Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Beith and Mike Penning

Tuesday 3rd February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

Will my right hon. Friend take a critical look at the proposal on its way to his desk that there should be a single local justice area stretching from Berwick to Sunderland, which could lead to cases being transferred for administrative convenience to courts 70 miles away at great cost to witnesses and families?

[Mike Penning]

I will, naturally, look at any submission that comes across my desk. I am sure the Minister responsible will look at that very carefully when it arrives.

Crime Reduction Policies

Debate between Lord Beith and Mike Penning

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Beith]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right; I agree with him and will say a little more about the issue. It always strikes me very forcefully that if a judge or magistrate is presiding over a case and sentencing, and decides that an offender really needs a significant drug rehabilitation programme as part of a supervision programme, that judge or magistrate has to find out whether it is available. If custody is the answer, however, a van will come along, take the prisoner away and it will be somebody else’s problem to find somewhere to put them, but the sentence will be carried out. That is a mismatch within the system, and it also reflects the weakness of drug rehabilitation provision in the community at large. Had that been accessible, it might have prevented that person from getting involved in the drug-related crime in the first place.

When we were in the United States, both for the previous parliamentary inquiry and the present one, we saw instances of problem-solving courts playing a much more central part in the rehabilitation of offenders. They were adapting their procedures, particularly when dealing with drug offenders, to use the collective will, both of the professionals and of all those who were coming before the court, to motivate people to get over the drug problems that were causing their acquisitive crime. It was fascinating to watch a court in Texas, for example. Those who had successfully met the conditions of their sentence were coming up before the judge and the other ex-offenders were sitting in the court applauding the success of the person who had, as it were, qualified to stay outside prison, because of the way in which they had carried out the conditions of their sentence.

I referred earlier to preventive initiatives. We are concerned by the Government’s approach to preventive measures on such things as health and substance misuse. The abuse of alcohol and drugs, as the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) said, are significant in many crimes, but their manifestations often have other root causes. The Government’s approach, which is still focused largely on the activities of the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, may over-emphasise the extent to which measures taken within the criminal justice system can tackle those problems, when a much broader spread of measures is needed involving a wider range of institutions.

It is very striking—we have come across evidence of this—to see the extent to which the criminal justice system is used as a gateway to mental health, drug or alcohol treatment. We come across ex-offenders who have committed further offences because they know that they can get either, in the most basic sense, a bed for the night in prison, or treatment, which they are having difficulty getting outside the criminal justice system. The solutions to some of those problems lie beyond the criminal justice system and the direct responsibilities of even the Minister who will answer this debate. His response might be that he straddles two Departments, which is helpful in this context, but maybe he needs to take two or three more Government Departments under his wing to achieve the co-ordination that we think is necessary.

[The Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims (Mike Penning)]

I will not make a bid to take on more Departments; I have had five in the past four-and-a-half years, which is probably enough for anybody. However, on drug addiction and the effects on crime and the community, very often, as I am sure the Committee saw in the evidence, the issue is not just drugs, but drink and drugs. There are often mental health issues and conditions as well, and there may be learning difficulties.

It is absolutely right that I serve on several committees in Government, where this issue is discussed across Government. I know that it is difficult for the Select Committee to have seen that, but the work is going on in Government. To be fair, it started under the previous Administration; we have accelerated it and pushed it on. This cannot be taken in isolation, which I think is what the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) is saying.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I am delighted that the Minister is so clearly aware of the point that I am trying to make and is endeavouring to do something about it. I wish him well in continuing to move in that direction.

A lot can be done to support people in the system to address health problems associated with their offending, but the funding of mental health services generally is crucial to that. The inadequacy of those services costs the police, the courts, probation, prisons and victims of crime a very high price. That should be an urgent cross-departmental priority of the Government as part of their national crime action plan.

