It is a reform of the criminal law that clearly shifts the balance against the citizen and in favour of the state. All criminal trials are issues between the state, with all its power and its might, and the citizen. One safeguard, which, having been created, has grown up and has worked for centuries, is that at least the citizen has had the presumption of innocence: he who accuses must prove the truth of his accusation.

My impression is that the Home Secretary and others believe that too often the courts have got it wrong in criminal trials. But who decides? Not the Home Secretary. Not the police. Not the media. It must be a court. It therefore appears to me that the Home Secretary is now changing the rules to make it easier to obtain a conviction. I should have thought that some of the recent miscarriages of justice might have made the Home Secretary hesitate before doing that. In the Daily Telegraph two weeks ago, he wrote:

"Intimidated juries are a good example of how an adherence to tradition fails justice".

What does that mean?

"Intimidated juries are a good example of how an adherence to tradition fails justice".

What tradition fails justice? There has always been tampering with juries. For scores of years, since the jury system began, people have tried to get at juries, and they always will. Neither the courts nor lawyers can do anything about it. It is for the police to protect juries and the system. The statement is absurd, if that is the level of the Home Secretary's thought about criminal justice reform.

I gather that there will also be proposals on double jeopardy. We must have strict limitations, otherwise they will encourage an existing vice: sloppy, casual preparation for prosecution. The proposals will affect very few, perhaps only a single case. I hope that reform is not being carried out simply on account of a single case. Hard cases make bad law. What is the purpose of revealing the accused's previous convictions? That information has been excluded so that a jury will convict, as they have sworn to do, on the evidence rather than on the principle of "give a dog a bad name". The Home Secretary is proposing a very risky novelty.

Changes will be welcomed by the police. I sympathise with the noble and learned Lord's comments. But the great failure has been the inadequate number of police available on the streets to look after jury members. There has been insufficient recruitment, including that of men and women of superior education, perhaps because of poor salaries, especially in the higher ranks.

Things seem to have gone wrong with the prosecuting authority. There have been too many slipups by the Crown Prosecution Service. Under the old system, there were prosecuting solicitors in towns and a representative of the Director of Public Prosecutions in each region. What has happened to the relationship between the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney-General? In the old days, there were constant discussions between the two, sometimes several times a week. Any case involving a hint of public interest or sensitivity was brought to the attention of the Attorney-General. Some cases require the Attorney-General's leave; for example. offences under the Official Secrets Act. As the Attorney-General, I would discuss any such cases with the Director of Public Prosecutions, along with the Solicitor-General, my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon. We would probably send for the police officer.

In the Burrell case, for example, I cannot imagine that under the old system the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney-General would not have discussed the case at the time of the police report, well before the prosecution was formally launched. We would probably have sent for the police officer to discuss his report. The question must have arisen, having regard to the strangeness of the man, whether there was evidence to show any intent to permanently deprive.

I congratulate the present Attorney-General for his personal activity in the courts, by contrast to some of his recent predecessors. He has played a big part in the courts over the past few months and years. He has little experience of the criminal courts and none of the Solicitor-General role. My fear is that under the present system the Crown Prosecution Service is not acting as it was intended to. First, it is underfunded. In the police, we only get quality if we arc prepared to pay a salary commensurate with what is expected in private practice. If the Home Secretary is serious about improving criminal justice, he does not need to make risky changes of hallowed practices and novelties in the criminal law. His job is to rattle the bars of the Treasury and frighten the Chancellor to produce more money for the investigatory service and the prosecution service. They must get more funds or the situation will increasingly deteriorate. The Home Secretary should not propose such risky novelties in the forthcoming Bill.

My Lords, I shall take you away from serious crime to minor trespasses, which may be committed in the process of legislation. The gracious Speech promises us 22 Bills, several draft Bills for pre-legislative scrutiny and other measures and proposals. It is a programme of considerable proportions, even before other measures are laid before us. I want to use the occasion of this debate to comment on the process by which Parliament. notably your Lordships' House, deals with this programme. I hope that I have chosen the right slot for such comments, given that the noble and learned Lords opening and concluding this debate for the Government are distinguished experts in matters of process as well as substance.

One of my conclusions as I enter my tenth Session in your Lordships' House, and incidentally my fifth on the Select Committee on Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform, is that this House has become central to the legislative process. While the other place concentrates on either supporting or challenging government, and on maintaining the link between the political centre and the electorate in the constituencies, we spend much time on line-by-line scrutiny of Bills and on improving legislation brought before us. In a sense, we do the work that in other countries is done by committees of the first Chamber. We can do so effectively because we are prepared to devote time and expertise to the task. This we can do because we are not too distracted by politics in the narrow sense, let alone by constituency demands.

One may wonder whether such an arrangement can be justified in abstract constitutional terms. But, in so far as it works—in my view, it works rather well—it does so because we, as Members of the upper House, are not elected. We do not have to compete with the House of Commons in any way. Once the House of Lords is even a partly elected Chamber, a new balance of tasks will have to be found or else the legislative process will suffer. I shall leave this issue on one side for the moment; it will no doubt keep us busy for a good while in the early part of next year.

I shall make five necessarily brief, and, therefore, probably unduly simple, comments on how our legislative process works or might even be improved. There is first the statement of the obvious. Bills that come to Parliament should express the Government's intentions clearly and be technically flawless. It is a regrettable fact that major Bills have come to this House in a very imperfect state. Perhaps it is a compliment to your Lordships' House that the Government once again introduced nearly 2,000 amendments to their own Bills during the past Session. Some of those amendments were the result of debates in this House and of open discussions between spokesmen from all Benches. However, at times one feels that departments have had to work to target dates rather than to standards of quality. The result is that Bills are changed by their sponsors even at Third Reading. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee has to add to its considered comments on the original Bills at times unduly rushed results of the scrutiny of amendments. When a Bill is finally passed and given Royal Assent, it still has evident flaws and one can see another Bill on the same subject coming. This is not good legislation and it may not even reflect good government.

One remedy proposed—this is my second comment—is pre-legislative scrutiny. The gracious Speech explicitly states that the Government place importance on that method, which involves a committee of both Houses looking at draft legislation. Those who were involved in the case of the Financial Services and Markets Bill and the Communications Bill speak of it with satisfaction and many others have considerable expectations. However, it is clear that pre-legislative scrutiny can be applied only to a small portion of all legislation. It is no accident that the gracious Speech mentions 22 Bills but only three drafts for scrutiny. Pre-legislative scrutiny is time-consuming. Joint Committees are sometimes barely quorate and, of necessity, they leave many questions open. We should give the new method a chance, but not over-rate it.

Thirdly, there is the much less satisfactory result of imperfect legislation, which is to add towards the end of Bills a clause enabling the Secretary of State to fill in "incidental and consequential" gaps by secondary legislation. Over the years the House has tolerated such clauses, even if Bills stipulated no more than negative resolution of regulations promulgated on this basis. It is relevant that in the recent debates on the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill, a more robust attitude was taken, especially when secondary legislation involved Henry VIII powers. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee will shortly put to the House a report on experience with such clauses. The Government have promised to comment on it and help find time for a debate in your Lordships' House. It would not surprise me if the outcome was a stricter scrutiny of enabling clauses for consequential provisions.

Fourthly, it appears that in the near future we are going to see more and more deregulation measures—or regulatory reform orders, as they are now called. These are intended to lift burdens. They are scrutinised by a committee of the other place and by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. These orders raise a whole new set of issues. In some cases, they take the place of primary legislation. Indeed, rumour has it that the Government have encouraged departments that were unable to find a slot for legislation to use the instrument of regulatory reform orders instead. No doubt both Houses of Parliament will follow the process closely. Again, a general debate of the issue may be in place once we have more experience with regulatory reform orders.

Fifthly and finally, my noble friends Lord Dholakia and Lord Goodhart tried the other day to test the view of the House and the Government on "sunset clauses". The occasion, right at the end of the Session, was perhaps not propitious, but the subject deserves attention. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee was impressed when visitors from Australian state legislatures told us of the use of clauses that limit the assured life span of secondary legislation to five years and thus force the legislator to take a positive decision to renew it for another period. There might well be scope for the extensive use of sunset clauses on secondary legislation in particular. It would certainly be worth a try.

These are footnotes and no more to an important legislative programme. They are intended to help create good laws that are clear in substance and technically as nearly perfect as possible. I look forward to the comments of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, but first, like all your Lordships, I look forward to the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester.

My Lords, I hope that it is in order for me to begin by saying that the 16 days that I have spent as a Member of this House have been an encounter with a spirit of welcome and assistance that went well beyond what I had been led to expect. I am most grateful not only to those noble Lords who have assisted me on numerous occasions, but particularly to the officers of the House, who seem to be naturally inclined to rescue wanderers who clearly do not know where they are going. I am learning gradually. There seems to be an instinctive recognition here that to the inheritor of an episcopal see established in the seventh century, coming here feels like entering a risky modern innovation.

Although my membership of this House derives from my being the current tenant of the see of Worcester, the three Archbishops of Canterbury, York and Wales, concerned lest idleness be an occasion of sin for me, have asked me to take on, on their behalf, responsibility for the episcopal oversight of the Prison Service. With that in mind, I have chosen to ask to make my maiden speech in this debate.

In that role, I succeed the right reverend Robert Hardy, the former Bishop of Lincoln, whose service to this House and to prisons, through his membership of this House, will be in the minds of many noble Lords. Your Lordships will wish to know that an occasion is being arranged for early December, to be presided over by the noble Lord, Lord Hurd of Westwell, at which he will be honoured. I am sure that that will delight Members of this House as much as it daunts me in thinking that I need to succeed him.

The modern Prison Service, by which I mean the development of a national and legislative framework for imprisonment since the 19th century, has had rehabilitation at its heart. Rehabilitation in the modern Prison Service is not a secondary object or something that you try to do while keeping people locked up, which is your main concern. It was at the heart from the beginning. That is why, historically, a prison was constituted by the presence of a governor, a doctor and a chaplain. It was also recognised that the contribution of faith and spiritual values to the rehabilitation of persons was indispensable. That precious tradition continues. It has, mercifully. been widened. We should be proud as a House of the contribution that is being made through the office of the Chaplain General and by his colleagues, the principal Roman Catholic chaplain, the senior Free Church chaplain and now the Muslim adviser and the representatives of other faith communities, to enabling all the faith communities of this country to play their part in creating a climate in which people can stand the best chance of being rehabilitated after conviction and sentence. In addition, I can say without fear of contradiction and without any sense of apology that the Churches in this country remain probably the foremost source of voluntary assistance in the process of rehabilitation—something about which I am not in the least complacent, but about which I am also very pleased.

The work of Mothers' Union branches in staffing visitor centres at prisons does a great deal to enable that very fraught environment to become as humane as possible. Members of the House who are familiar with the work of Alpha and of its courses may be less familiar with the fact that there are now between three and four hundred people whom Alpha volunteers have met at the prison gate, escorted into their communities, and enabled to find a place within local church communities. We need that kind of process if rehabilitation is to stay at the heart of the aim of the Prison Service.

I salute, and I hope all Members of this House support, the decency agenda that the present Director General of the Prison Service is pursuing with the support of his staff. It was a sign both of his recognition of the contribution of spiritual values and of our recognition of his contribution to the work of rehabilitation that he was invited by my predecessor Bishop Hardy to address the General Synod of the Church of England and is now preparing to address the first multi-faith, fully inclusive chaplaincy conference to be held next March. These developments are all extremely encouraging and merit our support.

So why do I feel it necessary to make any comment on this matter in the debate on the gracious Speech? It is because this rehabilitative heart of the aim of the Prison Service is under some considerable pressure, if not threat. The fact that we have approaching 73,000 people in our prisons and are now the foremost imprisoner in Europe indicates that we have entered a competition that we should not have entered. It also signals a victory about which we should riot he pleased.

I am particularly concerned at the relative increase in the number of women and young people being imprisoned. Both of those trends seem to me to run the risk of preparing other young people—and, indeed, children—for a life of crime, and is an implication of the imprisonment of the parents and people of a young age.

It is not for me—and, certainly, a maiden speech is not the time—to enter into the debate that other noble Lords are clearly initiating about the detailed provisions in the gracious Speech. However, while such provisions are debated, it is important for me to take this opportunity to invite the House to have ill the back, if not in the front, of its mind the implications of these measures as regards the overwhelming pressure of prison population on the very aims at the heart of the Prison Service.

It is extremely easy for people to be persuaded that there are simple remedies for the problem of crime. I have a good deal of local experience. I chair the chief officer group concerned with racial justice in the criminal and civil justice system in West Mercia. I also invited one of our most senior police officers to address our diocesan staff meeting on how he saw the future of his work. He made two comments that seemed to me to be of the greatest importance. First— this was shortly before an election—he said that he was very frightened of what he termed the political "auction" in toughness, which was likely to bedevil the campaign and lead people to suppose that there were simple remedies for the problem of criminality.

I mention the second comment of that senior police officer because I had intended to do so. However, I do so with some hesitation, lest it be presumed to be a criticism of a previous speech. He also said that he was extremely concerned about the rhetoric that was used in the debate about crime. In particular, although he accepted that the use of the language of "fighting" was very understandable under the pressures of the need to engage public sympathy, he believed that it liberated precisely those aggressive, angry and destructive instincts that lead in the long run to an increase, not a decrease, in criminality.

It is clear to all of us—indeed, that has been a thread in the speeches that preceded this one—that the reduction of criminal activity is a many-faceted task. The recent report of the Social Exclusion Unit on reoffending is an example of just how many considerations one has to bear in mind if one is seeking a reduction in criminal behaviour. So, in the many debates that will follow over the specific provisions adumbrated in the gracious Speech, I plead that we keep in mind the priority that is at the heart of our prison system. When seriously considering the implications of our legislation, we should keep in mind the three priorities of numbers, numbers, and numbers.

It is some 37 years since, as a raw priest in training, I sat in the chaplain's office in San Quentin prison on the west coast of the United States and heard a knock at the door. A man some three years younger than I came into the room and placed on the table a metal object that had been honed to a lethal instrument. He said, "You had better take this off me, or I'll use it". At that time I was new to that kind of situation. It was a very frightening moment, but the challenge was very clear. His challenge to me has remained a life challenge a metaphor for what we need to do about criminality.

The task is about lifting burdens: lifting burdens from individuals who are led into criminality; lifting burdens from children when their parents are in prison for, perhaps, short periods—times in which rehabilitation is not really possible; lifting burdens from the victims of crime, who need to live in a safe, warm and caring environment; and lifting burdens from the hard-pressed and committed servants of the Prison Service, who are seeking to honour the heart of their endeavour but are finding themselves placed under perpetual pressure.

We on these Benches know that, as a society, we have no mandate to give up hope on anyone; and that redemption and rehabilitation are concerns that merit the attention of all of us. I speak as the bishop to prisons, as well as the bishop of a diocese in which there are four prisons that represent almost all of the challenges about which I have spoken. If there is any way in which we on these Benches can support a many-faceted, careful, rational, compassionate, and firm approach to the issue of criminality, we shall certainly wish to do so.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, and other speakers, as well as the Home Secretary, have used the word "culture" to describe what needs to be changed if the issue of criminality and anti-social behaviour is to be addressed. We do need a culture—a culture of firm and demanding compassion. It has to be demanding so that we do not accept that anyone realises less than his or her potential, and compassionate because we recognise that all of us face considerable obstacles on that journey. I hope that the legislative proposals will be examined in the spirit of service to a culture of demanding compassion.

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester in his maiden speech, which has clearly been well received on all sides of the House; it was wide ranging and generous. I am particularly grateful to follow him as I was formerly a resident in the Southwark diocese, for which he had responsibility for many years. He combines the knowledge and rigour of an academic—he was William Leech Professor of Applied Theology—with the experience of a practitioner ministering to his flock. I was particularly interested to hear him mention prison visitors centres and his work there. Prison visitors centres have been mentioned in the House several times recently, and I hope to hear much more from the right reverend Prelate on the subject. I was also interested in his comments on rehabilitation and the important role that the Church plays in that. Those remarks were very instructive and helpful, and I hope that we will hear much more from him on many future occasions.

I am grateful to the Government for this opportunity to debate their legislative programme. I shall concentrate my remarks on the issues of sentencing and children in prison. I was particularly pleased to hear the noble and learned Lord the Minister refer to the specific needs of black communities and the need to protect them from crime. About three months ago, the son of a remarkable Afro-Caribbean woman with whom I have been acquainted for some years—she is the chef in a hostel for young home homeless people and is called "Mum" or "Mother" by many of the residents—was murdered. He was in his early 20s. I therefore appreciate the Minister marking out that territory.

I also welcome the Teach First programme, to which the Prime Minister recently alluded, which will encourage the cream of graduates to work for two years as teachers in our toughest inner-city schools before taking up posts in business. In the past 10 years, Teach for America has been successful in encouraging 8,000 high-flying graduates to fill a similar role in inner-city American schools where many children qualify for special school lunch arrangements. Such programmes are an important part of efforts to create a more integrated society where the privileged and the excluded can better understand each other. Such programmes remind me of the Fabian fire of my forebear and the forebears of several other noble Lords. They remind me also of the important contribution made over the years by my noble friend Lord Northbourne and his involvement with Toynbee Hall and with young people.

Young people are very sensitive to fairness. They are more likely to become cynical and less respectful of society and others if they perceive others as motivated by short-term self-interest. The Teach First programme is likely to produce some good role models—a theme to which I shall return later. The programme will help persuade children of the need to follow acceptable social norms.

I also welcome the recently announced increased funding for child and adolescent mental health services. Over the next three years, funding will almost double, increasing to £450 million. If the money is efficiently used, I expect that it will decrease the number of young offenders and provide a better experience for those who do go to prison, reducing the likelihood of re-offending. Strengthened child and adolescent mental health services are an important part of the rehabilitative process to which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester referred. If mental health is the Cinderella of the health service, then child and adolescent mental health is Cinderella's little known and forgotten sister. I am very pleased that the Government are giving the matter such priority.

