Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Ramsbotham and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Thursday 9th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, the amendment is tabled in the context of something mentioned in the Green Paper that has occurred many times in statements by the Government relating to what they intend to do with prisoners—in other words, to make prisons become working prisons and to increase the amount of time that prisoners spend at work; the 40-hour working week has been mentioned.

Clause 118 amends Section 47 of the Prison Act, which lays down what may happen. New subsection (2) refers to secure training centres and young offender institutions; new subsection (3) adds that different provision may be made for different cases; and new subsection (4) talks about employment rules made by the Secretary of State in that context.

My reason for this amendment, which may look a little prescriptive, is that from experience I know perfectly well that there is no way in which under current circumstances the Government will be able to enact what they say they want to do. I have known for years and years that the problem is that NOMS and the Prison Service simply are not orientated or equipped, nor do they have the ethos, to provide the business-like structure that is necessary if work is to be provided. They never have and they never will. The NOMS bureaucratic procedures involved in dealing with private contractors are ludicrously complicated and frustrate those who would like to contribute by providing work.

I have always contended that the ideal in a prison is a full, purposeful and active day for every prisoner, designed to tackle what has prevented them from living a useful, law-abiding life, with the idea that they come out and do not reoffend. That is not realised by prisoners spending all day in their cells doing nothing. A census done now of prisons would, I believe, come up with a figure of nearly 50 per cent of all prisoners doing nothing, which means that there is no help for them to live a useful and law-abiding life.

I have said again and again that there is a need for someone to be in charge, responsible and accountable. I have said for years that until and unless a businessman is appointed to be in charge of the overall direction and provision of work in prisons, nothing will happen.

I have spoken to two distinguished providers of work in prison: Mr James Timpson, who not only runs four academies but has taken on almost 200 ex-prisoners in his employment around the country, and Mr Edwin Lucas, who has been working in the recycling trade as well as providing work in prisons for years. I listened with horror to the frustrations that they have expressed about trying to deal with prisons where no one has a clue about how to deal in a business-like way. For example, a van will arrive with deliveries of materials to be used by prisoners only to be sent away because people say, “We do not accept vans until four o'clock in the afternoon. It is now 11 o'clock in the morning, and you will have to wait”. That is not how business works. People do not answer letters. Invoices are invariably late. People bring in pallets of material and are sent bills by prisons.

Until and unless there is proper oversight, run by businessmen, which includes trained people responsible for conducting business activities in each prison, nothing will happen. The present inefficiency of the system, where every governor is allowed to do his own thing, is telling against that, because the businessmen who are working with prisons tell me that probably only 20 of all the governors are capable of conducting the sort of activities that are needed. The others simply do not have the understanding or the ability to do it. There is no reason why they should. It should not be part of the requirement for a prison governor, who is there for another purpose.

In order to make the rehabilitation revolution work, I desperately want work to be provided. I know that a number of things could happen. For example, one of the best programmes in prison currently is Toe by Toe, where prisoners teach other prisoners to read. I seriously believe that in the prison population many skills are held by existing prisoners which could be put to good use in acting as trainers, and which are free and therefore will not act as a resource problem for the Prison Service. You get a double whammy, because the person doing the teaching gets as much out of the process as the person being taught.

For years, there has been an inhibitor on prison governors using their initiative to bring work in: grant in aid, which is required by the Treasury. Under that, a governor can declare that he will make a profit from an activity that he is to conduct, including prisoners making things. He declares that profit and, if he makes it, he is allowed to keep it and apply it within the prison. If he makes more, he has to surrender it to the Treasury. If he does not reach what he has said he will make, he has to provide it from his budget. For years, the impact of this has been that people have not been willing to risk making a loss and therefore they have not encouraged the uptake of work as much as they might have done.

The three additional aspects that I have suggested the Secretary of State should consider are all to do with the provision of work. The amendment would make certain that those contracted were properly overseen and that all the activities, both vocational and educational, carried qualifications of worth that could be used outside. As I said, I admit that this is prescriptive but I feel so strongly that this work ethic must be encouraged and enabled that I could not resist proposing the addition of these paragraphs to Clause 118. I beg to move.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I support the amendment so eloquently introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. From what he said, I got the sense that it is really a probing amendment and that he did not expect to receive much support for it. However, he made such a powerful case that I hope the Minister might be swayed to think again about some of these points. As we have already heard in this Committee, it is obvious that many people enter prison without the capacity to read and write, let alone to hold down a job when they come out on release. Therefore, examples such as the Toe by Toe programme should be mandatory. Indeed, it is a pity that the amendment has not specified that it should be a requirement on the Secretary of State.

We have no objection at all to what is being proposed. Indeed, we would regard its prescriptive nature as being of benefit in the sense of tying down, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, what is required of prisoners—that they should have a full, purposeful and active day, and that every prisoner should undertake something instead of staying in their cells so as to at least become engaged and appreciate what is necessary in order to succeed outside prison. It would therefore also reduce the level of reoffending.

There are some good examples of work with prisoners having been done by private employers. National Grid had a project at Reading in which I was involved in an earlier life, and I thought it was absolutely exemplary. It provided what seemed to be the critical path forward for those due to leave custodial sentences in the sense that it provided them with housing, jobs and training. It started before the prisoners left in order to bring their reading and writing up to speed, and it allowed them to learn a skill—in this case, fitting—which meant that they were able to operate as soon as they left. As I understand it, that programme is still going. The recidivism rate was very small indeed, so the programme was certainly worthy in that regard. It also had the advantage of satisfying a need on the part of employers—they had realised that they were not getting an adequate supply of people to do the necessary jobs, and they found that this programme provided a ready supply.

