Oral Answers to Questions
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 3 months ago)
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Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
This is something the Department studied in detail in 2015, and we have conclusive evidence that giving somebody a community sentence rather than a short custodial sentence reduces reoffending over a one-year period.
Carol Monaghan
We have evidence of that in Scotland as well. The Scottish Government’s move towards community payback orders has helped Scotland to achieve its current 18-year low in reoffending. Is the Minister looking to the Scottish Government’s example and considering how they have managed to achieve these figures?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. We have a lot to learn from Scotland, specifically on community sentences, and indeed we will be looking at what more we can do to emphasise that a custodial sentence in the short term should be a final resort. In reoffending terms, it is often much better for somebody to be given a community sentence.
Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)
In Cornwall, I work closely with Konnect Cornwall, headed up by Ian Curnow, which does a lot of work on behalf of the Government and the Department for Work and Pensions to support ex-offenders and people who are on the way into trouble. What more resources can be made available so that no one is left behind?
Rory Stewart
A lot of this is about identifying those key local providers. The real challenge that we need to overcome, which is true not just for justice but for local councils, is that of making sure that when we work with the third sector we work, not with big national providers, but with small, grassroots local charities.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
I draw the House’s attention to the fact that I am a life member of the Magistrates Association. In the all-party parliamentary group on women in the penal system, we recently heard from the Magistrates Association that magistrates are not familiar with the content of community penalties. That makes them reluctant to choose such penalties. The issue, in part, seems to be a lack of funding for training. Will the Minister comment?
Rory Stewart
This is a long-standing issue—it was true even in 2008-09—that consistently, the judiciary and magistrates have expressed concerns about community sentences. We need to do much more to build confidence, but the fact that this has been going on for nearly 10 years shows that it is a very challenging thing to do. Training will be an important part of that.
Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
Any death from suicide in prison is a tragedy. We have managed to reduce the number of suicides in prison—it nearly halved between 2016 and 2017—and most of that progress is due to a new protocol that identifies the individual needs of prisoners and their times of maximum vulnerability.
Mr Cunningham
How many additional staff who are trained to deal with medical illness have been brought in?
Rory Stewart
Nearly 15,600 of our staff have received additional training—that is the figure produced by my colleague. The ACCT—assessment, care in custody and teamwork—process, which is the new protocol for suicide reduction, focuses on the evidence for when prisoners are most vulnerable, for example their first night in custody, and how to ensure that we deal with them. But we still need to reduce the number of suicides further.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
Ninety-three women have died in prisons in England and Wales since the 2007 Corston report. When the new female offender strategy is published, will it focus on community alternatives to prison, especially for the 70% of women who are sentenced to six months or less?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. This is a common theme. We have clear evidence that reducing the use of custodial short sentences and instead diverting people into the community can be good for protecting the public, by reducing reoffending, but it is also very good for mental health and for reducing suicide.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)
Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
To address education in prison, Dame Sally Coates’s report makes three key recommendations: first, to carry out an individual survey of a prisoner’s educational needs when they enter prison; secondly, to make sure that governors have more control over education provision to reflect the needs of the prison or local area; and, thirdly, to make sure that English and maths are a core part of that curriculum.
Mr Wragg
A 2017 report said that the quality of education in English and Welsh prisons was generally good, but it found that poor attendance and punctuality of prisoners often went unchallenged and that the process of moving prisoners to learning, skills and work activities from the wings was often ineffective and poorly managed. What is being done to address those problems?
Rory Stewart
It is absolutely right that there is no point having good educational provision if prisoners are not getting to the classrooms. Fundamentally we need to do two things: first, make sure that prisoners are moved reliably and predictably from their cells into the classrooms; and, secondly, make sure that the educational provision in the classrooms is sufficiently attractive for the prisoners to engage.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
I apologise for being late, Mr Speaker, but I was at the unveiling of the first statue of a woman in Parliament Square.
May we have an evaluation of how far we have got? Some years ago, when I was Chair of the Education Committee, we looked at skills training in prisons, but I do not think that much has happened since then, particularly for people on the special educational needs spectrum, and especially those with autism.
Rory Stewart
There has been a significant improvement in the Ofsted reports, but the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that people with special educational needs, in particular, and the more than 50% of prisoners who have previously been excluded from school or have literacy challenges remain a big issue for education in prisons.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that one of the keys to reducing reoffending rates is ensuring that skilled probation officers have manageable case loads so that they can give enough time and energy to each individual in their care?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. It is particularly important that there can be flexibility so that there can be a higher ratio of probation officers to high-risk cases than for low-risk cases.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
It is right, of course, that prisoners must turn up, but when I visited Deerbolt prison in my constituency, the governor said that the contractor, Novus, was extremely unreliable. What is the Minister doing to respond to the report by ensuring that as contracts are rolled over, control of them is decentralised to the prison?
Rory Stewart
This is a central issue about which governors get very frustrated. Over the next 12 months, the hon. Lady will discover that we are putting governors in charge of that provision so that they can put pressure on the provider within the prison and ensure that it meets their needs.
Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
While the frequency of reoffending—in other words, the number of offences committed by prolific offenders—has risen since 2009, the base rate, or the number of people reoffending, has dropped by two percentage points since the introduction of community rehabilitation contracts.
Vicky Foxcroft
In 2015, the Government commissioned two important reviews: the Dame Sally Coates review of education in prisons, which was mentioned earlier; and the Charlie Taylor review of the youth justice system. Both reviews highlighted basic failures in the current system and made important recommendations. Will the Minister tell me how many of those recommendations have been implemented?
Rory Stewart
My focus has been on the Dame Sally Coates review; youth justice is dealt with by the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee). The Dame Sally Coates review is driving the entire education transformation over the next 12 months, particularly in respect of the three indicators that I mentioned earlier, including the assessment of prisoners and coming up with a plan. I shall have to reply in writing to the hon. Lady’s question about exactly how many recommendations have been implemented.
Ruth Cadbury
The joint report of the inspectorates of probation and of prisons stated that if the key functions of community rehabilitation companies
“were removed tomorrow…the impact…would be negligible.”
So what exactly are we paying for?
Rory Stewart
I must respectfully disagree with that. As I have said, the base rate of reoffending has dropped by two percentage points, which is actually quite significant, as the rate was flat for nearly 40 years before that. It would be very dangerous indeed to remove the community rehabilitation companies, which are looking after 40,000 people who were previously under very short periods of supervision, and nearly 100,000 extra people who would be dangerous to the community if not properly monitored.
Gill Furniss (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
In Devon and Cornwall, as in my own constituency in Cumbria, the number of offenders is fortunately quite small in absolute terms, which means that provision is at Exeter and Dartmoor.
Scott Mann
The Minister will know that Dartmoor Prison is earmarked for closure, after notice was served on its lease back in 2013. The prison is an asset to the south-west and employs a number of my constituents. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox) is also keen and eager for the prison to remain open. Will the Minister review the decision and look at what more can be done to keep that facility open?
Rory Stewart
The decision to close the prison was based on the fact that it was built in 1805 and there are significant maintenance issues, with a great deal of damp and leaking. However, we pay tribute to the governor and the prison officers for running a very good prison regime that is popular with the prisoners, which is one thing that we will have to balance when making the final decision on the prison.
Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I should like to pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for his amazingly assiduous campaign. He asked exactly the same question, with exactly the same words, at the last Justice questions, since when I have met him another half dozen times. We have had a good meeting with his constituents, and I am now aware of their individual and general concerns. However, we need prison places in Wales.
Mr Speaker
The hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) is further evidence of the KBO principle. The Minister said what he said non-pejoratively, but I simply make the innocent and prosaic, but valid, point that repetition is not a novel phenomenon in the House of Commons.
Stephen Kinnock
Repetition can be a form of flattery, Mr Speaker. I should like to thank the Minister for meeting me and the representatives of the NPT Prison Group for a constructive discussion, and for agreeing to put plans for the Baglan prison on hold. I am sure he will also have noted the decision of the Welsh Government to put all plans on hold pending a strategic review. Can he assure me that all plans for the Baglan prison are well and truly on hold, and that the UK Government will engage in a constructive and positive manner with the Welsh Government in the strategic review?
Rory Stewart
I hope the hon. Gentleman feels that we are engaged in a constructive and positive manner and that we have very much taken on board the concerns around that site, but it is important to bear in mind that more than 1,500 prisoners with Welsh addresses are currently being held in English prisons. We need to think about how to provide accommodation for them in Wales, because that is important for reducing reoffending, resettling them in their communities and keeping the links with their families.
Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)
Given the overwhelming evidence that smaller local prisons, where family links and the Welsh language can be maintained, are far more effective at reducing reoffending, why is the Secretary of State still proposing super prisons in south Wales when they are known not to work?
