Queen’s Speech

Baroness Stroud Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, I too rise to speak about prison reform, and for the purpose of this speech, I refer to my in entry in the Members’ register of interests.

Having spent a number of years working among those in entrenched poverty, I found that many disproportionately rotated through the criminal justice system and the mental health systems with concerning regularity. We therefore decided to look carefully at the whole of the criminal justice system, how we could prevent people from getting there in the first place and then, if there, how to stop the revolving door.

We undertook a report into prison reform in 2009 entitled Locked up Potential and found that half of all prisoners had no qualifications at all, rising to 71% of women prisoners, while 30% of the prison population had truanted regularly from school compared with 3% of the general population and 65% of prisoners had a numeracy age at or below the level of an 11 year- old. We found that we spend millions of pounds on outreach programmes trying to raise the educational outcomes and employability of ex-offenders and vulnerable people when they are not in prison and then, when we actually have them in our care sitting with us in our prisons with nowhere to go, we do little with them. On Wednesday when the Queen read the words:

“My government will legislate to reform prisons and courts to give individuals a second chance. Prison Governors will be given unprecedented freedom and they will be able to ensure prisoners receive better education”,

the first step, however small, was taken to address the situation and to ensure that the prospect of a second chance can become a reality.

The need for prison reform is absolutely clear, as many noble Lords have made the case for this afternoon in your Lordships’ House. Almost 50% of prisoners are convicted again within a year of release, while crime by ex-prisoners costs society around £13 billion each year. We send offenders to prisons because we believe they should be punished for breaking the law and because we want to protect the public from individuals who pose a threat to society. But we could do so much more than this; prison terms also provide opportunities to understand the problems that lead individuals to crime, unlock their potential and ensure that they become contributors to society rather than underminers of it. Prisons can, in other words, become engines for social justice, not just holding pens for criminals.

Thursday saw the launch of the Dame Sally Coates review, which the Government have agreed to implement in full. It was aptly named Unlocking Potential. At the heart of the review are plans to give prison governors, as we have heard, full autonomy to turn prisons into centres of educational excellence, equipping prisoners with the skills to find long-term meaningful employment on release. Dame Sally Coates has recommended a framework for ensuring that our prisons will be measured on how successful they are in providing every prisoner with a personal learning plan, improving the life chances of thousands of prisoners and reducing the likelihood that they return to crime. If the Government can match implementation to ambition, these plans could make a huge difference.

However, one aspect not announced last week is the need urgently to bring the Government’s family stability agenda to people who need the support of family the most—offenders who are separated from their families. I ask the Minister to consider adding to his prison education reforms the importance of family stability alongside implementing the reforms in the Coates review in full. Investing in family stability and educational attainment will ensure that real steps are taken towards genuinely providing a second chance for prisoners. If we can then add in employment opportunities and housing on release, we will have taken real strides towards breaking the cycle of recidivism.