Cutting Crime (Justice Reinvestment)

Alun Michael Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Beith]

It must be remembered that that was the response of the previous Government. I found that part disappointing because it got into a circular situation. If we simply look at the present prison population, we are looking at the failures of the past. If we do not change the policy, the situation will continue. I will return to that theme later in my remarks. Catching people early is of vital importance. The people who initially commit relatively minor offences sometimes go on to become those who, through drug dependency or something else, get into more serious offences and become subject to repeat custodial sentences because of the ever more serious or frequent crimes that they commit.

In 2007, the Texas state legislature rejected plans to spend $0.5 billion on new prisons in favour of a justice reinvestment approach. Half that money was spent on expanding the capacity of residential and out-patient treatment for substance misuse and mental health, community-based sanctions for offenders and post-release support to prisoners. Parole revocations were reduced, and the increase in the prison population was 90% smaller than had been predicted. Significant savings were made within two years, because the costs of increasing the capacity of treatment and residential facilities were significantly less than the cost of increasing prison capacity.

The Committee gave a great deal of detailed consideration to how justice reinvestment approaches could be applied to the system in England and Wales. We believe that the system as a whole should be revisited through a lens that looks at crime as a problem to be managed in a cost-effective way. A longer-term rational approach must be taken to policy and the diversion of resources. That would enable prisons that are currently stretched to deal more effectively with those for whom incarceration is necessary for public protection, and prevent the need for continued expansion in the number of prison places. Few hon. Members in the Chamber will not have visited prisons and seen the pressures under which prison officers work. Such officers desire more time and opportunity to devote to rehabilitative work. Ideally, they would work with smaller numbers of prisoners who need that kind of support, and they are anxious to provide it to them by using the skills that they have built up over the years.

We also suggest that probation services should be able to pay greater attention to those offenders who represent the greatest risk to the public. Lurking at the back of that is a problem to which I will refer later. We must find a way other than imprisonment to signify society’s disapproval of crime. For some, community sentences can be more demanding than prison. The week before last, we took evidence from four ex-offenders during our work on the probation service. Two of those offenders said that they had committed offences in order to get back inside, because that was easier than the community sentence on which they were engaged. In one case, the sentence did not seem to work well, because the daily supervision requirement prevented the person from taking a job. In both cases, people had committed offences that they knew would put them back in prison, which was the easier option. That is not often recognised by the public, who see prison as the only way of saying that society will not put up with crime. We must demonstrate that community sentences can fulfil that function, as well as reduce the risk of reoffending.

A priority for the Government is to find a mechanism to overcome the fact that we treat prison in the system as a “free good.” If the sentencer—judge or magistrate—has an offender before them, they may consider whether some form of rehabilitative treatment such as intensive supervision or a course of drug treatment, residential or otherwise, would be the right thing. Inquiries must then be made into whether that is available. If the sentencer says “prison”, the van pulls up outside the door and takes the person away. The prison system and the National Offender Management Service recognise that it is their obligation to take whoever the court sends. However, there is an imbalance between the automatic availability of prison, and the uncertain availability of an alternative, which might be much better in a given case.

We thought that the most promising way to deal with that issue was probably the devolution to local agencies and communities of resources that are spent on corrections. The first step would be to look at how money is currently spent on offenders across the system in Government Departments and statutory agencies. We felt that a business case could be made to move resources from a significant part of the prison building programme, if the numbers entering or re-entering the system could be reduced by a sufficient margin before contracts were signed for new prisons.

The Washington State Institute for Public Policy looked at the cost of imprisonment to the state, and developed an alternative model of investment that primarily involved investing in rehabilitation programmes that would break even over five years and yield considerable savings thereafter. It is therefore possible to reap significant rewards by adopting justice reinvestment approaches over a 10-year period.

Fundamental change in the pattern of public expenditure is entirely appropriate during times of economic difficulty. When is it more necessary to look at how we are spending money than when we realise that we have not got as much as we would like? That requires the Government to recognise that change must be facilitated by some movement of money and spending in other areas. When changes cut across departmental boundaries and involve transfers between central and local government budgets, it is rarely an easy process. We are looking not only for justice disinvestment but for justice reinvestment.

