Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Lord Adebowale Excerpts

Tuesday 7th February 2012 Lords Chamber

The policy branch to which I referred in 1997 is there. Nothing is happening. You can lay down policy until you are blue in the face, but unless someone is responsible and accountable for delivering it, it will not happen. This group needs it. We have the example of the intensive alternatives to custody. Please let us develop this for this age group in every probation trust in the country. At the same time, let us take on board the lessons from the inspection report on HMP Isis and make certain that, where they are in custody, there is proper provision and none of them is left idle in their cell, but that they are presented with full, purposeful and active days, which are the only thing that will enable them to live useful and law-abiding lives. I beg to move.

[Lord Adebowale]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to Amendment 177AA and I am particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for being here when I was not and to the Minister for allowing me to speak. I apologise to the House for my tardiness; I could not get here fast enough, cheese and biscuits held me a little too long.

My amendment would introduce a new intensive sentence for young adult offenders, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, mentioned. We live in an age where we need to present excuse removers for not doing something about a critical problem. If we carry on doing what we have always done, we should not be surprised if we get what we always have had. Those aged 18 to 20 years old are a particular problem. I guess that the Minister, or at least his officials, will find some fault in the wording of my amendment, but I hope that he will be able to respond positively to the policy concerns that I am raising alongside the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham.

Young adults continue to be significantly overrepresented in the prison population, with a very high reoffending rate often following short periods in custody. At the end of September 2011, there were 8,317 young people aged 18 to 20 in prison in England and Wales. In the 12 months to June 2011, 12,509 18, 19 and 20 year-olds were sent to prison under sentence. The vast majority of them are young men; a disproportionate number are from black and minority ethnic communities. I am not sure that there are any official statistics detailing the exact number, but I know that almost 40 per cent of the population of young people in jail under 18 are from BME backgrounds, and we can assume that the figure for 18 to 20 year-olds is similar.

Although there are pockets of good practice, prison simply does not deliver for those young men, especially those serving short sentences. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons specifically raised concerns about young adults sentenced to detention in young offender institutions, describing his impression of,

“young men sleeping through their sentences”,

in Her Majesty’s Young Offender Institution, Rochester, for example. He has also noted a lack of engagement in work, education and training opportunities across the youth offending estate, which again speaks to the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about leadership, and the fact that these things just do not work.

I have spent probably half a lifetime’s work in the not-for-profit and voluntary sector trying to help homeless and unemployed young people from disadvantaged communities to seize the positive opportunities available to them. I am actually optimistic about young people in Britain today, which is not something that you hear very often. However, none of us should be under any illusion about the negative temptations that most deprived youngsters face. I believe it is the responsibility not just of the not-for-profit sector but of the state to help those young men and women to turn their lives around when they have made bad choices.

That is why I was very pleased to hear about the young adult offender project, which was set by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland of Asthal, during her time as a Minister in the previous Government. Sadly, the working group that she set up did not survive her promotion to a different post, but one of the good things that came out of it, as was mentioned by the noble Lord earlier, was the intensive alternative to custody scheme—the IAC pilots around the country. The Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire IAC pilots were focused on the young adult age group in question, and over the past two years they have demonstrated great success in turning around the lives of young men who are on a path to becoming persistent offenders and perhaps hardened criminals. Experienced probation officers describe it as the first real opportunity that they have had to create a package of requirements that will change offending behaviour, and local magistrates are very supportive of this model.

These models involved tailored interventions, intensive supervision, enhanced monitoring, 30 hours’ activity per week, curfews, an accredited programme, unpaid work, court reviews progress and swift action on non-compliance—ingredients which are more likely to lead to a reduction in recidivism than what we provide at the moment. The Ministry of Justice funded the IAC pilot scheme but this funding ended in April last year, and the seven individual probation trusts are trying to find ways of mainstreaming it into their services as intensive community orders. Unfortunately, that is in just two of the 30-odd probation areas in England and Wales. The Prisons and Probation Minister, Crispin Blunt, told the other place:

“There was never an intention to extend funding centrally beyond the end of the pilots”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/5/11; col. 1362W.]

I accept that no commitment was ever given to extend this funding but I am not persuaded that there was no intention to extend the pilots should they prove successful. It seems bizarre that something should prove successful and that funding should then be stopped at a time of economic restraint. Of course, the real judgment is whether there is sufficient evidence of their success. That is why it is disappointing that we are still waiting for the Ministry of Justice to determine whether it will commission a full evaluation of the pilots. I do not wish to detain the Committee for much longer but I hope that the Minister will tell us today how this evaluation is going and whether it is now under way.