I welcome the priority that my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister has given to mental health and the way in which he has tried to lift it up the political agenda and the Government’s agenda. I also welcome the work on crisis intervention, including addressing the use of police cells as a place of safety—so clearly an inadequate response to that problem—and the ongoing work to improve liaison and diversion services within the criminal justice system. I welcome the presence of mental health nurses in many police stations now and encourage the development of that. Those are very welcome initiatives. We have waited quite a while for them and we really want a network of those services. At the moment, there are a limited number of pilots, with some more due to commence shortly.

However, we know from the implementation of the Transforming Rehabilitation programme that when the Government really want to, they can get on with something and make progress quite quickly. That programme of redesigning the probation service, whatever view we take of it—whether we are for or against it—has been carried forward very expeditiously. Governments can get things done when they are determined to do so, and we would like to see some of that determination in the area that I have just described.

Another good example of where what the Government have been trying to do is in line with what we have been asking them to do, although it needs to be built on, is the Troubled Families programme, in which the Government have invested heavily. Part of the motivation is that an estimated £9 billion a year is spent on the costs arising from families with those problems—an average of £75,000 per family each year.

Of the £9 billion, only £1 billion is spent on efforts to solve the problems that are getting the family members into all kinds of trouble and difficulty, so we very much welcome the Troubled Families programme. It is an illustration of preventive investment upstream, where the amounts of funding are, against the total picture, relatively small. For example, only £17.5 million has been dedicated to extending family-nurse partnerships, which we also saw working successfully in America; £10 million was given to enhance support to local authorities to tackle gang violence; and extending liaison and diversion services is costing £25 million.

With regard to the Transforming Rehabilitation programme, we were pleased to find that the purpose of achieving crime reduction was central to what the Government were trying to do. Achieving supervision for the less-than-12-months prisoners is an objective that has eluded previous Governments. This Government are determined to do it. They have chosen a route that is controversial even among members of the Select Committee, but we recognised what the Government were trying to do.

We had a number of concerns and we are still watching to see how those are addressed and how successfully. Some have been successfully addressed. We feared that there might be areas without bidders, but that has not proved to be the case. There was confusion about what would happen if a bidder dropped out or failed to meet its contracted requirements. It is now clear that the national probation service has to step in if that happens.

We had concerns about whether perverse incentives would be created in the way payment by results was structured, but it is too soon to know for certain whether that has been sufficiently mitigated. We had too little financial information to know for certain whether the goal of under-12-months supervision could be achieved within the total budget. That was central to what the Government were doing.

Partnership crime reduction activity must continue to build in strength as resources are diminished. As a Committee, we stress that new providers of probation need to be incentivised to reinvest part of any cost savings into further reoffending reduction initiatives, and to consolidate the partnership commitment to reducing crime more broadly. It is important that the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms do not frustrate partnership approaches. The new providers must get involved in the partnership structure, and the national probation service, being now a national service, must also be structured in a way that enables it to participate at local level. We do not want it to become a distant bureaucracy.

The most important conclusion that we draw is that the Government should focus their efforts in seeking to address the wider question of how they prioritise their activity as a whole on the reduction of crime. In our predecessor Committee’s report, we said that a rigorous assessment was required of where taxpayers’ money could most effectively be spent in cutting crime. We did not feel that that exercise had ever been done. That ought to be a serious question for the Treasury. It is supposed to be the Treasury’s job to look at whether Departments are providing value for money. That is the question that it should be asking of the criminal justice system.

If we compare the investment in drug and alcohol treatment, mental health schemes and early intervention activity with some of the annual costs of inaction, it is pretty difficult to justify. Annually, violent crime, 44% of which is alcohol-related, costs almost £30 billion. Nearly one tenth of that is costs to the national health service. Crime perpetrated by people who had conduct problems in childhood costs about £60 billion; drug-related crime costs £14 billion; and the annual budget for the whole of prisons and probation is £4 billion.

We believe that what is required is a longer-term strategic approach that recognises more explicitly that the criminal justice system is only one limited part of the system through which taxpayers’ money is spent to keep our constituents safe from crime. That safety question is important, too. We are in a position in which prison is the default option for society expressing its disapproval of criminal behaviour. That is not a very good way of deciding how to spend the money efficiently; it is a way for people to look as though they have taken something seriously, without having had proper regard to whether it will prevent the person from reoffending.