The Government are to introduce legislation to reform sentencing arrangements. I understand that part of their objective is to reduce the number of people in custody and increase the use of community penalties. Such action could not be more welcome as far as children are concerned. Your Lordships may have read the children's rights report, Rethinking Child Imprisonment: Report on Young Offenders' Institutions, published by the Children's Rights Alliance. On page 65, it states:

"Joseph Scholes hanged himself a month after his 16th birthday. Since his parents' acrimonious divorce some years earlier, he had allegedly suffered repeated sexual abuse by a relative, had received psychiatric treatment for depression and had tried to kill himself. He then went into the voluntary care of the local authority and was placed in a children's home. Four days after his placement, he joined a group of children from the home who committed a robbery with Joe acting as their lookout. Two weeks before his arrest, he slashed his face with a knife 30 times. The room was so bloody it had to be repainted. The young offender institution knew of his history and had him closely watched. But he seized a five-minute opportunity when a staff member went to a lavatory. The prison director Martin Narey is quoted as saying, 'We did everything we could for a boy who should not have been there'.

"Kevin Henson had developed emotional problems following the death of his mother when he was 14. He had become seriously dependent on alcohol and had a number of convictions relating to alcohol abuse. His remand to custody on a charge of wounding was his first experience of prison. On September 5th he was refused bail. He had hoped to be granted bail to visit his mother's grave on her birthday which fell soon after. The visit to her grave was of particular importance to him and a ritual he had carried out regularly. The following morning, he was found hanging in his cell. He had been dead several hours. Notes and letters were left expressing his desire to join his mother. A month before his death, the governor of the YOI, Kevin Dydin, had resigned in protest at conditions he described as Dickensian".

Many children in the young offenders estate have similar backgrounds. The noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, alluded to the high incidence of mental health disorders in the adult prison population. However, we often subject children who have experienced neglect in their families and possibly in local authority care to further neglect in the young offenders estate.

There have been important improvements with the introduction of the Youth Justice Board and the replacement of separate prison health provision with NHS provision. But the pressure of overcrowding is such that much of the improvement in the regime is undone, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has mentioned. It is as though the Youth Justice Board seeks to alight on a bus that accelerates away. In particular, and most alarmingly, children and young people are still not receiving an adequate assessment on their arrival in prison. Vulnerable children are not being spotted. I refer your Lordships to Vulnerable Inside: Children in Secure and Penal Settings, published by the Children's Society and written by Barry Goldson, lecturer at the University of Liverpool and director of the Youth Justice Research Unit.

I quote from an NRRI practitioner:

"A lot of children we have here have committed a fair quantity of crime but they are not desperately serious, so much so that you wonder how they have met the criteria for custody. But they have been put down as persistent young offenders. As an example—I admit that it is an extreme example—I had a kid with learning disabilities who had been remanded for theft of toffees from a toffee jar and criminal damage to the lid of the jar"

The report also mentions the assessment process. The present situation is not good, according to Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, with too many young prisoners arriving at YOIs with virtually nothing known about them. An NRRI practitioner states:

"If I get completed, and completed well, an ASSET—

a form of assessment that should begin at the start of the child's engagement with the criminal justice system—

"it gives very good pointers that I can follow further and expand upon. The reality is, though, that I rarely have all of the necessary documentation".

He refers at the end of the book to the,

"complexities of assessment which are given short shrift within a mechanistic, indecently hasty and deeply problematic process. Despite the rhetoric, representations and associated claims made for each assessment process, the practical realities reveal serious defects".

I look forward with keen interest to hearing Her Majesty's Government's comments on reviewing sentencing arrangements in the light of what. I have just said. Given Her Majesty's Government's evident concern in this area, I hope that there will also be an opportunity to consider the disapplication of the Children Act to the prison estate and whether:hat is still acceptable and to review Section 130 of the Criminal Justice Act 2001 that allows children to be remanded for petty theft when they are not a threat to others. That particular measure received scant attention as it arose at the end of a parliamentary year.

To conclude, I apologise for trespassing so long on your Lordships' time. However, I wish to return briefly to my theme of encouraging socially responsible behaviour and consideration for others as a complement to the stick of what is being offered now. I have spoken for long enough. I thank noble Lords for their attention.

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester on a powerful speech. It reminded us of our responsibilities as a society to those in prison and to those who are particularly vulnerable. As someone who is also very committed to those issues, I look forward to working with the right reverend Prelate over the months to come.

I cannot pretend that I am content with the proposals outlined by my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer. Had he spoken of the sexual offences Bill, by and large I should have been able to pay him and the Home Office a warm tribute. But the criminal justice Bill, with all its infringements on civil liberties, is a piece of proposed legislation that I consider unworthy of this Government. Regrettably, it is yet another example of a strand in contemporary lawmaking that can only be described as authoritarian.

Why is it that people one would have expected to be liberal are losing enthusiasm for civil liberties? I believe that there are a number of reasons. First, in debates about civil liberties the emotional power is always with those who make their stand on the side of victims and who seek to combat crime. In many ways it is the easy position to take. It certainly is the populist position to take. We can all imagine ourselves as potential victims. Few people are as concerned to imagine what it might be like to be a young, law-abiding person falsely arrested. It is much easier to imagine what it is like to be burgled or mugged or raped. Indeed, some of us have experienced some unpleasant crime.

But that appeal to populism is one of the problems. Modern political discourse is increasingly impoverished with no public space for real discussion. If focus groups become the source for politicians' decisions as to how they should proceed and those focus groups say that too many people get away with crime, but without very much debate on what infringements on civil liberties might mean, it is very easy for government to decide to do something about the courts. As mentioned in this debate, changes such as those now being suggested will he as of nought in reducing crime but as of much in relation to what will be done to our system of justice.

The second problem for civil libertarians is that authoritarians always have the best rhetoric. They claim the songs and the flags and the role of public protector. They promise a comforting paternalism to which a frightened public can surrender. And there is a lot of fear around at the moment. There is talk of war. There is concern about terrorism. There is the fear of crime. The claim is that the Government will not allow us to become victims of crime, of terrorism or of other horrors that might affect our security. It is very easy for us to be deluded into thinking that these, the good guys, could mean us no harm. The rhetoric of modernisation can be very seductive. The rhetoric of rebalancing in favour of victims sounds so plausible.

The third problem for civil libertarians—and perhaps most significant of all—is that it is particularly hard to engage popular support for the protection of civil liberties because we are losing our historic memory about why we need such safeguards. Even that 60s generation who so vociferously campaigned for civil rights and liberties is often itself the author of many incursions, no longer able to identify those at the receiving end, perhaps because they seem particularly alien. Or perhaps it is just the onset of middle age—the onset of comfort.

In the main, though, the recent generation of middle class white people living in the West have not had anything directly affect their lives that creates the visceral feel for what those protections mean. Most have not felt the heavy hand of the state. But—and I emphasise this—the state does not change. The need for civil liberties is just as strong. Where you will find civic memory still alive is often among the Jewish community, the Irish, black people and other minorities. There you may still find a sense of what it is like to be powerless and marginalised, at risk of being caught up in a backlash where the law is your only shield. Unfortunately, even minorities who have in the past been at the receiving end of state abuse can be lured into the phoney yet enticing embrace of "us" as distinct from "them".

It is right that the law should modernise. The law must evolve; it must never remain a dead letter. The thing I love so passionately about the law is that it is a living, breathing entity. It should never be allowed to atrophy. That is why I have campaigned so long and hard for legal reform in the profession and the courts.

However, before one modernises anything, one must identify the founding principles, which are not negotiable. It is on those principles that the edifice is built. Our legal system embodies certain fundamental values. That may seem a trite observation; it is nonetheless true. We would certainly know if it were not the case. Today, happily, we often look for those values in formal codes of human rights and in our new Human Rights Act. But values are also to be found elsewhere—in legal rules, in presumptions surrounding procedure, and, most importantly, in certain fundamental concepts that underpin the basic approach of the law.

For example, the presumption of innocence; the right to jury trial; and the principle against double jeopardy. Those values are the accumulated moral wisdom of the law, which gives us our understanding of how the law should work. That understanding has grown up over time. This is not a conservative position. The legal conservative would probably see those values as static and protective of existing arrangements. A more radical view sees them as a means of achieving greater social justice and freedom.

There has probably never been a period in which these values have been safe from attack. Any sense of history enables us to see that the freedoms and decencies to which a humane society aspires have been threatened in one way or another. Some of those threats have come from crude tyranny in the shape of fascism or Stalinism. But bullies may dress in all forms of clothing and, as I have said before in this House, tyranny can come clad in an Armani suit.

Erosion of civil liberties can come stealthily. The crude threats are perhaps easier to identify. We can tell when someone wishes to shut down our freedom through outright bans or persecution. The stealthy threats are more difficult to identify and they may even be missed. They may also come veiled in the language of social protection, or material betterment, or in claims of rebalancing the system in favour of the victim. But they can be dangerous, and it is salutary to remind ourselves of these dangers when it is necessary to do so. It is necessary now.

Legal values are under pressure from those who see them as an obstacle to efficiency or who are looking for ways o save money or assuage concern about crime. One might hasten to point out that those objectives of efficiency, saving money and dealing with crime are laudable, but they must never justify the abandonment of civil liberties.

I apologise to the House. I have been given the great honour of being invited to give the Hamlyn lectures—rather important lectures in the law calendar—this year. The first of those lectures is tonight at six o'clock. I do not know how the debate will proceed, but I may not be present to hear the reply of my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor. I extend my apologies to all noble Lords attending the debate; I intend no discourtesy. I hope that your Lordships will understand if I am not here at the end of the debate.

My Lords, it would be impertinent for me to congratulate the noble Baroness on the eloquence of her speech. Instead I would like to congratulate the Government on the courage of their legislative programme, having listened to some of the noble Baroness's remarks.

I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester on an outstanding and most interesting maiden speech. When I was Leader of your Lordships' House I was concerned that the Bishops' Bench did not seem to contribute too much to our deliberations. I sought out where I thought the centre of power was in the established Church—which was not necessarily most obvious—and said to its members that it was right they should encourage those bishops who were Members of this House to contribute on a wider range of subjects. Over the years I have been here that has been so. I am delighted that the right reverend Prelates have been reinforced with someone who clearly has many valuable things to say to us. We shall appreciate his contributions in the years to come.

I cannot be sure how many Queen's Speeches I have had some responsibility for putting together, but it runs well into double figures. I hope that your Lordships will not find it amiss if I say that to me the Queen's Speech has a familiar ring about it. I hope that it will not run into some of the familiar problems, but I fear that it may.

I therefore want to talk about the process rather than the substance, and in particular to echo some of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf. The Home Office seems to have—not for the first time—a little more than its fair share of the Bills in this Session. For as long as I have had any dealings with these matters, either in government or in opposition, it is a frequent and justifiable complaint—particularly in your Lordships' House— that Bills are not drafted as well as they should be.

That justification has substance and, of course, it did not start with this Government. Nor do I suggest it started with the government of which I was a member for many years. But I remember being told on one occasion that I was likely to be faced at legislative committee by one of the Law Officers telling us that a Bill was not fit to bring before Parliament. There was obviously no way I was going to allow a Bill to come before Parliament with such an endorsement, so we had to sort it out quickly. These problems have been going on for a long time.

Pre-legislative scrutiny will help, but we would make a great mistake if we thought it would bring about anything other than a marginal improvement. Your Lordships should not underestimate the inherent difficulties of persuading departments and Ministers to put forward their Bills in that form in time. Whenever we look at a legislative programme we should remember that, if this year is like any other, five significant Bills to be enacted by both Houses will arise out of circumstances or events. We know nothing of them at present and neither do the Government.

I want to talk about the difficulties with bad drafting. There are three reasons why Bills are drafted badly. The Leader of the House alluded to one in a remark earlier in the week. The first and most important reason is that Ministers do not make up their minds as to what the policy is in sufficient time for the excellent parliamentary draftsmen to do the job properly. That is squarely in the hands of Ministers. The business managers must encourage them to make up their minds in sufficient time for the work to be done properly.

The second problem is a tendency—in my experience, the Home Office is not the least offender in this regard—continually to add items to a Bill once it has started to go through the parliamentary process. Sometimes that inevitably has to be done hut when I was a business manager I did everything that I could to resist someone's additional idea, which was usually ill-digested and badly thought through. I did not always win the battles but I certainly tried very hard. Ministers should resist that and business managers in particular should be extremely tough in that respect.

The third problem is much more difficult to deal with. I was always in favour of getting the Long Titles of Bills drafted as tightly as I could to avoid additional amendments that widened the scope of the Bill, which often let the subject get out of hand. The government of the day had no intention of legislating in such a way, had not properly thought about the issue and quite rightly did not particularly want to. Problems therefore arose.

We are today discussing mainly Home Office legislation. In my experience, the Home Office has been one of the better departments; many others are considerably worse. The difficulty with Home Office Bills has not been the Home Office's capacity to draft a Bill but, as has already been made clear in our debate, the substance of its Bills. We shall certainly have some difficulty in that regard. I have not seen all of the details of the Bills and I shall not comment further. I hope that when we debate them, we remember the principles, which are not so much in question, and the detail. We should concentrate on that but our aim should be to ensure that the debate can be sufficiently constructive that we can agree to amendments from the Government and elsewhere in the House, that improve the legislation.

When I last considered this matter, I established that about 90 per cent of all decisions taken by government are not party politically controversial. The 10 per cent that are party politically controversial are usually high profile cases, which get plenty of publicity and are very important. Ninety per cent of the processes involving the government of our country are not party politically controversial. However, it is vitally important that those decisions are right. In so far as they involve legislative processes, the House has an important role to examine that.

I remember, for example, one occasion when I was Leader of the House. We had a Home Office Bill but every living former Home Secretary in your Lordships' House, from all three parties, came along and spoke against it. I had to move rather quickly and negotiate various changes. We got the Bill through and it was not emasculated; it was probably a better Bill. There was give and take on all sides and success was achieved. If I say to the Government that we have been here before, I do not say that in a spirit of criticism.

This process of debate and revision by two separate Houses with different responsibilities and composition is a key part of our present legislative arrangements. Some of us are worried about how those responsibilities will be discharged in the future. Great responsibility rests on the Joint Committee on House of Lords Reform. I, like the Government, look forward to considering its report, as it guides us to the future. I hope that what it and Parliament will do when they come to consider the report will be to recognise that the best may be the enemy of the good. There is going to be no solution that will command the overwhelming support of everyone. The only wise solution is some form of compromise, which may last for a long time or for a relatively short number of years. The royal commission which I had the honour to chair came up with a solution which was not the ideal of any one member of that commission; it involved an interlocking set of proposals in relation to which we felt we could make progress. Our proposals were designed to give everyone something but nobody everything.

I was partly flattered and partly embarrassed to find my name clearly spelt out in the Labour Party manifesto, which endorsed our report. While the Government accepted many of our proposals, the changes that they made were sufficient to make their proposals unacceptable to everyone. In some ways— I say this in the friendliest possible way—the biggest mistake that the Government made was to call their White Paper, "Completing the Reform". That sent a signal to those who did not think that the royal commission and the Government had gone far enough—that is, pretty well everybody—that that was the end of the road and that no further progress was possible. That, in my opinion, was a difficulty that we could have avoided.

My hope is that the Joint Committee will in the end recommend the sort compromise with which it would be possible for us all to live. That compromise may or may not last a long time but to assert that there is only one solution that will last for ever would be a big mistake. The committee should strive for the greatest measure of common ground, and further progress could be made when that has been digested.

My Lords, I declare an interest as a barrister who both prosecutes and defends in the criminal courts. I am proud to he hewing at the same coal-face with the same enthusiasm as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws. It is no coincidence that other toilers in the criminal law, on the Government Benches in the other place and in this House, are constantly in conflict with commercial lawyers who have no experience of the criminal law but who guide this Government and have brought forward this legislation.

We face yet another tweak of the criminal justice system, a huge legislative effort to break more basic principles of the common law in order to secure more convictions. The problem is not in the practice and procedure of the courts. Noble Lords will remember that the boast used to be that British justice was the best in the world. The problem is that of getting offenders before the courts at all. The Association of Chief Police Officers, which is, it seems, in conflict today with the Home Secretary, made it an art form to attack defence barristers. We had a whiff of that earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie. If he has any concrete evidence of misdoing by defence lawyers, he will no doubt bring it before the authorities and ensure not only that they go to prison but that they no longer remain lawyers. We get much talk like that but no actual proof. It is the job of defence lawyers to expose the inadequacies of police investigation, and the standard attack, such as that we heard today, diverts attention from those very inadequacies.

The document, Crime in England and Wales 2001/ 2002, published in July, demonstrates where the problem really is. It puts together for the first time the police recording of crime and the British Crime Survey results. There were, in that year, about 5.5 million notifiable cases. "Notifiable cases" does not mean all crime: much crime takes place without being reported to the police at all. Detection rates of notifiable crime have fallen to 23 per cent. Only 23 out of 100 notifiable cases are ever cleared by the police. Detection does not mean prosecution; it involves the clear-up rate. About 12 people in every 100 notifiable offences are prosecuted. Detection varies according to the offence. Seventy out of 100 cases of robbery were detected in 1988; today the figure is 30 out of 100. In sexual offences, the rate has fallen from 75 prosecutions out of 100 notifiable offences in 1988 to 50 out of 100 today.

The reforms that the Government are now bringing forward focus on Crown Court and jury trials. If we turn to the judicial statistics for 2001, we find that 91,160 cases arrived in the Crown Court—that is, one offender in 20 of the cleared-up cases. Of those 91,160 cases dealt with in the Crown Court, 56 per cent—or 51,000 defendants—pleaded guilty. Of those who pleaded not guilty, 25,000 were acquitted. But 10,000 of those were discharged by the judge, 2,500 by the jury on the direction of the judge and only 7,300 by a jury verdict—that is, 7,300 out of the 91,000 cases going to the Crown Court.

