Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what is the total annual budget for prisoner rehabilitation services; and how much of this is allocated to (1) family services, (2) employment training, (3) education and (4) other itemised rehabilitation activities.
Answered by Lord Timpson - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
Reoffending costs society over £22 billion a year and we know that access to valulable rehabilitation is an important tool in reducing that reoffending.
The overall Prisoner Rehabilitation Service budget for FY 24/25 is £360 million.
Family Services - £12 million
Employment Training - £25 million
Education including Prisoner Education contracts - £191 million
Other itemised rehabilitation activities - £132 million
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what leadership training is routinely provided to officers moving up the ranks in the Prison Service.
Answered by Lord Timpson - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
Officers have a wide range of leadership training available to them as they progress through the ranks.
All Ministry of Justice staff have access to a wide suite of cross-government training products available via Government Campus (part of Cabinet Office). These product topics include Coaching, Building your Team, and Career Development.
All Ministry of Justice staff also have access to two, four-day, intensive Leadership Schools per annum, focused on unlocking the potential to improve and transform their leadership capabilities. Leadership School provides keynote speeches, expert-led workshops, and in-depth peer reflection sessions, to ensure that leaders are equipped to use new capabilities in their roles.
In addition, MoJ HQ has developed a new HMPPS Leadership and Management Offer specifically for HMPPS staff (elements of this include the HMPPS People Manager Handbook and HMPPS People Manager Essentials Programme). HMPPS staff also have access to a wealth of free online resources on the myLearning Learning Management System.
There are several funded Leadership apprenticeships on offer for HMPPS staff, and a small number of leadership training interventions for HMPPS are provided by external providers.
The Spark Custodial scheme is an operational fast-track scheme for Public Sector Prisons, open to Operational Bands 2-4 and Non-Operational up to and including Band 6, that enables them to progress to Head of Function. The scheme lasts around 30 months for operational participants and 36 months for non-operational participants.
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to reform the prisoner telephony contract with the external commercial provider so that inmates are subject to the same terms and conditions as customers in the community.
Answered by Lord Timpson - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
The current supplier of the telephony service provides a service within the public prison estate which is not directly comparable to the services they provide to their customers in the community. In the prison estate, they also provide the network infrastructure and devices, a call management solution to allow for management of PIN phone accounts and to support call monitoring, and a call routing service to connect to phone numbers that have been permitted by HMPPS. The cost of the service is predominantly funded through prisoner credit purchases.
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what band of seniority (1) family services leads and (2) family engagement leads typically occupy in prisons; and what assessment they have made of how this compares with education and employment leads.
Answered by Lord Timpson - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
The Head of Reducing Re-offending (HoRR) – typically at Band 7 or 8 in His Majesty’s Prison & Probation Service (HMPPS) – is responsible for family services, together with other areas such as housing, finance/benefit/debt, faith, health/drug strategy and offending behaviour.
Unlike the HoRR role, there is no requirement at present to employ a Family Engagement Lead. In prisons where a member of HMPPS staff undertakes this role, it is normally in the range Band 3 – 5. These are predominately non-operational roles.
A Head of Education Skills & Work in an establishment is typically at Band 7. This is a functional management job, with responsibility for setting the strategic direction for all of education, skills and work within the prison.
Prisons Employment Leads, at Band 6, oversee Employment Hubs in prisons and support prisoners with employability, matching them to jobs in advance of their release.
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what proportion of men in prison have access to legal advice on the issue of parental rights and responsibilities.
Answered by Lord Bellamy
Prisoners are entitled to civil legal aid if their legal matter is in scope, and they pass both a merits and a means test. The merits test considers the case’s likelihood of success and benefit to the client.
Legal aid is available in certain family matters, such as public family law cases which fall under the Children Act 1989. These types of cases include proceedings relating to whether a child should be taken into care or who should have parental responsibility.
In private family proceedings, legal aid is available for domestic abuse victims and where the child is at risk of abuse, subject to providing the required evidence and meeting the means and merits tests.
However, the National Security Act 2023 introduced a restriction on access to civil legal aid for convicted terrorists, which narrowed the range of circumstances in which individuals convicted of specified terrorism offences can receive civil legal aid services, though these provisions have not yet commenced.
It is not possible to estimate how many prisoners have a family law-related issue that is in scope of legal aid, and/or are eligible for legally-aided advice, as doing so would require each prisoner undertaking a means test and merits test of their case, as well as an examination of their issue to understand whether it is in scope.
Prison staff are required to assist prisoners who wish to access legal advice by providing lists of legal advisers, supplying appropriate forms, and assisting prisoners to complete them where requested due to language or literacy difficulties.
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what the visit rates were for (1) male, and (2) female, public sector prisons in (a) 2019, (b) 2020, (c) 2021, (c) 2022, and (d) 2023.
Answered by Lord Bellamy
Visits are managed locally by each establishment and data is not routinely assured and reported nationally. Collating and assuring the data in the format requested would incur disproportionate cost.
His Majesty’s Prison & Probation Service continue to promote the importance of offering different types of visits including family visits. We are aware that the Covid-19 Pandemic substantially impacted the numbers of face-to-face visits and stakeholders’ concerns over visitor numbers in some prisons being slow to return to pre-pandemic levels. There are a number of possible reasons for this including the introduction during the pandemic of additional ways in which families can stay in touch including the roll out of in-cell phones and secure video calls. Establishments have been working to provide a range of services to help prisoners develop or renew positive relationships. This includes using Official Prison Visitors, contracted family support workers, partnership work with external organisations such as New Bridge and the use of peer mentors.
