'The Secretary of State may by order require police forces, the prison service, the probation service, judges and lay justices to make joint arrangements for the dissemination to each household in any local area of such information and statistics about the criminal justice system as he may direct.'.—[Mr. Allen.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

I have raised this subject with my hon. Friend before. It is the point at which the lawyers in the Committee can walk out because it is about reconnecting the public with the legal process. Therefore the tea trolley can get back into full working order outside the Committee Room. I raised this earlier in the proceedings in order to make sentencing more relevant to people and more honest. The Government's proposals for a sentencing council and the Minister's willingness to entertain a further possible extension of a sentencing council to encourage people to think that it and the criminal justice system

are more relevant to their daily lives is part of that process. It is also part of the view, which we all share, that we should recapture the criminal justice system for the people whom it is meant to serve.

The proposal is quite simple; there would be joint arrangements between all those involved in the criminal justice system, be they police services, the Prison Service, the probation service or judges, whether full-time or lay. Those bodies will come together and explain what they are about and how they serve local communities. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble) is a serving magistrate, and she may feel that that is an appropriate use of a minor amount of public funds.

I have used this example before: like many Members of all parties, I give my constituents an annual report, which costs a couple of grand to print and a couple of grand to be delivered by the Post Office. My hon. Friends the Members for Nottingham, East and for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) and I share a city, we know that for £12,000, it is possible to send every house a relatively simple and straightforward explanatory document of perhaps four sides of A4 paper. Such a document could explain to the local user of the criminal justice system what the system delivers; it could give phone numbers and explain how to make contact; it could give an idea of what the system does; and it could state the detection rates and the numbers of people that we have managed to put away or fine for criminal activities.

Such a document would ensure that people feel that the criminal justice system belonged to them because not only do they receive its services and benefit from them; they also fund it. Just about any other service, whether it is a local fitness club or a football team, expects, in return for each subscription or association, to give a report of its activities, however brief, each year. Such a report on the criminal justice system would not involve great expense, but it would be a great service to local people if we were able to reconnect them with the service in that way.

I do not want to make a long-winded speech that will turn off colleagues from an extremely good idea, so I propose the idea for consideration by the Committee.

This proposal, too, seems to have much to commend it. It is true that in many areas, especially my police area, there is an increasing willingness to put out reports on, for example, the performance of the police and crime statistics. I have certainly fought as hard as I can to persuade the police that they should make local crime statistics available, but they are always a tiny bit cagey about that. They have a tendency to say that the statistics will be misinterpreted or misunderstood. However, the bar chart helpfully provided to me by the chief superintendent of the two main local police stations in my constituency when I meet him every quarter is perfectly easy to interpret and very useful. Obviously I appreciate that a 100 per cent. rise in rape from one case to two is not necessarily statistically significant.

One must be careful about extrapolating a percentage increase from figures.

I agree with what the hon. Gentleman is trying to do and applaud the principle that people are entitled to much more information than they get. The question is how best to achieve a result. One of my anxieties is that the process must be divorced from central Government activity. The Minister will have to forgive me, but I do not think that the Government's annual report has been a model of usefulness.

It is a model of disappearance.

Indeed, it has been deemed to be so useless that, as the hon. Gentleman said, it has now apparently disappeared. When it did appear, I found it to be a very poor document. We must be careful that we do not end up simply providing a propaganda excuse for some branch of the legal enforcement agency to put out its report. That tendency can be sometimes be found in the annual reports published by local police forces.

The absolute need is for statistical material to be available. I do not share the belief that such material is misused, because if someone seeks to misuse it, it is possible to put out a correcting statement. The ability to obtain that information and to know what is going on would provide the greatest public reassurance about the way in which law enforcement takes place. We should be working towards that end, and I hope that the Secretary of State will encourage it. Perhaps he needs to be given a power to kick in the pants those bodies that are reluctant to give the public such information. We must be careful, however, not to encourage organisations to put out propaganda documents, because that is the easy way out for them, and it is not, I believe, what the hon. Member for Nottingham, North intends.

