Community Sentences (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Friday 26th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, on her contribution today but, much more particularly, on her excellent chairmanship of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee’s work on community sentences.

Our report came out in the context of the criminal justice system being regarded, according to the press, as a catastrophic public safety failure—so it was certainly relevant to have it. It has been found that 52.7% of hyper-prolific offenders, with at least 45 previous convictions, are given community sentences. The great majority of those offenders are of course not redeemable. Community sentences are therefore not suitable for them—something needs to be done about that—but for offenders who are neither prolific nor violent, intensive community-based sentences, including both punishment and treatment programmes, can be highly effective.

The Government need to make it clear in legislation that community-based sentences rather than short-term prison sentences should be the preferred option for these non-violent and non-prolific offenders. Very important is that, when sentencing offenders to community-based sentences, judges and magistrates must be required to set out the conditions of the sentence and why these are being imposed, with a very clear purpose of reducing reoffending in future.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, mentioned, our report makes it clear that crime can be reduced, and the lives of offenders turned around, through rigorous community sentences. This is not a likely outcome of short-term prison sentences, as we know. Yet community sentences currently fail to achieve their full potential: they are not sufficiently rigorous in either their treatment or punishment components, so work needs to be done on all that. Also, the use of community sentences has more than halved over recent years. As a result, we have untapped potential in our criminal justice system. To reduce reoffending, we need to keep offenders out of prison and apply rigorous community sentences to far more offenders.

The adult offender service can learn, as the right reverend Prelate said, from both the women’s service and the youth offending service, both of which adopt effective supervision of offenders in the community. Increased investment in treatment for offenders serving community sentences is urgently required, as the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, also said. In particular, the need for mental health and drug and alcohol treatments far exceeds the imposition of these treatments, and the availability of such treatments needs to be expanded substantially and urgently. Some 91,000 people on probation at any point in time have mental health issues, yet only 1,302 of them started mental health treatments as part of a community sentence in 2022.

Increasing the use of community orders can be expected to lead to a decline in reoffending, which would result in long-term savings. Of course rigorous community sentences are costly but, in the long run, they really are cost effective. The Government would do well to reverse the decline in their use under the previous Administration. However, the first step will need to be an increase in the availability and quality of mental health and addiction treatments.