Speeches and Statements

Annual Home Secretary's to the Parole Board

Dr John Reid, then Home Secretary, gives the annual address to the Parole Board in May 2006.

Thank you for your warm welcome to me and getting your defence in first cleverly, in your remarks, I would have done exactly the same thing. I am delighted to be the first Secretary of State to come along today.

There is not much else going on it’s not as if I have a full diary or full in-tray... so it was easy to make time to come to such an important meeting, and I want to share with you at the beginning of what I hope is a long and enduring relationship, subject, of course, to events and decisions.

I hope that I can share with you a number of my thoughts on what is of immediate concern to the public. Not specifically or only with the parole boards or your decisions but with an eagerness to feel that the whole criminal justice system is correctly balanced and weighs in the balance not only the rights of this and that individual but the collective rights of many, many individuals.

It is in that context which I have come to speak to you today. I also wanted to speak to you because I understand and appreciate what a crucial and in times very difficult role it is that you undertake. I am under no illusions about that and I think the events of the past few months have only highlighted the enormity of the challenges which you face. But I believe that it has also enhanced the obligation for us to work together to find a better understanding and to sometimes dramatically overhaul public protection arrangements.

So let me say at the start that I do not underestimate in any way the difficult and the complex tasks that you face. They can be, quite literally, decisions, over a matter of life and death which come in front of you. I think that is a huge obligation. It is an enormous burden and it places an obligation upon me as well to speak to you as frankly and as honestly as I can with the context in which you have to discharge that obligation.

Keeping the public safe is the first duty of government. A government, which fails in that, has no right to be a government. The public has the right to expect that everything possible will be done to minimise the risk from serious violent or dangerous offenders and the right to feel that this is happening and that sufficient priority is being given to that.

What is our current problem? It is quite simple: The public feel that the system in so many occasions is just not working on their behalf and they are losing confidence, fast and we need to restore it fast. The release in the supervision, as you well know, of the murderers of John Monkton and Naomi Byrne are the most recent relevant cases in point.

Reasonable people would view a decision to release someone that appears to them to emphasize the rights of a convicted murderer over the rights of his potential victims is tragically and disastrously mistaken. That is how the public feel and we should not hide ourselves from that, and I believe that there can be no excuses for a system that allows this to happen and that it is vitally important when it does, that we all honestly face and learn the lessons from these tragic cases and try to put them right.

This not a responsibility of one or two people, it is the responsibility for all of us to try and make sure that this does not happen again. So I believe that everyone here today, including me, has an absolute integral role to play in assuring that public faith and confidence in the criminal justice system is restored and as quickly as possible. To do this that system must be seen as fair and dedicated to protecting the public. It must be seen to take into account in every occasion the rights of the 60 million individuals who make up our nation and who want to live in this country free from fear and not just the rights of one offender at any given time. You know that and I know that.

So I want to say a word about human rights. I am not a lawyer. I don’t come to this with a background of jurisprudence, judicial expertise; I come to it actually with the same background as most people in this country. A non-legal perception of events as they occur in the system.

You will see much press speculation over the last few days so let me clear on my views on this matter of human rights. I am not for one moment suggesting that offenders, even offenders of hideous crimes have no human rights. But I am suggesting and rather more than suggesting that the community, that body of 60 million individuals that I mentioned earlier has a right to be protected from dangerous criminals and in order to do that we have to be sure that the system is correctly balanced and if it isn’t to re-balance the system.

The re-balancing of the system means making sure that it is moved back in favour of victims and it falls upon the recent announcement by the Lord Chancellor to allow the families of victims or their advocates the opportunity to sum up their views before the sentencing of murderers. I believe that that was a major significant step in this re-balancing process.

But I tell you today that I want to go further in ensuring that victims and their representatives get a greater say about the release of offenders back into the community and I believe that the victim’s voice must be heard more clearly than it has done in the past. That is why we are already interviewing the members with experience of either being a victim or of a victim support organisation and I can tell you that by June, I intend that the first members with that experience will have been appointed to parole boards as lead members.

I can tell you also that I want more of them, and there will be more of them, and that I will continue hereafter to see what re-balancing needs to be done and to see that it is done, not just in the parole boards but in the whole of the criminal justice system. Legislation, regulation, interpretation and administration, and I’m well aware that some of the deficiencies are in my department rather than in your department.

To do that re-balancing is important because it is nothing less than the public expects and it is nothing less than they will accept. I share that with you today at the very beginning of my tenure as Home Secretary.