I have one or two points to make. Further to the hon. Gentleman's comments, I can tell the Committee that in my local area all the agencies are keen on publishing statistics, but they are not always presented in an easily accessible form.

My impression is that my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North is interested not only in statistics, but in giving people more information. For example, many members of the public do not really understand the importance and significance of community sentences. They tend to think that they are a soft option, but for many people they are not. When I sat as a magistrate, many people did not want a community sentence but preferred to go to prison for two or three months.

I appreciate the hon. Lady's point. I may have the advantage that my constituency is the lead area in the country on restorative justice, and much has been done by the police to publicise what that involves, so that people know that it is not a soft option. However, I suspect that there are widely differing practices throughout England and Wales, and it may be useful for us to address that issue.

I certainly agree. There have been many changes in the criminal justice system over

recent years, and pulling all of that together into an easily understandable form will be useful.

In Blackpool, the new community safety partnerships have been good at giving information on crime statistics because they show a substantial reduction in crime. Our local evening newspaper has also been good at reporting that. There was an article this week on the substantial reduction in youth crime which highlighted the new agencies working together to effect that reduction. However, not everyone reads the local newspaper.

There is work to be done to ensure that members of the public understand the changes that have taken place in the criminal justice system. We need to examine those statistics and consider the best way of delivering to the public the information that they contain.

My proposal may also combat some of the most obvious prejudices or misunderstandings such as ''They just give them a slap on the wrist'', ''They are out after serving half their sentence'' or ''We never see a policeman; we don't have any round here.'' We should be able to communicate the reality of how sentencing operates without going into great technical detail and in a way that ordinary people can understand.

I entirely agree. I will develop that point further and say that such a move could be useful in helping to allay the fear of crime. Many people, especially older people and pensioners, have a fear of crime that is disproportionate to the criminal activity in their area.

I hope that the Minister will seriously consider how best to disseminate information along the lines suggested by my hon. Friend. It could be sent out to pensioners' groups and those who use day centres and luncheon clubs, so that they can see what changes have taken place and how those changes better protect and support them. That will not only educate them about what the police, the probation service and all the other groups are doing, but help to allay any unnecessary fears that they may have about becoming victims of crime.

I support the new clause, but I also have a major concern about it. I hope that the hon. Member for Nottingham, North will bear with me, whether or not he wants to give up the right to live during my contribution. I am going to have a bit of blast at his Government and the Home Office, because the one real failure of the proposition is that the statistics disseminated will be those that the Home Secretary directs. I do not blame the Minister, but the Home Office is increasingly disgraceful on statistics. It is reprimanded more and more, and it is seen to be fiddling the figures, misrepresenting and delaying them, which is completely unacceptable. I shall give evidence for that claim in a moment, in a specific example of a document that the Home Office published only this week.

Like the hon. Member for Nottingham, North, my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome and

I seek to make ourselves accountable by producing reports for our constituents, as I know other colleagues do. That is a good starting point. Those statistics should be available, but I share the concern expressed by the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood because in my area, like hers, the statistics are not always in an understandable or easily comparable format. Unless one can compare like with like, last year with this year, or the hon. Lady's town with other towns in Lancashire, the statistics do not mean much. They are only today's statistics. They may tell us that there were one or two rapes last year, but they are not useful unless one can see the pattern and make comparisons.

Last week, the Home Office produced a new way of comparing the effectiveness of police forces. If anything was likely to confuse the public, that was it. I refer all colleagues, if they have not seen it, to the extraordinarily confusing way of calculating how well one's police service is doing. That is not the only recent example. There is concern that the delivery of statistics should be taken out of politicians' hands and given to those who have no political axe to grind.

The former Home Secretary, who is now the Foreign Secretary, told me that he had a personal interest in trying to get the statistics right. I recall that he is a lawyer by training, but I do not know if he ever qualified or trained as a statistician, so perhaps his wife's civil service influence persuaded him to that view. He thought that we should try to achieve a co-ordinated view of statistics and, to his credit, he set up a group of representatives from different parties to advise him on how to improve the statistics. Some of the group's work was good, but the record under the current Home Secretary has been worse.

