King’s Speech

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, this has been a long debate, and it is not over yet. By now, the Minister can be of no doubt that he is genuinely very welcome in his important role. Nevertheless, I add my voice to that chorus. I have long appreciated what his business can do to give a new lease of life to my shoes, but far more important is the new lease of life that it has given to so many offenders—a remarkable achievement.

The Timpson example has encouraged other companies to employ ex-offenders—companies as diverse as National Grid, Virgin, Tesco and the Royal Opera House, which all welcome ex-offenders. The charity Working Chance does great work getting women ex-offenders into employment. However, there are still some companies, including large ones, that plead that their existing staff would not want to work alongside ex-offenders, and they use that as an excuse not to take them on. The Minister may now find that he can encourage people rather more forcefully to change their minds about that. The scheme described by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, is surely a blueprint that other companies could emulate by providing work training in prisons and then employing people when they leave.

I shall address most of my remarks in my limited time to the issue of offenders, but, first, I will offer a brief thought about asylum seekers. Near my home in Kent, hundreds of migrants are housed in a fairly dilapidated barracks. They are mostly young and able-bodied, often well-educated and certainly brave. They are in limbo, waiting for their cases to be processed. Yet they could be, and most would like to be, usefully employed, filling the many vacancies in our workforce. They could be net contributors, rather than a vast cost, to our economy. As the Minister understands the value of work to morale, will he reconsider the attitude to employing asylum seekers, albeit temporarily?

Dostoevsky wrote:

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons”.


How would the author of Crime and Punishment judge our society had he ventured inside the overcrowded institutions that, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester put it, are warehousing our vulnerable, in appalling conditions in many cases? Half of prisoners are addicts, and more than half—57%—are largely illiterate. Some 31% of women prisoners and 24% of male prisoners were taken into care as children; that figure is only 2% for the population at large.

So these are people with deep-seated problems. They need help if they are to become useful members of society. Instead, they are locked up then turfed out—with nowhere to go, in many cases—with £82.39 in cash. Recent statistics from the Government showed that 17 prisons met the target for providing accommodation on the night of release; 98 did not. Performance against the target for ex-prisoners being in employment six weeks after release was little better. Is it any wonder that our recidivism rates are so high?

We have a Minister who understands the dire failings in our prison system. I trust that he will be able to bring about change—that is what the Government came to power promising—but I ask him to look in particular at whether people should be in prison in the first place. Others have made the point that our sentencing is completely wrong. It is absolutely having the wrong effect and it needs revisiting now.