Therefore, there can be a win-win in what the Government and private enterprise are looking for. Indeed, one might say that it could apply to charities and public bodies and not just to private companies. However, the essential point of the amendment is that, if it is decided that there will be employment from such activities in prisons, it should be done properly so that those who benefit from it have skills and qualifications that are nationally recognised, and it should be done in all cases so that we have a better outcome from the prison element.

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, I have had the opportunity to look at some organisations that have become involved in providing work for prisoners and, like him, I am impressed. It is encouraging that those who have taken the risk, as some may see it, of employing ex-prisoners, helping to train them, and doing work in prisons, find it a very fruitful experience.

Sometimes I think that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is a little hard on NOMS. I fully accept that it is obvious that the vast majority of the prison estate was not designed for operating work regimes. Many very competent prison governors and prison officers are not equipped to run businesses. That is a given, which makes the idea of work in prisons difficult but not impossible. One of the things that we have tried to do in the past 18 months is to tackle in a practical way the realities to which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, referred. Several hundred organisations already provide work and training opportunities inside prisons, but many are small and want to do more to attract business.

We aim to provide a competitive package for business. We will make involvement as straightforward as possible and get the commercial model right for both prisons and the private sector, subject to our paramount interest in ensuring security, in line with our legal obligations. NOMS is developing new structures and putting in place the right people to operate in a businesslike way. That includes the recruitment of a new chief executive for the prison industries team within NOMS and a business development manager who will have responsibility for finding new businesses and managing relations with customers.

We are trying to address some of the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and as of now around 9,000 prisoners are employed in prison industries, which my rough arithmetic makes it to be around 10 per cent, or perhaps just a little over of the prison population. It is clear that there is much to do, but there are great prizes if we can get this right. Clause 118 is central to our plan to achieve our aim to make prisons places of meaningful and productive work where prisoners make reparation. Ensuring that prisoners and those detained in young offender institutions or secure training centres have access to training and can obtain qualifications is important. The Government certainly recognise the importance of this area and agree with the intent behind the amendment.

Let me assure noble Lords that we are already doing much of what we aim to do. Through our desire to increase the amount of meaningful and productive work done in prisons, the Government will give many more offenders the chance to learn the discipline and skills of working. As study after study has shown, offending patterns diminish once employment has been found. However, it is not just through prison working that we aim to reduce reoffending. Experience of a proper working week will be augmented by ensuring that their work links them to the right opportunities to develop the skills necessary to their finding employment when they are released.

We plan to deliver learning bases on clusters of institutions that regularly transfer offenders between them. The learning and skills offer will focus on the needs of employers in the areas into which prisoners will be released, as well as on key issues, such as numerous, literacy and communication skills. Here again, I pay tribute to Toe by Toe, which is a marvellous way of tackling illiteracy—one of the problems that comes through time and again in offending. Decisions on the most appropriate learning and skills offer will be taken locally with the key aim of giving offenders the skills that they need to find and keep jobs and apprenticeships on release. There will be no one size fits all approach, nor should there be. Within this new framework we are retendering the offender learning and skills services—a process that gives the chance to look afresh at how to work with the best range of providers. As well as learning the necessary skills and having the right qualifications, many offenders have barriers to entering the labour market that must first be tackled.

As the Deputy Prime Minister announced in August 2011, from the summer of this year offenders leaving custody and claiming jobseeker’s allowance will have to engage with a work programme provider on release, who will be paid for getting them into work. As well as creating this “day one” service, we are bringing together the claiming of jobseeker’s allowance and the processing of benefits before release rather than after it, so prisoners should have a shorter wait for their first benefit payment, which will help their resettlement. In addition, any prison leaver who claims jobseeker’s allowance within 13 weeks of release will be mandated to the work programme from the point of claim. We will also test, in two work programme areas, the addition of a reducing reoffending payment as part of our payment by results approach, in which we will use a variety of methods in the pilot phase.

We recognise that equipping children under the school leaving age with the skills they will need to succeed in life is vital. There is already an expectation that they will be in education rather than paid work. The raising of the participation age will mean that from 2013 all young people, including those in custody, must continue in education or training until the age of 17, and until 18 from 2015. Young people in secure training centres and under-18 young offender institutions will have access to a full day of education and constructive activity. In secure training centres, young people participate in education or training for at least 25 hours per week. In the under-18 young offender institutions, each young person will receive at least 25 hours per week of education and other constructive activity.

We believe that the amendment is constructive but unnecessary. Section 47(1) of the Prison Act 1952 allows the Secretary of State to make rules concerning the regulation and management of prisons, young offender institutions and secure treatment centres, and the treatment of those required to be detained therein. Subsection (3) states:

“Rules … may provide for the training of particular classes of persons”.

Clause 118 will not change those aspects of the 1952 Act, which cover the same ground as Amendment 181A.

For adults detained in custody, the rule-making powers contained in the Prison Act are augmented by provisions in the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009, including a duty on the chief executive of Skills Funding to,

“secure the provision of reasonable facilities for education suitable to the requirements of persons who are subject to adult detention”,

and, in doing so, to take account of a range of factors such as facilities and equipment. In carrying out this duty, the chief executive must have regard to various matters, including the desirability of prisoners continuing the education or training that they have begun, and making the best use of resources.

I have listened often to—and have always welcomed—the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, championing the concept of making work, training and education a priority. They are the key to rehabilitation. I hope that what I have said has convinced him that, although we may not have achieved all that he desired, we are listening and trying as best we can to move in the direction that he advocates. For that reason, I hope that he will withdraw his amendment.