Mr Blunkett said on Wednesday that it is a travesty of justice when the guilty walk free. Seven out of 90 defendants whose cases reach the Crown Court are acquitted by a jury. How many of those results are travesties? How many guilty walk free? The police and the Crown Prosecution Service do get it wrong, spectacularly so at times. So where should the effort be placed in the fight against crime? Should it be devoted to tweaking around with the criminal justice system? Or should it be concentrated on the investigative process so as to arrest offenders and bring them before the courts?

The provisions in the legislation proposed in the gracious Speech which are unacceptable are, in particular, the revealing of criminal convictions to the jury, the abolition of the double-jeopardy principle and the abolition of jury trial for fraud. What the Government always seem to forget is the overall duty of a judge to see that a trial is fair. If prejudice is occasioned by the revealing of convictions, for example, it is the duty of the judge to counter that. That does not depend upon the human rights convention; it is deeply embedded in the law. If the Labour Party wants to alter that, no doubt it will fight the next election promising in its manifesto unfair trials in British courts in order to get more convictions.

I was in court yesterday. I listened to a summing up. It so happened that the defendant's convictions and the periods that he had spent in prison had been revealed to the jury. The judge directed the jury in these terms:

"Because the defendant has previous convictions, it does not mean for a moment that he committed the offence with which he was charged".

The judge was doing his job of ensuring a fair trial and ensuring that the jury considered the evidence and did not take into account the convictions they happened to have heard about during the case. What will happen now? Will the judge have to direct the jury thus:

"In determining guilt, you may take into account the fact that the defendant has previous criminal convictions".

If he is not to direct in that way, what on earth is the purpose of revealing those criminal convictions to the jury? Shall we now change the jury oath? The noble and learned Lord, Lord Rawlinson, referred to the jury oath. Shall we now have:

"I swear by Almighty God that I will faithfully try the defendant and deliver a true verdict according to the evidence and such prejudicial material which, thanks to the Labour Government, is now placed before me".

Will that be the jury oath in the future?

I turn to the issue of double jeopardy. Only in high-profile cases will such second trials he ordered. It will be impossible not to reveal to a jury the fact that a previous trial has taken place and impossible for the jury not to realise that the Court of Appeal has said that there is a strong possibility of conviction. If there cannot be a fair trial because of publicity of that kind, the judge, whose overall duty is to be fair, will have to discharge the defendant. There cannot be a second trial if the publicity is so strong. Convictions on a second trial will be so infrequent that they will not make a blip on the statistics. Yet every single defendant who is acquitted in the courts of this country will not be able to gain closure to the allegations which have been made against him. If this provision goes through, he will be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life.

All that arises out of one case— the Lawrence case— which should never have been brought. The Crown Prosecution Service did its duty in advising that no prosecution should have been brought because there was not sufficient evidence. The judge, not the jury, did his duty in throwing the case out at half-time. It was not a jury that acquitted the defendants in the Lawrence case; the judge said that there was not enough evidence. In that case, the Attorney-General of the day should have intervened to enter a nolle prosequi in order to stop the prosecution— noble Lords will recall that it was a private prosecution—and to keep alive the possibility that the defendants could be prosecuted in the future should further evidence come to light.

Why was there not sufficient evidence in that case? It was because the police investigation failed. The inquiry found that it failed due to, among other things, institutional racism. With every sympathy for the Lawrence family— we all have that—they were ill-advised to bring a private prosecution. But the Attorney-General of the day was faint-hearted in failing to step in and stop it. How can the basic principle of double jeopardy, recognised by every civilised common law country in the world, be abnegated as a result of a case brought on such inadequate evidence that, as the judge found, it should never have reached the court?

It is said that DNA makes a difference. These days, DNA is sought in every single case. If there is any trace of DNA, a person who stands his trial in relation to that case will also have his DNA assessed. That is something which has no foundation. I draw an analogy with the right to silence. Your Lordships will recall that that was trumpeted by a Conservative Home Secretary in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 as another way of securing more convictions. By Section 34 of that Act, juries should be directed by the trial judge to draw adverse inferences from the failure of a defendant to answer questions in a police interview—as if they did not do so anyway.

But the current practice—this is how it has developed; I speak from the coal face— as taught to solicitors and their clerks, is to advise "no comment" in interview and to hand in a voluntary self-serving statement at the point of charge. At one time, such a statement was inadmissible. But now the prosecution has to lead it because it is relevant to the question whether the statutory direction under Section 34 should be given. In fact, that voluntary statement suffices not merely to negate the drawing of adverse inferences from the defendant's silence at interview; as the statute reads, the judge has positively to direct the jury not to hold against the defendant the chanting of "no comment" at interview.

We have therefore reached a situation where what was thought would lead to more convictions has in fact operated in favour of the guilty who keeps his silence and against the interests of the innocent defendant who is anxious to blurt out his account. Because of that, through the various procedures adopted by the police these days and, in particular, phased disclosure—I shall not bore your Lordships with that—the interests of the innocent defendant are now at risk.

I want to say a word about jury trials. I have never understood what is wrong in having counsel explain a fraud case to 12 ordinary people in such a way that they and the public understand it and, when the person goes to prison, everyone knows why he is doing so. I believe that it is wrong to substitute the City of London's view of what is honest and what is dishonest for that of 12 people drawn by lot from the community. If one cannot explain how a person has been dishonest so that 12 ordinary people can understand it, then that person probably has not been dishonest at all.

These provisions will be subject to the greatest scrutiny from these Benches. They are against civil liberties. They will be attacked.

My Lords, I have considerable misgivings with regard to the Home Secretary's crusade to reform the criminal law and its procedures. I intend, however, at Second Reading of the relevant Bills, to make the odd timid and deferential intervention. It occurred to me that it might be more welcome to your Lordships if, instead of commenting on what the Home Secretary has suggested, I comment on what I think is an important omission from his programme.

Over 20 years ago, the Criminal Law Revision Committee recommended that where the defendant honestly believed that the force used was necessary and reasonable, but the amount used was objectively unreasonable in the circumstances believed to exist by the defendant, the verdict should not be murder but should be manslaughter—sometimes referred to as the overreaction defence.

One of the advantages if this was adopted would be that the discretion as to how long a person should be given by way of punishment would be meted out by a judge and not by a politician. That suggestion was adopted by the Law Commission in its draft criminal code and was recommended to your Lordships' House by your Lordships' Select Committee on Murder and Life Imprisonment, on which I had the privilege to serve.

Your Lordships may have an indistinct recollection of the Irish case of R v Clegg, who, on 30th September 1990, when serving as a solder with the Parachute Regiment, shot the driver of a stolen car and one of his passengers who drove through a control point. He was convicted of murder on 4th June 1993 after a trial before Mr Justice Campbell without a jury.

His appeal to the Court of Appeal of Northern Ireland was dismissed, the Court of Appeal holding that the firing of the shot that killed the passenger was, on the facts found by the judge, a grossly excessive and disproportionate use of force. In the course of its judgment, the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal recommended that the law should be changed by the adoption of the recommendation of the Criminal Law Revision Committee.

The Judicial Committee of your Lordships' House, which dismissed the appeal, again endorsed that recommendation, with my noble and learned friend Lord Lloyd, who is, I am delighted to see, in his place, saying that the recommendations were all one way.

Your Lordships will doubtless recall the case of Martin, a somewhat eccentric farmer who in April 1999 shot and killed a 16 year-old burglar and wounded his accomplice when they broke into his home. He was convicted of murder. In his appeal to the Court of Appeal, he introduced new psychiatric evidence that he was suffering from "an abnormality of mind" at the time of the shooting. He was diagnosed as having a long-standing paranoid personality disorder exacerbated by depression, although the consultant psychiatrist who gave evidence at the trial found no evidence of depression or mental illness. The Court of Appeal accepted the new evidence and a verdict of manslaughter was substituted for that of murder, and he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment.

In the course of his judgment, the Lord Chief Justice said that there were suggestions that the law was in need of change, but that this was a matter for Parliament and not the courts. That was an interesting reservation because, in April 1996, an inter-departmental review of the law on the use of lethal force in self-defence, or the prevention of crime, set up by the Government, duly reported. It dealt with various options for change, including that proposed by the Criminal Law Revision Committee, to which I have referred. This was dealt with in what I respectfully submit was a confused manner in paragraphs 37 to 45.

Had the alternative of manslaughter been available, I have no doubt that the enormous outcry in favour of Tony Martin would not have occurred. He was convicted by a verdict of 10 to two. Mr Hague, the then Leader of the Official Opposition, referring to Martin's conviction said that it triggered,

"an explosion of anger and resentment among millions of law-abiding people who no longer feel the state is on their side".

In a leaked memorandum, Mr Blair cited the Martin conviction as an example of how the party was becoming "out of touch" with public opinion.

Mrs Gillian Shephard, a Member of the Conservative government's Cabinet when they were in power, said that the case had brought the biggest postbag of her political career—more than 1,000 letters—and that,

"the overwhelming number of responses I had were in favour of Tony Martin and saying he was right to defend himself'.

Quite recently on 17th October, Barry-Lee Hastings was cleared of murder but found guilty on a majority verdict of 10 to 2 of manslaughter. He stabbed to death a professional burglar who had a string of convictions, including one for attacking a person with an axe, and was on the run from the police when he broke into the flat in Tottenham, north London, where Hastings' estranged wife and their two children, both aged under four, lived. Hastings was on a visit to his family.

As Hastings approached the flat, he saw Williams in an upstairs bedroom and found the front door had been forced. He said he was about to call the police when he thought he heard his daughter crying out and so went in. He claimed that he picked up a knife intending to frighten the intruder, but when he was attacked by Williams in a darkened hall waving something in the air, he stabbed him in the back some 10 times. In the press this case was compared with that of Tony Martin and the possibility of an appeal was mooted.

As a matter of law, it might well be contended that Hastings was fortunate not to be convicted of murder, since it would appear that he intended to inflict serious bodily harm upon Williams and used excessive force in so doing. This Government have repeatedly stressed that the law must not only be just but must be seen to be just. I accordingly trust that in the extensive programme of modernising and amending our criminal law, the Government will find time for this amendment, which has the impressive support of those to whom I have referred.

My Lords, I beg to move that further debate on the Motion for an humble Address be now adjourned.

My Lords. I beg to move that the House do now adjourn during pleasure.

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. In doing so I declare art interest—not a financial one—as president of the Haemophilia Society.

The Question was as follows:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what implications for National Health Service patients identically affected in other parts of the United Kingdom follow from the findings of the expert group appointed by the Scottish Executive to consider financial and other practical support for patients infected with hepatitis C by contaminated National Health Service blood, blood products or tissue.

My Lords, the expert group's report was commissioned by the Scottish Executive, and its recommendations on hepatitis C relate only to people who contracted the virus from blood or blood products from the NHS in Scotland. It does not, therefore, have implications for patients in other parts of the United Kingdom.

My Lords, is it not much to the honour of the Scottish Executive that it had the case for compensating those infected and bereaved in this worst-ever treatment disaster in the history of the NHS independently examined by an eminent Scottish judge, not as in Whitehall by an in-house inquiry behind closed doors at the Department of Health?

If it is now seen as morally right to compensate in Scotland for hepatitis C infection by contaminated NHS blood products, should not the same moral imperative apply elsewhere in Britain? Is not the Haemophilia Society eminently justified in insisting that to deny parity of treatment in this case would diminish the NHS to a two-tier, two-class and two-faced system of healthcare for the British people?

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend for his distinguished presidency of the Haemophilia Society and to the society itself for the vigour with which it pursues its case. The fact is that the matter was considered by this Government and by the previous government. In general. compensation is given only to those who suffer negligent damage from NHS treatment. On that basis, the decision was made that no compensation would be given.

The position in Scotland is a matter for the Scottish Executive. I am, of course, aware of the recommendations of the expert group set up by the Scottish Executive. My understanding is that the Scottish Executive, in welcoming the preliminary report, is now considering what the outcome should be.

My Lords, despite what the noble Lord has just said, can the Government give a clear assurance that, if contamination has occurred within the National Health Service, adequate compensation will be given to the individuals who have been affected?

My Lords, I can only repeat my words to my noble friend Lord Morris of Manchester. One can only regret deeply the fact that so many people with haemophilia were infected with hepatitis C through blood products. As soon as the technology to make blood products free from hepatitis C became available, the NHS introduced it. On that basis, there is no legal liability to justify compensation for people with haemophilia and hepatitis C.

My Lords, even though there are separate organisations north and south of the Border, it seems extraordinary that the Minister should say that different moral considerations apply, depending on which side of the Border one happens to be. Malcolm Chisholm, the Health Minister, has been extremely sympathetic to Lord Ross's report, whatever the final settlement is to be.

Is the Minister really saying that the representations of the Haemophilia Society and, in particular, the results of the work of the expert working group set up by the society under Matthias Kelly QC will not be sympathetically received in the circumstances?

My Lords, Mr Chisholm welcomed the expert group's preliminary report and said that there were complex medical, legal and financial considerations to take into account. The Scottish Executive will need to consider its further position. There is little point in having devolution— certainly for NHS issues—unless the Scottish Executive and Parliament can come to their own view on such matters, as this Government do.

All that I can do is repeat my great sympathy for those who were affected. The Government have reviewed the matter. The previous government reviewed the matter some eight years ago and came to the same conclusion.

My Lords, the Minister gave an answer that was, in every way, factually correct. There is no legal responsibility on the NHS in England and Wales because no negligence was proved. Is there not, nevertheless, a strong moral responsibility to offer compensation to those infected through no fault of their own when blood products used for the treatment of haemophilia were infected with hepatitis C? No one could have predicted that. but the moral responsibility is very strong.

My Lords, noble Lords will know that the Government gave careful consideration to the matter and to the point raised by the noble Lord, as did the previous Government in 1994–95. Undoubtedly, meetings took place with the Haemophilia Society, and it argued its case strongly. I cannot pretend that the decision that the Government made was easy, but we decided that we could not make an exception to the general rule in this case.

My Lords, in an earlier reply, the noble Lord referred to "negligent damage". Surely, there was damage from the contamination. As for negligence, whose can it be, other than that of the NHS?

My Lords, as soon as the technology became available to make blood products free from hepatitis C, the NHS introduced it. There was, therefore, no legal liability to justify compensation for people with haemophilia and hepatitis C. The conclusion that this Government reached is exactly the same as that reached by the previous Conservative government— on the same issue and on the same facts—in the mid-1990s.

My Lords, how does the noble Lord differentiate between this case and the extensive compensation provided for victims of crime? There is no obligation on the Government to provide a penny piece for victims of crime, but, in the past, it was provided on the same basis as the ordinary civil liability. Subsequently, it went on to a tariff system. Many millions of pounds are provided for victims of crime. Why is there a differentiation between them and the haemophiliacs whom we are discussing?

My Lords, we cannot make a straight comparison. The principle that I enunciated has applied to the NHS for many years. It was shared by this Government and the previous government.

asked Her Majesty's Government:

Whether there have been any changes in the Ministry of Defence's arrangements, announced in 1988, for dealing with bullying.

My Lords, measures to combat bullying in the Armed Forces are kept under regular review and adjusted as necessary. The services' policy is unequivocal: no form of harassment or intimidation will be tolerated, and all allegations are investigated and appropriate action taken. Officers and senior ranks have the responsibility to preserve good order and discipline at all times. That is reinforced on appropriate military training courses.

My Lords, I am grateful for that response from my noble friend. We have a fine army, and we need tough, well trained soldiers. However, is my noble friend aware that the announcement made in 1988 was designed to eradicate bullying from the Army? Recent events, including suicides at Deep Cut barracks, indicate that the policy is not working. In future, instead of repeating the mantra that bullying is unacceptable and will not be tolerated, can we make commanding officers directly responsible for any bullying in their unit?

My Lords, I, too, want to acknowledge the part my noble friend played in another place in 1988 in ensuring that changes were made in this area. However, he knows that I cannot comment on the specific circumstances surrounding the deaths at Deep Cut while investigations of the Surrey police remain ongoing.

The Army continues to co-operate with the police in the course of their inquiries. There have been big improvements since 1988 in a number of areas, including increases in manpower to oversee training and better man-management training of officers and NCOs.

Furthermore, an Armed Forces code of social conduct was issued in 2000 and a diversity policy for the Armed Forces was issued this year. It is an issue that the Armed Forces take very seriously.

My Lords, does the Minister accept that the connected survey conducted by the Army was correct in suggesting that almost half those surveyed considered that the Army does have a problem with bullying? Does he also accept that this is a particular problem in training establishments and that clear attention needs to be given to training establishments in the Army in this respect?

My Lords, the noble Lord is right to the degree that 43 per cent of those who responded to the "Continuous Attitudes" survey said that they believed that harassment, bullying and discrimination were problems. The figures for those who claim to have been the victims of bullying are, thank God, lower; that is, 5.4 per cent, and 2.8 per cent of those who were surveyed.

Indeed, problems with bullying undoubtedly occur during training, as one would expect, because very young men and women are entering the Armed Forces. That would be true in other walks of life, too, because when people leave home for the first time, alas, bullying occurs, whether it be in the Army, Navy, Air Force or at school.

My Lords, I remind the House that I have an interest. How does the record of our Armed Forces compare with the Armed Forces of other western nations?

My Lords, I do not know how it compares, but I would be very surprised indeed if it did not compare very favourably.

My Lords, everyone would agree with my noble friend that there is no place for bullying in our Armed Forces, excellent as they are. However, will he accept that during recent months the newspapers may have verged towards inaccuracy, and sometimes imagination, in reporting on defence matters? Is not the key issue whether service men and women are adequately informed of the arrangements which he and previous Ministers have made to ensure that accusations of bullying are properly examined?

My Lords, one case is too many. There is a policy of zero tolerance. However, there are actions which service men or women should take if they consider that they are being bullied The first avenue to any individual who has those concerns is to approach his immediate superior, or someone else within the chain of command. It is the duty—-I repeat, the duty—of every officer and senior noncommissioned officer to confront and deal with inappropriate behaviour. That is emphasised time and time again during training. Therefore, any suspicion of bullying should be dealt with immediately.

