Crime, Reoffending and Rehabilitation

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I welcome the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, to his new job. I hope that he does better than all the others ever did. Look at it this way: one thing that we are not embracing is that whatever we are doing is not working. Until you recognise that something is not working, it is like carrying an illness around with you and keep saying, “I’ll go and see the doctor”, but you do not—and then one day you do go and see the doctor, which means you move nearer to the solution than by doing nothing about it. We have a problem over prisons. We have problems with all sorts of things that the Government are expected to respond to but, with prisons, we spend £4 billion largely on warehousing people for a particular period. Then we let them out on the streets and they return to crime.

When I made my maiden speech here six years ago, I was being serious when I said that I got into the House of Lords by lying, cheating and stealing. I did not mean that I had to brown-nose a lot of people and leave a lot of envelopes around. I meant that the class of person I came from—we always like to avoid “class” now, post Thatcher—did not get an education. You got a form of babysitting from the ages of five to 15. I was blessed by the fact that every time I got nicked, I was taught something. In a boys’ prison at the age of 16, I learned to read and write, and even though it took me another 15 years to get out of being a naughty boy and a naughty young man, I had laid the foundation stones of a complete and utter transformation in my life. Why is the illiteracy rate in prisons so high? Why is it that 35% of children who pass through our schools are failed? They join the working poor and the long-term unemployed, and they become 90% of the prison population. I repeat: 35% of our children are failed at school.

I like the idea that the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, can find a magic bullet. I am not being rude but we are always looking for a magic bullet. My magic bullet is for us to address that we fail 35% of our schoolchildren and condemn people to poverty. Behind all of this is poverty. That is what it is. How did you do in the poverty argument? When you come into life, you could say, “Where am I in the poverty argument?”. When you leave life at the other end, maybe you should also ask “How did I do in the poverty argument?”. Most of the people who end up in prison did badly in the poverty argument.

It is a class issue, not just one of families. God above, I would not want my family anywhere near children —my mum and dad could not organise a urination in a whatever. They were absolutely useless, because they did not see the importance of education or ballet lessons—which they never paid for. They did not see that, to bring me out of poverty, they had to address the fact that they knew nothing about education or the social opportunities that it can bring.

I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, has raised the issue of families because I agree with him. Is it not terrible that, if a child does not see their parent in prison, the reoffending rate of the prisoner goes through the roof—some 60% of them are likely to reoffend?

We need to address issues that are nothing to do with prisons. Prison is an emergency response to a social crisis. If you have been a bad boy or girl, we are going to lock you up. We then say we are going to do all sorts of things for you but do not do them. Why is it that, when I talked to 150 prison governors in the north of England a couple of years ago and asked them to tell me how much time and money they spent on rehabilitation, it was next to nothing? They put rehabilitation as maybe a fifth or sixth consideration. The first thing was the safety of staff and the second was the safety of prisoners—no one running away and those sorts of things.

The problem is that rehabilitation and education—which can get people out of the sticky stuff and move them on—are not there. We must address the problem that 35% of our children are lost in the education system and become the working poor. They are the ones who cannot handle inflation; they will become long-term unemployed and then become our prison population.