In order to release resources in the medium term by halting the prison building programme, investment is required in the shorter term. We must identify where resources are currently being wasted or duplicated, and where quick wins could be achieved by reducing the prison population if that money were reinvested. The amount required for reinvestment is relatively small when compared with the resources that would have been committed to building and running 96,000 prison places.

The Committee’s proposals are in line with what the previous Government sought to do—and significantly achieved—in diverting women away from crime. That explicitly linked the reduction of expenditure on women’s prison places with the funding of new initiatives to improve community provision. For two years, £7.8 million per year was committed to provide additional services in the community for women offenders who were not a danger to the public. That was an attempt to reduce the female prison population by 400 by 2012, as recommended by Baroness Corston in her 2007 report. Those initiatives have already borne fruit in reducing the number of women in prison. The investment required was a tiny sum in the context of spending on prisons.

The previous Government had some similar success in reducing custody for young offenders. We may no longer need a free-standing Youth Justice Board, and it is going, but we should recognise that it helped to achieve a sharp reduction in custody as a way of dealing with young offenders.

In both cases, the significant element was that there was a commissioning process, which created the opportunity to change the mix of custody and alternatives to custody that were available to sentencers. We argue that similar approaches should be adopted to deal more effectively with other groups of offenders, including low-level but persistent offenders, who frequently have problems with drugs, alcohol or mental health, or some combination of those things. The severely mentally ill could be dealt with more appropriately in the health care system.

Local services such as housing, drug agencies and mental health trusts, which could help to prevent people from reoffending when they are no longer in contact with the criminal justice system, are often under-resourced. Targeted investment in the areas where offenders and victims are known to live could ensure that services were more readily available, without having explicitly to prioritise access to offenders, whom the public would regard as a not particularly deserving target in themselves.

The right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth brought to the Select Committee his knowledge of what was happening in Cardiff and the work done by an accident and emergency consultant there. I hope that he will find an opportunity to refer to that in the course of this afternoon’s proceedings.

[Alun Michael (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is just possible.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I am giving the right hon. Gentleman a prompt, but I am sure that he does not need it.

Short-sentenced prisoners frequently end up in custody after repeated community sentences. There is a need to examine why community sentences are breached and why some offenders continue to offend. We concluded that that was partly because the sentences are under-resourced. There are waiting lists for offender behaviour programmes and assessments for mental health and treatment. Probation officers typically have extremely large case loads, and often we are talking about people with completely disorganised lives who just do not get up in the morning. What they need is not a very short prison sentence but someone to bang on the door and get them out doing the community programme that they are supposed to be carrying out. They need someone to exercise some authority.

In the course of the inquiry on probation, we have spoken to ex-offenders, and what they said was very illuminating. They made it clear that they needed probation officers to challenge them, not simply to offer friendship and a cup of coffee, however desirable it is to establish a relationship. They needed probation officers to challenge them because, as they openly admitted, their behaviour needed challenging. Their unwillingness to do some of the things that they needed to do to turn their lives around needed someone with authority to challenge it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alun Michael (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to sit under your supervision today, Mrs Main, and I hope that I do not strain your patience too far.

I join the Chairman of the Committee, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), in paying tribute to all our colleagues across the four parties who were members of the Committee. I say four parties as an MP for the Co-operative party, which is the fourth-largest party in Parliament. We do have to remind everyone that we are here, some of the time. The partnership we are in is an open and honest pre-election one, which has lasted for many decades, and so it is worth drawing it to the attention of the House. I also join the right hon. Gentleman in paying tribute to the staff of the Committee—Fergus Reid and his team—and particularly to Gemma Buckland who gave enormous good service to the Committee by being good not only at producing evidence and thoughtful contributions, but at challenging members when we got a bit carried away, as we did on occasion.

I thoroughly enjoyed—if that is the right word—my three years on the Committee, and I pay tribute to the consensual way in which the Chairman sought to tackle some major issues. I have now gone on to try different pastures on the Home Affairs Committee, but the complementary nature of the agendas of those two Committees is something that we overlook at our peril. I am certain that the Justice Committee is safe in the hands of the right hon. Gentleman.