Furthermore, there are now other people to whom an individual who is worried about something can turn. They are professional personnel such as the medical officer, padre and local welfare services. But I want to take the chance of praising the Women's Royal Voluntary Service which before 1988 had 19 people in the field of welfare and now has 72. It does a remarkable job in ensuring that young service men and women are catered for if they feel that they are unhappy are or being bullied.

My Lords, it is all very well providing somewhere for someone who is being bullied to turn, but it is difficult indeed for someone who is being bullied to take that step. Does the Minister agree that what is needed is the efficient training of junior non-commissioned officers to detect what is happening and provide a friendly face, rather than an authoritarian one, to those who need it?

My Lords, I agree entirely with the noble Lord and that is what happens. The training of junior officers and senior ranks involves a huge amount of being told how to behave towards youngsters in their charge. It is an important part of their responsibility. However, for those who indulge in bullying there is the prospect of being disciplined most severely indeed by being charged, if need be, with a criminal offence, or by an administrative means which can include being chucked out of the Armed Forces altogether.

asked Her Majesty's Government:

Whether, following the recent World Summit at Johannesburg, they will be focusing more of their scientific research and co-ordination work towards the goals of international sustainable development; and whether this policy will be extended to all relevant government departments and organisations funded by government.

My Lords, the issue of sustainable development already runs through the work and priorities of the UK science base. Research councils are committed to supporting the research and development to understand and address priorities such as climate change, sustainable energy, biodiversity, water and health. The science budget attracted substantial new funding in the latest spending review and details of the allocations will be made public shortly.

In addition, departments such as DfID, DEFRA, the Department of Transport and DTI undertake research in support of their policy interests relating to sustainable development.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his encouraging response. Will he change the wording of the affirmation required of researchers seeking government funds? The 1993 White Paper introduced the worthy but limited objectives of improving "wealth creation" and "quality of life". Will the Minister start consultations about introducing wider objectives?

My Lords, improving the quality of life also includes the objectives we would have in terms of international development. It is a wide-ranging phrase and would be taken also to include that.

My Lords, is the Minister aware that only last week the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was concerned that government departments would do no more than pay lip service to the objectives of sustainable development? In the light of that, what will the Government do to ensure that sustainable development is put at the heart of policy making?

My Lords, we already do a great deal across a wide range of departments in initiatives in this area. We have the sustainable technologies initiative, which includes developing an understanding of socio-economic aspects of the adoption of sustainable technologies. There are also the enviro-wise programme; the waste and resources action programme; the market transformation programme; and the work of the Carbon Trust. So already a number of important programmes are in place and we have taken action in areas such as energy research for sustainable development, which will have a major impact.

There are already major programmes and we also have in this country some of the finest research in places such as the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the Hadley Centre for Climate Change, which are recognised as being world-class centres.

My Lords, bearing in mind the emphasis placed by the UK at the Johannesburg World Summit on access to safe water, has any scientific research been conducted in the UK with a view to providing third world countries with effective and low-cost methods of testing drinking water for arsenic and other heavy metals? Will the Minister also say whether with our increased emphasis on wind energy we might be in a particularly convenient position to transfer those technologies to third world countries where high average wind speeds obtain?

My Lords, we carry out a lot of good research on wind energy. We can transfer technology in exactly such areas to markets of the developing world. In fact, we recently welcomed a report from the innovation and growth team on environmental industries and services. Energy and wind energy is part of that, as is the way in which we increase our share of those markets in this country by transferring that technology to the developing world.

I am not certain about the position on water. I believe that we have some good research, but I shall write to the noble Lord setting that out specifically.

My Lords, as an extension to the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, do the Government have any plans to extend their scientific research and co-ordination to assist African scientists and researchers on vital sustainable development goals?

My Lords, we already have substantial ongoing research for African countries. I believe that that will continue to be extended. We have an MRC research station in the Gambia, and DfID does a good deal of work and research in Africa. One of the most interesting examples is the research work that has been done on a disease affecting cassava; namely, cassava mosaic virus. Two hundred million people in Africa benefit who might otherwise suffer as a result of the disease. The work has been developed at a cost of £3 million over the past 10 years and the gross monetary benefit is about £80 million. So there are substantial programmes, with very substantial benefits.

My Lords, I ask the Minister in what respects? The programmes to which he has referred are suggested to be wholly defective.

My Lords, I have just given an example where £3 million of research money was spent on traditional breeding of new varieties of cassava. That gave a benefit of £80 million. By anyone's standards—certainly by mine— that is an extremely good cost-benefit ratio.

My Lords, does the Minister recall the report of the Science and Technology Committee of this House, published in May this year— which I chaired, and to which he was kind enough to give evidence— indicating that the fate of the systematic biologists who are needed for the implementation of so much sustainable development was found to be in a parlous state? When will the Government give their response to the report, and which department will be leading on that response?

My Lords, I am sure that it is going to be given shortly. I believe that it will be given jointly by the OST and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, because both were involved—the DCMS is also involved—so I think that the response will have to be across government. The DCMS is heavily involved in the question of places such as the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum, which are very involved in the biodiversity debate.

My Lords, there is much excellent. publicly funded research in this country on, for example, sustainable agriculture. Does the Minister accept that if only there were a mechanism to fund its application in the third world it would help to meet the objectives set at Johannesburg? Does he agree that for the lack of this relatively small amount of pump-priming money we are wasting an opportunity to help the third world?

My Lords, I am not sure that I do agree with that. I think that money is available and some research establishments in this country do a very good job doing just that.

asked Her Majesty's Government:

How they have responded to a recent appeal by the Ethiopian Prime Minister for international donors to help combat the onset of famine in that country.

My Lords, the humanitarian situation is a matter of great concern. But so far in 2002 good co-ordination between the Government of Ethiopia and donors has represented a big advance over the situation in 1984.

Prospects for 2003 are potentially very serious. We are keeping the situation under continuous review. We are involved in frequent in-country dialogue on the humanitarian situation between the Ethiopian Government, other donors and NGOs. So far, we have made humanitarian commitments of some £12.3 million in the calendar year 2002. We remain committed to playing our part in the international response, which includes increasing UK bilateral contributions when necessary.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her Answer. Does she agree that studying the recent history of Ethiopia can help dispel the myth, apparently supported by the Foreign Secretary, that all the problems of Africa are linked to a British colonial past? Will the noble Baroness therefore support the view that the best way to tackle famine across Africa is by the international community looking forward and working with African countries to end the cycle of corruption, economic stagnation and war which condemns so many Africans to poverty and famine?

My Lords, I do not necessarily agree with the noble Baroness on the first part of her supplementary question—in fact, I do not agree with it at all. I agree strongly on the other part. The Government have become extremely engaged with the present situation in Ethiopia. We are monitoring developments on the ground through our DfID office in Addis Ababa— an example of the co-operation referred to by the noble Baroness. The Secretary of State spoke this morning on the telephone to Prime Minister Meles. We have had meetings with the Ethiopian ambassador, and the Secretary of State will visit Ethiopia in January. We have a continuing partnership programme with Ethiopia, as we have with many developing countries. The programme includes ensuring that debt relief is on track. I am pleased to say that partial debt relief is now available to Ethiopia. We also ensure that long-term alleviation of poverty is at the top of developing countries' own agenda.

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that, in view of the appalling developing situation in Ethiopia, it is essential to bear in mind the importance of balancing talk about reform of world trade and level playing fields by very specific, tailored policies to enable desperately poor countries such as Ethiopia to reach the point of economic fitness to play on those level playing fields? Does she further agree that the tragic situation underlines the importance of the previous Question by my noble friend Lord Hunt of Chesterton. Unless climate change is brought under control, we shall be confronted with worse disasters throughout Africa in the future?

Yes, my Lords, I strongly agree with my noble friend on both issues. I agree with his point on climate change, and unless we have a level playing field we shall always be catching up with the poverty situation in Africa. The Government have made very important moves, for instance in terms of CAP reform. Unless CAP reform takes place, there will continue to be a major distortion in world markets.

My Lords, would the noble Baroness like to reconsider—

My Lords, does the noble Baroness agree—

My Lords, I think it is the turn of the noble Earl, Lord Onslow.

My Lords, would the noble Baroness like to reconsider her answer about the Foreign Secretary's reply regarding British imperialism. Ethiopia was not governed by the British; it was removed from Italian control by the British. Does she not realise that a war has been going on in Ethiopia between the Eritreans and the Ethiopians? The country has been independent since 1959 or thereabouts. So the fault, dear Brutus, is in ourselves, not in our stars. We should not be permanently saying that it is our fault— mea culpa. The Ethiopians are responsible for their own independence and their own actions. That is what grown ups are about, and we assume that we are grown ups.

My Lords, I believe that the noble Baroness talked about colonial power not necessarily British colonial power. I agree very much that the Government and DfID are ensuring that countries become independent as quickly as possible.

My Lords, does the noble Baroness agree that, since the donor community is being asked to supply 300 million dollars worth of food aid and 12 million dollars worth of veterinary and medical, non-food aid, it should determine which ports would best be used for the purpose, including the Eritreans' offer of Massawa and Assab? Would not the use of those ports be beneficial in encouraging friendly relations between Eritrea and Ethiopia, which are so essential to the long-term recovery of the region?

My Lords, it is for the agencies managing the operations to use the most cost-effective means of delivering relief supply. In that sense, I very much agree with the noble Lord. We urge all parties to facilitate that process.

My Lords, as a matter of pleasure rather than duty, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the right reverend Prelate on his maiden speech during this debate. He simply. directly and eloquently brought us to the heart of the issues in the Bills that the Government have included in the gracious Speech covering this area. As a mere layman, I feel slightly exposed at being preceded and followed by such a galaxy of noble and learned Lords. I am happy to declare an interest as chairman of the All-Party Group on Penal Affairs.

It is clear that our criminal justice system needs to work much better to respond to the concerns of too many local communities that they have had their safety and security stolen from them. That is why I welcome the measures that the Government want to put in place in these Bills. The day-to-day activities of the yobs, the graffiti sprayers and the anti-social louts are contemptible to neighbours. neighbourhoods and communities. As my noble and learned friend said in opening the debate, in the past few years, many types of crime have fallen on the back of much higher and sustained investment in the number of police officers, in their equipment and in more effective policing. But too many people know that darker nights and school holidays mean extra disturbance around their homes. People whose lives are ruined and wrecked by petty crime and anti-social behaviour will be impatient of lawyers who do not recognise this and who defend current measures and give the impression of resisting change. They will simply not understand it if Parliament, councils, police and the community safety partnerships that they have formed do not respond and demonstrate that we are all on their side.

There is progress, and it is important to acknowledge and learn from it. I have been involved in efforts to regenerate a rundown council estate at Castle Vale in my former Birmingham constituency. I also have the privilege of chairing, at residents' request, the neighbourhood management board, which links service providers and users in preparing for when the successful Housing Action Trust ends its work in about three years' time. One major, important key to sustainable development on Castle Vale is recognition of the need to tackle the causes of crime, trying to prevent it and to engage residents in that process. We have been slow to learn that neither the police nor any other agency can do this alone. There must be a partnership involving residents of those communities. They must feel safe in taking part in that process.

The Housing Action Trust has won massive resident support for making sensible use of anti-social behaviour and eviction orders against a handful of anti-social and criminal residents. If that had been contemplated by Birmingham City Council 10 years ago, there would have been close to a riot among residents and tenants on the estate. Years on, through the work of the Housing Action Trust and the partnerships that it has built, the residents were wholly behind what the trust did. The HAT uses CCTV and neighbourhood wardens to show residents three things: it is on their side, it is now more difficult to commit crime in that community, and it is much more likely that those doing so will be caught and prosecuted. The Housing Action Trust also funds a home-school liaison officer to help young people under threat of exclusion and to try to divert them from crime. In partnership with the Home Office, it funds ;.in arrest referral officer to assess and fast-track into treatment residents arrested on criminal charges who have a drug dependency.

The Government need to better spread this successful practice and to find new and more effective ways of involving the main victims of crime in its prevention and in combating it. The main victims of crime are young people. Perhaps we can learn in partnership with organisations such as the Scouts and the Guides actively to involve young people in such work. It is right that we should acknowledge the fall by 14.6 per cent in juvenile reoffending since the Youth Justice Board started to implement changes in the system two or three years ago. It is also important that we do not overlook the fact that, for every young hooligan. another 99 young people respect their neighbours and community, and, like their families, want to live in peace and security in and around their own homes. As Sir Peter Hall, professor of planning at University College London, said earlier this month in the context of the problems of litter and anti-social behaviour:

"Maybe…the answer is to get the kids—natural authoritarians, if organised—to police the other kids and to maintain their own zero tolerance regime".

That is a useful thought.

We also need to find better ways of reaching out to those mainly young men in urban and rural areas who do not see themselves sharing in the better life and prosperity, and who feel it beyond their reach in any event. This lies at the heart of alienation. disconnection and much anti-social behaviour. The criminal justice system is also failing, to combat crime and to offer offenders more fulfilling lives.

As we hold this debate, there are around 73,000 people in our overcrowded gaols—the highest per-capita population in the European Union. According to Martin Narey, the director general of the Prison Service, in 18 months that figure is likely to reach 80,000. In the past year, the prison population has risen by 5,000—around an extra seven in every 100. The remand population of around 13,000 has increased by 1,300, or 11 per cent, in the past year alone. As Professor Rod Morgan, the Chief Inspector of Probation, reminds us, the proportion of offenders sent to prison has almost doubled, from 17 in 100 to 30 in 100, in the decade from 1990. Your Lordships will have noticed that it was not in that decade that crime fell year on year. It is falling now, and we all hope that that continues. Around three out of every four young offenders whom we send to prison are back behind bars within two years. That is not very successful.

We need to make two changes. If half :hose prisoners sentenced to six months or Less—that is 8,000 prisoners, or about 11 in every 100—were given community sentences, where appropriate, the prison population would fall by about 4,000. I hope your Lordships will join me in saying that politicians and the press have a responsibility to challenge those who argue that community sentences are somehow a soft option. They are not. They are sentences and, when they are well targeted and well resourced, they offer a much better prospect of stopping people reoffending. In those circumstances, they are much better at that than simply locking people away. We share a duty with the press and the media to make that clear to: hose among the public who have doubts.

An astonishing 75 in every 100 prisoners are sentenced to just 12 months or less. Even more astonishingly, 14,000 prisoners get one month or less and 40,000 get three months or less. How is the Prison Service supposed to fulfil its duties in helping these young offenders to lead better lives if they are with the service for such a short time? That collides and conflicts with the education and drug treatment roles that the Prison Service is now about.

It would be useful if my noble and learned friend could also explain what action the Government propose to take to transfer to the health service those 5,000 prisoners who are profoundly mentally ill. They do not belong in prison and need expert care and treatment that the Prison Service is not equipped to provide.

As I have told your Lordships' House, I am all for the much wider use of community sentences for those convicted of non-violent offences. However, Ministers must listen and respond to the concerns of Professor Rod Morgan, who heads the probation inspectorate. In an interview in the Guardian on 13th November, he said that,

"the probation service is facing the same overloading crisis as the prisons".

If, as I believe, the Government's ambition is rightly that more sentences should be served in the community, they must do even better than they have done so far with the probation service. That is in spite of the fact that an extra 2,000 probation officers have been recruited since the national probation service was put together two or three years ago and its funding in the period up to 2005 is going to increase by 80 per cent. If we are going to lay extra duties on the probation service to make a better success of the use of community sentences— which is what I want, and I suspect that a number of your Lordships agree—the resources must be provided to the probation service to enable that to happen. That would be money well invested, because cutting the large number of repeat offences is good for society and produces an economic benefit, as well as the benefit for the individuals concerned.

Professor Morgan and Martin Narey, the Director-General of the Prison Service, believe that the collapse in the use of fines by the courts has partly fuelled the rise in the prison population. There is a strong case for going back to the system of tying fines to the ability to pay, but using that fine system as an alternative to sending people to prison for short sentences. Those short sentences need to be replaced by well designed, staffed and funded community penalties. There is a rare collection of views on that now. It is the view of the Home Secretary, of my noble and learned friend on the Front Bench, of my noble and learned friend the Attorney-General and of the Lord Chief Justice. All the big players have said that. The Government now have a responsibility to ensure that it happens.

I hope that my noble and learned friend will assure me that these views have been heard and will be acted on. The Government's response to proper concerns about anti-social behaviour will be helped by a stronger emphasis on community sentences and extra funds for the probation service to make them more effective. That will give the Prison Service a better opportunity to carry out what I believe is its main role, which is not punishment, but the prevention of further crime. In that sense, the emphasis must properly be on rehabilitation.

As the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, said earlier, there are lots of people whose lives are blighted, maybe not by offences that are criminal in the normal sense, but by everyday nuisance and disturbance in going about their business. We must collectively find answers to that. I hope that the Government will achieve that in their measures.

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, I, too, know that it is no longer the convention for speakers to say something nice about a preceding maiden speech. However, I want to say that it was a privilege to hear the speech of the right reverend Prelate. For far too long, too many backs have been turned on what goes on in the prisons—on those who are inside them and on the often self-defeating regimes that are pursued there. The right reverend Prelate will do much to correct that.

I hope I shall be forgiven for not following the extremely important speech just made by the noble Lord, Lord Corbett. I intend to limit my remarks to criminal trials for serious offences. Governments have always faced a critical dilemma. On the one hand, they have to be seen to address the public's anxiety and anger about crime. They have to show that they are on the case. Procedural reform is temptingly available to them for that purpose. On the other hand, they realise that they are the custodians of a precious framework of individual liberties, containing safeguards that, once curtailed, are seldom, if ever, restored. They certainly are part of our national heritage and I believe strongly that preserving them has far more than a mere historic or antiquarian importance. Establishing a fair and practicable balancing of those objectives has always been part of the art of governing this country. The Government are in danger of getting it wrong.