The Prison Reform Trust has just published a new report on young adults in the criminal justice system, as has already been mentioned. It specifically highlights the good work of the IAC, particularly in Manchester, and it is worth finishing with an example. Lee is currently 10 months into his 12-month IAC order after being convicted of theft with violence. His father and uncle have also both served time in prison. He spent the first three months of the IAC with a tag, which he found helped him to avoid getting into further trouble. The IAC team helped Lee to find accommodation, have regular contact with his baby daughter and complete his construction skills card. In his own words, Lee says:

“The IAC team has helped me grow up and come to a realisation that, even though this is a punishment, it is helpful. It’s pretty intensive when you come here. At the same time, it’s made me aware that reoffending is going to be more detrimental than anything. After twelve months in here, it’s not really something I’d do now. They’ve given me other options, like going on different courses. Plus, because my offence is drink related, I had to learn to curb my drinking. It’s made it a lot more unlikely for me to reoffend”.

Some of the issues facing young adults in the criminal justice system were raised in the House of Commons during the debate on an amendment to the youth cautioning regime. Responding to the debate, the Minister said:

“We need to ensure that, given the colossal cost of failing to turn this particular age group around, we find ways to get interventions and investment into it, which will then deliver savings to the Ministry of Justice, because of the huge advantage of getting these people better and making them pro-social members of society”.

He went on to say:

“I accept the … general point about 18 to 20-year-olds presenting a particular challenge, and we need to be imaginative about how we deal with that”.—[Official Report, Commons, Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill Committee, 13/10/11; col. 800.]

I hope the Minister will agree that this amendment is exactly the kind of imaginative thinking that his colleague wants to see.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Northover]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords for their amendment. Young adult offenders are a particularly difficult group and outcomes are not always as we would wish. I have a great deal of sympathy with the intentions here.

The amendment proposes a new requirement of the adult community order called,

“an intensive community supervision requirement”,

available for offenders aged 18 to 24. It is clearly intended to mirror the intensive rehabilitation order available for juveniles. I agree that we need to reduce the level of reoffending by young adult offenders and that more intensive engagement may very well have a role to play. However, we need to find ways of achieving this without further complicating the legislative framework and constraining how the needs of this age group will be addressed.

Affordability is, of course, critical. If we were to create extra burdens through statute by delivering intensive interventions, supervision and surveillance to this age group, the Government would not have the resources to deliver what we prescribed. We want to see more effective and efficient use of resources, with payment by results and competition being used to secure improved outcomes for 18 to 24 year-olds and other offenders. A range of interventions may be used to achieve these outcomes, and we wish to avoid prescribing which approach must be used with different age groups.

I heard about the problems at Isis, and the MoJ will be commenting in due course. I also note what noble Lords have said about intensive alternatives to custody. The Green Paper Breaking the Cycle said that the Government were looking at how the IAC principles could be extended nationally. The analysis of the reoffending rates of offenders who took part in the IAC pilots is under way at the moment. We will write to noble Lords as soon as the results are available. I hope that is useful to noble Lords.

The spirit of the amendment ties in very well with work that we are already doing to improve community sentences generally. In addition to provisions in the Bill to strengthen community sentences, we want to deliver a step change in the way they operate. They must address the problems that have caused the offending behaviour in the first place: the drug abuse, alcoholism and mental health problems that noble Lords have referred to. They must also punish properly and send a clear message to society that wrongdoing will not be tolerated. We are hoping to provide sentences with a much improved community sentence offering a robust and credible punishment to deal with both young and old offenders. To this end, we are currently conducting a review of adult community sentences and hope to publish a consultation document shortly. I encourage noble Lords to feed into that. In the light of my comments, I hope the noble Lord will accept that this is not a necessary step to take at this stage and will accordingly withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Adebowale]

Has there been any cost comparison between the IAC model and the cost of keeping a young person in prison and the concomitant cost of recidivism? The Minister seemed to imply that there is a cost implication in the IAC. Has any work been done on the comparison?

[Baroness Northover]

We are acutely aware of the cost of keeping people in prison. Obviously it is not only for cost reasons that you try to keep people out of prison, but given that it is a costly route, other measures can be measured against it.

[Lord Adebowale]

I am not quite sure that that is the answer. Like many noble Lords who have amendments to this Bill, I feel that we have not hit pay dirt here. We have what I, and I think many others, consider to be an excuse remover in terms of the IAC model and the leadership required, which my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham mentioned in his speech. I look forward to further conversations with the Minister on this issue. I do not feel it will go away and I do not want to be here in a couple of years’ time making the same speech as recidivism goes through the roof. However, if the Minister is open to a conversation with me and my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham on that matter, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 177AA withdrawn.