UK Chemical Industry: Regulatory Divergence

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Kate Green

Wednesday 26th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Alex Cunningham]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Kate Green]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

Asylum Accommodation Contracts

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Kate Green

Wednesday 10th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Alex Cunningham]

My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) makes a fair point. That is why we have to take opportunities with the new contracts to improve on what we had in the past.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is just one of dozens of organisations that has reached out to me since I secured this debate. In common with many others, it has recommended that the new contracts must have robust monitoring, with compliance and complaints mechanisms built into the agreements. I wonder whether the Minister agrees with that.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests in relation to funding support I receive for research capabilities in my office on immigration and asylum. In its report, the Select Committee on Home Affairs suggested a much tighter monitoring and inspection regime—something we would have hoped that the Government would have picked up in issuing the new contracts.

[Alex Cunningham]

Yes, indeed; that is the case. It is something that I will allude to later on in my remarks.

My staff team and I know first-hand how hard it is to break through the barriers of service providers and their subcontractors to try and get them to fulfil their contracts to vulnerable people. One example in Stockton is a family with a seriously disabled member. They were dumped in a second floor flat, making the person a prisoner in their home. It took us weeks and umpteen phone calls to providers, contractors, subcontractors and the Home Office to sort it out. Had the contract been properly monitored, this would never have happened.

The Home Affairs Committee—I said I would mention it—recommended that the Government recognise local authorities and the third sector as key stakeholders, empower devolved Governments to monitor the delivery of the contracts and give local authorities greater flexibility to determine where accommodation is procured.

Probation Service

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Kate Green

Tuesday 13th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend paints quite a dire picture as things are developing under this new-look service. Does she agree that it is rather sad that those high-performing probation trusts never got the opportunity to consider taking on an expanded work load? They were, after all, the experts and they, too, could have delivered this expanded service.

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend is right. It is highly regrettable that the expertise and commitment that we all see in our probation service was not taken advantage of and that probation staff were not given the opportunity to deliver these new programmes of post-release supervision.

Indeed, in Greater Manchester we had piloted such a programme—the Choose Change programme—and learned many valuable lessons about the challenges of working with this particular group. Since Greater Manchester Probation Trust obviously no longer exists, and so cannot take forward the lessons from Choose Change, perhaps the Minister will say how that learning will be transferred across to the new structures, so that what we now know after that experiment is not lost.

[Kate Green]

I agree with every word that my hon. Friend said. Indeed, it is surprising to me that one of the first acts of the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice was to cancel some of the pilots in relation to these new structures, rather than adopting the sensible approach of continuing with them and evaluating the lessons learned before proceeding with the new model—if there was evidence that it was the right model to follow.

In the aftermath of the changeover, probation officers have talked to me about an overwhelming work load, about IT systems that do not speak to each other and require the same information to be inputted over and over, and about random allocation of staff to the new community rehabilitation companies or the new NPS. Morale has suffered, staff are stressed and the human resources support in the new NPS in particular has been inadequate throughout this period of major change, given that the MoJ closed down the shared support service and that communication to staff has been haphazard and often delayed.

Offenders have also noticed problems. I met offenders in my constituency late last summer and they told me that they were constantly finding themselves seeing different offender managers who did not know anything about them or their circumstances. Now the chief inspector of probation has produced a highly critical report of the early implementation of the changes and the problems that have been experienced, and it bears out much of what I and other MPs have been told.

The report specifically recognises that the speed of the implementation caused problems that could have been avoided or mitigated. It makes a number of suggestions about how those problems can be addressed. The Minister may argue that these problems are teething problems and that the recommendations in the report will be followed, but in fact the problems run deeper. They are a reflection of a model that fragments the management of offenders, adding bureaucracy, damaging effective communication and increasing risk. I have genuine concerns about the implications of Transforming Rehabilitation for public safety, and indeed for the safety of officers supervising offenders.

My first concern is that there are clearly issues about access to the full and timely information necessary for the initial risk assessment to be made. It was worrying to read in the chief inspector’s report of delays in obtaining information about an offender after they had been sentenced, because that information is needed to enable a full risk assessment to be carried out.