Last year, I had occasion to report to the Home Secretary for the Statistics Commission—an independent body that examined some of the Home Office statistics. As I told him in the House, it has publicly criticised the way in which some of those statistics were produced and represented, and said that it was the fault of Ministers and the Home Office.

My specific complaint relates to the juvenile offending figures, which are simply a distortion of the truth. That is sad: I wish that they were true, but they are not. The hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Flook) elicited from Ministers the fact that the current Home Office spends over £1 million of taxpayers' money on its press machine. Under this Home Secretary, the number of Home Office press officers and special advisers has doubled compared with the number under the previous Home Secretary, and the original cost of £845,000 a year has trebled.

The number of press officers alone increased from 13 in 1997–98 to 37 this year, so the Home Office spends £1 million a year on the press, while the police, prison, probation and other services are all substantially under-resourced and require more money. That strikes me as fundamentally wrong. The Home Office's defence—not a terribly strong one—is that independent consultants recommended those arrangements. Furthermore, the press office machine in the Lord Chancellor's Department has trebled in

size under the present Lord Chancellor, though at only £200,000 a year it costs much less.

I hope that I can persuade members of the Committee to share my concern that independent people should carry out independently checked actions. The process must not rely only on the Home Office.

On Tuesday the Home Office issued news release 051/2003 headed, ''Juvenile reoffending significantly reduced by new youth justice measures''. I shall read the first paragraph and subsequent short paragraphs:

''Reconviction rates for juveniles have been cut by 22.5 per cent. overall, according to Home Office statistics published today. The new reprimand and final warning scheme in particular has helped the Home Office exceed by a long way its target of a five per cent. reduction in juvenile reconviction rates compared to 1997.''

If that were true, it would be worth applauding.

It is bogus.

I will show that it is an absolutely bogus claim. The news release continues:

''Reprimands resulted in a 47 per cent. proportionate drop in convictions, and final warnings resulted in a 19.3 per cent. reduction compared to the previous system of repeat cautions for young offenders . . . The statistics also show a dramatic decrease in the reconviction rate for females since 1997, which has fallen proportionately by 35.8 per cent. to 13.1 per cent.''

The statistics sound like an extraordinary and amazing improvement.

Mr. Allen rose—

If the hon. Gentleman will allow me to make the case, he can intervene later. The news release continues:

''The reconviction rate for males has also fallen proportionately by 20.8 per cent. to 30 per cent . . . Improvements in reconviction rates are better for the younger juveniles. Eleven-year-olds showed the greatest reduction in reconviction rates at 38.7 per cent. for males and 66.1 per cent. for females.''

Let me now explain why all that is, in the words of the hon. Member for Beaconsfield, ''bogus''.

It is bogus because the overall reconviction rate for the first quarter of 2001—the last quarter measured for the purpose of comparison—appears as 26.4 per cent. In fact, that is exactly the same reconviction rate as for the previous year. To turn the stagnant performance of no change into an apparent improvement, the Home Office compared the 26.4 per cent. of the previous year with the adjusted predicted rate for the most recent year, which was 34.1 per cent. The reality of one year was therefore compared with the adjusted predicted rate of the other year. Let me get the figures right: the expected rate for 2000–01 was 36.4 per cent.; the true rate was 26.4 per cent. The comparison is therefore completely bogus.

Since the figures appeared on Tuesday, I have had them examined by a statistician who discovered that the supposed decrease was not presented as a fall of 7.7 per cent.—the difference between the adjusted predicted rate and the real rate—but, in order to inflate the degree of improvement, as a percentage of a percentage. Other figures in the report use the same statistical sleight of hand. First, they do not compare two similar sets of statistics, and secondly, they wrongly calculate the percentage.