In the few minutes available, I shall focus on trial by jury. As we all know, the right to trial by jury has been adjusted more than once in modern times. Yet trial by jury for serious offences remains a fundamental feature of the balance that we strike, as it has for centuries. We have always placed it in the scales on the side of freedom. The question is whether it still carries weight there. I believe it does. I can think of one fairly recent case in which a jury's apparently eccentric acquittal led promptly and directly to the drastic revision of the absurdly catch-all law on official secrets. That is one example. The point is that juries are able to do what seems to them to be right. If they think that a prosecution or the law on which it is based is wrong or unfair, they are impregnable against the displeasure of the executive when they acquit accordingly. They do not have to give reasons, as, for example, is the case with a Diplock court in Northern Ireland.

I should like to cite a line or two from the response to the White Paper, Justice for All, prepared by the Bar Council and the Criminal Bar Association. I do so because they make the point so well:

"Juries keep the law honest…because they oblige lawyers and judges to deal with what is right and wrong by the standards of the general public, as well as what is the letter of the law".

These days, I detect a tendency in the Home Secretary to say impatiently of the Bar Council, and of others in relevant practice, "Oh, them!", thereby implying special pleading on their part.

I suppose I should declare an interest here in that I am a retired barrister, with a son practising at the Bar. But in the Bar's response to the White Paper, I do not detect anything of the nature of special pleading. All I would urge upon your Lordships is that the language that I have cited is surely perceptive and reflective language. As such, surely it is worthy of being heeded with respect. To draw upon special knowledge is not necessarily to indulge in special pleading.

We should never forget how devastatingly invasive can be the exercise of the state's jurisdiction to prosecute people. In its powers it is quite unmatched by anything that is made available to the subject, the individual, who is at the receiving end. In these days when it is. rightly, fashionable to seek public "ownership"—the modern phrase—of public processes, I cannot believe that it has somehow now become right that, in even a single category of serious crime, the ownership of the outcome of a trial should be removed from the public, represented as they have been for centuries by a randomly selected jury. That cannot be right. It is important for us to know from the Government the justification for doing so, at any rate in serious fraud cases; and, indeed, in the other categories of case to which it may be applied in the future.

Yet, again, one understands the Government to say that there is a case for this action. At least in the case of serious fraud they agree with the Roskill Commission, of some 15 years ago, which thought that such cases were too difficult for juries and recommended special tribunals. I confess to having a previous record in this respect—some form—that I suppose Ministers would feel should be disclosed to them. When the government of whom I was a member rejected that Roskill recommendation, I, for one, was not disappointed. I later established the Serious Fraud Office, answerable through its director to the Attorney-General.

When he concludes the debate, will the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor confirm that over the past three years the conviction rate of individuals prosecuted by the Serious Fraud Office has been, as I understand, no less than 86 per cent? If that is correct, does it not, as the Bar Council's response rather modestly puts it,

"provide a proper basis for having substantial confidence in the present system"?

I hope that there is no evidence at all—indeed, I would not expect there to be— that in formulating its prosecutions the Serious Fraud Office has failed to bring out the full criminality of a case out of a desire to temper the wind to an unskilled jury, as the Government suggest in the White Paper. But if such evidence exists and is causing concern, is it not remarkable that Lord Justice Auld did not refer to it and rely upon it? Perhaps the noble and learned Lord could also deal with that issue.

What jury trial for serious fraud certainly does is to oblige the prosecution to explain its case in a way that the layman can understand. And why not? Fraud is dishonesty. No one should be convicted of it without his peers being enabled to understand from the way in which the prosecution has put the case the basis upon which dishonesty is alleged. That is not asking too much. If the prosecution team cannot manage it, there is either something wrong with their case or with them. I thought that we were all agreed that we need to take the mystery out of the language and the processes of the law. I suggest that we do not want criminal trials conducted and resolved between experts in arcane jargon that no one outside their craft can understand. Keeping jury trials for serious fraud cases will safeguard us against that.

Both the DPP and the director of the SFO must, by statute, be superintended by the Attorney-General, who is answerable to Parliament. That, in itself, is part of the public ownership about which I have spoken. The Attorney-General is the guardian of the public interest. I warmly agree with the remarks made by my noble and learned friend Lord Rawlinson of Ewell earlier today about the practice that this implies in real life for the Attorney-General and the two directors. I should emphasise strongly that the Attorney-General does not have to be asked for his advice by a director before it can be right for him to give it. Some of the answers given by the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General when recently questioned about the Burrell case could have given rise to that impression, which would be wrong.

Of course we have to take into account our experience of the Diplock courts in Northern Ireland. I have never had anything but admiration for them. But they were introduced solely by reason of the intimidation of juries, as was the special court in the Republic. I cannot speak for them, but I greatly doubt whether any of the Northern Ireland judges, who have to act as both judge and jury, would not prefer, if circumstances permitted. that the system reverted to what it was. I should also be surprised if they are not irked by the assertion able to made by some defendants that they are obliged to suffer their cases being the subject of a fundamentally exceptional procedure. Incidentally, the rates of conviction and acquittal in the Diplock courts compare very closely indeed with those in cases where jury trial still obtains.

In my few remaining minutes I should like to say a few words about proposals for disclosing previous convictions. I agree with the comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, in this respect. What is the theory behind this proposal? What weight is it said may properly be given to disclosed previous convictions? How will this affect prosecution decisions? Guidelines to the Crown Prosecution Service require that a prosecution shall only be brought where there is a realistic prospect of a conviction. Will the service be advised that, notwithstanding that other evidence—if you can call it "evidence"—is insufficient, the ability to disclose a previous conviction is nevertheless capable of tipping the balance, which would mean more prosecutions than is the case at present? It is enough simply to ask that question. For the moment, I hope merely to receive a reply. The time for comment will come later.

In reviewing in this Session what will be but the latest tranche of the Government's recurring Bills on law and order, I am sure that we shall return time and again to the proportionality of their impact upon the liberties of those individuals who make up the very public whom they are intended to protect. For my part, I can think of no subject more worthy of your Lordships' most vigilant attention.

My Lords, I wish first to apologise to the House for failing to be present in the Chamber for the opening speeches. I must confess to falling victim to the new sitting hours. I extend my sincere apologies to those concerned.

The Home Office must be the most uncomfortable ministry to occupy for reasons we all know well. Before launching into a series of criticisms of the Queen's Speech, I pay tribute to the Home Secretary, an admirable man and an experienced Minister who has his feet planted firmly on terra firma.

I shall say a few words about prisons and policing, a few words about law-making, a few words about magistrates' courts and even fewer about the criminal justice Bill on which many noble Lords have already spoken with great eloquence, experience and knowledge. I add my voice to the concerns expressed with regard to fraud juries, or the lack of them, previous convictions, double jeopardy rules, and some of the reforms proposed to sexual offences, especially rape.

The bias towards the avoidance of all wrongful conviction, which lies at the very root of our criminal justice system, has uncomfortable consequences that neither we nor the press do much to explain to the public. There is a choice to be made, and we in this country have made our choice as to where the bias should lie. We must, for no reason, move from that foundation.

With regard to prisons, it is a mystery that we have, by so great a margin, the biggest prison population per capita in the whole of Europe, bar Turkey. We let ourselves off the hook as to why that is so. The public perhaps blame politicians more than they should, and we do not always do our best to avert that blame by putting the problem back in front of the public, as we often should. The seedbed of the extraordinary level of criminality in this country, of the bizarre proliferation of anti-social behaviour, for which we are now notorious throughout not just Europe but the world, is composed of many highly complex matters. Sometimes, we should try to return to the causes of that sad state of affairs, although we are much more inclined to plunge into the particularities of legislation designed to cope with it.

A fortnight ago, I spent the morning at Feltham Young Offenders Institution, a place that has received more than its fair share of bad news coverage in recent years by dint of an exceptional number of suicides there. Happily, it is now functioning much more effectively. It has an exceptional governor in Nick Pascoe. I thought that it would interest your Lordships to hear a few of the brute facts about that place.

At present, it holds 680 prisoners, of whom 330 are young offenders aged 18 to 21, and 350 are juveniles aged 15 to 17. For those 680 prisoners, there are 1,050 staff, of whom 380 are prison officers. Even with that complement, they are 50 short. The cost per year of a young offender is £21,000; for a juvenile, nearly double at £41,000. Ten per cent of the inmates have mental problems; 70 per cent are re-offenders; 23 per cent are not British; and 60 to 70 per cent—this is shocking—are illiterate or near illiterate. Ninety-nine per cent were unemployed when they committed the offences for which they were imprisoned. The noble Lord, Lord Corbett, referred to the fact that their average stay is but two months. Perhaps most devastating of all, even in that enlightened institution, where so much good, hard work has been done, they spend 17 to 18 hours a day in their cells.

The Queen's Speech states:

"Sentencing will be reformed to ensure that the punishment is appropriate for the offender. New types of sentence will be introduced to protect the public from dangerous offenders, help reduce offending and deal with young offenders".

The one certain way of not reducing re-offending is currently to put anyone into one of our prisons. They will return to society less fit to play a constructive role than when they entered prison. That is a commonplace—a notorious one—that we continually ignore. It is one that the public will not face—or, perhaps more fairly, are not called upon to face.

I am not sure that the public really understand the facts. If they understood that the direct cost of keeping people in one of our young offenders institutions or prisons was more than that of sending them to Eton or of giving them their own personal full-time tutor and that the cost of their criminality adds several times to the annual cost of their incarceration, the public would not be as retrograde as they sometimes seem.

To expect the police to deal with that parlous state of affairs is unfair and unrealistic. It is notable that the massive reduction in criminality in New York was achieved by a near doubling of the police force. Its police force was originally roughly equivalent per capita to ours in London at present. When we realise that the direct cost of crime to this country in the most recent year for which we have records was £65 billion, for us to continue with the current extraordinarily modest accretions of manpower to the police is bizarrely short-sighted.

The cost of doubling the size of the Metropolitan Police would be well under £1 billion, but we are discussing an annual direct cost to society of £65 billion. If anything like the savings experienced in New York as a result of reduction in criminality and in damage and anxiety to citizens were achieved in London, we would save not £1 billion but £10 billion or more.

Lastly, I shall say a word about law-making. During last year's debate on the Queen's Speech, I suggested that the flow of legislation promised to us was liable to be counter-productive. We had already had about 15 criminal justice Acts since the present administration came to power. I looked up the legislation for 1902. Primary legislation took up 147 pages of small A5 sheets. Interestingly enough, it included the first Licensing Act, a subject with which we shall now grapple again. Secondary legislation took up 976 small sheets. For 2001, which is the most recent year for which the Library could give me records, primary legislation took up 2,063 pages; while secondary legislation took up 10,693 pages; a total of nearly 13,000 pages. That is roughly 25 times more than in 1902.

Things have changed, but we are now legislating with a voluminousness and complexity that has become totally self-defeating. It is self-defeating for us, because so much legislation is not scrutinised at all either here or in the other place; and it is self-defeating in the extra burden that it places on those who are supposed to use it. Let us consider the police. Every new piece of criminal legislation with which they must deal wraps up the police force in an ever-greater subjection to bureaucracy. It confuses and deters the magistracy. Out in the streets of this wonderful country, more and more people have given up—they have ceased trying to understand what we are doing in their name— and they do not pretend even to understand the broad purport of the legislation which pours forth from this place like so much sophisticated effluent.

The Licensing Bill which thumped onto our desks last week totals nearly 200 pages. The first crucial landmark Licensing Act consisted of 12. The Bill includes—I hope that the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor will take note of this—a "Framework" for future guidance which is 11 pages long. Clause 177 will entitle the Home Secretary, in effect, to fill in the substance of the Bill itself. All the crucial criteria for the operation of the Bill are to be provided, not by way of statutory instrument, which we can at least in theory challenge, but by way of guidance, which we cannot. This is a recipe for the final side-stepping of this Chamber and the other place. That should not be accepted.

However inconvenient it may be, we should say to the Government—and, indeed, to ourselves—that too much legislation is counterproductive; that too much law makes for more unlawfulness; that the more complex the law the less (and the less fairly) it will be implemented; that trying to manage a democratic society by legislation will eventually make it unmanageable; that imperfect laws which are accepted are better than sophisticated laws which are not; and that w here we, the legislators, cannot understand our own legislation, the public certainly will not do so either. In dealing with the legislation to come, I hope that we will be able to make some impression upon it.

My Lords, I welcome very warmly the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester. I am sure that noble Lords will agree that we need a strong, eloquent bishop of prisons who talks about compassion. We had one, and I am glad to see that we now have another.

I should like to make some broad comments about the direction of the Government's policies in criminal justice generally, particularly in relation to the first and third of the six Bills listed this morning, and I should also like to say something about balance. Much has been said about balance and, as the Bills were enumerated earlier, it struck me that the anti-social behaviour Bill has a title that we could never have accepted here 15 years ago because laws against anti-social behaviour were the prerogative of the totalitarian countries under the thumb of the former Soviet Union. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said, our historical memory can be very short.

I am reminded of a talk with the chief prosecute r of a former communist country not so long ago. We asked, "How many acquittals do you have?". He said, "That is an odd question, but I shall find out". He sent someone away, who came back and whispered in his ear. He said to us, "Well, out of the last 5,000 cases we had two people who were acquitted. Of course", he said, "if we had more acquittals than that it would suggest that the police were arresting the wrong people. Our police are very good and they never arrest the wrong people".

The Government talk about rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of the victim. I am not sure whether that includes the two children referred to by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, today—disturbed children needing compassion— who were sent to prison in our name and who killed themselves there.

I should like to talk about three other rebalancing acts. The first is between the criminal justice system and other ways of responding to social disorder, family breakdown, drug addiction and conflicts in communities. Governments make choices about where their resources are spent. There is a path that can be taken where the criminal justice process grows ever larger, where more and more social problems are swept up into the machinery of police, courts, prisons, and more and more small time nuisance and petty criminal behaviour is dealt with through the criminal system.

Unfortunately, I fear that that is the path the Government are taking— more and more prosecutions. No doubt there will be targets and that to reach the targets the CPS will be prosecuting more and more poor confused souls who break windows or steal cans of beer from upermarkets—prosecutions that will not be in the public interest at all.

The most effective and cost-effective way to deal with low-level anti-social behaviour is through social measures. In the excellent debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Elton, on 27th March this year, the House looked at the balance between punishment and prevention; at prosecution versus an appropriate social intervention. Figures were brought before the House which showed that, compared with very similar countries, our per capita spending on health and education is lower and on the machinery of crime control is higher.

If the Government were really serious about effectiveness and about reducing crime and the number of victims of crime, they could well have considered a quite different proposition—that is, that prosecutions should be brought only when they are in the public interest, and that the very large number of pathetic, troublesome, addicted people, whose crimes are petty and whose problems are huge, should be referred to social agencies for action.

I remember well some 20 years ago that most distinguished Law Lord, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman, speaking of his conclusions after he investigated the Brixton riots of 1981. He said:

"There can be no criminal justice without social justice".

The second rebalancing I wish to refer to is the balance between prison and non-prison sentences, an issue on which the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, made some very cogent points. The statement in the White Paper, Justice for All, that,

"prison must be reserved for serious, dangerous and seriously persistent offenders",

is very welcome. However, that admirable statement cannot be implemented merely by saying it. It requires an enormous amount of action. One major action that it requires is to make the alternatives to prison more visible, more credible and more clearly effective.

In the Criminal Justice and Court Services Bill 2000, we legislated for a national probation service and for a change of name of the community penalties. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, argued that these measures would make them,

"truly effective and credible alternatives to custody".—[Official Report, 3/7/00: col. 1287.]

No-one can claim that this has been the outcome. The opposite has been the outcome.

Community penalties have fallen in their use as alternatives to prison and increased in their use as alternatives to each other. The noble Lord, Lord Corbett, has already mentioned the article in The Times on Tuesday by the very distinguished and scholarly Chief Inspector of Probation, Professor Rod Morgan. He makes it clear that probation and community service—I have never been able to get my tongue around the new names and I hope that your Lordships will forgive me for not using them—are now being used not for those on the borderline of prison but for those who would in the past have been fined. This is a very expensive business and a totally non-cost-effective use of resources.

Community penalties are delivered by the Probation Service. I used to be very much in favour of a national probation service. I envisaged that a national service would get rid of local variations and weaknesses in the provision of community sentences, and would enable talented probation staff more scope. I imagined that there would be a strong high-profile chief probation officer who would be on television and in the newspapers frequently, pointing out the successes of community service orders and probation work, reporting how satisfied local people were with the work done and reporting how happy victims were to see a useful outcome as the result of an offence. I imagined that there would be a central, strong research office looking at results and publicising outcomes.

I now believe that I was quite wrong. The National Probation Service does none of those things. The result of abolishing the local probation structures and pulling all the probation services into the Civil Service has been that the good local services that did those things have been swallowed up by Home Office bureaucracy and have all become invisible. No one is promoting community sentences and trumpeting their successes. I therefore urge the Home Secretary to have another look at the National Probation Service and think about the possibility of a reconfiguration. The work of supervising released and life-licence prisoners, managing risky people when they leave prison—I am sure it is being done very well at the national level—should continue to be done by the National Probation Service. It is my view that the provision of credible community punishments will be successful only if there is a strong local base. That aspect of the work should be returned to local areas.

That leads me to my third rebalancing suggestion, which is about the relationship between the national and the local in criminal justice and the relationship between meeting national targets and dealing with crime successfully in the places where people live and where they experience it. The Minister for prisons and probation recently made a speech warmly welcoming the achievements of the Probation Service in reducing re-offending by 3.1 per cent. No one would wish to question such an achievement, even while wondering what those figures actually mean. But for the people living in areas where crime blights their lives, the meeting of such a national target is completely meaningless. Crime is experienced locally. There are targets that might mean something to the people who experience that crime.

It is clear that, rightly, the Government want to have an impact on those areas where crime is worst and where people cannot afford the protective devices, nor the insurance policies that we have to protect ourselves from crime. Targets, for example, might be the number of residents in such an area who say, "I feel much safer than I used to"; the number of elderly people who decide that it is possible to go out at night to the local community centre; and the number of young people who have committed crimes, have apologised to their victims and made the victims feel that they have been listened to and understood. A place where many people who appear in court, are convicted and go to prison is not necessarily a safer or a happier place.