Rory Stewart
There are of course reasons why larger modern prisons are favoured, and that is partly about how we can manage things at scale. However, if there are communities in Wales that would like to come forward with proposals for smaller local prisons, I would absolutely agree that there is a strong argument for keeping prisoners closer to their homes.
Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)
Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, there has been an urgent notification process. We have put a plan in place. I have now visited HMP Nottingham, and I pay tribute to Tom Wheatley, the governor, for the work he is doing. He has a much better care process in place, and he has highly trained staff. We expect to see improvements soon at HMP Nottingham.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
Rory Stewart
I will be meeting the Welsh Secretary specifically on this issue next week. We are setting up a meeting with the Head of the Welsh Government, who of course will be changing, and I would very much like the hon. Gentleman to join that meeting. I reiterate that, so long as offending rates in Wales remain as they are, although it is laudable that the Welsh Government wish to divert people away from prison, we currently need places for Welsh prisoners.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Ind)
Rory Stewart
Fentanyl is unbelievably dangerous and has contributed to nearly 20,000 deaths a year in the United States. We have underscored through the Crown Prosecution Service guidance for prosecuting people. Fentanyl is a class A drug, but 50 times more powerful than other drugs. People need to understand that even a tiny quantity of this drug is a serious danger to the person producing it, to the person supplying it and, above all, to the public, and must be prosecuted.
Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
The troubled Holme House prison in my constituency has had another damning report, this time from the Independent Monitoring Board, which talks of a shortage of staff, a lack of appropriate care for prisoners, a sustained drugs problem, and more violence against staff and between prisoners. Things do not seem to be getting any better. Will the Minister please take an interest in Holme House and ensure it gets the support it needs?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. The central problem in Holme House is, of course, not the age of the building—it is relatively modern—but the drugs. So the first steps we are taking are to get more scanners, sniffer dogs and staff in place. It remains a very serious problem; the connection between the drugs, the violence and the suicide in Holme House is making it a particular area of focus for this Department.
Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)
What steps are the Government taking to improve the court experience for victims and for witnesses, because it can be a highly stressful and intimidating environment?
Dan Carden (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
Most people know my constituency of Liverpool, Walton as the home of two premier league football clubs, but I think the Minister knows it better for the two prisons: HMP Liverpool, which was built in 1855, and Altcourse, which was built in 1997. Will he update the House on progress in the redevelopment of HMP Liverpool, and does he think that these Victorian prisons can ever be fit for purpose?
Rory Stewart
Unfortunately, as the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) implied in his question, the age of a prison is not always the determining factor. We have significant challenges in relatively modern prisons. It is true in Liverpool that Altcourse has been performing better, and it is the newer prison. In Liverpool, we have provided a new multimillion pound fund for the repair of the windows across the estate, and we are looking at improving the conditions right across the estate. Stafford and Dartmoor show that it is possible to run good prisons in older, Victorian buildings.
Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)
I am grateful to the prisons Minister for meeting me recently to discuss the Farmer review, and I welcome his commitment to it. Will he update the House on the implementation of the Farmer review?
Rory Stewart
The Farmer review focused on the importance of families in rehabilitation. Prisoners’ links with families are central to reducing reoffending, and we have very strong evidence that when family links are kept, reoffending reduces. That means better family rooms and more family visits. In certain cases, prisons are having a lot of success piloting interactions between prisoners and, for example, the teachers of their children. All that is central, and the Farmer review is something for which we should be hugely grateful.
Judith Cummins (Bradford South) (Lab)
In October last year, the Government announced that they planned to increase the maximum penalty for death by dangerous driving. They also said that they would create a new offence of causing serious injury by careless driving. Six months on, we have still not seen any action. Will the Minister tell the House just when these vital changes will be implemented?
Oral Answers to Questions
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
As the House will be aware, a major change in the law was brought in in 1988 to allow victims to be able to challenge unduly lenient sentences. At the moment, that applies to the most serious indictable offences, but the Government have recently extended it to a range of terrorist offences.
Philip Davies
I am grateful to the Minister for that answer, but as he well knows the Government have promised for quite some time—including in our manifesto—to extend it to a further range of offences. When will the Government pull their finger out and extend the number of cases that can be appealed for being unduly lenient, as we have been promising for quite some time?
Rory Stewart
As I have already said in my answer, the most serious offences—murder and so on—are already covered by the unduly lenient sentence scheme. We have extended it twice in the past few years, but we are talking very closely to my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney General about looking at other opportunities to extend the scheme.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
The Secretary of State will know that I regularly write to him about unduly lenient and unduly severe sentences, but I never ever seem to get a reply. The fact is that too many women are locked up for non-violent offences for long periods of time, and that is the sort of case that I write to him about. Why do we never get any comeback?
Mr Speaker
It is reassuring to know that I am not the only person to whom the hon. Gentleman regularly writes. I am grateful to him for confirming that important fact on the Floor of the House.
Rory Stewart
To get to the nub of the hon. Gentleman’s question, there is a very serious issue here, which is that it is absolutely true that there are many more women in prison than we would like. The Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee), is working very hard to reduce that population for exactly the reasons that the hon. Gentleman has raised.
Emma Little Pengelly (Belfast South) (DUP)
While I welcome the fact that victims can ask for a review in relation to unduly lenient sentences, there is an absolute 28-day limit on that. A criminal case can be very traumatising for victims. Will the Minister consider perhaps introducing a discretion in relation to that 28-day absolute limit?
Rory Stewart
That is a very interesting idea. Perhaps the hon. Lady and I can sit down to discuss that interesting idea in more detail.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
Skilled professional prison officers are absolutely heart and centre of running good prisons. That is why we have committed to recruiting 2,500 extra prison officers. I am pleased to say that we are now nine months ahead of target on delivering those prison officers.
Andrew Bridgen
I of course welcome the fact that the Government are making progress in recruiting extra prison officers, but will the Minister reassure the House that he is making every effort to retain the services of experienced and long-serving officers who are absolutely essential for mentoring new recruits into the service?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. As my hon. Friend points out, this is not just about numbers. Working in a prison is incredibly challenging, and having the experience and the prison craft to do it is vital, so we are putting incentive schemes in place to try to retain our most experienced staff and to understand, when they do leave, why they are doing so.
Chris Green
There is a huge opportunity for rehabilitation in prisons, which is often not taken. What rehabilitative capacity will this increase in prison officers create?
Rory Stewart
The central objective of bringing in 2,500 extra prison officers is to allow us to pair each individual prison officer with six prisoners, which allows them to develop their individual personal relationship over time through weekly meetings to achieve exactly the rehabilitative and educational objectives needed to reduce reoffending and protect the public.
Tom Pursglove
The redevelopment of Wellingborough prison will provide many new employment opportunities for people across Northamptonshire, including in my constituency, but what are the Government doing to attract local people into the profession and to encourage them to stay in the role—including, for example, former members of the armed forces?
Rory Stewart
I am very pleased that this has been raised. As you will be aware, Mr Speaker, almost 40% of prison officers traditionally came from the armed forces, but that number has fallen. We are now working very closely with the Ministry of Defence to explain what an interesting career this can be, and we are doing a lot of advertising. But the most important thing we can do is remind people that, as we have all seen when meeting prison officers, although it is a very challenging and sometimes quite difficult career it also can be a deeply fulfilling one, and we would like to encourage many more people to come forward into the profession.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
Rory Stewart
There are a number of drivers of suicide and self-harm, of which the number of staff is one. There are other questions around the estate, but probably the largest single driver that we have seen since 2011 is the use of new psychotropic drugs that are creating extraordinary psychotic episodes and leading to a direct increase in violence. We must address those drugs.
Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)
The Government’s recruitment drive is welcome, but is it not true that we are just now catching up? The number of staff at Feltham young offenders institution in my constituency has fallen by a third, from 600 in 2013 to 461, which has had a huge impact on the governor and staff. The institution has been deemed unsafe for both staff and prisoners. Is it not time that the Government committed to working closely with staff and the Prison Officers Association to tackle this crisis and ensure that we get back on track with rehabilitation for young offenders?
Rory Stewart
One hundred per cent.—we will be working very closely with prison officers for exactly that reason. As the hon. Lady points out, we must get the numbers right. Those 2,500 extra prison officers will be vital in order to get the 1:6 ratio needed for rehabilitation.
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)
I have listened carefully this morning to the Secretary of State talking about high-security prisons. Ministers talk of finally starting to address the crisis that they made by axing so many prison officers, yet over a third of high-security prisons have actually seen a fall in the number of prison officers since the Department’s so-called recruitment drive began. Will the Minister guarantee that these high-security prisons will have more staff by the next Justice questions?
