Prisons

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I declare an interest as I have a close association with a charity called Safe Ground, which works in prisons and addresses the third point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Stern. May I say how much I agree with her about how effective it is and how difficult it has been to get funding and attention from a Prison Service obsessed with targets and tick-boxes? I hope that that will not be a characteristic of the Prison Service of the future. I greeted Ken Clarke’s announcement with total delight. I have waited 15 years, which is most of my time in this House, for a Home Secretary about whom I can say that—and at last I have one. If we can get the people out of prison who should not be there—principally, to my mind, those with drug and mental health problems—and treat them properly elsewhere, we would make the space in prisons for prison to work properly and do what it should be doing to rehabilitate the people who are in there.

There is no time to put what I am going to say in context, I shall just fire off words of advice at the Minister and hope that he takes them. First, he should not abolish NOMS but allow it to evolve. When you make big reconstructions in places such as the NHS and schools it takes a couple of years for the system to stabilise, for everyone to know what they are doing and for it to become easy to work with again. Prisons just do not have that resilience. There are no populations of qualified professionals such as doctors and head teachers around to bring a system back to normal quickly. It has taken five plus years for NOMS to settle down. It has at last got some degree of stability. Parts of it work very well but there are elements of extreme waste and misallocation, which I am sure this Government will take a knife to. But, for goodness’ sake, allow the structure to evolve rather than shake everything up again, which will make it impossible for other people to work with it. We must also look carefully at this election mantra of payment by results. The only people who can stand that are big commercial organisations. How can little charities, focusing on one part of the problem, ever live under that sort of structure? You will lose an awful lot of good work if you make that the centre of what you are doing.

Secondly, take a lesson from schools and make governors and management teams stay a decent length of time. What would you think of a school which changed its headmaster every 18 months or two years? You would never send a child there, and quite right too. It takes time for a governor to get to grips with a prison. They need to be there five or seven years to make prison somewhere where the governor is the governing influence rather than the bureaucrat in the middle of tick-boxes and targets. You have to learn more from schools than that. You have to support and find ways to involve governors stuck in prisons in outside things, but for goodness’ sake leave them in charge of prisons. The Prison Service could take a lesson from Teach First. Having really high-quality people in a profession makes an enormous difference. You cannot easily take people straight out of university or school into the Prison Service; they need to spend a bit of time in the world first. There has always been a connection with the services and a good flow of people between the services and the Prison Service. There is no reason why that cannot be made into something much more formal whereby we take the best people coming out of the Army, train them up and support them and get a really high-quality cadre into the Prison Service, making it something which people look up to, as they should.

Ministers have set out on a 25-year journey. This is real long-term stuff. The Secretary of State for Justice should be there for the full five years of the Government. The Prisons Minister should be there for the full five years of the Government. If you have rotating Ministers all the time, it is terribly difficult to keep long-term objectives in mind. Your job as Ministers is to take the flak and to stand up there while the Daily Mail throws stuff at you. Things go wrong in prisons. You must have the courage of knowing that you are not risking your next promotion by getting some little thing wrong and running for cover, as Ministers have done so often in the past 15 years. We want to see courage and commitment right at the top.