Many of my colleagues in the House were puzzled that we went to Texas, which they thought of as a place where right-wing Republicans merely executed any prisoner who came into their sight. What we actually found was that right-wing Republicans and centre-left Democrats had agreed that they were wasting the taxpayers’ dollar, because they were spending more and more money creating more and more prison places to deal ineffectively with people whom they could deal with better through the kinds of initiative that I have described. So they changed the policy and we are seeing good results. That seemed to me a good example of a society looking at how it is spending its money to keep people safe and working out whether it is really achieving that objective.

In this country, we want to get away from a mere “predict and provide” approach to the criminal justice system. It is time that politicians and the media stopped using the length of prison sentences as the sole measure of the seriousness with which we treat crime, because that traps us into using expensive custody to lock up not only those who have to be locked up for a considerable time for public safety, but those who would be much less likely to reoffend if they received effective treatment, which could be provided less expensively outside the hotel envelope, if I may call it that, of the prison system.

The Justice Committee has members from four political parties and with a wide range of political outlooks, but we share a determination to make our criminal justice system more effective in protecting our constituents and breaking the intergenerational cycle of crime. What enables us to produce what are usually unanimous reports—in fact, invariably unanimous reports—is the fact that we look objectively at the evidence of what works, and develop our ideas from that starting point.

We are in an election year—the election is getting closer—and however many things we disagree about, it is important that we come through the period without engaging in a sterile contest over who can sound toughest on crime; rather, we need a realistic debate about how we can best protect our constituents. I hope that those on both Front Benches will indicate their willingness to maintain that level of debate about how we can make our criminal justice system effective in keeping our constituents safe, at reasonable cost.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Beith and Mike Penning

Monday 24th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

T6. Will Ministers do something about the fact that, of all the people being helped with personal independence payment claims by the Berwick citizens advice bureau, not one remaining in the area has received an assessment since the scheme started?

[Mike Penning]

Of course, as we roll out PIP, this is a really difficult situation and we must make sure we get the quality right. I will look into that individual case for my right hon. Friend and make sure we get it right in his area.

Search and Rescue Service

Debate between Lord Beith and Mike Penning

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mike Penning]

The shadow Minister is very knowledgeable in this area because he was around in the Department at the time, so I pay tribute to his knowledge of the problems that occurred during the consultation. It will always be difficult, because some of the stations are operational and so an operational capacity need has to be addressed as well as the secondary use, which is the air-sea rescue.

[Sir Alan Beith]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mike Penning]

If my right hon. Friend will bear with me, I want to answer on this point and will then gladly give way—we have plenty of time, to say the least.

The procurement will now be Department for Transport led, with MOD involvement. I say this in the presence of listening ears from the MOD: we certainly will be as open and honest as we can, and will provide as much access as possible both to colleagues throughout the House, and to local communities, because it is important that they feel part of what is going on. We are all about trying to do the right thing and developing a service that we can all be continually proud of—we are very proud of the current service, but we know that there are issues. I assure Members that we will do as much as possible as we lead on this in the new procurement programme, which is why I say that we have a plain piece of paper. We can learn from mistakes and from a lot of the issues that the shadow Minister has mentioned, but we will not necessarily take on everything. We have a blank piece of paper, and can ask, “What’s best for us?”

[Sir Alan Beith]

It would be helpful to know what machinery has been set up to make the decision, or to prepare the ground for Ministers ultimately making it. That cannot be a state secret. Is there a joint project board between the two Departments, or a working party? What stage is it at, and what mechanisms are in place for making this important proposal?