Rory Stewart
One of the challenges around the high-security estate, particularly in places such as London, has been the employment opportunities. We have put new incentives in place—a signing-on bonus and a retention bonus—to recruit people in London. I am not in a position to guarantee the employment market exactly, but we are making a lot of progress—for example, in recruitment to the high-security Belmarsh Prison in London.
Richard Burgon
I thank the Minister for his answer, but nearly one in four prisons has seen prison officer numbers fall since the Government’s recruitment drive began. Moving on, we have another problem of very experienced officers leaving the service, creating a dangerous cocktail of inexperienced officers and experienced prisoners. In the last year alone, 1,000 prison officers with more than five years’ experience each have left the service. That is the equivalent of more than 5,000 years of experience in the Prison Service lost in the last year alone. Will the Minister guarantee that there will be more prison officers will five years’ experience at the end of the year than there are now?
Rory Stewart
The hon. Gentleman’s fundamental point is right: we need experienced prison officers. It is very difficult working in a prison. We can bring in huge numbers of new junior staff, but it will be difficult to get the kind of results we need unless they have experience. We therefore have a plan whereby we have targeted the prisons that are losing the most experienced officers and we are understanding why that is happening. We are both working with the staff and putting in place financial incentives to retain experienced staff.
Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)
Rory Stewart
I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend, particularly on prisons and advocating for the prison population in her constituency. It is absolutely true that there is a strange anomaly in the human resources procedure, and we must tackle it. It cannot make sense that people are paid more to act up than to occupy the role. We want people to have career development and we will focus on the issue immediately.
John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I believe that the hon. Gentleman and I have discussed this issue about five times in the past six weeks. I pay tribute to him for being a very firm advocate for his community. We have listened very carefully to his complaints. A decision on this prison is not likely to be imminent, as construction is not likely to be imminent. I would like to say, however, in addition to having listened to his complaints, that a prison built in the right place in the right way can provide significant economic opportunities for an area.
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for his answer, but the problem is that the proposed site is right next to residential areas, schools and a care home; is served by very poor transport links; is on a designated enterprise zone; is on marshland; and is restricted by a covenant saying that it can only be used as an industrial park. The Minister must surely agree therefore that the whole idea is a non-starter and should be scrapped with immediate effect.
Rory Stewart
The hon. Gentleman has made those points on a number of occasions. We are listening very carefully. Indeed, two members of our Department travelled to Port Talbot, to a very lively public meeting where those points were made repeatedly. We are listening very carefully to him.
Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
Would there be an answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question on the industrial estate if any new prison fully incorporated the work of ONE3ONE Solutions, which was designed more than six years ago to increase the productive and commercial output of prisoners? The numbers given by the Justice Secretary just now suggest that we have not made much progress in the number of prisoners who are working. Will any new prison include ONE3ONE Solutions, and how are we getting on with prisoners working overall?
Mr Speaker
Particularly if any prospect of their working is in Port Talbot, upon which the question is focused.
Rory Stewart
I look forward very much to meeting my hon. Friend to hear more about ONE3ONE Solutions.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
If a super-prison is built in Port Talbot, there will up to 1,000 more prison places in Wales than there are currently prisoners from Wales. Does the Minister share the Howard League’s concern that Wales is set to become Westminster’s penal colony?
Rory Stewart
I think we ought to be very careful with that kind of language. There are currently about 85,000 prisoners within the estate, so having 1,000 extra prisoners in Wales is not the creation of England’s penal colony.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
If that prison is built, will the Minister ensure that its chaplaincy avoids the extraordinary carrying-on that has recently been reported at HMP Brixton?
Rory Stewart
I would like to take this opportunity not to get drawn into the individual case of Brixton, which I am looking at personally, but to pay tribute in general to the work of the chaplaincy—that is the Christian chaplaincy, the Jewish chaplaincy and the five imams I met recently at Belmarsh Prison who are doing extraordinary work with the Muslim community.
Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
There have been a number of challenges with the community rehabilitation companies—CRCs—particularly in transition. It is not all bad news: in fact, the number of people reoffending has come down by 2% and certain CRCs, such as Cumbria and my own county, are performing well. But we need to focus particularly on the questions of assessment, planning and meeting, and that is what we have focused on in the report on London that is due on Thursday.
Alex Norris
Her Majesty’s inspectorate of probation recently warned that private sector probation companies’ focus on contract compliance rather the true quality of supervision was inevitably having an impact on culture and was undermining the established values of probation professionals. Does the Minister agree that it is time to put proper probation ahead of private profit?
Rory Stewart
The hon. Gentleman is a Nottingham Member, and I had a very interesting meeting with the CRC last week on my visit to Nottingham Prison, where the CRC is providing very good Through The Gate services—in fact, services for prisoners in prison that did not exist before the transformation reforms. Before, they were outside the prisons. I do not believe this is a question whether it is done by the private sector, the public sector or the voluntary sector, but it is a question of getting the basic standards right. As I say, that is exactly what we will be assessing the London CRC on on Thursday.
Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)
Putting it bluntly, probation privatisation has been a disaster. Despite that, the Government are still pursuing their privatisation agenda. Last week, the Government outsourced night staff in probation hostels. Given that those hostels house some of the most dangerous ex-offenders, will the Minister accept full responsibility for any impact on public safety resulting from that ideological outsourcing?
Rory Stewart
The shadow Minister refers to a decision by the National Probation Service—which is a Government- run service, so it is not a CRC service—to bring in additional contracted staff to provide double night duty in the hostels. That has been done because it is not work that is traditionally done by trained probation officers, but by contracted staff. Of course I will accept full responsibility for that decision.
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I would like to express, as I am sure would the whole House, our immense gratitude for the role that service animals play and have played for a long time in public life. They frequently do things that humans would not do, ranging from detection of bombs and drugs to taking on violent criminals. There are serious aggravating circumstances that a judge can take into account when sentencing, and serious sentences can be given to anyone attacking a service animal—that is absolutely right.
Stephen McPartland
Police dog Finn was brutally stabbed several times in my constituency while apprehending a violent criminal. The current law treats police dog Finn, a canine hero, like a piece of computer equipment—the charge is criminal damage. This is unacceptable. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Sir Oliver Heald) is leading a campaign to introduce Finn’s law. Will the Minister agree to meet me and my right hon. and learned Friend, so that we can provide greater protection for our service animals in the course of their duty?
Rory Stewart
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and others for the very active campaign that they are leading. I would of course be delighted to meet them to discuss that law.
David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
Given that Canada, America, Australia and many European Union states have a law similar to that being introduced by the right hon. and learned Member for North East Hertfordshire—I am a sponsor of his Bill—why did the Minister order the Government to block the Bill last Friday?
Rory Stewart
As we have discussed, very significant sentences of up to 10 years can already be imposed for this kind of action, but I would be delighted to discuss the issue in more detail with the right hon. Gentleman and my hon. Friends.
Mr Speaker
And doubtless with the right hon. and learned Member for North East Hertfordshire (Sir Oliver Heald).
Mr Speaker
Very well done. The right hon. and learned Gentleman is obviously ahead of events. I was enjoying the family history he was educating us on just now.
Rory Stewart
My right hon. and learned Friend is a great authority on the law. There are a number of issues here, ranging from the exact sentences that can be imposed to the work my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is doing to introduce new sentences for animal cruelty. I look forward to discussing all those issues both in the House and over a cup of tea.
Tracy Brabin (Batley and Spen) (Lab/Co-op)
Mr Speaker
I think the Minister might be a bit confused. I have the impression that he is answering a question that would have been put if the hon. Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) had not been called earlier on a different question. The question with which we are now dealing is Question 16, on levels of violence and self-harm.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
My apologies, Mr Speaker.
There have been worrying increases in levels of violence and self-harm. As was said earlier, a lot of that is being driven by new drugs inducing psychotic episodes. We are working hard on this issue. We have provided training to an additional 14,000 prison officers focused on issues of violence and self-harm. More staffing will help, but there is much more to do.
Tracy Brabin
The Minister will be aware that incidences of self-harm in prisons have risen by 75% since 2007. I appreciate the Minister giving us the drivers of violence and self-harm in prisons, but will he tell us in more detail what steps he will take to reduce the amount of self-harm and suicide? Does he agree that part of the solution is encouraging the use of mental health treatment requirements, which has fallen by 48%?
Rory Stewart
The hon. Lady is absolutely correct that mental health is at the heart of a lot of these issues. On the concrete steps we are taking, one is the training for 14,000 additional officers and the second is the proper use of the ACCT—assessment, care in custody and teamwork—strategy, which is the process for assessing the risk posed to the prisoner and coming up with a plan to deal with it. We have managed to significantly reduce suicide over the past 18 months, but the level is still far too high. Any death is a great tragedy, and we will continue to work very closely to reduce suicide further.
Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)
Sixty-two years ago, Bessie Braddock, the then MP for Liverpool Exchange division, stood in this Chamber and raised concerns about the appalling conditions at Liverpool Prison—then called Walton Prison—and particularly the treatment of prisoners with mental illness. In the past two years at that very same prison, seven inmates have taken their life, including Tony Paine two weeks ago. I note that the Minister said on 22 February that the conditions at the prison were “very disturbing” and “unacceptable”. What action is he going to take today to ensure that all prisoners’ mental health needs are adequately met and that no other prisoner takes their life in one of our prisons?
Rory Stewart
As the hon. Lady mentions, the situation at Liverpool Prison was very disturbing. I have visited Liverpool Prison, and mental health provision is now significantly better than it was at the time of the inspection—I spent quite a lot of time with the mental health staff there—but there is a broader issue. Although we are reducing suicide, there is still far too much of it happening. A lot of this will be about making sure not only that we deal with drugs, but that we have the right kind of purposeful activity in prisons, so that prisoners do not feel the temptation to take their own life.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
Reducing reoffending is above all about having healthy relationships between the individual and their family, the individual and society, and the individual and the state, so having that relationship with the family is vital. That is partly, of course, about the prisoners’ entitlement to two visits a month. There have been some excellent examples in Liverpool—for example, at Altcourse Prison, with its fantastic family centre for meeting family—and it is also about having telephony in place to keep those contacts up.
Maria Caulfield
I thank the Minister for his response. Does he agree with the findings in the Conservative-led strengthening families manifesto, which found that if family contact is maintained, reoffending can be reduced by more than 39%?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. Getting that family relationship right and embedding people properly with their family is vital to reducing reoffending, along with many of the measures we take on education.
Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I am very grateful. There is almost no Member of Parliament who has been more assiduous on this subject, with, I think, five meetings in the past six weeks. There was a vigorous encounter between my officials and the hon. Gentleman’s community on their last visit. I would like very much to have the next meeting here in London, if that is possible, and I would be delighted to discuss the issues on that occasion.
Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)
Rory Stewart
That is an interesting example of a community rehabilitation company in Devon and Cornwall. The particular strengths of the Torbay approach seem to us to be in the partnership working with the police and children’s services and in the work done with Catch22 on accommodation.
Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
Rory Stewart
As the hon. Gentleman will know, I had a serious visit to HMP Nottingham last week. I pay tribute to the prison officers and the governor for their work, but there are a number of serious challenges in the prison. We are particularly focused on safety. We have a new manager in place and a new violence reduction strategy, and the ACCT process will be central to solving these problems.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
Rory Stewart
It is absolutely true that many of the serious challenges we have been discussing in the House today, particularly on violence, self-harm and drug use, focus on the population imprisoned for less than 12 months. The more we can do to try to rehabilitate people in the community while protecting the public the better.
Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)
Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)
Rory Stewart
Levels of literacy in prisons are shocking. About 54% of prisoners currently have a reading level below that which we would expect in an 11-year-old. Let me put that in context. Nearly 50% of prisoners have been excluded from school at some point, compared with about 2% of the general population. Our solution is to give governors more control of their education budgets, and to ensure that literacy training is available in every prison as part of the core curriculum.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
The Minister’s earlier answers to questions about violence in prisons focused on prisoner violence. Our hard-working prison officers face daily violence in their jobs. I have just written to the Minister about a constituent who had urine and excrement poured over him, but let me now ask him a wider question. What is the Department doing to ensure that prison officers are given full support when they are assaulted, and also to ensure that mental health services become better than they are at present?
Rory Stewart
We have a huge obligation to prison officers, particularly when they are assaulted. We can deal with the problem in a number of ways. We need to ensure that prisoners are punished for assaults, and to make it clear that they will be punished. We need to reduce drugs, and we need violence reduction strategies. We are already using more CCTV cameras and body-held cameras to record assaults, but our prison officers must feel safe in their environment. [Interruption.]
Fiona Bruce
Will the Prisons Minister meet me to discuss the welfare of prisoner’ children, especially at the point of sentencing? There are 200,000 such children a year, and they often fall through the care system completely.
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. One of the most terrifying statistics is the very high number of prisoners’ children who go on to offend themselves. I should be delighted to meet my hon. Friend to discuss not just the issue of families, but the issue of children in particular.
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
What are the Government doing to reverse the dramatic fall in community sentencing, which has nearly halved in the past decade, with a particularly sharp drop in recent years?
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
So what exactly has happened at the chaplaincy at HMP Brixton?
Rory Stewart
That is a brilliant question. The answer is that I am still trying to get to the bottom of it and I cannot provide an answer to the House.
Mr Speaker
May I exhort the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) for the umpteenth time to circulate his textbook on succinct questions to all colleagues in the House? If he is in a generous mood, he might even offer copies to people sitting in the Public Gallery as well?
Death by Dangerous Driving: Sentencing
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 4 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. I begin by paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) for bringing this extremely important debate to the House. I also pay tribute to the work of the Express and Star and to the local Labour councillor, Doug James, who has done an enormous amount of work on the issue.
This issue combines the House across different parties, linking people from Scotland, Northern Ireland and England, and I am sure that colleagues from Wales would be here too, because, as my hon. Friend pointed out in his eloquent speech, this horrifying tragedy is something that does not stop at any national border. He has provided, much more eloquently than I can, a description of what that means for a family. We have seen cases in the last week where dangerous drivers have killed a toddler and a baby in a pram by charging across a road. Those are people whose recklessness with 1.5 tonnes of metal—an incredibly dangerous weapon —is unbelievable. The loss that it means for a family is something unimaginable. The hole it leaves in somebody’s life to have lost a child or a loved one in that way is unbelievable.
That is why we as a Government have committed to increasing the penalty for causing death by dangerous driving to a life sentence, and why we are now working to find time in the legislative agenda to bring that in. That needs to happen, and the fundamental reason for that is that families feel the system is not just. They feel it is not fair to them or to their experience. That has also been brought forward clearly by my hon. Friends the Members for Dartford (Gareth Johnson), for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) and for Moray (Douglas Ross), by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), and indeed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), who raised it with me yesterday in relation to his constituents.
The one area where the Government would have some disagreement with my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North is on the question of somebody fleeing the scene. There is already an offence for fleeing the scene, and although he pointed out that that in itself is a short offence, it is a very serious aggravating circumstance when the judge comes to convict. Were the judge to find that somebody had killed someone and then fled the scene, it would significantly increase the sentence that the judge was able to give. Once the opportunity for a maximum life sentence for causing death by dangerous driving is provided, fleeing the scene is an aggravating factor that would drive the sentence up towards a life sentence.
I know that Members of Parliament have challenged that, so I will be clear about what we are talking about. It is of course true that we are dealing with an enormous number of different types of situation. Those situations range all the way from somebody who is drunk, driving at twice the speed limit in a town and speeding through a red light, to my 25-year-old constituent who overtook, sober, at 5 in the afternoon and killed somebody coming the other way because he misjudged his overtaking. All of us in this House understand the importance of the judge and jury in making those difficult decisions in different cases.
We should be in absolutely no doubt about what dangerous driving means. Dangerous driving means that all those people, whatever they were doing, fell well below the standard we would expect of a careful and competent driver. They ought to have been aware of their physical surroundings, aware of the normal laws of causation, aware of the terrible danger posed by the vehicle they were driving, and aware that their dangerousness caused the ultimate thing—a lack of life.
The disagreement over whether that should be a case of murder is around the question of intention. This House believes that there is a difference between somebody who intentionally sets out to murder someone—to stab or shoot them—and somebody who is behaving dangerously in a car, who is overtaking, who may not intend to kill the person. However, the impact on the family is exactly the same; whether the individual intended to kill their family member or accidentally killed their family member, the impact is the same. That is why we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Members of Parliament who have campaigned tirelessly on the issue, which has been neglected by this House. That is also why we will be bringing legislation forward, and why I pay tribute again to my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North, to the Express and Star, and to all the Members of the House who have campaigned on this important issue.
Gareth Johnson
The Minister is right to point out that there are a range of circumstances. That is why courts should be given lengthy maximum penalties, to cater for the different scenarios that can arise. We have a situation where the maximum penalty for someone charged with causing death by driving without due care and attention and then fleeing the scene is just three years. Worse than that, any unduly lenient sentence cannot even be appealed by the prosecution. Therefore, we need the matter to be reviewed right across the board.
Rory Stewart
The Government’s belief is that, by increasing the maximum sentence to a life sentence for causing death in that situation, the distinction my hon. Friend is drawing between different types of crime—in particular, the question of manslaughter that he raised in his intervention earlier—will be dealt with. The maximum penalty of life that the Government will introduce will then allow life sentences to be imposed on an individual who did that, regardless of whether it was done in a car or in some other fashion. With that, I will conclude with another tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North.