The point about justice reinvestment is that it is not an academic concept but a deeply practical one. It is not about being soft on crime—I underline the Committee Chairman’s comments in that regard—but about being effective. It was interesting to discover the clinical approach in the USA, to which the right hon. Gentleman referred, which rather goes against the general image of how justice is dispensed on that continent.

There are two exemplary initiatives that the previous Government pursued—not without some challenges—and the right hon. Gentleman referred to them both. One was the previous Government’s success in reducing youth offending at the same time as reducing youth custody, and the second was dealing with women in the criminal justice system. The numbers involved in those two groups are lower than the overall prison population, but we should take very much to heart the lessons about what worked.

In his conclusion, the right hon. Gentleman offered three challenges to Ministers, including whether Ministers are ready openly to take on the “prison works” agenda. We could ask a wider question: is Parliament ready to take on the “prison works” agenda? To my mind, it is only if the consensus on the way forward that developed in the Select Committee is reflected across the Chamber that Ministers will have the authority to do that. I hope that we will provide that sort of supportive opposition in the coming years. Secondly, the right hon. Gentleman was certainly right to say that there is a big challenge to ensure that the alternatives are available, and I shall come back to that in a moment. Thirdly, the really big challenge is ensuring that the cuts do not put a roadblock in the way of applying common sense to how we deal with criminal activity.

I want to focus on a small number of points. The first is the use of methodology in analysing crime, to find ways to prevent it. Crime mapping and the methodology of analysing crime has not been applied with the consistency that we might desire. Crime reduction partnerships have been a success, but the methodology has not been driven consistently at every level. The right hon. Gentleman referred to Jonathan Shepherd, who made the point that

“more imaginative use could be made of existing local data without extra cost, if it is collated by the partner agency electronically, anonymised”—

as has happened with health information in Cardiff—

“and passed on to someone with the capacity to analyse it.”

Since that was stated in the report, an appointment has been made jointly by the police and the health authority, so that data could be analysed properly and productively, without having to be transferred. It is striking that not only did the initial work of analysing data lead to steps that helped to reduce crime, but progressively it has been possible to drive crime down further and further.

The implication of some of the evidence that we received was that the skills of mapping and analysing crime are bedded in within the police, but not within other agencies. I rather suspect that there is a difference in methodology, in that local authorities are probably better at doing the longer-term mapping and projections and the police are rather better at taking the incident and asking, “What does this tell us that we ought to be doing today or tomorrow?” Ideally, the combination of that immediacy and that longer-term mapping ought to be a virtuous one, but I rather suspect that some of the time they rub up against each other and that that is one reason why the approach is not as effective as it should be. The approaches should complement each other, and it seems that they do in places such as Manchester and Liverpool. Where the partnership works it is immensely powerful, as the Home Affairs Committee heard from representatives speaking on behalf of the Local Government Association on Tuesday, primarily in relation to Liverpool and Merseyside.

The right hon. Gentleman rightly suggested that I might refer to Jonathan Shepherd’s work, and I want to say why I think that that work is so important. Professor Shepherd came to see me at a surgery about 15 years ago. He said that, as a surgeon, he had discovered that he had, in effect, two in-trays. One was for those who had been injured in car accidents and the other was for those who had been injured in violent offences. He was struck by the fact that the in-tray for car accidents was getting smaller year on year, while the in-tray for incidents of violence was getting bigger, and he wondered why that was. Could it be that science and engineering skills are being applied to understanding motoring injuries, leading to developments such as air bags, seat belts and improved tyres and brakes, but that we are not applying the same skills of analysis to crimes of violence and driving policy forward logically?

The answer came when Cardiff’s new crime reduction partnership tried an experiment. Professor Shepherd supplied a nurse scientist, the local authority supplied a victim support worker and the police supplied a police officer. All the incidents that resulted in people going into hospital were properly analysed. Two things came out of that. First, we thought that the statistics would be pushed up, because many offences were not being reported. In fact, that did not happen. The gain was fairly immediate. Secondly, we thought that the experiment would confirm what we already knew, which was that offending was by and large random across the city centre, but it did not. Instead, it proved that a couple of small locations and one large one accounted for a totally disproportionate number of the injuries that led to people putting a burden of cost, time and effort on the national health service. The benefits of the partnership’s work were enormous in terms of reducing victimisation and the number of people who needed to be taken to court, with the consequences that that has for prison numbers.