[Mike Penning]

As my right hon. Friend will realise, we are at a very early stage, not least because there are legal issues—he mentioned them in his speech—which are very difficult and technical. The police are fully involved and there is a full inquiry going on, so I am very restricted in how far I can go down that line. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that others may decide to take action in the civil courts, and it is entirely down to them to decide that. We have to ensure that the existing contract is not affected in any shape or form by the private finance initiative contract. It is completely separate, but it has been lumped in with the existing one, certainly in the media. That contract is close to its end time, and we have to negotiate best value for the taxpayer as well as ensuring that we have the service provision. At this stage, I am not in a position to say, “This is the mechanism that we’re going to go forward with,” but we will announce it as soon as possible. This will be led by the Department for Transport, and that decision has been made.

[Mike Penning]

The PFI contract went way beyond the existing spending review period, and so we do not know how quickly we can get this going. It is crucial that we get it right, so that we do not get anywhere near this position ever again. The PFI was signed off for this spending review period, but it went way beyond it, as I am sure my right hon. Friend is aware. The key is that the interim measures, which must be in place, are what it says on the tin—“interim”—and that we then have a proper contract. We have not just gone to another re-bid, we have said, “Whoa, let’s look at this another way.” That will take longer than if we just said, “Okay, there’s a few mistakes here. Someone’s been naughty, and we’ll do it this way.” That would be the quick option, but it is right to say, “Let’s put this completely on hold and look fundamentally at the contract.”

[Mr Joe Benton in the Chair]

[Sir Alan Beith]

I would like to press the Minister a little further. It would be helpful to know whether there is one process, or two separate processes, with a team of people from the two Departments assessing the viability of the existing arrangements and what has to be done to keep them going for the time being, and a separate team considering the future options.

[Mike Penning]

There are two separate processes, which is why, when I began my speech, I stated that there is what we need to do now and what we need to do in the future. I have just been passed a note with some information that I did not know, which is that the Secretary of State for Defence has already been in contact with AgustaWestland—last month—to see if we could engage with the company to consider how to extend the life of the Sea Kings beyond 2016. That is because of the interim short-term situation, and how we go forward. It was mentioned earlier that perhaps the most cost-effective way of doing that would be a major refit, taking us a long way forward, or we could do a shorter-term refit. Two separate projects have to take place, although I am not saying that the same people will or will not be on the working groups. The key is to get on with this now, so that we have the provision in place and can then go forward.

As to when the announcement was made and the reason why it was not made to the House first, it was, obviously a significant market announcement, which is why it had to be made to the stock exchange at 7 am. I am always passionate in the belief that things should be announced to the House, and I have done so myself on many occasions, but an announcement involving such a large private finance initiative had market significance, which is why it needed to be made, and was made, at 7 am.

I know the Falklands rather well. Sadly, several of my friends are there in war graves. Luckily or unluckily, when the Falklands war began, I was with the Grenadiers on spearhead, who were not deployed, but my friends in the Welsh and Scots Guards were. As my right hon. Friend knows, one of my closest friends is Simon Weston, who was disfigured and scarred while he was there and has done much work for charity since he came back. The Falklands is not affected by the PFI. The MOD will continue to provide air-sea rescue in the Falklands and will decide its future. It was never part of existing search and rescue helicopter procurement. There are still a lot of MOD and service personnel in the Falklands. I have flown in a Sea King down there in recent years, although not during my time in the armed forces.

We have mentioned the effects of service personnel and knowing what they are doing. Service personnel work on tours of duty. The original time scales involved in the PFI meant that they would have been beyond their tour of duty—the Prince would have been away from Wales, serving in whatever other duties Her Majesty had in mind for him—long before the changes took place. The MOD will, obviously, continue with its own tour of duty process. That is a matter for the MOD, not for me as a Transport Minister. As we enter the interim period with cover, I am sure that tours of duty will be addressed in many ways.

The hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley), who has left the Chamber, mentioned the interim contract for the coastguard. The existing MCA contract is not interim; civilians have been doing that work for many years. We need to find out what the interim contract is now, but the existing contracts are not interim. We can also learn a lot from the concerns about the MCA contract as we go forward. There are concerns involving the working time directive; I assure hon. Members that it is one of the pains of my life as a Minister. In the past couple of days, I signed off on a document exempting the military from certain things such as driving time, tachographs and so on. At the same time, the MOD manages brilliantly to provide cover within existing restraints. All of that will be part of the documents as we go forward with the concerns.