Question put and agreed to.
Private Probation Services
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) on securing this debate, which is hugely important, given the risk that criminals can pose to the public, as the hon. Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain) eloquently put it. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) expressed the very important idea that people can change and improve, and that the public can be protected through that individual journey.
We have always faced fundamental challenges, but the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge is absolutely right that there have been very significant challenges since 2014. However, let me briefly take it back to before 2014. As the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) pointed out, the reality is that it is and has always been extremely difficult to do this kind of work. Before the privatisation of 2014, for nearly 30 or 40 years, probation services worked extremely hard under different Governments to reduce reoffending, and over a 40-year period the reoffending rate barely moved. It hovered around 50% within one year and 70% within nine years. It did not matter whether people were involved with innovative housing, mental health or employment projects. It was stubbornly difficult to reduce reoffending.
Despite all the problems with Through the Gate services that the hon. Member for Bradford East talked about, those services effectively did not exist before 2014. I was at Nottingham prison yesterday. Before 2014, nobody in the prison would have been working on the initial five-day assessment and the pre-12-week assessment to ensure that prisoners are properly co-ordinated Through the Gate. The CRC is now embedded in the building. It is also true that, even before 2014, there were sadly a number of issues with people coming out of prison, reoffending and harming the public.
I take very seriously the complaints that have been made. Those are serious observations by Members of Parliament and the chief inspector, who found and raised powerfully significant problems relating to morale—in particular, staff morale—case load, which the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) raised, and the tragedy when things go wrong. The hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) described the horrifying situation that happened to her constituent, Conner, when somebody who was supervised under a CRC contract reoffended.
All those things need to be gripped and dealt with. The disagreement between the Government and the Opposition is that, for a number of reasons, I do not believe the question is only whether the service should be provided by the public sector or the private sector. Many of these issues predate the privatisation. There were very significant problems with probation in 2010, 2012 and 2014. It made sense—on this, I defend my predecessors—to try to work out how to deal with some of those stubborn problems, including, first, the absence of any proper Through the Gate services; secondly, the fact that before 2014, 40,000 prolific reoffenders were not supervised at all; and, thirdly, how on earth to deal with the stubborn reoffending rate of 50%. It seemed perfectly justifiable that people would try to think about how we could focus relentlessly on dropping the reoffending rate and on encouraging innovation. Why innovation? Because an enormous number of voluntary-sector organisations and charities around the country have proved that the reoffending rates can be reduced. I was looking at a recent example in Stafford, where a chaplaincy housing project has managed to reduce the reoffending of persistent reoffenders—a very tough group to work with—from 50% to what appears to be about 17%. There are similar examples, such as the Clink restaurant in Brixton Prison. Meeting people at the gate, finding them a job and putting them into the catering industry reduces reoffending dramatically. The idea of the reform was to try to bring some of those new ideas into the system.
Jenny Chapman
The Minister is trying to be helpful in acknowledging our points, but I want to challenge him. He is arguing that trusts were not innovative, but they absolutely were. He talks about the Clink and other examples. There are always pockets of absolutely excellent practice that have amazing successes, but the challenge is mainstreaming that, and getting it out so that it is the norm and not the exception. This reform has made that more difficult. Rather than analysing where we are, I hope the Minister will move on to tell us where he intends to take us next.
Rory Stewart
That is a very good challenge, and I will move on to the question of the voluntary sector and how to take good small examples to a bigger scale.
The challenge is what on earth to do about that. How do we address the problems? The fundamental thing is to get back to the basics, which are exactly what hon. Members in the Chamber have discussed. Basics include ensuring that people have a manageable case load, which means not going beyond 50 to 55 cases. They must meet the people in the cases regularly; they must ensure that they not only meet them but put in place a good assessment of the needs of the individual and of public protection; and they must come up with a plan linking that assessment to action. That is before we go on to the other things that we have been discussing, which is how we work with the voluntary sector and wider society. The basics need to happen first.
Around the country we can see that some people are delivering those basics well. Cumbria, for example, which has a CRC, has a good report from the inspectors for doing that. London, as the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge knows well, got a negative report from the inspectors exactly about some of those areas. We will not go into the details and explanations for some of that today. Some are about transition and inheriting a difficult situation, and London has always been difficult for probation services and has more than 30 different boroughs. There are complexities with IT systems and so on. However, we do not want to make excuses. The fundamental question is: can we sort those things out? I believe we can.
I am very confident that we can get to a situation, even in London, which is probably the most difficult area in the country, where we can have manageable case loads, where people can be met regularly, where there is good tracking of offenders—we know where they are and take good enforcement action if they do not turn up to appointments—and where the assessment and the plan are in place. I am very hopeful that, when the next inspection report comes out from the probation inspectorate, we will see those improvements even in London. I expect to be held accountable if those improvements are not recorded in the next report.
Liz Saville Roberts
I am interested in what the Minister is saying. Will he commit to ensure proper parliamentary scrutiny of how those organisations operate, whatever their name in future? That is not the case at present.
Rory Stewart
It would be interesting to know what kind of parliamentary scrutiny the hon. Lady means. There are some pretty good examples of scrutiny—the Justice Committee is doing a report on the probation service and we have an incredibly active, energetic and highly critical chief inspector of probation who is doing an enormously good job which is drawn on by everyone around the Chamber—but I am open to more. Debates such as this one are very powerful ways to hold us to account.
The next issue, as we move on from addressing the basics, is to look at some of the questions the hon. Member for Darlington talked about, in particular how we scale up pockets of really good small practice in individual local areas. That seems to be a huge challenge for everything—not just probation but everything we do with the voluntary sector. It is infuriating to find in most of our constituencies good local providers being pushed out either by contractors coming in from elsewhere or by large charities and voluntary sector organisations. In my case, in Cumbria, they appear to come up from London with hundreds of proposal writers to take over a local council contract, but lack the local skills and knowledge to deliver.
We need to find ways to encourage CRCs to provide both the money that could go to those voluntary organisations—for example, in housing—and the cultural change, as the hon. Member for Darlington is aware, which is to encourage probation officers to let go of the cases to let specialist providers in mental health or housing take over their clients. That can be done but it must be driven through individual CRC by individual CRC. However, that is just the beginning. The big aim is to move from what happens with the individual in the probation office to what happens in broader society.
The real reason we have faced reoffending rates stubbornly stuck at 50% for nearly 40 years is that, in the end, the behaviour of someone coming out of prison is not controlled simply by what happens in the interaction with the probation officer or, when in prison, the prison officer. That is a very individual psychological engagement. What tends to happen is that the probation officer tries to change the behaviour of the individual in the room. However, that individual exists not only in the room but in a broader society. Unless such individuals can repair their relationships with family, society and the state, we will not get into a cycle in which they offend less or, eventually, do not offend at all.
That involves difficult things, with the individual feeling a sense of hope and agency; and that they can take control of their lives and have a sense of dignified participation, not as a labelled criminal but as a citizen in the fullest sense in society. No one in the Chamber has easy answers to how to achieve those things, but we must focus on ensuring that we get everything right, from the basics of meeting, assessment and planning, right through to the broader engagement with society to make that citizen function. We must recognise that the idea of desistance is not a linear path, but it is a path to reduce reoffending and protect the public.
I will conclude with three remarks. First, I pay tribute to the very hard work of probation officers. They are some of our most dedicated and serious professionals. Yesterday in Nottingham Prison I was lucky enough to see the Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Rutland CRC—people who have worked in probation trusts for nearly 30 years. They are based in the prison, telling very powerful stories about the assistance they provide in housing, and they represent exactly why we should be so proud of the work that probation officers do. They have difficult work which, as hon. Members have pointed out, combines the work of a social worker with that of someone who has to implement a court order and protect the public.
Secondly, I pay tribute to Members of Parliament. Their work in this area is often ignored by the public and, sometimes, too much ignored by Parliament. Such work matters deeply, as the hon. Member for Strangford pointed out, both for the individuals themselves on their journey towards improvement, and for the public.
Finally, I undertake to the House that we must focus. The results that we are getting from the inspectors are simply not good enough. I wish to be judged on driving the CRCs back to the very basics of their task, and on opening up to all the innovations and new ideas shared around the Chamber, to ensure that 40 years of stubborn rates of reoffending begin to be addressed, for the sake of individual offenders and the public as a whole.