We need to return to the methodology put in place in the crime reduction partnerships in the first instance. If that methodology is applied consistently, with requirements being centrally driven, but actions and decision making being local, we will have the best of both worlds. The methodology involved analysing crime and disorder; including the public’s view, as well as police statistics, in analysis; setting priorities; developing a joint strategy that is clinically precise in targeting identified problems—there are a few words there that need unpacking fairly carefully if we are to understand their true significance; setting targets that are jointly measured; undertaking annual evaluation and recalibration; and returning after three years to renew the audit and the strategy so that the link between the facts, the community and the strategy is renewed.

The benefits are local targets and clear understanding. In that way, we have success at a local level driving national success, instead of targets being set under a more top-down system. Generally, the approach that I have described has been a success story, but immense benefits could be gained if the methodology were emphasised more clinically.

[Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)]

As a new member of the Justice Committee, may I say what an absolute pleasure it is to listen to former members, who did so much incredibly good work in the report, revisiting these issues and making an impassioned case for similar pieces of analysis to be carried out in the future? I wholeheartedly support that view. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree, however, that the one piece missing from the list of valuable items that he gave us is accountability? Before the election, I was lucky enough to be involved in work on the Conservative party policy on the rehabilitation revolution. One thing that really struck me—

[Claire Perry]

Yes, I am coming to my point. One thing that really struck me was the lack of accountability in the system and the fact that one person should be responsible. I would be grateful if the right hon. Gentleman commented on that.

[Alun Michael]

It is not an individual who needs to be accountable, but the system. The way to ensure that that happens is to have the facts out in the open. It is tragic that, 12 years on, I still cannot get proper local analysis and information on trends in wards in my constituency. I know that the police are analysing the information they get and using it to inform their activity, and I know that the local authority and the police are working in partnership and sharing information, but it is not out there for individual members of the community. This is not about one individual—it does not matter whether they are an elected mayor, the chief executive of a local authority, a chief constable or whatever. Anything that depends on just one individual is doomed to failure; indeed, if I may say so, anything that depends even on one Minister is of limited value. It is a question of having transparency so that there can be proper accountability. To that extent, I agree with the hon. Lady. I am very much describing a system that allows proper accountability and transparency.

I referred to the work of Professor Shepherd in Cardiff because many lessons have been learned from it, but the real lessons—about applying a proper methodology and having transparency—have not been learned adequately or transferred to other bodies. Targeted policing has reduced licensed premises and street violence, as well as reducing violence-related A and E attendance in Cardiff by 40% since 2002. That is a 40% reduction in the number of people going over the A and E threshold for treatment. That is a much more effective measure than any of the general police or criminal justice measurements. That endorses some of the evidence from the British crime survey.

There is a second big point that I want to make. One reason why there is a muddle is that we are still not totally clear about the purpose of the criminal justice system. We need to be much clearer that it has a single purpose, which is consistent with what the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice said in recent evidence to the Home Affairs Committee and with what Sir Robert Peel said when he gave his reasons for establishing the police service: the criminal justice system is meant to prevent offending and reoffending. If every agency focused on its contribution to that objective, rather than intermediate objectives, we would reach the point we all want to reach, with fewer people becoming victims.

I mention victims because we keep talking about their interests, and it is right to do so, but let us be clear about what we mean by that. I have been enormously struck by the clarity that has been offered on more than one occasion by Victim Support, which has said that what victims want, other than not to become victims of an offence in the first place, is to know that they will not become victims again. They want to know that something has been done about the activity that led to their becoming victims so that such things are less likely to happen in future.

One positive development in recent months has been the establishment of the Sentencing Council, which I welcome. I sat on the Committee that dealt with the legislation that introduced it. We should go a stage further by being much more precise about the council’s purpose, and I tabled amendments at the time that I would have liked to make to the legislation. The council’s purpose should be to analyse what works so that when sentencers take their decisions, they are fully cognisant of the likely impact on lessening the likelihood of further offences.

The report specifically refers to these issues. The Committee says:

“We believe that the role of the Sentencing Council should be to ensure that sentencing practice succeeds in reducing offending and re-offending.”

We talk about the need for the council to be

“well-resourced to enable it to perform its research function.”