I do not want to pontificate for another half-hour, as there is not much more that I can say. We are conscious that there are concerns, and we as a Government are concerned. In a perfect world, this would never have happened. But we do not live in a perfect world and, sadly, an anomaly has occurred with the procurement programme that has created real concerns and legal ramifications. A huge amount of taxpayers’ money has been expended on the procurement programme, and we will be looking to recoup it, as it is not the fault of taxpayers or the Department for Transport. To be fair, the MOD, which was criticised earlier, could not have predicted that the persons involved would do what they did. I know that there are concerns about the MOD’s procurement programme—that is for the MOD to address—but the criticism that the MOD is to blame for what happen might not be right. Individuals are responsible, rather than the MOD.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Alan Beith]

I thank the hon. Members who have taken part in this debate. There are, obviously, other hon. Members whom it would have been useful to have present to represent other areas. I am particularly grateful for the support shown by my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) for the work of RAF Boulmer in his constituency, of which air-sea rescue is a significant part. We have also heard interventions from my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton), my right hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr Laws) and the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen), in whose constituency is located basic training for all RAF search and rescue pilots, a fact of which people might not have been widely aware until a royal prince became one of the aircrew there. Their interventions have been helpful.

In concluding, I will focus on what the Minister could and could not do today. Clearly, Ministers cannot comment on what has happened in any detail while investigations are taking place, and legal action—not just legal action arising directly from the investigations but civil legal action—is a possibility. He said that he had a blank piece of paper, but I remind him that it cannot stay blank for long, particularly in respect of the continuity arrangements, and that he does not have a blank chequebook with which to make extremely expensive temporary arrangements that might prejudice what is done in the long term. That is why I am so concerned to establish that there is a clear process at work. I am not sure whether we are entirely clear about that yet. The long-term alternatives have to be looked at in some detail, and I assume that a joint working party is doing that at the moment.

On the continuity arrangements, the centre of gravity has shifted back to the Ministry of Defence, which must affect the way this is being done. The Minister has a more direct responsibility for what is happening in relation to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency—it has a contract that will expire shortly—but the dependence on the continuing RAF and naval provision shifts the centre of gravity of the immediate decision-making process back towards the MOD.

It has never been clear whether the Department for Transport has become a purchasing Department with the relationship of a purchaser with the MOD that says, “This is what we want, even in the short term. How can you provide it for us?” or whether this is a traditional joint departmental process with a degree of fuzziness about who is really in charge. We cannot afford that in situations such as this, so I will continue to press Ministers in both the DFT and MOD to be clearer about how decisions will be taken in both the short and long term, and how the relationship between the two Departments can be operated in a way that ensures that decisions are made quickly on the things that have to be decided quickly. It is bad enough trying to get decisions out of the MOD alone, but when two Departments are involved, unless there is some sort of purchaser-provider split between the two, there is too much uncertainty about how decisions are taken. I am not even sure how confident the Minister is that we have a real grip on the issue and an effective process in operation.

The situation inherited by the Government is difficult, but difficult situations call for resolute action and I want to be sure that there is a process that can do that. Will the Minister, when he reflects upon this debate, write to me, in a letter that can be published, an explanation of the process? It would be helpful.

[Mike Penning]

I think that I have already said that. I am sure that there will be other debates on this subject—although I cannot predict what Mr Speaker will or will not select for debate—but we will do that in writing as things develop. I am conscious of two things. First, we have to make sure that we get it right. Secondly, at the end of the day, this was not the fault of the taxpayer so it is crucial that, wherever possible, the taxpayer will not pay for it. As we progress, I will be open and we will write, correspond and give as much information as possible. The MOD has a procurement skill that the DFT does not in this area, so we need to work closely together and we will continue to do so. It will be led by the Department for Transport.

[Sir Alan Beith]

That is a helpful intervention and I am grateful to the Minister for a number of points. Indeed, he said a number of things during that short intervention that had not been fully clear previously in the debate.