HMP Liverpool
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Robert Neill
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I know that he knows Liverpool Walton jail, as it is often called locally, very well. I entirely understand the point of his remarks and I hope that the Ministry will reflect on that. The whole thrust of our report is that we need to shine the light of transparency and publicity on these matters. We also, in a separate piece of work, have in hand an inquiry into the shape of the prison population by 2020. Part of that, again, is this need to deal with overcrowding. Our recommendation on persistent overcrowding is part of that. Getting the fabric right is necessary. Walton jail—Liverpool prison—is one of the old Victorian prisons and there is a real need for work to be done there. If we are publishing the public framework on facilities maintenance, I do not see why we should not be able to have similar publicity about the capital works that are required.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
This is an historic opportunity. I think that this is the first time in more than 200 years of our Prison Service that we have had an individual prison debated on the Floor of the House. I pay tribute to the Justice Committee for bringing the matter forward.
The situation in Liverpool prison was, as the Chairman of the Select Committee has pointed out, genuinely shocking. It is very disturbing and it is unbelievably important that Select Committees, inspectors and Members of Parliament hold us accountable for prisoners. These are closed communities. They are often hidden away from the public. In many areas, they can be forgotten, and without scrutiny standards can drop. They dropped very seriously in Liverpool prison.
The condition in the cells was unacceptable; how prisoners were treated was unacceptable, and the lack of purposeful activity was unacceptable. We are now addressing this hard and quickly, but there are still huge lessons to be learned through the system. I pay tribute to the new governor, Pia Sinha, who has come in, taken cells out of commission and made it clear that she has cleaned the prison and that her objective over the next six months is to get those cells into a smart, good condition. We now have the money in place to put in the new windows and she is focused on ensuring that the education and employment activity is good.
More generally, there are lessons right the way through the prison system. We need to get the basics right. There is no point talking about rehabilitation or dealing with reoffending unless we have clean, decent and safe spaces for all prisoners. We want our prisons to be smart and well-functioning. We are bringing in more than 2,000 more prison officers, and that will relieve some of the pressures on the prison estate, but these are new prison officers and will need training and support until they have the prisoncraft to deliver what we require. We also need to invest a lot more in training. Because prisons are unbelievably complex environments, the governor needs the support and training—this could mean months of training—to ensure that they are in a position to turn around the prison. That training should also apply to the uniformed staff. Finally, the role of the inspector and the Select Committee will be vital in improving performance.
Robert Neill
I am grateful to the Minister for that response. He is very much on the case in recognising that we must get basic things: cleanliness, decency, the maintenance of the establishment, and the ability to run a regime where people can get out to healthcare appointments and rehabilitative work. All that is critical. Unless we turn the existing problems around, we will face a real crisis in our prisons.
I look forward to working with the Minister on those matters. In particular, I hope that he will take up our recommendations on the inspectorate and the constructive role that it can play. I can honestly say that this is a case of a small investment being likely to pay off in the long term.
Prisoners: Outdoors Endurance Activities
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I begin by paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) for bringing the debate. It was fantastic to see the energy that he put into it. His interests as an ex-soldier and as the Member of Parliament for South Dorset came through. It is great that an initiative partly pioneered in the first place by a Member of Parliament is now being pioneered again and promoted by another Member of Parliament.
The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made some characteristically powerful comments, reflecting on some of the practicalities of the subject and some of the moral and philosophical background when it comes to balancing the protection of the public with our obligations towards prisoners. My hon. Friend the Member for Moray (Douglas Ross) provided a good example in John McAvoy of exactly the kind of transformation that can happen for somebody who would, by definition, have been considered one of the most at-risk prisoners most likely to reoffend. He has come through an extraordinary personal journey and transformation.
The right hon. Member for Delyn (David Hanson) was almost the longest serving prisons Minister in British parliamentary history, I think, so he is quite an intimidating man to have opposite. He made, I think, more than 67 separate visits to prisons; he has a deep understanding of the whole system, and I will not attempt to quibble with him on any of the things that he said. Indeed, he and the hon. Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain) pointed out very powerfully that there is no point in simply looking at this thing in isolation.
For any of these schemes to work, we need to think much more broadly about who these people are, who they were before they got into prison, as the hon. Member for Bradford East pointed out, what kind of resources exist—how much money there is, how many prison officers there are—and what kind of routines are run in prisons. In addition, there were practical issues raised by my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset, which extend all the way from relief on temporary licence conditions to conditions in relation to drugs.
I do not want to expand on this subject too much or trespass too much on your time, Mr Howarth, but clearly the challenge that we face is very remarkable. We are all aware of fantastic initiatives—the Airborne Initiative is one of the most powerful and admirable—and we have been aware of them as they have been run for some time. The right hon. Member for Delyn will be aware of many such initiatives that he will have seen when he was the prisons Minister.
The tragic truth is that, although there have been incredibly powerful initiatives for many decades around the country, and although each of these programmes points to fantastic improvements, reoffending rates in general have barely moved. That has been true with more resources and fewer resources; the reoffending rates were roughly the same when the right hon. Member for Delyn was the prisons Minister as they are today. That is partly for some of the reasons that were mentioned.
This is a very difficult cohort to deal with. As hon. Members know, nearly half the people entering prison are almost functionally illiterate. Nearly 60% or 70% come in with pre-existing behaviour issues and particularly drug use problems. Nearly 90% are reporting different ranges of mental health issues. There is an incredibly high homelessness rate among people who leave prison, and they have many problems getting employment. Even the Airborne Initiative, a successful scheme, touches only the percentage of people—it is in the mid-20s—who get into education or employment. These are terrifyingly difficult issues to deal with and to turn around.
That is why the hon. Member for Bradford East and my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset were absolutely correct to pay tribute to the Prison Service. At the centre of a lot of this is the dedicated, tailored work of prison officers. We have tried, by having a keyworker programme where one prison officer is assigned to six prisoners and through some of our work with physical education instructors, to ensure that we build up tailored relationships. Having 2,500 more prison officers is important, because it will begin to make that possible, but each prisoner is different—that leads to the question of empowerment—and each prison is different. One of the reasons why we need governor empowerment is that the kinds of education and activities provided for young, short-term prisoners will be quite different from those provided in a category C prison, let alone in the high-security estate. Governors need to be able to adjust.
Balancing the power of the centre with empowered governors is more of an art than a science. Obviously, in any organisation, we need to trust people and empower them. They need to feel that they are in charge, that they have the necessary levers and, in the end, that the buck stops with them. To take an extreme military analogy, the captain of a ship needs to feel to some extent that, if the ship crashes, it is his fault. Equally, of course, he operates in the huge system of a navy, where there are many other reasons why a ship might crash that might not be entirely down to the captain. Getting that balance right, setting decent national standards and holding people like me to account will be critical.
I expect to be held to account on some of the basic standards issues that were raised. Frankly, I should be able to come back here in 11 months’ time and show that we have significantly reduced the number of people testing positive for drugs in our 30 worst prisons. I would like to come back and present cleaner prisons and prisons with fewer broken windows, and I would like to be judged on some of the basic issues around education provision. If I am not judged on those things, I am not doing my job.
Richard Drax
As always, the Minister is making an eloquent and powerful speech. On his point about reoffending rates staying the same, the Airborne Initiative is aimed at the young. If we stop those people—all right, 20% is not 50%, but it is better than nil—moving on to category C, B and A prisons, we surely will be achieving. If the scheme works and we stop young people from going up the chain to more serious crime and longer prison terms, that surely will be another reason why it is particularly brilliant and different.
Rory Stewart
One hundred per cent! Any scheme that dramatically reduces reoffending does an incredible amount for the individual young person, because it gives them a chance to have a life that is not in prison, and for the public, who would be the victims of the crime that that person would go on to commit. It also, of course, makes a huge difference to the Prison Service and the prison population, because it means there are fewer people in prison and there is less pressure on the whole system. For all those reasons, reducing reoffending has to be at the centre of this issue.
Reducing reoffending is partly about the Airborne Initiative, but it is about many other things, too: ensuring that people have accommodation to go to when they leave prison and trying to ensure that they have jobs to go to as well. A lot of that is not in the gift of my Department. We need to get together a taskforce with all the other bits of the Government and ensure that local authorities have houses to provide, that employers are really reaching out and so on.
There are brilliant ways of doing this. To take one example, there is a fantastic scheme being led by Liverpool Altcourse prison, where prisoners are being trained on metal welding and metal painting, and are connected directly with a company that employs metal welders at the other end. The same is happening with recycling machinery: prisoners make huge recycling trucks inside the prison and are connected with the recycling company for a job as soon as they leave the prison gate. They get some income—that can go into an escrow account, which provides them with some money when they leave—and a vocational qualification, and they get a job at the end.
The Football Association is leading a fantastic programme to pair every premier league club with a local prison. Two people from the club are paired with 16 prisoners, who train for level 1 coaching qualifications with the aim of filling a gap—we need 4,400 coaches in the British system. Leeds Rhinos rugby league team makes fantastic use of its facilities to develop a connection whereby prisoners can use all the community facilities and all the club’s contacts once they leave prison. That is what I want to try to get to.