There are two other significant reasons why the report is flawed. The comparison between the 1997 statistics and these recent ones is entirely misleading because of the way in which the young people are dealt with. Since 1997, the Government have introduced two new options for the least serious offenders: reprimands and final warnings. The young people affected are, by definition, on the lower scale of offending—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Beaconsfield will bear with me, I will give way in a moment. The figures include many individuals who were not included before and are the least likely to reoffend. The inclusion of that new group of offenders in the statistics has had the effect of lowering the reconviction rate without there being any improvement in the effectiveness of all the other things that were there before. Does the hon. Gentleman want to intervene?

No, there is no need.

I give way to the hon. Member for Nottingham, North.

I have forgotten what I was going to say but as you are in a very generous mood, Mr. Cran, I should like to make a short speech on the Galleries of Justice, a popular tourist attraction in Nottingham. It has been open for a number of years, and many people come to Nottingham to see the dungeons underneath the Shire hall in the centre of the town. They see the chains that held the convicts, who were put down a hole in the basement of Shire hall. Before they were transported they were given food lowered down through the same the hole. The entry fee is only £5 or £6 and the chairman of the Bar Council was one of the first people to associate himself with that important legal and penal monument. The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke)—

On a point of order, Mr. Cran. I gave way to an intervention. This does not sound like an intervention.

We must clarify this. I had understood, Mr. Hughes, that you had finished your speech, but obviously this is an intervention. Make it very short indeed, Mr. Allen.

Is this an intervention?

Yes.

The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe was a leading sponsor of that important breakthrough. Not only is there a full-scale courtroom from the 19th century, but when a visitor enters, he is given a ticket—

Order. Mr. Allen, you lost me some minutes ago. We must go back to Mr. Hughes.

I am happy to give way to proper interventions. I treat the hon. Gentleman's interventions with courtesy and I hope that he will treat those of other members of the Committee similarly. He cannot expect collaboration one day and disrespect the next.

My last point on the statistics is that not only has disproportionate weight been given in the comparison

to the number of juveniles who have received reprimands, cautions and final warnings—the things that are least likely to produce reoffending or to be relevant to the youngsters who are least likely to reoffend—but that adding the load of disposals completely skews the total. That skewing has masked the significant increases in reconviction rates for more serious offenders.

The worst thing in Tuesday's Home Office press release, which was headed ''Juvenile reoffending significantly reduced by new youth justice measures,'' is the significant increase in reconvictions of serious offenders. Some 55 per cent. of those with between four and nine previous convictions, including reprimands, were reconvicted in 2000, which is the first year for comparison. By 2001, that had gone up to 64.7 per cent. For those with 10 or more convictions in the year in question, the reconviction rate went up from 58 per cent. to 80 per cent.

I have taken just one example. If statistics are to be disseminated and they are to command the confidence of the public, they need to be independently attested; they should not be subject to increasing numbers of spin doctors manipulating them to hide the truth.

Over the last six months the Government should have learned the lesson that the public lose confidence in them when they seek to present something as a given when it turns out to be something else. That has been the outcome of the sad press management of many of the issues concerning Iraq. If the Government have not learned that lesson, it is sad both for them and for democracy.

I am signed up to the idea that we should give the public good, independent information. As the hon. Member for Nottingham, North said, the public might therefore be disabused of illusions; for instance, that very lenient sentencing is passed when it is not, or that community sentences do no good when they apparently do more good than imprisonment. I am not signed up to that being done on the basis of statistics that come from the Home Office, unchecked by anybody else. My example has shown that those are sometimes misleading, sometimes dangerously misleading, and sometimes not true.

This debate has ranged rather more widely than I had anticipated. I have just written a letter to the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey on the subject of reconviction statistics, inviting him to come and meet the head of the Home Office research and statistics branch to raise this matter with him directly. I hope that he will do so; I am sure that he would find the conversation helpful.

Simon Hughes indicated assent.