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what progress they have made in identifying prisoners’ children, by sex and age, and obtaining other relevant data for their welfare, through the Better Outcomes through Linked Data programme.
Answered by Lord Bellamy
The Ministry of Justice’s most comprehensive estimate remains that over the course of a year, approximately 200,000 children may be affected by a parent being in or going to prison. This estimate is based on 2009 survey data.
The Prison Strategy White paper detailed our intention to work with other government departments to commission updated research to improve our collective understanding of the overall number of children affected by parental incarceration.
As part of this work, changes have been made to the Basic Custody Screening Tool (BCST) to enable us to collect data on entry to prison about how many primary carers are in custody and how many children under the age of 18 are affected by their imprisonment, which means that we can access this information centrally. Questions contained within the BCST are under continuous review to reflect learning from operational colleagues and people with lived experience of prison. While the BCST does include questions on the sex and ages of dependents of prisoners, the collection of this information relies solely on self-declaration of the parent in prison and therefore may raise challenges as to the accuracy or consistency of this information without being able to verify with other sources.
The Government is delivering on its white paper commitment to improve our data and evidence in this area, through the Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) Programme. BOLD is a £19.7m cross government Shared Outcomes Fund programme which is linking data to enable better evidenced and more joined up cross government services. The purpose of BOLD is to identify the overall scale of the issue by improving our understanding of the number of children affected by parental imprisonment. The BOLD programme aims to do this by exploring data available across government, including information that does not rely on self-disclosure. We expect findings from the project to be published in Spring 2024.
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what progress they have made in collecting data on prisoners who are primary carers and their children through the Basic Custody Screening Tool so that this information can be accessed centrally.
Answered by Lord Bellamy
The Ministry of Justice’s most comprehensive estimate remains that over the course of a year, approximately 200,000 children may be affected by a parent being in or going to prison. This estimate is based on 2009 survey data.
The Prison Strategy White paper detailed our intention to work with other government departments to commission updated research to improve our collective understanding of the overall number of children affected by parental incarceration.
As part of this work, changes have been made to the Basic Custody Screening Tool (BCST) to enable us to collect data on entry to prison about how many primary carers are in custody and how many children under the age of 18 are affected by their imprisonment, which means that we can access this information centrally. Questions contained within the BCST are under continuous review to reflect learning from operational colleagues and people with lived experience of prison. While the BCST does include questions on the sex and ages of dependents of prisoners, the collection of this information relies solely on self-declaration of the parent in prison and therefore may raise challenges as to the accuracy or consistency of this information without being able to verify with other sources.
The Government is delivering on its white paper commitment to improve our data and evidence in this area, through the Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) Programme. BOLD is a £19.7m cross government Shared Outcomes Fund programme which is linking data to enable better evidenced and more joined up cross government services. The purpose of BOLD is to identify the overall scale of the issue by improving our understanding of the number of children affected by parental imprisonment. The BOLD programme aims to do this by exploring data available across government, including information that does not rely on self-disclosure. We expect findings from the project to be published in Spring 2024.
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what is their most recent estimate for the number of children with (1) a parent in prison, and (2) a primary carer in prison.
Answered by Lord Bellamy
The Ministry of Justice’s most comprehensive estimate remains that over the course of a year, approximately 200,000 children may be affected by a parent being in or going to prison. This estimate is based on 2009 survey data.
The Prison Strategy White paper detailed our intention to work with other government departments to commission updated research to improve our collective understanding of the overall number of children affected by parental incarceration.
As part of this work, changes have been made to the Basic Custody Screening Tool (BCST) to enable us to collect data on entry to prison about how many primary carers are in custody and how many children under the age of 18 are affected by their imprisonment, which means that we can access this information centrally. Questions contained within the BCST are under continuous review to reflect learning from operational colleagues and people with lived experience of prison. While the BCST does include questions on the sex and ages of dependents of prisoners, the collection of this information relies solely on self-declaration of the parent in prison and therefore may raise challenges as to the accuracy or consistency of this information without being able to verify with other sources.
The Government is delivering on its white paper commitment to improve our data and evidence in this area, through the Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) Programme. BOLD is a £19.7m cross government Shared Outcomes Fund programme which is linking data to enable better evidenced and more joined up cross government services. The purpose of BOLD is to identify the overall scale of the issue by improving our understanding of the number of children affected by parental imprisonment. The BOLD programme aims to do this by exploring data available across government, including information that does not rely on self-disclosure. We expect findings from the project to be published in Spring 2024.
Asked by: Lord Farmer (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the reasons for the 22 per cent rise in divorce applications since reforms were introduced in April 2022.
Answered by Lord Bellamy
The Government continues to monitor and assess divorce application statistics. In the first year since divorce reforms were introduced in April 2022, 119,000 divorce applications were made through the new process, compared to almost 108,000 applications for the last full year under the previous legislation. This is an increase of 11 per cent. We expected a temporary spike in the volume of applications following implementation of the divorce reforms. This is because people will have waited to apply for a divorce under the new process. However, international evidence shows that long-term divorce rates are not increased by removing ‘fault’ from the divorce process. We expect volumes to return to previous levels once the initial peak has occurred.