The Airborne Initiative has three brilliant elements. The first is the military element. We have seen everything that that means. It is shared by initiatives such as the 3 Pillars initiative in London, which emphasises exercise, employment and, above all, a military ethos—the sense of courage, pride, honour and self-confidence that is hugely important for pushing people forward into the world.
The second element is the benefits of the outdoors—we heard about those from the hon. Member for Strangford—and all they mean for everything from someone’s endorphins to their health, their love of nature and, after coming through ice baths and freezing rivers, their sense of resilience. Crossing the River Dart and orienteering alone through the night must be challenging experiences. The third critical element is everything that people get in the evenings. These are residential courses that give people the ability to reflect on their character, their future and their life.
However, we could be doing more to take these schemes to the next stage. First, we should work with the incredibly dedicated and impressive PE professionals in prisons to ensure that they feel absolutely central to these programmes. They should not feel replaced—the voluntary sector is not a replacement for them—but they should feel that they bolt in as role models and mentors. That applies both to these programmes and to other things: PE staff can be central to helping people wean themselves off drugs and to guiding people through nutrition. We now provide much more nutritious food in prisons. Proper nutritious meals have an extraordinary impact—a nearly 30% reduction—on violence and behavioural issues.
We should think not just about young people but about older people. There is no reason why older people cannot go on these courses. We should think about what outdoor activities and sport we can use to reach out to older people. We should embrace sport as a way of doing education—mathematics, for example—as a leveller and as a way of including people who may have struggled at school. We should think about diversity. The Airborne Initiative may be ideal for one cohort but, in another context, something like the Clink restaurant in Brixton may be ideal for someone who wants to go into catering.
Above all, we should stick with courses. We do not want short, shiny, high-quality courses that are delivered for very short periods. That is deeply depressing for prisoners. They turn up, get a terrific package that runs for about three or four weeks, have their fantastic role model and feel their life is turning around, but then that person vanishes and we never hear from them again. Prisoners really want through-mentoring. They want people meeting them at the gate. Clink restaurant is a good example. It meets prisoners at the gate, takes them out, connects them with a catering company and stays with them. Fulham football club is another great example. It meets prisoners at the gate, takes them out and tries to involve them in activities outside the prison. None of this stuff is a silver bullet, but it is all stuff that we need to lean into, facilitate and make easier.
Let me set out the action points that I want to take away from the debate. We clearly need to work out exactly what the problems are with getting prisoners into the Airborne Initiative and to solve them. I will contact governors so that, next time the course is run, we do everything we can to ensure that prisoners are available to go on it. We will have to deal with the deeper structural issues in the next debate, but the basic philosophy is absolutely central: if PE instructors in prisons, prison officers and the voluntary sector work on outdoor education and sport and think about how to connect those things together, that can transform prisoners’ lives, transform reoffending and protect the public.
Along with everything I am talking about in terms of back to basics—the stuff with drugs, cleaning up prisons, fixing broken windows, having basic standards and getting 2,500 prison officers back in—Britain, with its astonishing love of sport and the outdoors and the commitment of soldiers from the Parachute Regiment, MPs and everyone in the Chamber—can make a huge difference to vulnerable lives, and ultimately to public safety.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rory Stewart Excerpts(6 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I should like to begin by paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for his work on the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017. With the agreement of colleagues from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Act should come into operation in April. It is absolutely vital that every prisoner leaving custody has a home to go to.
Bob Blackman
I thank my hon. Friend and welcome him to his new position. As he rightly says, it is in our best interest that ex-offenders leaving prison do not reoffend. One of the key issues is to ensure that prison governors honour their commitment under the Homelessness Reduction Act to ensure that people are prepared for life outside prison. What action will he take to ensure that prison governors train offenders who are due to leave prison so that they do not reoffend?
Rory Stewart
There are two key things to do: first, to empower governors so that they have real flexibility and control over education budgets and career advice; and, secondly, to connect that to housing. There is an obligation under the Act that my hon. Friend has championed, and co-ordination with local authorities will be essential.
Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
Why has the number of women who become homeless on release doubled in only a year? Is this not more evidence of the Government failing prisoners and probation policies?
Rory Stewart
There are a number of complex issues relating to homelessness, but we absolutely agree that this is unacceptable and shocking. We need to work much more closely with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, with local authorities and with prisons to ensure that we cut those numbers.
Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)
Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) (Lab)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I visited Liverpool prison yesterday. The inspector’s report was genuinely disturbing, and of course that is reflected on the ground. There are some very good prison officers working there, but unfortunately the conditions are really shocking, particularly basic sanitation, with piles of garbage. We now have a new governor in place, millions of pounds are going into the infrastructure, and 172 places have been closed so that we can begin a proper refurbishment and maintenance programme. Most importantly, we must not allow this to happen again.
Rosie Cooper
These appalling conditions did not emerge overnight. Who will be held to account locally and nationally for failing to implement the recommendations of the many critical reports about the prison? How in 21st century Britain could this national disgrace be allowed to happen? Lack of adequate healthcare meant that lives were lost. What happened to the regulators and the leadership? Were they being paid while asleep?
Rory Stewart
Those are important questions that we will look at closely. We have published an action plan for Liverpool prison. There are two key things we need to do. The first is about leadership. The governor has now been replaced. The second is that we have put in place a new urgent notification process, so if anything like this happens again and inspectors raise it, we will be forced to reply within 28 days. But that is only the beginning, because this requires a complete change in culture that focuses on getting back to basics: cleaning the prison, reducing the violence, reducing the drugs and making sure the healthcare provision is in place.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Ind)
Rory Stewart
This is a big question of management. There are many very hard-working people at Liverpool prison who take their jobs very seriously and work very long hours, but we have to balance that with a recognition that clearly there have been fundamental failings. People will be held to account. Above all, we need to work with the team at the prison to ensure that in future it is a clean and decent place, both to protect the public and to reduce reoffending.
Dan Carden (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
I welcome the Minister’s prompt visit to HMP Liverpool in his new role, and to Altcourse prison, which is in my constituency. His action plan states that there will be a full conditional survey and investment proposal for medium-term refurbishment. Given that Walton prison was built in 1855—some 15 years before this Palace was completed—is that the most realistic outcome for the future of the prison?
Rory Stewart
It is certainly true that there are challenges with older buildings, as we see with this place, but it is possible to keep them going—Westminster Hall was built in 1080. Stafford prison, which was built in the late 18th century, is a clean and decent prison. We will look carefully at the fabric, and in some cases there is reason to build a new wing. But in Liverpool prison we can make a huge difference simply with £2.5 million for new windows and for refurbishing individual cells.
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)
The inspectors described the conditions at HMP Liverpool as the worst they have seen, citing rat infestations and filthy conditions. Prison maintenance at Liverpool was outsourced to Amey. This shows that the problems with outsourcing go way beyond Carillion, which mismanaged maintenance at 50 different prisons. Will the Secretary of State commit to a review looking at bringing prison maintenance back in house, in Liverpool and at all prisons, as Labour has pledged to do?
Rory Stewart
We will look carefully at the maintenance issues in Liverpool, but sadly the problems are not only to do with Amey; they are also to do with relationships between management and the contractors and how prisoners were, or were not, used to clean the estate. We have made a huge amount of difference in just the past five weeks by changing not the Amey contract but the management approach and the focus on cleanliness.
Richard Burgon
I thank the Minister for his answer on Amey and contractors, but it is hard to have faith that he will address the problems at Liverpool or, in fact, any prison, because it has recently come to light that his Government handed £40 million to Carillion in 2017, even after the then prisons Minister had expressed concerns in Parliament about Carillion’s performance in prisons. Will not poor maintenance in Liverpool continue to contribute to inhumane conditions while responsibility is left in the hands of private contractors who, in reality, put profit first?
Rory Stewart
We do not believe that this is fundamentally an ideological fight between the private and public sectors. Most of those people working for Carillion—70% of them—were public servants just three years ago, and most of those people working for Amey were public servants in the prison service. Most of the problems have been solved through basic management and leadership. There has been a deep clean, the yard units have been increased from five to 18, and the conditions have improved rapidly. In the end, a lot of this is about management, not a private/public debate.
Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
We have been doing three things on education: first, we have been making sure that governors are empowered to bring in their own education providers; secondly, we have been setting minimum standards, particularly on English language learning; and thirdly, through the new futures network, we have been connecting people to jobs.
Rory Stewart
As the Speaker implies in his reprimand to me, the causes of offending are many and multiple. Literacy is one of them, along with many issues relating to people’s health, education, social background and, indeed, our criminal justice system as a whole. Nevertheless, literacy is key to the reduction of reoffending because it is key to getting a good job. Good education provision in prisons, driven by governors, is going to be key to addressing this issue.