Why is it necessary to do it? Apart from the one or two incidents which have been mentioned recently it is because we need to learn to understand and accept honestly that bodies such as your independent bodies are ultimately accountable to the public and more accountable than ever before.

It is in the nature of our life that politicians, soldiers, police, almost every institution in this country is under more scrutiny, under more inspection and is more accountable than ever before.

Forty years ago, decisions taken by junior officials, by the Privates, Lance Corporals and Corporals of any organisation, those in the junior ranks often had serious ramifications, serious consequences no one noticed.

They went unnoticed, they were hidden there, in the depths of mass-organisations and the consequences were very rarely paraded across our television screens - and so the nature of the decision, the evidential base of it, the consequences were very often confined only to be known after a very long period of time, very often not widespread.

Nowadays, there is much greater independent scrutiny, through the Internet, 24 hours news cycles and greater interactivity with the news event agenda. Decisions are profoundly more transparent and as a result those that take decisions are profoundly more accountable.

To use the continuing reference to the job that I have just left and the rank structure we now have everywhere in every organisation what you can call  ‘Strategic Corporal’, i.e. somewhere, someone in your organisation, will take a decision that decades ago may have saved confined in knowledge and empire to a relative few number of people and nowadays would be all over the television headlines sometimes within hours.

I can promise you that, even after only a fortnight in the home office that, that is the case and so we have to decide whether this is a good or a bad thing. It is certainly a challenging thing but as it happens – I believe it is a good thing.

I believe that it is right that people see, inspect, scrutinise politicians, public bodies and the institutions, which they found, which they rely upon to maintain a balanced system. And of course alongside this scrutiny grows the growing aspirations, ambitions and wish to have more information and more control over the institutions that run our lives nowadays.

That is a natural progression as well with an educated population that grows ever more sophisticated. But it does mean that everyone, who is involved in public protection understands that each part of the process is indeed open to the same level of intense scrutiny and analysis as the final decision and ultimate outcome and, therefore we have to work in order to prevent bad or wrong decisions taking place in the first place and I believe we can only do that by working together, not separately.

So if I was to lay out after a couple of weeks in my new job, what it is that would be the centre of the vision and the aspiration of what I want to do in the Home Office – if you want to call it my core values – and to try and reduce them to one or two simple words that are understood by everybody – it would be to reduce fear, to increase security and to maintain fairness. If those three things are done, then the public will truly believe that they have a system that is operating and functioning properly. So I am absolutely dedicated and committed to promoting these three values under the overall heading of that simple one of ‘Fairness’.

Public protection obviously must be my first priority, but it is one I share with you, because it is the first priority of the parole boards as well. The safety of the public, you know as well as I know, must outweigh the rights of the offender.

Now you play a vital role in risk assessing those whom the courts have sentenced. Those serving an indeterminate sentence are released back into society only if you as individuals are absolutely satisfied that it is safe to do so.

There are risks attached to that. There is no 100 percent certainty, there is no risk-free solution and out of fairness to you, because you are entitled to fairness as well as the public, it has to be made plain that there can be – in human societies, where there is no scientific predictability about human action – no risk-free decision.

But we can, we must and I believe we do try to minimise that risk through the highest quality risk assessment and management and that is what we need to do, consistently and confidently.

That is why I am working with the Lord Chancellor and Attorney General to lead a review into the criminal justice system and the immigration/asylum system to ensure that public protection is the major consideration at all times.

We will be looking at existing legislation and regulations and many people have pointed to that as the possible cause for imbalance.

I do not say that that is the exclusive direction in which we should look but I say that we should be open to looking at the regulations including those, which emanate from my own department.

But looking at legislation is only one area because beneath that is a whole layer of interpretation by those functioning in the law and order system running from police through probation officers through the parole boards right through the judges here and judges abroad and we have to ask of that interpretation that bodies such as yours are charged with such a delicate and burdensome task whether or not we are providing an adequate resource in terms of training in terms of inculcating and providing a framework for a balanced judgment in full awareness of all the regulations.

So whether further training is required to improve the competence and confidence of officials to, for instance, challenge bogus human rights’ arguments, which are not based on any reasonable interpretation of the Human Rights Act or convention but may well be part of the armoury of lawyers when it comes to the everyday task of pleading their client’s case.

So I hope that you will be an active member of this review, as a body collectively in some cases talking individually as I will be and I hope you do, and I am sure you do share the public concern, as I do, to make sure that the public concern on this issue is reconciled.