The deeper penetration of the criminal justice process into more anti-social acts can have the opposite effect. Local people begin to feel that they are not responsible for what happens around them. When anything has to be controlled the police should do it; when disapproval has to be shown towards certain behaviour the courts will do it; when anyone has to be corrected and made to reconsider their behaviour, the probation officers will do it. The more low-level antisocial and petty criminal behaviour that we hand over to the criminal justice system and the more young people who are dealt with by the official agencies, the more we weaken the capacity of local communities to take responsibility and exercise social control. I urge the Government to reflect on whether the approach that they are taking will lead to a safer society. I fear that it will lead to a more controlled and a more fearful society.

My Lords, the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, was certainly an argument for the life peerage of the Cross Benches. "Lovely" is all I can say! I also want to say "lovely" to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester. He rightly drew attention to the vital role of rehabilitation in prisons. If we do not rehabilitate prisoners, they will return to prison. It is as simple as that. My historical sense draws me to remind him of a contrast. The only time that the whole of the Episcopal Bench voted as one was on a case in the 1830s when it was proposed to remove the sentence of capital punishment from those who wrote their names on London Bridge. All the Bishops voted against its repeal. What a pleasant contrast that was.

I sincerely hope that the noble and learned Lords, Lord Falconer, Lord Irvine of Lairg and Lord Goldsmith, start their pupilage again, sitting in awe in the chambers of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws. She gave them all a lecture. All governments, not only this one—sometimes even that of the noble and blessed Baroness, Lady Thatcher, as the noble Lord, Lord St John of Fawsley, used to call her—need lectures on the difference between the rights of individuals and the liberty of the subject. The liberty of the subject cannot be stopped except by order. Rights have boundaries.

By nature, this Government is a bossy and an illiberal government, and worse so than most. One only has to look at what they are trying to do to the licensing laws. Instead of saying, "Let pubs open", they produce reams of regulations about how people should do this, that and the other and how the local authorities are to organise matters. One only has to consider their attitude to hunting. It has nothing to do with cruelty; it is about bossing people about and salving the conscience of Gerald Kaufman, an act in which no government should ever indulge.

The Anti-terrorism. Crime and Security Bill was riddled with illiberalities. The football hooliganism Bill was riddled with illiberalities. Now they say—this may not be accurate—that they want to carry-over Bills from one Session of Parliament to another. That is another way of making life easier for our lords and masters so that they can boss us about. In these Houses we should stop our lords and masters, however clever they are. No one is cleverer than the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg. I say that with complete truth and no irony whatever. They must be stopped and held to account.

It is crazy to believe that we need any more criminal justice Bills. Since I have been in your Lordships' House we have had umpteen millions of them, one after another. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, says that crime is falling. As my noble friend Lady Anelay said, if crime is falling what is wrong with the system. "No, crime is falling so we have to abolish double jeopardy; we have to allow hearsay evidence; and we have to allow records of previous convictions to be allowed in evidence".

It seems to me that the fault is not so much in the law as it stands, but in the way in which it is enforced. There have been horrendous cases of miscarriages of justice. People have been let out after 25 years in prison because the police have hidden evidence. We had the case of that pathetic man whose name I cannot remember, but whose features I can, who was accused of killing someone. He was let out only after serving 15 years but died six months later. The other day we had a case in which a man had said that he did not do it—and he had not done it—and so wrongly stayed in prison for another 10 years. There have been miscarriages of justice.

So the Government now suggest that we should make it easier to make mistakes and convict such people. But what is hearsay evidence other than gossip? Let us assume for the sake of argument that someone came up with DNA evidence showing that the Birmingham Six or the Guildford Four were guilty. Would the Crown dare to prosecute them again? Of course it would not, and rightly so, because those might be regarded as political crimes.

A very learned friend of mine—whom I would not dream of identifying as he said this in the social context of a conversation—said that although the police had a perfect defence against the charge of institutional racism in the Lawrence case, it was the one defence that they could not run. It was, "We are always as inefficient as this in our murder inquiries". Cases such as that of Damilola Taylor make one believe that there may be some truth in that. The CPS has not done us all that well. I cite Taylor again and I cite Burrell, both very high-profile cases.

We should not in any circumstances make it easier for people to cover up their mistakes. However, that is what the abolition of the protection against double jeopardy and of the right to trial by jury would do. We should not abolish the right to trial. by jury in any circumstances, either at the top, in fraud cases—because the Government are so patronising and believe that the plebs are too incompetent to understand fraud trials—or at the bottom. The Government are actually saying that the legal profession cannot get its act together and make the case sufficiently good to stick. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said, the abolition of these liberties is a sure and gentle way to tyranny.

The other day, between half past twelve and one o'clock, I heard a rather interesting interview on the wireless with a man who had been a community policeman in Windsor. He said that in the rather grotty areas of his beat there had been a lot of the unpleasant, nasty and mucking-about sort of crime such as the banging of doors, graffiti, the harassment of old people and general shouting and mayhem. He used to go round his area on a bicycle and crime levels had decreased. When he retired, however, the police were not getting convictions and crime levels rose. His job had been to prevent crime.

The Government rightly complain about anti-social behaviour. I did not know that fly-tipping was not illegal. I had not realised that spraying something nasty about someone on a white wall with a spray can from Halfords was not illegal. I had thought that such behaviour was illegal.

We have to stop people doing those things. However, we shall do so by ensuring that they are caught. We do not need to change the law. It is already not legal to spray the word which Kenneth Tynan used on television in relation to the Lord Chancellor on a white wall; that is illegal. However, we have to catch the chap doing it. If he is caught, he may not do it again. Extra legalities will not stop him. Fly-tipping is already illegal, as I know to my own cost. There are beds, lavatories and other bits and pieces of detritus at the edges of my woods at the end of the A246 and the A247, but I cannot catch those who put it there. I wish I could catch them. I wish that Plod could catch them, but he cannot. The problem may be slightly worse because of something called a landfill tax which makes it more expensive to put things into landfill.

We have to get a grip of the forces of law and order. We have to get a grip of the police who in many cases still assume that 30 days' sick leave is the right of any policeman. We have to get a grip of the Prison Service so that it does not allow drugs to run riot in prisons. We have to get a grip of our present system rather than abolish the ancient and well-established rights and liberties of British subjects for which we have fought and died for so many hundreds of years.

My Lords, I regret to say that I cannot be present at the end of the debate, for which I apologise to noble Lords. My reason is much less impressive than that given by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws. May I, however, take the opportunity to wish her luck with her Hamlyn lectures. It is indeed a great honour to have been asked to give them. My reason is simply that I have to be in Cambridge tonight on behalf of the Inner Temple, of which some of your Lordships may have heard, and I do not feel that I can let them down.

I, too, want to return to the figures given by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, at the very beginning of his speech. I think that those very remarkable figures should have informed the whole of this debate. The fact is that all forms of crime have decreased steadily since the Government came to power in 1997, as they had done even before then. The Government are entitled to take credit for that, for sure it is that they would have been given the blame had it been the other way round.

The figures are remarkable. According to the British Crime Survey—to which reference has already been made, particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford—crimes of violence have decreased from 3.7 million in 1997, to 2.9 million in 2001, a decrease of 22 per cent. Burglary, of all things, has decreased from 1.6 million to under 1 million—990,000—in 2001, a decrease of 39 per cent. Even vandalism has decreased from 2.9 million to 2.7 million, a decrease of 6 per cent.

The figures may seem surprising: they are surprising only because we are so used to thinking in terms of recorded crime. Recorded crimes of violence have indeed increased—the number has doubled since 1997—but the figures for recorded crime mean almost nothing in this context, and they are certainly no guide in identifying trends. The reason is that only half of all crimes of violence are reported at all, and less than half of those are recorded by the police.

Recording practices are constantly changing. Thus, what appears to have been an increase of 8 per cent in recorded crimes of violence last year was in fact—and should have been shown as—a decrease of 5 per cent. So the levels of recorded crime which often appear in newspapers as showing an incipient crime wave mean nothing. What is left is the survey, which shows beyond any doubt that there is no evidence of a crime wave; indeed, quite the opposite.

I turn to the obvious question asked by so many: why do we need a new criminal justice Bill at all? Unless it be—this is only a tentative suggestion—that the Home Office, faced with two massive new reports (the massive and impressive reports of Sir Robin Auld and Mr John Halliday) feels that it ought to do something about them. Why do we need all these new provisions that are said to redress the balance in favour of the victim—provisions that are bound to prove controversial as they proceed through this House, when what we really need, and what would do the victim far more good than anything else, is a better rate of detection? That is the key point. Detection was scarcely mentioned, if, indeed, it was mentioned at all, by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer. I echo very much what was said by my former pupil—if I may refer to him as such—the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford. I must have taught the noble Lord well as he keeps on anticipating what I am about to say. He did it in the Iraq debate and he has done it again today. In future, I shall have to try to speak before rather than after him.

I repeat the figure that the noble Lord gave. Of the 5 million recorded crimes last year, less than a quarter were detected. That is not just a one-off result. Detection of recorded crimes has gone down steadily since 1997. I refer to an obvious point: unless criminals are detected, how can they be brought to court? Before we point the finger too critically at the courts and at their procedures. let us do what we can to increase the rate of detection. What would be the best way of doing that? Again, it is obvious; it is to have more police on the beat and to have police who are better able to detect crimes.

I turn to another point and echo what was said by the right reverend Prelate in his remarkable maiden speech. When I became a judge there were 42,000 men and women in prison. We thought then that if the number increased to 45,000, it would be the end of the world. Here we are with 73,000. I regard that total as a national scandal in the full sense of the word. How has it come about? We all agree that there are people in prison who ought not to be in prison. That is easily said; it is often said. And it is true. But there is a perhaps more significant explanation. More and more defendants are being sent to prison for longer and longer. I take the example of the crime of causing death by dangerous driving. When I became a judge the going rate for that crime was a fine or, in a bad case, a prison sentence of perhaps nine months or a year. I refer to the leading case of Guilfoyle in which the judgment was given by Lord Justice Lawton.

I tried just such a case at the Old Bailey at the end of the 1970s that involved a young man returning from a rugger dinner. He had had a lot to drink and his car mounted the pavement killing three women whose three husbands were walking immediately behind them. It was an awful case. I worried about the sentence for a long time. Finally, I sentenced the man to either a year or possibly 15 months. It was certainly not more than that.

A few years later the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lane, then Lord Chief Justice, gave new guidance in the case of Boswell. He said that a year was not enough and that, for a bad case, the sentence should be two years or more. Parliament then intervened and increased the maximum sentence from five to 10 years, so judges felt that they had to follow suit. Now sentences of five, six and even seven years are common. I do not necessarily criticise those sentences. However, I point out the insidious way in which sentencing practice has led to increased sentences over the years. There is almost a form of inflation in that regard. I refer to an increase in the length of a certain sentence from one year to six or seven years in a period of less than 25 years. The same is true of other areas of the law.

If Parliament continues to create new crimes, to raise maximum sentences and to contrive new ways of increasing sentences that have already been imposed, the prison population is bound to increase with all the deleterious consequences to which the right reverend Prelate referred. What can be done to decrease the prison population? The proposal, as I understand it, is that in serious non-violent crime such as drug dealing, fraud and the rest, half the sentence will be served in the community. That has been tried before. It did not work, and I do not like it. I consider that it constitutes a deception of the public. The public think, and are entitled to think, that when a man is sent to prison for four years, that will actually mean four years, subject only, of course, to remission for good conduct.

My solution is much more radical and I believe that it may be worth trying. I would want to persuade the judiciary—I would even compel them, if it were at all possible—to determine the sentence they would impose in any given case under the existing guidelines and then cut that sentence in two. I believe that that could work. Of course, it would be criticised as sending entirely the wrong message, but it would be an honest message. It would make people serve what they appear to be sentenced to. I believe not only that it would work hut that a strong government could put it into effect. Quite how one would persuade the judiciary to do that is a subject we would have to consider but that should be the objective. Something of the sort was tried as an experiment in Germany some years ago. I do not have the details. All I remember is that the effect on the crime rate of halving sentences was imperceptible. I shall leave to another occasion what I intended to say about double jeopardy.

I say, finally, that one of the objections I have to this method of legislating is the kind of piecemeal codification that it appears to involve. I happen to be a great supporter of codification of the entire criminal law. It was suggested in a brilliant draft prepared by Professor Sir John Smith some years ago. I am glad to note that Sir Robin Auld agrees entirely with that view. There is a task worthy of the Home Office to which it should set its mind. What we have at the moment is the worst of all possible worlds: codification bit by bit. The criminal law ought to be accessible to the intelligent layman. What we are getting at the moment—piecemeal codification—is exasperating beyond belief to the professional and is wholly inaccessible, and therefore wholly incomprehensible, to everyone else.

My Lords, it is daunting to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick. I am no lawyer; I am an ordinary member of society who looks to the protection of the law. As such, however, I am convinced that the decent, secure society we all want to see can be built only by a holistic approach to positive social policy and will not be achieved by law and courts alone.

For this, a transparently consistent value system is essential. I fear we cannot have a decent society if greed, selfish opportunism and damaging social irresponsibility are too often the name of the game at the top of the social pyramid while we preach social responsibility to those at the bottom faced with a desert of deprivation.

We need practical and generous support for the deprived young. We need to listen to them in our heartbreaking council estates, rather than have a too ready overreliance on punishments and penalties with all the attendant danger of institutionalised criminalisation in increased numbers. Of course life on those estates is hell for too many, not least ethnic minorities, the elderly, the frail and the vulnerable. But let us get to the origins of the social disease so that we can cure it rather than just reacting to the symptoms. That is the way to durable protection of the community.

Last weekend, like many noble Lords, I was saddened by some of the media reaction to the death of Myra Hindley: the culture of the mob of centuries ago. Do we believe in redemption and rehabilitation? Are we determined to find the potential for good in people and build on that, however grim the challenge that presents itself? Myra Hindley's crimes were truly terrible. Or is our civilisation in danger of imploding in a catastrophic lack of self-confidence?

With their large majority our Government have the opportunity to lead us into an age of penal enlightenment. If they have the confidence to take that road they will deserve our full unbridled support

Much of our coming year will be taken up with deliberations on the administration of justice. As a layman, I hope that we will constantly keep in mind certain pillars of our legal culture as we have painstakingly built them in our social history. Citizens are innocent of any alleged crime unless and until they are proved guilty. Court proceedings should therefore concentrate on the evidence concerning the crime in question. In reaching a verdict, what may have happened before must never be allowed to take the place of hard proven evidence.

However, in deciding an appropriate sentence, the situation is altogether different and obviously the past becomes highly relevant. We need to make the needs and plights of victims far more central to our social policy. But that is not the same as overplaying the role of the victim in deciding how to treat the criminal. Objectivity is essential. Having said that, it is good to see restorative justice coming into its own. That makes a great deal of sense. There is a lot to be said for bringing delinquents face to face with the consequence of what they have done.

It has been a long struggle in history to establish our society based on freedom and justice. Those freedoms, especially in an age of terrorism, could be too easily eroded. We must be vigilant and remember all the time what has made our civilisation worth protecting. In recent years, the coming to light of past miscarriages of justice inescapably presents us with a challenge.

The Howard League for Penal Reform has told us that the prison system is in crisis. That argument is underlined by the work of the Prison Reform Trust, by the recent riots in Lincoln and by the wise words of the Lord Chief Justice, and it has been powerfully put today in the outstanding maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester.

According to the Howard League for Penal Reform's statistics, since May 1997 the prison population has increased by 20 per cent—more than 12,000; from over 60,000 to over 72,500. Sixty-four per cent of our prisons are overcrowded. The number of women in prisons has risen from 1,500 or more in 1992 to 2,600 or more in 1997 to almost 4,500 last month; an increase of 180 per cent in the past 10 years.

Last month, 11,732 young people under 21 were in prison in England and Wales. Of these, 2,981 were under 18. At the beginning of last month there were 13,095 remand prisoners in England and Wales; a 12 per cent increase over the previous 12 months. Yet significantly in the year 2000, less than 50 per cent of male remand prisoners and only 36 per cent of female remand prisoners went on to prison sentences. Indeed, 23 per cent of men and 21 per cent of women remanded in custody were acquitted or proceedings against them were terminated early.

There are disturbing variations across the country in the rate of custodial sentences imposed. In Lincolnshire, 0.8 per cent of offenders are sent by magistrates to prison. In Greenwich the rate is 31.6 per cent. That must inevitably raise questions about any increased presumption to remand offenders into custody in so-called high crime areas.

England and Wales have the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe; 134 people per 100,000. The cost to the taxpayer per prison place in the last financial year was more than £35,784, yet in the year 2001–2002 the Prison Service failed to meet six of its own key performance targets. For example, only 46 per cent of prisoners met the purposeful activity target. In Belmarsh, the average time of such activity per prisoner was only 11 hours per week. How does that dismal record assist in rehabilitation?

Suicides have been tellingly described in the debate. There have been 80 suicides so far this year in prisons in England and Wales; sadly, two by young people under 18. That figure is up from 72 in the whole of last year. How can that record be acceptable in a civilised society?

I turn to reconviction. Fifty-eight per cent of prisoners released in 1997 were reconvicted of another crime within two years. Thirty-six per cent went back to prison. For 18 to 20 year-olds the figures were 72 per cent and 47 per cent respectively. Little wonder that the Social Exclusion Unit has noted,

"Prison sentences are not succeeding in turning the majority of offenders away from crime".

As my noble friend Lord Corbett has argued, the priority must be rehabilitation. Anything else amounts to wasted lives and economic nonsense, particularly if the system is counterproductive and produces hardened criminals, with all the consequent costs to society.

It is clear that there must be a huge change if the policy commitment—I do not doubt that it exists— to the prison system is to become effectively positive. It will require strong leadership and a new culture, and it will cost money. But we cannot afford not to invest that money if we are not to be swamped by the costs of social disruption aggravated by a penal system that is helping to generate those costs. Education and training for prisoners are indispensable priorities.

