Arts: Funding

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Clancarty for obtaining this important debate and for enabling many of us to raise issues that are dear to our heart. I declare an interest as president of the Arts Alliance, which is a coalition of all the organisations working to bring arts to offenders. I was therefore very interested to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, suggest that the need might be the same for children. I can assure her that it works.

I have two requests to make to the Minister. First, I ask that she will thank the officials from her department who play their part in the Arts Forum, which is the cross-government organisation formed to work with the Arts Alliance by the previous Government. Secondly, I would request her to pass what I am going to say to her colleagues in the Ministry of Justice.

When I was the Chief Inspector of Prisons, several times I went to Low Newton women’s prison in County Durham where I talked with the outstanding director of learning and skills. One day she told me that the writer in residence had achieved something that no one else had been able to do. A woman had gone in who was incapable of speech thanks to the violence to which she had been subjected from her husband. The writer in residence encouraged her to write down her experiences and then to write them in verse, which people read out. One morning, she said to the woman, “Come on, you read it”, and she did. After that the woman could be rehabilitated.

I mention that because I want to put forward clearly for the Ministry of Justice that the arts has an enormous role to play in the rehabilitation of offenders because of its ability to get to the heart of what is wrong and what has failed with some people. Every work of art—it does not matter what it is—is a personal achievement. Every personal achievement can be recognised. Every recognised achievement equals self esteem. Self esteem is absolutely vital in getting people on the right road towards work, education and training, which are the keys to successful prevention of reoffending. Therefore, the arts are a crucial part of any rehabilitation programme, not as something that can be measured as an end in itself but as a means to an end.

What worries me, which is the burden of my message to the Minister, is that present attention in the rehabilitation revolution centres on the phrase “payment by results”, under which it is said that organisations working with offenders will be paid for their results, which will be related to whether or not they contribute to the reduction in reoffending. The organisations which deliver the arts—many of which are voluntary and/or small—cannot afford to wait all the years that it may take to assess whether they have made a contribution to the ultimate prevention of reoffending. The money to help them do the work has to be provided.

If rehabilitation is to work, it is absolutely essential that the arts are included in the syllabus of every prison, every young offender institution and every probation area. I would go further and say that contracts for art work should be for not less than three years, but preferably for not less than five, so that proper investment can be made in that work. I say that not just because I have seen the work—of which I have given one example—but because I really believe that the arts have a crucial role to play in the protection of the public by the prevention of reoffending.