Probation Service

Lord Austin of Dudley Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)]

I am grateful to you for calling me for the second time today, Mr Speaker, which I know is unusual.

I recently had the privilege of visiting the Dudley office of the Staffordshire and west midlands probation trust. I was impressed with its work. It is currently the third best in England and Wales at reducing reoffending. Of 53,216 ex-offenders in the entire region, just 6.9% went on to reoffend, down 16% compared with 2007. Across all areas covered by West Midlands police, none has reoffending rates above 10%.

That is excellent work, but it is not unusual. In July, the Government’s own report assessed all probation trusts as either good or exceptional. Despite that, the Justice Secretary has criticised reoffending rates for prisoners serving less than 12 months, but the probation service will not be allowed to deal with those people. Despite all the evidence that the probation service is functioning well, the Government plan to hand 70% of its work to private companies.

I support using private and voluntary sector expertise and investment where it works, and I believe that the principles of competition and contestability drive up the quality of public services and can reduce costs, but the Government are planning to invest in a completely untested payments-by-results model and do not have a clue if it will work. First, they have no evidence that it will work in practice. Nowhere else in the world uses a payment-by-results model, and the Justice Secretary cancelled pilot schemes in his first week on the job.

Secondly, the Government have no clue how many low and medium-risk offenders will go to private companies. This is key to the Government’s plans, but parliamentary questions have revealed they have no idea how many of the 260,000 offenders handled by the probation service are low, medium or high risk. We need to remember that low risk does not mean no risk. Figures show that the majority of serious offences committed on probation are committed by low and medium-risk offenders. Those are the basics and they should be absolutely clear. Instead, the Government are intent on splitting the probation service, and introducing bureaucracy and delays that could lead to mistakes.

Thirdly, the Government do not even know if the scheme will save money. They are investing in a completely unproven scheme, instead of tried and tested local probation services. That is not good enough when the cost of failure is more criminals committing crime on our streets. That is exactly why chairs of probation trusts told the Government yesterday that the plans will lead to

“more preventable serious attacks and deaths”.

The truth is that the probation service should be more integrated into the justice system, not less. The first way to do that is to ensure more cases are dealt with by the courts and, where community resolutions are used, probation officers should be involved. Community resolutions are being used more and more extensively: the cases never go to court and the perpetrators do not come into contact with the probation service. I heard about a case where an offender kidnapped his underage girlfriend at knifepoint and raped her repeatedly. He assaulted the girl so severely that she miscarried. Unbelievably, just four weeks before the attack he had been issued with a community resolution for underage sex with the same girl. In another case, the rape of another underage girl was dealt with by community resolution, and in other cases robbery, domestic violence and sexual assault were dealt with in the same way. These people should be going to court and the probation service should be working with them, because there is no other way of stopping criminals from offending again.

Secondly, probation offices and courts need to work together at the local level. In Dudley, the Government are threatening to close our criminal court, which is in the same building as Dudley magistrates. Part of the reason why Dudley has one of the best probation teams in the country is that it too is based in the courts and works closely with them and uses their local knowledge.

Thirdly, probation officers should work more closely with prisons. Investment in prisons without investment in rehabilitation is a false economy. There is normally a small probation team based in each prison charged with co-ordinating the sentence planning and the programmes that a prisoner should be on, in conjunction with external probation officers, but I am told it is not permitted to run offender programmes, which are ultimately the best way of reducing reoffending and rehabilitating offenders prior to release. I am told the team finds it almost impossible to work with prisoners in private prisons in Birmingham and Wolverhampton, because the companies that run them are paid to lock people up and have no incentive to do anything that might ensure they do not commit crimes when they are released.

The Government know that their plans are a gamble—that is why they are trying to force them through quickly and quietly—but we cannot afford to gamble with probation. The cost could be more criminals on our streets and more victims of crime. The probation service is working—we have the evidence to prove it—and we should be investing in it, not selling it off. That is the way to reduce reoffending still further.