It is also clear that as a priority we must develop a wider range of constructive alternatives to prison. In this context we all know that many of those in prison should not be there at all. Inadequacy, psychiatric illness and family breakdowns are frequently the real issues. We are increasingly concerned about the protection of our children from sexual harassment and abuse. That must be right, although we must be careful not to produce a neurotically inhibited society in which warmth, affection and freedom for our children have no place. That too would be a nightmare.

In this context, the Howard League for Penal Reform and a number of leading children's charities have emphasised how vulnerable children in prison are. Too many have suffered physical and sexual abuse; half have previously been in care; and the majority have been assessed as having special needs. Those children require more, not less, protection from the state than children in other institutional settings.

In our preoccupation with protecting children, we must be honest with ourselves about the paradox. We must face the uncomfortable fact that the United Kingdom has recently been criticised by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child for the treatment of children in our criminal justice system. Its concern included: our low age of criminal responsibility—10 years—which is much lower than in most European countries; 12 to 14-year olds being routinely deprived of their liberty; increasingly high numbers of children in custody at earlier ages for lesser offences and for longer sentences; the absence of adequate protection and help in young offender institutions; the poor staff/child ratio; high levels of violence; bullying; self-harm; and, tragically, suicide.

I should declare an interest as honorary president of YMCA England. We are doing an increasing amount of what is proving to be encouraging work with young prisoners. I asked the national secretary for a few points that I might cite. I shall share them with noble Lords. He wrote:

"The work maintains a primary focus on the young person.

"We like similar organisations use our expertise and network of opportunity in various fields including housing, training and positive recreational activity in order to provide resettlement for young people leaving prison, through in our case 150 centres, 7,200 bedspaces and 2,500 training places.

"We are able to build relationships with young people while in prison prior to working with them post release.

"Our independence and non-judgmental style means we are approachable in a way in a which the prison is not.

"We work in prisons in a way which is nationally significant and locally relevant.

"Organisations like ours are able to make a major positive impact on the culture within prisons".

The Government are determined to be tough on crime and, as we heard again in this debate, on the causes of crime. But what are the causes? Too many who should know better would still have us believe that the cause of a crime is simply the person who commits it. 'That superficiality is unworthy of a civilised society. The real causes and origins include poverty, deprivation, exclusion, inadequate parenting, broken families, abuse, poor education and the rest. There are no shortcuts. If we want to succeed, we must have an holistic social approach. I wish that the gracious Speech had emphasised that—I know that my noble friends on the Front Bench understand that—as much as it emphasised a crackdown.

We desperately need policies that reflect self-confident, civilised values and which, at the same time, are based on sound analysis, experience, common sense and what has proved to work in place of policies that extravagantly pander to prejudice.

I hope that noble Lords will forgive me if I conclude with one anecdote. I referred to my role in the YMCA. We have a former chief constable who has done outstanding work over a considerable period with some young offenders in our programme. He tells the story of how he was talking to a young offender who was about to be released when the young offender began to weep. He said to the young offender, "Why are you weeping? You are about to be released''. The offender said, "Because I am frightened. This is the first time in my life that anybody has cared for me, spoken to me, discussed my life with me and begun to discuss the future with me. It is the first opportunity that I have had to begin to understand myself as a person".

That says a great deal about the chief constable and the youngster; but it also says a very great deal about our society. The challenges are complex and we shall be judged by how we deal with the complexities, not by the oversimplifications that may tempt us.

My Lords, regarding crime and the attempt to deal with it, one revealing comparison, as has already been mentioned, is our poor performance against other European states. First, there is the inconsistency when our Prison Service is compared with those elsewhere. We spend less than our European partners on health and education but we spend much more on prisons. Yet our recidivism level has not been reduced as a result of that increased expenditure. Nor has it decreased below the European average.

Secondly, there is the anomalous relationship between custodial and non-custodial sentences. For a number of years, there has been a steady application of non-custodial sentences, but they have not effected a proper reduction in custodial sentences. They have even coexisted with a significant rise in the number of custodial sentences and with a large increase in the number of prisoners, from 46,000 in 1991 to more than 72,000 at present, with a predicted figure of 83,000 by 2008. Despite the availability of non-custodial sentences, there are still too many—both below and above the age of 17—who are in prison for minor crimes and who should not be in prison at all. Far too many young people are still detained and in the majority of cases, as several noble Lords have stressed, their detention is as futile as it is counterproductive.

Thirdly, paradoxically enough, there is even the worrying anomaly, or its prospect, relating to the pursuit of much better practice. The Government already seek improved practice within prisons. Their aims include better education, improved employability and reduced drug and alcohol dependency. However, those schemes will work properly only if the vast number of prisoners is reduced. Otherwise, resources will remain too overstretched for prison staff to fulfil all of those objectives.

The Government may say that prison numbers will now really begin to come down and will do so following the substance and measures of co-ordination between the services currently proposed in the Queen's Speech. Certainly, that direction is much to be welcomed, not least where new guidelines for sentencing policy are concerned. The Government should also be encouraged to build upon and develop further their successes, which may have recently proved their worth. Those include the youth justice supervision scheme and, to some extent, detection and training orders.

During the passage of this year's criminal justice legislation, as has already been emphasised, there is likely to be much cross-party co-operation and good will. No doubt there is also consensus about the fact that no constructive purpose can be served through political wrangling or jockeying for position. Previous mistakes, when made in office by both the Labour and Conservative Parties over criminal justice, have coexisted, if ironically so, with well-meaning intentions and quite often with the implementation of sensible short-term expedients. However, broadly speaking, the mistakes and failures of both political administrations have derived from an apparent unwillingness or inability to form proper long-term plans which could be carried out with patience and determination.

As the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, and others have pointed out, such effective long-term plans must go well beyond legislation itself, however much that can and should be improved and co-ordinated. Through education, employment, the home and the community, the challenge must also always be to deter, guide and inspire in order to promote well being and to prevent crime in the first place. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester encapsulated that objective when he referred to the culture of demanding compassion. I join with others in congratulating him on his extremely good speech.

How should the Government and the criminal justice system proceed to make matters better, and a lot better? There must now be a much sharper focus. The past 30 years have witnessed the steady development of size, cost and crisis within the Prison Service. At any time over that period, we have been told by every government that their policies were working and that overall results were improving. Overall, however, they were never improving. This time, we should make sure that they actually do so. That must mean a constant focus on the evidence about whether the situation is really improving and, if so, which combined measures rather than others are causing it to do so.

Connected to that, and secondly, our criminal justice service must be prepared far more than it is to analyse, adjust to and learn from not only the evidence of the effect of its own practices but also that from a variety of different sources. Not least is such useful information disseminated through research bodies, including the institutions associated respectively with the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, and the noble Lord, Lord Corbett of Castle Vale, whose excellent contributions we have just heard.

Within the United Kingdom there is the guidance which comes from the Scottish criminal justice service. Per head of population, much better results are now produced in Scotland than in England and Wales. Among many public servants who have assisted that process, I want to mention, in particular, the Chief Inspector of Prisons for Scotland, Mr Clive Fairweather, who retired last month.

As already indicated, comparisons should always be made between our performance and that of other countries. Good guidance can, of course, often come internationally and from a number of different European states. Curiously enough, and despite their recent civil war, certain states in the former Yugoslavia already reveal encouraging criminal justice results which, in several respects, stand to give good guidance to ourselves and to other European states. Two such are Slovenia and Croatia.

The Croatian service provides a clear example. It has comparatively low numbers of prisoners per head of population and it demonstrates comparatively high levels of civilian prisoner rehabilitation. And, of course, the process of shared information will work in each direction. As chairman of the UK Parliamentary Group for Croatia, and as a Council of Europe parliamentarian, I was able to introduce our own Home Office overseas service to the Croatian prison service. That has led to the establishment of a training centre by Zagreb for the training of prison governors and other staff.

It goes without saying that the attainment of best practice in the field of criminal justice, as well as all others, must come from a full assessment of relevant sources, including those within international comparison and co-operation. In this context, and as a British parliamentarian who addressed the issues of drugs, community stability and the problems facing young people both here and overseas, I pay tribute to the significant achievements of Tim Rathbone, who died earlier this year.

In summary, current poor results from criminal justice lower our reputation for competence nationally and internationally as they undermine confidence and morale within the country. The Government's intentions to do much better are to be welcomed. The aims must include a dramatic reduction in reoffending and in the prison population. The means must not he confined to legislation. They should also bring in the home, education, employment and the community in order to prevent crime in the first place. This time, the resolve must be to achieve proper results where the past 30 years have failed, and to do so for the benefit of our own stability and, by example, for the benefit of that elsewhere.

My Lords, criminal justice is very much at the top of the Government's agenda for this Session. That is understandable. Crime is a cause of a great deal of public distress and alarm. I refer not only to violent crime but also to the kind of minor crime that makes some parts of our native cities intolerable places for many people who live there: vandalism, graffiti, noise and drunken behaviour. The noble Lord, Lord Corbett of Castle Vale, made an admirable speech on that subject.

This has been a valuable debate. I do not agree with my noble friend Lord Dahrendorf on the subject of elections to your Lordships' House. But I agree wholeheartedly with what he said about the legislative process. I also agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, said about that. The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill was an extreme example of bad process when we ended up with more than 300 government amendments in your Lordships' House—some of them important amendments introduced at Third Reading.

I heard the noble and learned Lord, Lord Ackner, with interest and a good deal of sympathy. However, I believe that the real answer to the problem that he raised about over-reaction in self defence is to replace both murder and manslaughter with a single crime of culpable homicide, carrying a maximum, but not a mandatory. penalty of life imprisonment.

We very much welcomed the speeches on prison issues from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester, in his admirable maiden speech, from the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, from my noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury, and from the noble Lord, Lord Judd. We also welcomed the speeches on probation and other issues from the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, and on sentencing from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick.

I turn briefly to the subject of civil justice. There is not much primary legislation in the Queen's Speech on that subject. I do not complain about that because in the last Session we had two big Bills: one on commonhold and one on land registration. Furthermore, the Government are now making use of regulatory reform orders to achieve some technical legal reforms; for example, in connection with the rule against accumulations and the law on the execution of deeds and other documents. I consider that to be very much the kind of issue that is appropriate for a regulatory reform order, and I believe that my noble friend Lord Dahrendorf will agree with that.

Finally, we on these Benches have continuing concern about the working of the conditional fee system in civil actions. Given two years' experience of the system. I should like to see the Lord Chancellor's Department carry out a full review of how it is working.

I return to the subject of criminal justice. We have what I believe can only be described as a "jumble" of Bills, some, but not all of which, have been published. There is, first, a courts Bill. We shall support a single administrative structure for the Crown and magistrates' courts, but we believe that it is necessary to have a high degree of devolution to local management committees. The present magistrates' courts committees work well and ensure local input. It is essential to maintain those local links in any new system.

Then there is the Crime (International Co-operation) Bill. Again, we support that in principle. At a time of organised cross-border crime, it is very important to maximise co-operation between the judiciary and the police in different countries, especially in the European Union. We welcome the extension of the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom courts to prosecution of terrorist acts committed outside the United Kingdom by or against United Kingdom nationals. We welcome the mutual application of driving disqualifications within the European Union—surely something that is obvious and, indeed, long overdue.

The right of hot pursuit is the most controversial element in this Bill, although I suspect that it will not be much used in relation to the United Kingdom because it is more relevant to the land borders of the mainland states. We shall not object to the right of hot pursuit in principle, but it must be without firearms and it must involve surveillance and not powers of arrest or detention or anything that would require a judicial warrant in the United Kingdom. I hope that the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor will be able to assure us that that is the case.

We support the objectives of the anti-social behaviour Bill but we doubt how effective the process will be. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 introduced orders which have had a distinctly limited effect, Antisocial behaviour orders—ASBOs—have been used only some 200 times a year and are expensive to obtain. Parenting orders are used even less, and the child curfew orders, of which we were highly critical at the time of the debate on the Act, have not, in effect, been used at all.

Fixed penalties have attractions for minor offences. They save time and bureaucracy for the police and leave the offender without a criminal record. But they raise a number of difficult questions which will require answers. First, who can impose the fines? And—perhaps a particularly difficult question—will they be effective against young people who cause many problems of this kind but who clearly will not be in a position to pay the fines? If that is the case, can any substitute be provided for a fixed penalty in those cases?

I hope, as my noble friend Lord Dholakia said, that the Government will encourage the use of acceptable behaviour contracts for children and young people who show signs of becoming troublesome, as pioneered by Islington Borough Council.

Then there is the Extradition Bill, which introduces the European arrest warrant within the European Union and takes some steps to simplify and speed up extradition in non-EU cases. We welcome that in principle. The United Kingdom's extradition process is exceptionally slow by comparison with most foreign states and provides too many opportunities for delay. I remember one case where someone was fighting extradition to Hong Kong. He was detained in prison for a period of six or seven years. That was a far longer time in prison than he would have served if he had agreed to go straight back to Hong Kong.

In principle, we believe that it should be as easy to send residents of the United Kingdom for trial in another EU state as it is to send a resident of England for trial in Scotland.

The European arrest warrant will make it easier for-the United Kingdom to obtain extradition from other states—in particular, Germany and Austria—which until now have refused to extradite their own nationals. But in order to justify the use of the European arrest warrant we need to have confidence that the extradited person will have a fair trial in the state to which he is sent. There are problems in some states with, in particular, interpretation facilities and with legal aid. We believe that the Act resulting from the Bill should not be brought into force until there is an effective agreement on minimum standards across the European Union.

The sex offenders Bill is welcome. We would be wrong to convict of rape a man who reasonably believed that consent to intercourse had been given. But we accept that unreasonable belief in consent should not result in an acquittal. We also welcome the Government's decision not to open the paedophile file to the public.

The draft corruption Bill again is clearly welcome. I hope that the noble and learned Lord will be able to confirm that the Bill will cover corrupt acts involving Members of Parliament and Members of your Lordships' House, who clearly are the holders of public office.

I turn to the Criminal Justice Bill, described by many people as the "flagship Bill". I have to say that if this is the flagship, it cannot be much of a fleet. This is not the occasion for a Second Reading speech, especially as the Bill—and a massive Bill it is—was only published today. But it is controversial, to say the least.

There are a number of aspects of the Bill that should be welcomed, such as making it harder to avoid jury service. We agree that the Crown Prosecution Service should be involved at an earlier stage and should take over from the police the responsibility for charging.

We believe that greater assistance for victims is desirable, although many steps do not require legislation: for example, segregating defence and prosecution witnesses within the court building; laying out the courtroom so that the prosecution witnesses cannot be intimidated by the defendant's friends in the gallery; and some new sentencing powers—for instance. "custody minus"—are innovative and helpful. But the Government intend to challenge four long-established principles of criminal procedure. First, they will extend the right for the prosecution to use hearsay evidence; secondly, they will allow evidence of previous convictions to be disclosed in many more cases than at present; thirdly, they will create exceptions to the double jeopardy rule; and, fourthly, they will exclude jury trials in some cases.

It is not surprising that this challenge has roused a hornets' nest and that these proposals have been attacked from all sides of the House by the noble and learned Lords, Lord Rawlinson and Lord Mayhew, by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, and by my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford.

I do not propose to add anything to what has been said on the first three proposals. That will be a matter for the Second Reading and subsequent stages of the Bill. But I shall say something briefly about juries. The jury system is central and essential to our system of criminal justice. That is not because jurors have some special wisdom that is not given to judges. I do not believe they have. Non-jury courts for serious offences can work well. Indeed, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, pointed out, the Diplock courts in Northern Ireland have operated with remarkably little criticism. Juries are vital because people feel they own the jury system. They feel that criminal justice is the justice of the people and not the justice of the elite. Any limitation on jury trials is unacceptable if it damages public confidence in the criminal justice system. That is the test that must and will be measured against the government proposals.

I finish by talking about a few things that are not in the gracious Speech. First, we regret that there has been no change in the law of corporate manslaughter. The law should be extended to make corporate bodies liable where the death has been caused by a serious failure on the part of the corporation as a whole, even if that results from the accumulation of minor failures by a number of individuals, none of which is itself sufficient to justify a charge of manslaughter against the individual responsibility.

Finally, I raise two more fundamental issues, not for the first time because they are points that have been made on many previous occasions from these Benches. We have long argued that the Lord Chancellor should cease to be responsible for the appointment of Queen's Counsel and the judiciary. Year by year it becomes more obvious that that role is inconsistent with the Lord Chancellor's role as the Minister of justice. This is not intended as any criticism of any individual who has been appointed by the present holder of that office or his recent predecessors. All those people appointed are unquestionably fit to hold the offices to which they have been appointed. But the process must be seen to he independent of the holder of Cabinet office.

The noble and learned Lord took a wise step in creating a Judicial Appointments Commission to monitor the appointment process. That commission is doing good work. It has produced a valuable and not wholly uncritical report. But the creation of the Judicial Appointments Commission should be the first step only and should be followed by a transfer to it, or to a replacement body, of responsibility for the appointment of judges.

The other fundamental issue is the separation of the legislative and judicial function of your Lordships' House. We are of course moving towards reform of your Lordships' House. Whatever shape that reform takes, I believe that within a few years, if not at the beginning, your Lordships' House will lose its role as the supreme court of the United Kingdom. That separation has already been supported in public speeches by the senior Law Lord, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bingham of Cornhill, and by his colleague the noble and learned Lord, Lord Steyn. I believe that that separation is right. It is inevitable, and it will come sooner rather than later.

My Lords, I know that your Lordships' House is eagerly awaiting the speech of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor. I shall therefore keep your Lordships' period of anticipation as short as possible by saying the minimum necessary in my closing remarks.

First, I congratulate the right reverent Prelate the Bishop of Worcester on his outstanding maiden speech. It was not only a very moving occasion; but he made a series of remarks, of considerable perspicacity, about the state of our Prison Service. I just warn the right reverend Prelate that advertising himself as the new representative of the Bishops' Bench on prison matters might well lead to adverse remarks being made should he ever choose to absent himself on the occasion of a debate which touches on this highly sensitive subject; and as the right reverend Prelate will be aware, there are many occasions in your Lordships' House to consider Home Office matters.

