The Coroners and Justice Bill
Article for The House Magazine February 2009
Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, was a promise often repeated by this now tired Labour Government. It was a promise proclaimed as vehemently as 'Britain forward not back', or most recently, 'British Jobs for British People', yet like all New Labour promises, it has been and remains unkept.
In the last 12 years this Government has failed to alleviate the causes, failed to reduce criminal outcomes, and failed to enhance the justice process: today in the UK nearly 2 million are unemployed; one in three children live in poverty; the number of children in prison has virtually doubled since 1997; violent crime has also doubled; two thirds of prisoners reoffend within one year of release; half of all crime is committed by those who have already been through the criminal justice system but whom the government failed to reform; over 47,000 prisoners have been released early due to a failure to build adequate prison capacity; and 66 per cent of people think the Criminal Justice System fails to meet the needs of victims.
This multi-faceted failure results from the fact that in an attempt to address these most serious problems of society, this Government has traditionally employed two feather-bladed weapons: the ill-considered and wasteful throwing of taxpayers' money at a problem, and ineffective, authoritarian, headline-grabbing legislation.
In line with this tradition, the Coroners and Justice Bill which had its Second Reading in the Commons last week, is the 56th and very long Home Office and Justice bill introduced by this Government and will only add to the more than 3600 new criminal offences created since 1997 – almost one for every day in power. There are some provisions in the Bill which we will support and which may contribute positively to our criminal justice system. Yet at the same time, significant parts of the Bill are no more than symptoms of that unrehabilitated legislative addiction which, after 55 earlier warnings, the Government still fails to realise will do little to improve their poor record on crime and justice. This Bill, like last year's Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, is too big, covers too many discreet subjects. It is no more than a plum duff: plenty of duff and not many plums.
We welcome some long overdue reforms. Many of the proposals for reform of the coroners system are useful and worth careful consideration. Measures to prevent criminals profiting from their crimes through memoirs or other publications are also welcome in their promotion of natural justice and protection of victims' sensitivities. Proposals which aim to rebalance the criminal justice system in favour of victims and witnesses through providing them with support and better protection, while maintaining the principles of a fair trial, are also laudable. So too is the tightening up of bail laws even if the current proposals do not go far enough to deter breaches, make public protection an explicit priority and restrict bail for repeat and prolific offenders.
On the other side of the coin, there are some less welcome areas. In particular, the return of an even wider version of secret inquests last seen in (but removed from) the Counter-Terrorism Bill is not only wrong on principle and open to abuse, but will not attract sufficient public confidence to be workable. What's more, there is no evidence that it is truly necessary. Secondly, it cannot be restated often enough that offenders' sentences should fit their crime, not temporary Government priorities or resource availability, so we will be seeking to amend the clauses about the Sentencing Council for England and Wales, which will stem judicial discretion and not promote justice. Finally, proposals in the Bill which could amount to the unfettered and widespread sharing of personal data by the state must be removed. No convincing case has been made that this growth in state power is required, and given the Government's dire record for losing data the usefulness of the measures is dwarfed by the risk to personal security and privacy that this data sharing represents.
This Government has no strategic vision about how to reduce crime and improve justice in the UK. The last 12 years have shown that even its best attempts at innovative and intelligent policy planning have only produced 'solutions' that are draconian, a waste of taxpayers' money or primarily aimed at grabbing headlines. They are under the impression that activity is the same as productivity and cannot distinguish between ineffective authoritarianism and sensible measures to protect the public. The Coroners and Justice Bill has some merits, but without substantial amendment, it risks leaving British citizens shackled by restrictions whilst facing rising crime.