The MoJ claims that that situation is not different from what happened previously, when an offender could be allocated to an offender manager who would not necessarily have the full information at the first appointment. I appreciate that Ministers want the allocation process to be speedier, with an expectation that cases will be assessed on the Offender Assessment System, or OASys, within two working days of sentencing, rather than five weeks, as can be the case now. However, that would represent a huge step change in service standards. How confident is the Minister that such an improvement can be achieved?

Moreover, even if the assessment can be done speedily, there is increased risk from the fragmentation that arises from having two entirely separate services. If the initial risk assessment and allocation are wrong, there will inevitably be a delay in getting the offender to the right place and therefore a delay in the offender’s building a relationship with his or her supervisor, as well as in beginning the appropriate programme of support to address their offending behaviour.

It also seems that the information for forming an assessment, even if timely, may not be sufficient. I was pretty shocked that the inspector identified a failure to address diversity issues in the assessment and allocation process. Ethnic, religious and cultural background may have a bearing, for example, on the language needs of an offender or on appropriate sentence planning, such as what unpaid work might be suitable.

There is a high prevalence of mental health problems and learning disability among offenders, and those need to be identified at the outset; the offender manager must be made aware, so that tailor-made sentence planning and effective communication with the offender takes place. Understanding the offender’s family circumstances is relevant. Child care responsibilities may impact on sentence planning and information about family members and relationships is especially important in relation to risk and safeguarding.

Clearly, these all-important matters go to the heart of successful intervention to address offending behaviours and to protect the public. What steps will the Minister take to address the concerns raised by the inspector in relation to reflecting diverse circumstances in reports and in the allocation process?

The Minister may not be surprised to hear that I am particularly concerned about the need for specific, tailor-made approaches for women offenders. The weaknesses in preparing assessment reports, identified by the inspector, are of real concern in this context, but there is also concern about the nature of the interventions that women will receive. As far as I can see, none of the community rehabilitation companies or the organisations that they are working with appear to be specialists in managing women offenders.

In recent years, there has been some good learning and recognition of the specific needs of women offenders and of what works. Specialist women’s centres are effective and positively regarded by offenders. I recently met a group of female offenders in Manchester—Women Moving Forward—who told me how important the support they received from the women’s centre was and who expressed anxiety about future provision, as well they might when women’s centres lack any certainty about their funding after March.

[Alex Cunningham]

This morning, I met some people from Barnardo’s, who told me about their concerns for children affected by people who may be in prison or on some probation regime, or something of that nature. Does my hon. Friend agree that more must be done by the Minister and others to ensure that we get the correct approach from Government, so that offenders with children are identified and these factors are properly taken into consideration, so that the whole family can be looked at properly, rather than a prisoner or offender being looked at entirely in isolation?

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend is right on many levels. First, it is important that family circumstances—particularly the presence of children and other vulnerable family members—are properly understood, so that safeguarding issues can be addressed properly. Secondly, what he said relates to my point about the need to understand particularly the circumstances of women offenders. Many women offenders are mothers: that impacts on the kind of responses and programmes that will work for them and what sentence planning will be appropriate. Mothers in particular will have to balance child care responsibilities with the demands of the sentencing plan.

Thirdly, my hon. Friend makes a good point about the whole-family approach. A stable, comfortable and happy family life helps an offender to overcome offending behaviour, so the ability to take that holistic view of family circumstances would be a real opportunity to address the offending behaviour of many offenders who could be supervised in the community. Indeed, the Minister may want to say how this might be taken forward in the context of his expectation that the community rehabilitation companies will be more innovative than the old probation service. I have not yet seen any evidence of that, but he and the CRCs might like to turn their attention to that area.

I am concerned about specialist provision through women’s centres for women offenders and women at risk from offending. The Prison Reform Trust points out that CRCs will be “expected to fund” ongoing provision after March. Can the Minister therefore assure us that specialist provision will be guaranteed? Given the concerns about this small, often highly vulnerable group of offenders, will he undertake to carry out an annual audit under section 10 of the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014, to confirm that Transforming Rehabilitation is meeting the needs of women offenders?

As I have said, one important change in Transforming Rehabilitation is that, for the first time, offenders who have served short custodial sentences of less than 12 months will receive supervision on release. That has been universally welcomed, although there is little sign yet of when it will actually happen. Of course, it is vital that the CRCs and the National Probation Service have the resources to do the job. Again, there are some serious worries. The report from the inspector specifically raises concerns about staffing in the new NPS. Can the Minister say what expectation there is about the proportion of those leaving custody who will be deemed to be high risk and under NPS supervision? The inspector recommends a full evaluation of staff resources and this surely must be undertaken as a matter of urgency, so that we can be sure there is adequate provision for the supervision of high-risk offenders. Will the Minister say how he intends to respond to that recommendation?

