Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Lord Ramsbotham

Wednesday 23rd November 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has made a very powerful case, particularly for those serving short sentences. One can be reasonably confident that the benefit entitlement with which they enter prison will remain the same when they leave it. Could the Minister help me by fleshing out his thoughts a little further on a situation in which you cannot know in the same way, under universal credit, whether someone leaving prison is going into the household of a former partner with children or whether that household has broken up while he has been in prison? What question marks will there be? It was much easier to arrange when we were dealing with a single benefit, such as jobseeker’s allowance, which was not particularly related to the network of other benefits that a household might receive. It would clearly work for those serving short sentences or for somebody who was single throughout their sentence and expected to come out single. Could the Minister help us on how he would handle a situation in which a person was going back into a household with children, where there might be rent to be paid from his universal credit entitlement? He might go back expecting that payment to be made to him. Perhaps the Minister could help us on that.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

Thank you very much. I am glad that the noble Baroness raised that point. It reinforces something that many of us have been saying for a long time: the prison system of this country is not organised to help itself. The trouble is that prisoners are scattered all over the country by an incoherent national population management structure, as opposed to—as recommended by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, after the Strangeways riots in 1990—prisons being grouped into what he called community clusters or regional clusters so that nobody ever left their region. Therefore, all the resources of the region could be applied to the rehabilitation of their own offenders. It will be very difficult for the Ministry of Justice to resolve the questions that noble Lords have asked under the present distributed system. If prisons were regionalised and the prison authorities properly hooked into all the authorities in the region, it would be much easier to liaise with the regional authorities responsible for finding out that sort of detail. That should of course be part of the whole rehabilitation process anyway. The questions that the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, posed are absolutely ones that should be referred to the Ministry of Justice. We should ask, “How will you ensure that these are answered, because they must be?”.