I begin by reminding your Lordships' House that at the end of July we considered the White Paper that lay behind not only the Criminal Justice Bill but, I suspect, a number of the other measures that will represent the Home Office contribution to your Lordships' debates this Session. I hope that your Lordships will forgive me, if I refer to a paragraph that I contributed to your Lordships' debate:

"As I understand it, the organising theme of the White Paper is to marshal all the component parts of the criminal justice system into a successful integrated force. I think that that is a wholly admirable objective. Indeed, it is only common sense. If the police do not successfully do their job of detecting crime, the courts will not have any prisoners to try. If the CPS is not properly resourced and does not do its job of bringing the right charges in relation to the right people, prosecutions will fail in the courts. If the courts are too biased towards the accused, many victims will not get justice. Equally, if they are too biased against the accused, we will find ourselves living in a totalitarian society. If we do not get our sentencing policy right, we will never rehabilitate criminals.

So all these parts are crucially linked together. If one of these links in the chain fails, all the others will be mortally wounded. So, the philosophy behind this White Paper has to be the right one".— [Official Report, 17/7/02; col. 1246.]

In his closing remarks, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, kindly said:

"He"—

by which the noble and learned Lord meant Lord Kingsland—

"said that the philosophy underlying the White Paper, which he described as right, was marshalling all of the component parts of the criminal justice system into an effective fighting force. I would not quarrel with that description of one of the very important foundations of the White Paper".—[Official Report, 17/7/02; col. 1250.]

So, your Lordships are entitled to ask the noble and learned Lord to what extent the programme that the Government have laid out reflects the aspirations of the White Paper.

We have just had sight of the Criminal Justice Bill, and I have barely had a chance to look through the index. I have, incidentally, already noticed that the Bill is 273 clauses long. From a superficial reading, it seems that the main body of the Bill deals with procedures in criminal courts. There are, of course, also certain sentencing matters, and your Lordships have already heard the reflections of the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, on certain changes in the operation of the Crown Prosecution Service.

However, as I understand it, the thrust of the Bill is court-related. So, your Lordships are entitled to ask the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, about the other component parts of the aspirations set out in the White Paper. They are essential to ensuring that the system of criminal justice delivers what we would wish of it.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, touched on one of those component parts, when he talked about the rate of detection. Your Lordships are entitled to hear more from the Government about their plans in that area. We read little about it in the Criminal Justice Bill.

Then again, there is the question of the CPS. As far as I understand it, the Government do not intend to entertain an inquiry into the aftermath of the case R v Burrell. There is no doubt that important questions arise out of it over the way in which the CPS operates and from its relationship with the Law Officers, something to which my noble and learned friend Lord Rawlinson of Ewell so eloquently drew attention. The noble and learned Lord made a speech of conspicuously high quality, as one would expect from one of the great Law Officers of the post-war era. Your Lordships are entitled to know more—if not today, in the immediate future—about the conclusions that the Government draw from the recent conduct of the CPS in that regard.

At the other end of the spectrum were the cogent and germane remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Corbett of Castle Vale, about the probation service. The Government, rightly, aspire to reduce numbers in our prisons, on the one hand, and, on the other, to introduce sentences that are effectively rehabilitative. In order for that to be achieved effectively— I take entirely the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Stern—it is vital that substantial resources be directed towards the probation service.

The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor may not be able to deal with that matter today, but I am keen to know the Government's future plans in that respect. Certainly, the Government's rhetoric suggests that probation is a crucial part of their vision of a successful criminal justice system. If that is so, the Government must explain to your Lordships exactly how that will be resourced.

Every Home Secretary is presented with the not inconsiderable temptation of populism when dealing with matters of crime and punishment. I am sure that every Home Secretary is equally aware of the dangers of giving in to it. They are dangers not only of principle but of common sense.

Populist solutions to criminal justice problems, while having short-term attractions, will, invariably, fail in the long run. There has been a theme running through some—not all—of the Government's remarks that much of the problem faced by the criminal justice system today can be solved by reducing—if not eliminating—the opportunities for what the Government might be pleased to call clever defence lawyers to exploit the court system. Many of those clever defence lawyers feature on the Liberal Party Benches, and I greatly admire their skills.

I hope—I am sure—that the Government will not give in to that temptation. First, as I said, it will not work. Secondly, it is wrong in principle. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, referred to authoritarianism in an Armani suit. I must confess that the image of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, does not spring immediately to mind, when I reflect on that observation. At any rate, he appears today to be the Milan representative of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, or wherever Mr Armani plies his trade on earth.

Therefore, it is legitimate for the Opposition Front Bench to remind the noble and learned Lord that these great components of our court system—jury trial; not putting in evidence other than that which is before the jury relating to the particular case that is under review; the refusal to entertain hearsay evidence; the rules of double jeopardy—are legal principles that were hard-won in our constitutional history after brave battles fought by doughty lawyers. They have stood our criminal defence system well for several hundred years.

It strikes me as being a bit rich for a Government who are, after all, elected for only a few years—although their mindset may be somewhat different—to come along and simply jettison all those great principles. I trust that the noble and learned Lord will pay particular attention to the speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Rawlinson, in that regard. It may well be that ill-prepared prosecutions play a considerably greater part in the acquittal rate than the existence of all these opportunities for defence lawyers.

A number of other important issues have been discussed today. I applaud the Government's intention to introduce anti-social behaviour legislation, although I entirely share the views expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Judd, about the difficulties of solving such problems simply through the criminal law. The fact of the matter is that we did not have such problems as a society 50 years ago because children were brought up in a different way by families and were educated in a different way in schools. And so the kind of behaviour that manifests itself by the arrival of a child's mid-teens was hardly visible 40 or 50 years ago.

While the aspirations of anti-social behaviour legislation are wholly admirable, I am sure that the Government will be bearing in mind the context in which they are legislating and will think carefully about their relationship to their wider legislative programme.

My biggest concern of all about these legislative measures relates to the European arrest warrant. That may come as a surprise to those noble Lords who have heard me make speeches on other European matters in your Lordships' House. But there are two matters of deep concern about that piece of legislation which are likely to make it the most controversial Home Office measure of the whole Session. It will be manifested in the form of the Extradition Bill which is now in another place.

The first concern is that the European decision which lies behind the measures which will appear in the Extradition Bill was made without the participation of any democratic national legislature or indeed by the European Parliament. It was conceived by national civil servants sitting behind closed doors; endorsed by COREPER sitting behind closed doors; and finally rubber-stamped by the Council of Ministers sitting behind closed doors. It is an example of intergovernmentalism in the European Community at its worst. It is the worst of both worlds. The legislation is neither endorsed by national parliaments, nor by the European institutions which, for all their weaknesses, would at least have achieved some public debate.

The result is that under the Extradition Bill we will be presented with a virtual fait accompli. That has mattered less in the case of most European legislation because most of it touches on commercial interests— interests which do not go to the heart of the liberties of the citizen. But here we are going to be asked to extradite people on the basis of some crimes abroad which are not crimes in this country. Furthermore, we will be asked to do so without knowing whether or not the fundamental protections in our criminal law will be respected in those countries to which British citizens will be extradited.

I, for one, consider that unacceptable. I suspect that there will be many Members of your Lordships' House sitting behind the Government Benches who will also find it unacceptable. The great difficulty for the Government is that there is little they can do about it because the damage is already done; the agreements have already been made in the European Community.

Whatever the outcome of our deliberations on the Bill, it is crucial, in future, that, in considering intergovernmental decisions made by the European Community, your Lordships' House has the earliest possible warning from the Home Office about what it is up to, and that your Lordships' committees have the power to ensure that Home Office Ministers appear regularly in front of them to give an account of the progress of discussions and deliberations with the other member states, otherwise, noble Lords will once again be presented with precisely the same terrible dilemma as they will discover in the new year.

I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, has become chairman of the European Union scrutiny committee. He now has the challenge—to which I am sure the noble Lord will be equal—of making sure that the committees exercise this power over government Ministers in future to make sure that intergovernmentalism operates as democratically as other forms of legislation in this House.

I have one final reflection—on the question of drugs. Perhaps the most original contribution that my right honourable friend Mr Letwin has made in another place as Shadow Home Secretary has been to examine, intensely and creatively, the difficulties that lie behind solving the dreadful problems of drug-taking in our country. The recommendations that he has made have, in my submission, not been taken seriously by the Government.

The best way to solve much of our crime problem—burglary in particular—is to solve the drugs problem. One of the most effective ways in which we can get on top of this is by following the advice of my right honourable friend. I hope that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, and his colleagues will look very seriously at what has been achieved by Mr Letwin and will report back to this House.

My Lords, your Lordships have covered an exceptionally wide range of important subjects in high-quality debates over the past live days. Today, we have heard a notable maiden speech from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester and a distinguished contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf, on the quality of the statute book.

The gracious Speech has at its heart a balance between rights and responsibilities: the right to feel safe in our own homes; the right to justice; and the responsibilities that we have as citizens to respect others and the environment in which we live. As my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer outlined in his opening remarks, reform of the criminal justice system is key to achieving this balance. We need to ensure that the system is refocused on its basic purpose: to reduce crime and deliver justice to victims, witnesses and communities. But that must not be at the expense of the rights of the defendant. The criminal justice system must certainly convict the guilty and acquit the innocent. The presumption of innocence is at the heart of Article 6 of the European convention, and we firmly believe that our reforms do nothing to impair that principle.

In dealing with contributions to the debate, I turn, first, to that of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford. He certainly provided the most fetching image of the debate when he declared his pride in hewing coal at the same coal-face as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. But my prize for the most entertaining speech goes unquestionably to the noble Earl, Lord Onslow. I comforted myself when listening to his attack on the Government with the reflection that the noble Earl almost certainly has a healthy disregard for all governments.

I return to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford. Dealing first with previous convictions, when he studies the Bill as published, he will discover that judges will have a discretion to let juries hear about defendants' previous convictions and other misconduct where relevant to the case and provided that their probative value is not outweighed by their prejudicial effect.

On the matter of double jeopardy, the abolition of the rule will apply only in very rare circumstances, but we do riot believe that offenders who have committed very serious crimes should be able to escape justice where there is compelling new evidence of their guilt.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord for giving way. How many cases does he foresee as likely to happen?

My Lords, it will be a small number of cases. Of course, I do not predict a specific number. But no matter how many these cases are, they are an affront to justice if there is compelling new evidence of guilt and they are not retried. An important consideration will be whether the evidence could reasonably have been available for the first trial. There will also be the safeguard that a defendant will be retried only where the Court of Appeal is satisfied that there is new and compelling evidence and that a retrial is in the interests of justice.

My Lords, will the noble and learned Lord explain how, if the Court of Appeal has already reached this decision, the defendant can thereafter have a fair trial?

My Lords, I have no difficulty whatever with that. The Court of Appeal is acting as a sieve to decide whether it is proper that there should be a further trial. The evidence will appear to be compelling. It will be made absolutely plain to the jury at the trial that they must assess the evidence for themselves, and it will be challenged. But it must appear to be compelling.

In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay of St Johns, and the noble Lord, Lord Thomas. the right to elect for jury trial in either way cases will remain. The noble Baroness said, wrongly, that we were going to abolish jury trial in serious cases. Not so. Our proposals are confined to serious fraud cases and very complex and lengthy cases that the judge thinks would be unduly burdensome for the jury to try. It will also apply to cases of jury intimidation. No doubt, your Lordships will wish to scrutinise these provisions closely in Committee. But I do not think that they amount to the end of the world for legal verities. On the contrary, they are limited and well-judged proposals. We will demonstrate that by argument in Committee.

I have to say to the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, in her unavoidable absence, that her opposition to the Bill is not made good by generalised castigation. The expressions she used were, "authoritarianism", "unworthy of this Government", "loss of enthusiasm for civil liberties" and even, "receding into comfortable middle age". I plead not guilty to all these unparticularised charges. We will make good by argument in Committee the case for these limited changes. Those who trumpet a liberal position must always be on guard against falling into the conservative error that no change is ever possible in setting the balance between the protection of the public interest and the protection of the interests of the individual.

We can achieve the improvements that the criminal justice system so desperately requires only if all the relevant agencies work together towards a common purpose. The Courts Bill will bring the administration of all the courts below the House of Lords—civil, family and criminal—into a new single. modern organisation accountable to Parliament through my department and offering a better service to court users.

I can reassure the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, on one point. He talks of the need to maintain local links. I agree. The new agency will combine the best qualities of the Magistrates' Courts Committees and the Court Service. A strong centre will set a framework of clear national standards and strategic direction. It will work in co-operation and partnership with local court administration councils. These councils will not be mere consultative bodies. Their role, which will be embedded in statute, will be to involve fully the local community—meaning magistrates and others—in decision-making, including on key issues such as the location of services and court facilities. The councils will enable decisions to be taken at a local level wherever possible, so improving local accountability and responsiveness to local needs.

The agency will also embody a degree of what is fashionably called earned autonomy. The better performing areas will have more freedom to innovate, with less intervention from the centre and a light-touch inspections regime. The centre will be left freer to concentrate on areas where performance is poor, there exercising a greater degree of control and ensuring that best practice is spread.

New structures that facilitate rather than hamper agencies' attempts to work together will be complemented by an entirely new case progression system. Often, administrative changes to delivery on the ground can achieve as much as—and perhaps even more than—legislation, if there is the will to promote and accept cultural change. That is the aim of the case progression project, led by my department, which will see that cases progress more quickly and more smoothly through the criminal justice system. Judges will assume overall supervision for case progression. The judge will agree with both sides at the outset what the issues are, what action is required and within what time-scale, so giving case progression a clear structure, timetable and momentum. Together with clearer responsibilities for all involved, tough enforcement of case progression targets and more certain listing so that cases go ahead when planned, this will help us to bring more offenders to justice, give victims and witnesses a better deal and cut down on delay.

We remain as firm as ever in our belief that delay in the criminal justice system is the biggest impediment to justice. As Lord Denning famously said, "delay turns justice sour". Delay reduces the commitment of witnesses, gives further opportunities for witness intimidation, demoralises victims and plays into the hands of the guilty, who wish only that cases will go away. Tackling delay has been a success story since 1997. Magistrates' courts' waiting times have been reduced by 20 per cent. Delay in the youth courts has fallen from 87 days to 57 days last year. We have cut the time from arrest to sentence for persistent young offenders from 142 to 63 days.

My right honourable friend the Prime Minister famously said:

"tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime".

Let me add that being tough on crime means being tough on delay in the prosecution of crime.

Convicting the guilty is not the end of the story. Sentencers must have adequate means at their disposal to make the punishment fit the crime. The Criminal Justice Bill will reform the sentencing process. Those who are a danger to the public, who commit violent or sexual offences, must expect stiff prison sentences. Those who persistently offend must also expect to face a prison term. The Sexual Offences Bill will make this crystal clear. In particular, it will ensure that those who prey on children will face tougher sentences. I know that child protection agencies support the creation of a new offence of "grooming" a child. I welcome the support also expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, last Wednesday for our moves to give children greater protection.

The Government's position on sentencing is clear and will be reflected in our reforms. Protecting the public from violent, sexual and other serious offenders is our priority. But the courts must strike the right balance between the need to deal effectively with serious and violent crime and the need to keep prison as a last resort in other cases. The Home Secretary and I have twice now issued statements to this effect. In doing so, we have been echoing the words of the Lord Chief Justice: imprisonment only when necessary and for no longer than necessary.

I assure the right reverend Prelate that we shall recognise that rehabilitation and crime reduction are as important as punishment as aims of sentencing. He will see that enshrined as a statutory purpose of sentencing in the Criminal Justice Bill.

I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, that our doubling of magistrates' sentencing powers is not intended—I say this loud and clear—as a spur to send more people to prison for longer. The new sentencing framework will encourage full use of tough new community sentences, aimed not only at punishment that is proportionate to the crime but also at preventing reoffending, and encouraging rehabilitation.

The Criminal Justice Bill will establish a sentencing guidelines council to promote greater sentencing consistency, and to ensure that local justice does not mean unequal justice.

Both the Courts Bill and the Criminal Justice Bill will stay faithful to the principle of local justice. This legislative programme puts the interests of local communities at the heart of the Government's reforming agenda with measures to tackle anti-social behaviour. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, put it so well last Wednesday: such behaviour makes people's lives almost unbelievably hard to endure; indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, made the same point. We all have a responsibility to respect our neighbours and our environment. Anti-social behaviour orders already provide a powerful weapon in the fight against persistent and serious anti-social behaviour. For that reason, the Government will do much more to address such issues, especially as regards those who ignore their responsibilities, with new measures in the civil and in the criminal law to tackle truancy, aggressive behaviour, vandalism, litter, graffiti, and nuisance. Every local authority will have a comprehensive plan to tackle anti-social behaviour, tailored to the specific needs of that community. That will involve public, private, and voluntary sectors to the full.

Some mention has been made of House of Lords reform. It is a subject about which your Lordships remain fascinated—and rightly so. However, only the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, spoke specifically on the matter today, although the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf, made some observations in that respect. As the gracious Speech said, we look forward to considering the report of the Joint Select Committee. But, first, we await completion of that report, followed by the free votes in both Houses that we have promised. We all recognise what a vexed issue this is. The Joint Committee has already been working on the matter for four months. That the report has not yet been completed should not detract from the fact that this Government have progressed much further down the road of reform of this House than any of their predecessors.

However, I noted with interest the observation made by the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf, that your Lordships' House makes its unique contribution to the legislative process because it is not elected. We have certainly always taken the view that one of the most important questions to be asked of any proposal that any proportion of your Lordships' House be elected is what effect that would have on Parliament as a whole, and on this House's role in the legislative process. Composition should flow from consideration of this House's proper role and powers, and not dictate it.

The legislative programme set out in the gracious Speech furthers the Government's radical programme to reform and modernise public services. It is an enabling agenda. It removes the barriers that frustrate those agencies working together in the interests of service to the public, whether in the criminal justice system, the National Health Service, or in education. It is a programme designed to protect rights and promote responsibility. I commend it to the House.