Of course, the NPS needs adequate contingent resource to address the fact that risk is not static. Categorising offenders as low, medium or high risk is massively to oversimplify. Transforming Rehabilitation recognises this: if there is a concern that an offender who has been categorised as low or medium risk becomes high risk, a fresh assessment will be carried out and he or she will transfer from the community rehabilitation company to the NPS. That is hardly likely to be an infrequent situation.

An offender who is identified as low or medium risk can quickly become high risk if circumstances change. Many offenders are volatile or vulnerable and prone to erratic and potentially dangerous behaviours in response to difficult or unexpected life experiences, such as loss of a job or the ending of a relationship, bereavement or the arrival of a new member of the household. Many come from relatively chaotic backgrounds, where such changes in their circumstances happen fairly frequently. We may see a substantial proportion of offenders move at some time in their sentence from medium or low to high risk, which will necessitate their transfer to the NPS. Has the Minister an assessment of the likelihood of a transition and can he assure us that the NPS will have the resources it needs to deal with it?

[Alex Cunningham]

I wonder who will be carrying out the assessments at different levels, when people are allocated to various parts of this new-look probation service, and how confident we can feel. Probation officers tell me that they are not perfectly sure yet who is going to do what in the system. Yet here we are, hurtling along on this great change programme that is under way.

[Kate Green]

It is worrying that those working in the system are still not clear about who is doing what. This is symptomatic of an approach that seems both unnecessarily complicated and fraught with difficulty.

I understand that the system depends on the CRC identifying and escalating a case where there is a perception that risk is increasing—someone in the CRC will have to make that judgment—and then the determination of the risk level will be made by an officer in the NPS. Will the Minister say how the NPS will carry out effective risk assessments of offenders with whom it has not previously had any contact because they have hitherto been managed entirely in the CRC? How can those assessments be objective, given that the NPS has a stake in the outcome, as it will become responsible for any offender that it assesses as high risk? Equally, how will we know whether the CRCs are escalating risk appropriately when they, too, have a stake in the outcome of the risk assessment? I understand—perhaps the Minister can confirm this—that the CRCs will continue to collect outcome payments, even after offenders transfer to the NPS, if the reoffending targets are met.

How will the payment-by-results element work, and what incentives will the NPS and the CRCs have to ensure that we get the crucial risk identification assessment and identification process absolutely right? Although low and medium-risk offenders can become high risk, conversely high-risk offenders can become lower risk over time. I would have thought that we hope rehabilitation programmes have that outcome, but the system does not seem to make provision for it. Once an offender is with the NPS, they stay there, even if their risk subsequently reduces. Will the Minister tell us why high-risk offenders who are subsequently reassessed as low or medium risk will not be transferred back to the CRCs? What are the resource implications of that structure?

What monitoring will be undertaken of when cases are escalated? For example, if there is a pattern of cases escalated very soon after the initial allocation, that might suggest delays in the provision of information or poor data at the time of sentence. A pattern of escalation later in the sentence might offer an early warning of weak intervention in the CRC.

[Alex Cunningham]

Might it not also reveal that the personnel in the new organisations do not have the appropriate range of skills and understanding and that they are washing their hands of difficult problems as quickly as possible and dealing with only the easy ones?

[Kate Green]

We have seen that kind of parking approach in other privatised programmes. In the Work programme, for example, the most difficult clients, for whom it was difficult to produce effective outcomes, were parked by the providers. My hon. Friend is right to highlight that risk.

What will happen if an offender is wrongly allocated to the NPS? Can he or she challenge the assessment of the risk if they think it is wrong? That is important, given that it appears that once an offender is allocated to the NPS, they are stuck there. It is important that we know whether the Minister has thought about the effect that that will have on the relevance of the interventions that the NPS receives and the expectations and preconceptions surrounding the offender, which might feed into their chances of resettlement.