Mrs Latham
Can the Minister say anything more about the steps the Government are taking further to empower governors to deliver effective education and training in prisons?
Rory Stewart
Yes. We have empowered governors by having in place a new procurement contract, which means that we in the Ministry are going to do the central procurement bureaucracy, but the governors will be able to choose who they use to train and educate the prisoners. I saw a good example in Altcourse Prison in Liverpool of how governors are also going to be able to choose which companies to pair with. The excellent work on metal welding that I saw in Altcourse will really contribute to those prisoners getting jobs in the community.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
Does the Minister agree that whatever plans he comes up with will require there to be enough prison officers on the estate so that they can release prisoners from their cells and take them to education and training classes? Does he now accept that the Government’s dash to reduce the number of prison officers has seriously hampered the chances of preventing prisoners from reoffending?
Rory Stewart
Among the many challenges that face education in prisons is the issue of numbers, which is why we have now committed to having 2,500 more prison officers on the estate, and we are delivering that ahead of target. That will allow us to have in place the key-worker programmes, in which each officer will be paired with six prisoners to guide them through the process.
Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)
Does the Minister accept that there are some good examples of literacy classes in prisons and reoffending rates thereby reducing? Will he undertake to ensure that best practice from throughout the United Kingdom is replicated so that reoffending rates fall across the UK?
Rory Stewart
That is absolutely true. An enormous number of programmes have huge success in reducing reoffending. For example, in Brixton prison, the Clink programme has reduced reoffending by 43%, but we can do much more to learn the lessons and have a proper standardised document that takes what works elsewhere and drives it through the entire system.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
In order to encourage more businesses to take on ex-offenders, the Government need to lead by example and not just by exhortation. The Ban the Box initiative was brought in across Government a few years ago to encourage that. How is ex-offender employment going within Government and the public sector?
Rory Stewart
First, I wish to pay tribute to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), who did this job far better than I will be able to do. One of the things that he introduced, which is going very well at the moment, is working with the Ministry of Defence. We are providing basic supplies for British military troops. It is something that is providing not just employment to prisoners, but the training and vocational skills they require for future employment.
Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)
Prisoners move round the prison system and, in the end, they come out of the prison system. One thing that consistently goes wrong is the lack of consistency in education and training between different institutions and in institutions once the prisoner leaves. The Minister has talked about power to the governor, but governors must work within the construct of the wider environment. What will he do to ensure that we have that consistency?
Rory Stewart
This is of course a balance between empowering the governor so that they can have a tailored programme that is flexible and works for the prison and having decent national standards. That will mean setting the curriculum at a national level, having the area managers engaged over the governors and also giving the governors the ability to have education that is relevant to their areas—skills that are relevant to the jobs outside the prison gates.
Jeremy Quin (Horsham) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
I first pay tribute to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Mr Gyimah), for his extraordinary work on drones. We have done a range of work, ranging from Operation Trenton with the police, which took place in 2016, through to the conviction of over 28 individuals for drone-related offences.
Jeremy Quin
What particular extra support is given to those prisons with a high incidence of drone attacks? Will the Minister agree to meet me to discuss potential improvements to the relevant legislation?
Rory Stewart
We have established specialist teams for prisons that have particular vulnerabilities to drone attacks. I am very happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss some of the legislative issues. I also believe that there is much more we can do on basic issues such as netting and grills, as well as focusing on high technology.
Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)
Drones are one of the ways in which mobile phones are got into prisons, where they can be used for criminality alongside drugs. What measures are being taken to use technology to limit the use of mobile phones in prison?
Rory Stewart
Two types of technology can be used on mobile telephones. One is jamming technology, and the second, which is more commonly used in prison, is a wand to detect mobile telephones. An astonishing number of phones—at over 20,000, there are far too many—are detected in prisons. We should be addressing this in two ways. The first is by making sure that they do not get in: these are closed environments and we should be able to massively reduce the amount coming in. The second is that, by putting phones in cells to allow people to talk to their families, we can monitor the calls and control the need for phones in the first place.
Andrew Lewer (Northampton South) (Con)
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
We focus on making sure that we have a proper capital investment programme in place, so additional money has been allocated for the building of new prisons, two are currently being commissioned, and we currently have spare places in our prisons. To reassure my hon. Friend, it is absolutely vital that we have the places so that people can serve their sentence. Sentences should not be driven by availability of prison places.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)
We know that conversion to a radical brand of Islamist thinking too often occurs in a prison setting. Will the Minister update the House on the work being done to address this issue and set out the procedures to vet religious officials working with the vulnerable prison population?
Rory Stewart
This is a hugely important issue for Members on both sides of the House. We know absolutely that extremism—we can see this in France, and we of course saw it in Iraq—can be driven in a prison setting. The problem is not simply the 230 prisoners arrested for terrorist offences, but others who can be influenced when they are in a prison setting. We are working very hard with colleagues in the Home Office on this issue, and it will be a priority for the Secretary of State and me during our time in office.
Eleanor Smith (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
Recent reports by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons reveal a consistent failure by the Prison Service to act on recommendations made by the inspector in previous reports. Does the Minister agree that compliance with inspectorate reports should be the norm, rather than the exception?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. Peter Clarke, the chief inspector of prisons, does an extraordinary job. We are doing two things to make sure that we implement those recommendations better. First, we have set up a special unit in the Ministry to follow up on every one of those recommendations. Secondly, we have introduced an urgent notification process, which requires us to reply within 28 days to any issues raised by the inspector.
Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend will be aware that the prisoner transfer agreement was suspended because of the corrupt release of prisoners from Pakistani prisons. We are addressing that at the moment with the Government of Pakistan, and we continue to work very closely with officials in the Foreign Office, the Department for International Development and the Home Office to make sure that we continue to return a record number of foreign national offenders—4,000 last year—to the places from which they came.
Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)
In the 18 months prior to May 2017, three openly transgender women took their own lives while they were in custody in England. What is being done to ensure that staff have the right training and, critically, that prisoners have the right mental health support to head off such tragic events?
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
When a prisoner is released, they are not even at base camp in their rehabilitation unless they have accommodation. Some local authorities actively discriminate against ex-offenders—for example, by claiming that they have no local connection because they have been sent to a prison a long way away. Fairness is what is required. Will the Minister challenge that behaviour with his counterparts in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government?
Rory Stewart
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his knowledge of this issue. There are three things we are doing to address this issue, but we can do much more. The first is having a statutory duty on governors to identify prisoners who are at risk of homelessness. The second is investing more in bail accommodation support services to provide temporary support and accommodation. The third is working with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to make sure that, through the Housing First pilots, we can actually have homes available even for people with severe mental health needs. Housing is essential.
Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)
One of my constituents has a young son who is serving a very long prison sentence. He often spends 23 out of 24 hours locked up in his cell. How does the Minister think that is affecting his mental health and his chances of rehabilitation on release?
Rory Stewart
Clearly, this is not good. Prisoners need decent, purposeful activity. If they are locked up in their cell for too long, they are obviously not having educational opportunities. We should aim, as the chief inspector of prisons made clear, to make sure that people are spending eight or 10 hours a day outside their cells. That is partly about numbers of staff, which is why we have brought 250 more staff into the Prison Service. It is also about better scheduling of educational and vocational provision. However, the situation the hon. Lady describes is not acceptable.
Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)
Following campaigns by victims’ families, the Government announced in October last year that they would bring in tougher sentences for those causing death or serious injury by dangerous driving, but still nothing has happened. Why the delay?
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
I would like to put on record my role as co-chair of the justice unions parliamentary group.
When north Wales’s only prison, HMP Berwyn, partially opened on 28 February last year, its regime of skills development and rehabilitation was lauded as pioneering, yet we now learn that, in its first six months, 27 staff members left, and I am told by the Prison Officers Association that morale is at rock bottom. I understand that, in the early months, prisoners assaulted staff on nine occasions, and only one was referred to police. How will the Minister improve offenders’ rehabilitation when recruitment, retention and, critically, staff safety at HMP Berwyn are in crisis?
Rory Stewart
I am very happy to speak in detail with the hon. Lady, who has put an enormous amount of passion and energy into studying issues in prisons in Wales. We believe there are some very positive signs now at HMP Berwyn, but we can talk those through. Recruitment figures have actually been very positive—we are ahead on the recruitment of 2,500 people across England and Wales—but I am very happy to sit down and talk about Berwyn in particular.
Several hon. Members rose—
Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are some of the most vulnerable inmates in prison and are often subject to bullying, abuse and victimisation, with high rates of suicide. What progress is being made on autism accreditation in prisons?
Rory Stewart
This is a hugely important issue. I would very much like to sit down with the hon. Lady, because the Scottish Prison Service has a lot that it can teach us. It is doing a very good job on many of these issues, and I think we can learn a great deal from it.