So I want to work with everyone here and while in the couple of days and couple of weeks that I have been in I do not think you would expect me to outline detailed proposals on how to improve the management of offenders at this stage. I hope that we can work together to look at that, indeed the point is that I want to work with you because I know that you share that aim of reform as well.

I can no more impinge upon those areas of human dependence, than you can with me, but by sharing views with each other we can set a direction which is mutually acceptable and in particular, I would like to hear your views on a number of emerging proposals.

We ought to consider whether Board decisions, with such serious consequences, as we have sometimes seen, should be taken, in my view, with anything other than unanimous verdicts, for instance. That is what I think is one consideration and I would like to know Duncan, what you and your colleagues here think of that, particularly on those serious offences where a judge might in the first instance prefer a unanimous verdict rather than a majority verdict.

Let us discuss whether that might be the case. Also I would like to work together with you to look at the emerging proposals for improving risk assessments, extending interviews of offenders and dealing more effectively with the release of indeterminate and life sentence prisoners.

Additionally I am looking again, at whether current Parole Board directions are fit for purpose, at how to improve public protection representation at oral hearings through 'Public Protection Advocates' who will represent victims' and societies' views, and at the whole process of release and supervision to ensure that it is sufficiently joined up.

Now these are but three of the areas where I think we can usefully and productively exchange views on the matter. I would like therefore an agenda on which we can have productive discussions where both sides of this equation, might come to some form of understanding about what it is that has been sought from the public in this balance.

As I said, I don’t have – this quickly into the job – detailed proposals on every area but I am sure that our discussions might release into the atmosphere a number from your point of view as well. Because I am pretty sure that you do want to put yourselves in a position where you feel that you have been given the backing to do the job that you want to do which is the one, as outlined earlier, the protection of the public.

I think that we can do that. I regret that on this occasion though I have been able to come here, I cannot stay longer than to deliver this speech. Duncan, you will want to know why, it isn’t because I am going off to a reception for the world cup, or to give drinks to journalists, it is because I promised last week, and I think it is right that I should have promised, to start meeting with groups of the victims’ families and survivors from the July 7 bombing and I am meeting the first group tonight and I think it would be discourteous not to try and make it in time for them.

But I did want to come here today to share those views with you and I want to finish by saying that the reason that I came here and the reason that I have shared my views honestly with you is not because I think that you – an unimportant organisation in all that you do –  it is quite the opposite. If I believed that, I would not be here.

I am here because I believe that the parole board is a vitally important institution. You have my full support in what you do and, more importantly, my appreciation in what you do. It is in the nature of these brief exchanges that it is often by exception that we address issues so rather than a litter nay of encouragement and congratulation which you may feel you deserve and I am sure you do, but I have only been in a fortnight so I have not read that part of the briefing.

You may feel that I have come here to highlight only that which has to be attended to and may perceived to be a deficiency - that is true. It is true, it is the nature of these visits, but I do want you to know that I do not believe that what has been done by the parole board is marked only by the important subjects that

I have raised today and I have raised it today because I think that it is central to a much wider spectrum of views, beliefs and perceptions that I have to address, which spills right outside the criminal justice system to many of the things we have seen on asylum, immigration and illegal entrants to this country so that every mistake that we made then becomes magnified into a systemic problem if we do not address it.

That is why I have shared my views as honestly as I have today. But I do give you my appreciation, not only for what you do, but for taking forward some of the many reforms which have been undertaken in recent years. We both have a clear duty and that is to protect the public and therefore it is not only beneficial, but essential that we have an ongoing dialogue and one which continues way beyond today, and you have my pledge that I will do all that I can to make sure that you are fully equipped to provide the public with the protection it rightly expects from the criminal justice system.

And if I can do that then I am sure that instrumental in that will be ensuring that the role you play contributes towards that speedy re-balancing of the public perception of the whole system, without which the system itself cannot get the adherence and the respect of the whole of our nation. I thank you very much indeed for listening today to what I said.

It is a robust message and I know that it is one that you will want to consider and I know also that you will want to come back to me having considered and put to me your views on some of the proposals that I have put forward today and no doubt the position that I have taken today on these issues, and that is in the nature of the important jobs that we do.

And I just say “Thank you very much” once again for being here today and I hope that I am here this time next year but in life, there are no 100 percent certainties as I said earlier. Thank you very much indeed.