Finally, I want to say something about transparency. The public has a right to know whether an upheaval on this scale has been worth it. They must be able to find out whether the contracts are working effectively, whether we are being more effectively protected, whether reoffending has been reduced as a result of the changes and whether public money has been well spent. A Labour Government would extend freedom of information legislation to ensure that the community rehabilitation companies are covered, but the Government opposed that during the passage of the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014. Shamefully, they made it impossible for a future Government to reverse the contracts, except at great cost to the taxpayer. Can the Minister assure us that the contracts include strong break clauses to ensure that the public does not end up paying for failure if they do not deliver the reduction in reoffending, which we are told is the goal of Transforming Rehabilitation?

All the concerns I have highlighted today should have been addressed before this wholesale, high-risk, evidence-free reorganisation of the probation service went ahead. It seems that ideology, not evidence, characterised the Government’s approach. Perhaps the Minister will reassure us with his answers today. I look forward to his response.

Youth Service Provision

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Kate Green

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship yet again, Mr Davies. I say in opening that I am rather disappointed; when I look round the Chamber, I see that we have Opposition Members who are interested in youth services, but we have only the Minister to reply on behalf of the Government. It is very disappointing, but even so, I am grateful to be granted the opportunity to raise some of these issues today.

As hon. Members know, there is a crisis in youth services, which have suffered cuts of around £260 million since 2010. There was nothing today in the Chancellor’s autumn statement to cheer up our young people at all. Link that to the ditching of the education maintenance allowance and the access to learning fund, the virtual collapse of careers advice delegated to schools without the necessary resources, and the pittance that local authorities have to pay out from the student opportunity fund, and we can see that young people are getting a very poor deal from this Government.

We are all aware of the spending cuts that local authorities are being forced to make as a result of reduced funding from central Government. That is being felt acutely in areas such as the north-east of England, where 11 out of 12 councils will experience higher than average reductions in spending power for 2014-15, along with a 5% funding reduction compared with 2013-14. To be clear, in pounds per dwelling, that is 10 times higher than cuts in the south-east, and almost four times higher in percentage terms. Across the country, this is devastating service provision and the ability of councils to meet the needs of residents, whether in the form of road maintenance, care and support services for the elderly or the provision of sporting and recreational facilities for the young. Nowhere has been left untouched.

One area particularly hard hit by the attacks on spending is youth services. Despite those services being among the most important that local authorities provide, and ignoring the long-term nature of the impact, levels of provision for young people across the UK have suffered horrendously under the coalition. To be clear from the outset, the Government’s policies have seen young people, just like women, shoulder a disproportionate share of austerity and its worst effects.

Youth services have been hit by funding cuts of £60 million since 2012. Some 73% of local authorities have reported being forced to reduce youth service spending during that time because of central Government cuts, resulting in the loss of hundreds of youth centres and thousands of youth workers across the country. I know that view is recognised by the former children’s Minister, the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who said:

“Because they don’t have to statutorily provide youth services they”—

the councils—

“have too often been at the top of the queue when cuts come along”.

However, that is just part of a trend that started when the coalition came to power.

Over that longer term, 93% of respondents to a Unison survey said that their local authority had cut youth service spending since 2010, with youth service spending down by £62 million in 2010-11 and £137 million in 2011-12. Overall, that adds up to cuts of £259 million since 2010, with some local authorities having to slash spending by over half to meet their costs.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this afternoon’s debate, and I apologise for the fact that I will not be able to stay for the entire debate. He paints a rather rosier picture, perhaps because he is talking about two or three years ago, than is the case today. My local authority of Trafford is now proposing that we would have no spending on the youth service at all from next year.

[Alex Cunningham]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. That is frightful, and as I develop my speech this afternoon, I will refer to some of the consequences of losing youth services altogether.

The Government have established a maze of inefficient and underperforming nationally controlled programmes that duplicate services locally. There are around 40 national schemes and services delivered by 10 different Departments and agencies, leaving councils little, if any, influence to co-ordinate, target and scrutinise the shifting market of publicly funded provision and hindering their ability to plan where best to invest their own support.

Over the summer, I visited one of the schemes, the National Citizen Service, and met some lovely young people. I was impressed by the efforts and intentions, but the fact remains that these schemes have failed to fill the gap that cuts to youth services have created. To make matters worse, the NCS costs £1,200 per head for a six-week volunteering programme, whereas a similar scheme in Germany is able to fund a whole year’s work-based volunteering for the same cost.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate about a matter that is of huge concern to my constituency following the Trafford council budget proposals made a few weeks ago, which would result in the closure of all of our youth centres around the borough, leaving only the central Talkshop available for young people in Trafford. In a borough that has, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) highlighted, some outlying geographical areas and quite high transport costs, it is unlikely that many young people in my constituency would be able to access the central Talkshop.