The need to improve public understanding of the criminal justice system, and the provision of information about it, is a theme that my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North has consistently pursued with dogged determination during the passage of the Bill. It is good to see other hon. Members participating in the debate in his support. I am as one with him in this, as are the Government. My hon.

Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood referred to the need for explanation and reassurance.

What I cannot understand is why the Minister comes to the Committee without having before him the leaflet called ''Catching up with Crime and Sentencing''. I am amazed that he is so ill prepared.

That sounds like a prompt for a prop. My hon. Friend must have extremely good eyesight because I do have a copy of that excellent booklet, and I was about refer to it. There is a range of information available and I commend to hon. Members the CJS online website in which the material in the booklet can be found. We take my hon. Friend's point seriously. It is important to make information about how the system works and what it is intended to do as widely available as possible.

That will be one of the tasks for the new local criminal justice boards in producing their annual report and making it available to the public. Another of their tasks is to increase public confidence. We agree that providing timely and appropriate information to the public is a very important way to do that. Obviously, it would be appropriate to make booklets and information available at courts. People who have come into contact with the criminal justice system, including offenders, victims, witnesses and their families would be interested in reading such information.

The hon. Member for Beaconsfield made a most important point about ensuring that information is disseminated at a local level. This is not about the Government putting out standard information, although there is a case for us reviewing the range of information centrally, which we are doing now. We would not want the 42 local criminal justice boards to reinvent the wheel and each try to write their own explanation of how the broad principles of the criminal justice system work. However, there is a case for providing them with information to set in the local context.

I concur with the hon. Gentleman's point about the importance of local information, because it brings these matters to life. It also deals with the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North about reassurance and public confidence developing locally through mechanisms such as consultation, channels of communication and places where publications can be placed. Leaving things to be done locally ensures that information can be communicated effectively, as my hon. Friend wants. Although I concur with the spirit of the proposal, I hope that he will ask for leave to withdraw it.

Before my hon. Friend sits down, will he accept that although it is important that such material is available at community centres, pension clubs and so on, we have all been to such places and seen the racks stuffed with well-meaning leaflets from various bodies, so the key aim should be to get information to individual households. Will the Minister please underline his commitment to encourage people at local level in that respect?

I will reflect on that point but it is the job of the local criminal justice boards, with their responsibility for public confidence and communication, to determine the most effective way of getting the information out and about.

I want to correct an error that I made earlier. I referred to answers given to the hon. Member for Taunton, but I meant to say my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws).

On the subject of the interchange between the Minister and his hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North, I make a practical suggestion: although dissemination may technically be the responsibility of the criminal justice board, the best way of getting information out at least cost would be to use the same mechanism as the local authority. Once a year it sends every household an envelope containing details of local authority services along with the council tax bills. The disadvantage of such a suggestion is that sending everything together may be an information overload, but the advantage is that it would include a report on the local authority services.

I understand from Ministers in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister that they are considering sending civil defence emergency planning information in the same way to save money and to facilitate access. I am signed up to idea of information being given to every household rather than remaining on the racks in the library or community centre, and my suggestion would ensure consistency, regularity, visibility and comprehensibility. I hope that the Minister will consider the suggestion and talk to his colleagues about it.

I appreciate that it will take another year's cycle before any such proposal is adopted. However, I would support it as the next stage in the process that the hon. Member for Nottingham, North seeks to persuade us to accept, even if it came from the criminal justice boards, provided that there were agreed statistics, verified in a way that would avoid any accusations of party political or Government spin. The worst thing would be if they were seen not to be credible, which would do no one any good.

I thank the Minister for his helpful response. There is still a little further to go on the matter, which I may raise on Report. The local boards need a nudge from the centre; a model, or examples of best practice from elsewhere, may be just what they need. The cost of delivering a glossy A4 document to every household in my city would be a mere £12,000. That would be a tiny part of the budget but it would have a massive impact in doing as my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood said and bringing the perception of crime into alignment with reality. I thank the Minister for his reply. I shall continue to pursue the matter, but I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Motion and clause, by leave, withdrawn.