The concern extends well beyond my constituents, although many of them have written to me about it over the past few weeks. There is considerable pressure on MPs from all over the country to sign a recently tabled early-day motion, and at a recent meeting of the all-party group on poverty, young people challenged MPs from all political parties about the importance of the youth service. They received favourable responses from MPs from all political parties about how we value the youth service, and they told us that, frankly, we do not put our money where our mouth is. It deeply discredits us as politicians when we proclaim our belief in a service but we are unwilling to ensure that it is sustainably maintained and funded. Young people become disillusioned when they see that our promises of investment in them are only words.

In Trafford, we are not only concerned about the loss of youth centres, important though that is—some of them are extremely effective and popular in reaching out to the young people in their neighbourhood; as my hon. Friend said, we are also concerned about the loss of trained youth workers. There will also be a reduction in volunteering opportunities in those youth centres, and I am surprised that a Government who are so keen on volunteering should remove such opportunities, which are much valued in my constituency.

In Trafford, as in other communities, the voluntary sector has traditionally supplied a good proportion of youth provision. I believe that our local authority hopes that that sector will now do much more. Like my hon. Friend, I greatly value the youth work that is done by a range of non-governmental, non-statutory organisations in my borough. The problem is that if we leave such work entirely to voluntary and self-organising youth provision, the offer across the borough will not be strategic. Some areas may be quite well served, but other areas where need is higher may be rather poorly served. There may be some activities that offer lots of opportunities for young people, but other activities that young people want to take part in may not be available in our borough.

My hon. Friend made an important point about sustainability. Voluntary organisations are keen to do what they can to fill the gap in Trafford, but it is a big challenge for them to raise sustainable funding to enable them to make commitments beyond one or two years. For example, Redeeming Our Communities, which has recently begun operating in Partington in my constituency, is keen to look at what more it can do as the youth service in Trafford is degraded, but it has already made the point to me that it can do only as much as it can raise funding for. We must be mindful of the fact that a voluntary sector solution is not sustainable unless there is sustainable funding to allow such organisations to operate.

[Alex Cunningham]

One of the questions that perhaps I should have asked the Minister is whether he will do something to ring-fence and protect youth budgets. Even if Trafford had only a small amount, at least it could work with the voluntary sector to improve its chances of delivering provision in some of the more difficult areas.

[Kate Green]

Certainty would be valuable to those who want to provide youth services. I also make the point to the Minister that the availability of statutory funding has drawn in additional voluntary funding on top of the statutory funding that has hitherto underpinned our service. Lostock youth centre, for example, has been able to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds of voluntary money to top up the statutory support that it receives. Although some of that voluntary money may continue to reach our youth centres, we will lose the basic infrastructure that enables a trained team of youth workers to go out and seek such additional voluntary funding support. Even if voluntary funding were widely available, provision cannot exist in a vacuum, without an underpinning of statutory financial support.

I am concerned that there is a real mismatch between the degrading of our youth services and the other strategic ambitions of local authorities and the Government for our young people: priorities such as reducing crime and antisocial behaviour, making young people feel safe, ensuring their emotional well-being and ensuring that they achieve, attain and have aspirations. In the context of considerable attention being given to the risk of sexual exploitation and abuse, there must be the highest provision in relation to safeguarding, and the youth service hitherto has been an important element of providing such protection to potentially vulnerable young people. As I am sure the Minister will understand, we are deeply concerned about that in the Greater Manchester area. The youth service in Trafford has been actively engaged in that area, and it is well informed about the young people who are at risk. I am concerned that such knowledge and intelligence may be lost.

Everyone recognises the financial pressures that our local authorities are under, but it is very short-sighted simply to slash youth provision. It is poor value for money because it will generate additional costs and pressures in other parts of the system in the years to come. I appreciate that the Minister will say that local authorities must exercise discretion locally and make their own decisions, but he has the opportunity today to offer certainty and stability so that we at least have the capacity for forward planning. I hope he will give us those assurances this afternoon.