We mention the time that it has taken for data to be adequate to inform decision making. We ask for the council to be told to

“consider how sentencers can be given a better understanding of what works in terms of reducing offending and re-offending”.

Ensuring that judges and magistrates understand the implications and likely effects of their sentences would help the whole criminal justice system and be very much in Ministers’ interests. I could develop that point, but it is fairly clear and simple, and the report’s recommendations are clearly set out.

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman is right about the paucity of information that is available for sentencers. It is worrying that we rely on the public spiritedness, intelligence and inquisitiveness of judges and magistrates to determine the problems in their localities and reflect them in local sentencing, but there is no system to give them access to proper objective evidence and information. I am grateful that the right hon. Gentleman has highlighted that point.

[Alun Michael]

We went through a period when sentencers were almost discouraged from going to see what was happening. In my time on the bench, which was quite a long time ago, I used to spend time, particularly with respect to youth justice, going to see where we were sending people. That included community as well as custodial disposals. It was invaluable. Under the previous Government, we moved back to encouraging sentencers to engage in an understanding of the places where people were to go. However, it is clear from work done by charities that more could be done, and that not enough is known, particularly by judges, who have a disproportionate influence, through the training programme, on the decisions of magistrates. They set the tone. A lot needs to be done in that area.

Incidentally, the issue of purpose arose elsewhere. The Committee also undertook an inquiry into the role of the prison officer, which overlapped with the later stages of the justice reinvestment work, and I want to draw attention to one of our conclusions:

“The aim of imprisonment should be to reduce re-offending, while treating prisoners with humanity and keeping them appropriately secure.”

That clarity of purpose should be reflected in the aims and objectives of the prison service, and in the way in which its activities are measured. If lots of other things are used as measures they get in the way of that overall objective.

It is important for us to mainstream the objective of reducing crime and reoffending. In the report on justice reinvestment we said:

“We are concerned that there has been low take-up of crime-related indicators in local areas and we believe that local strategic partnerships should better reflect the priority given to crime as a matter of public concern both nationally and locally.”

That is something that local MPs and councillors have, in my experience, always considered important, because it is important to their constituents. Therefore it is not impossible, if the information and data are adequate, to achieve coherence. There is a need for coherence across several Departments—we refer in the report to the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and others—to ensure the most appropriate allocation of resources to reduce crime. The report states:

“A considerable amount of management information about offenders is held locally by prisons, probation areas and other providers which, if captured centrally, would provide a wealth of material to support the case for cross-departmental reform.”

The idea that reform should be cross-departmental is important, because most of the resources that affect offending, for good or ill—the resources that, if applied in the right way, lead to a reduction in reoffending, or, if not properly applied, lead to a likely increase—lie outside the criminal justice system. That, too, is highlighted in the report.

One of the things that worries me most at present is the decision made in rather too much of a rush by the incoming Government to cut the support for, and the pledge to, unemployed young people. I do not say that just to be oppositional. I came into national politics because I worked with unemployed young people and saw their hopelessness. It was what led me to decide we needed to change things nationally. That is going back to the 1980s. I believe that the end of the pledge was foolish and short-sighted, but, more to the point, in relation to the criminal justice system, it may turn out to be a very expensive step. It was meant to save money, but I believe it will prove expensive. The drivers of offending and reoffending, or the things that can reduce them, are education or the lack of qualifications, basic skills and employment-related skills; drug rehabilitation or its inadequacy; mental health—we know that mental health problems are the trigger for the activities of many people who end up in prison; and housing. Those are the four drivers of the apocalypse of reoffending, so to speak. There is a need somehow to connect those four areas of provision and efforts to reduce reoffending.

If I were to include a fifth element it would be relationships. We underestimate the extent to which relationships or their lack, or failure, drive offending and reoffending. There is a connection between those things and the other four drivers. I suggest that, for instance—and this came out in the report on prisons—trying to turn prisons into learning establishments where prison officers and prisoners share the sense of the importance of learning opportunities would make an enormous difference. I heard on the “Today” programme a couple of weeks ago a reference to a protest in America, where local people objected to the fact that prisoners were being given greater educational opportunities than prison officers. The result was that educational provision for the prisoners was reduced. The obvious thing would have been to increase the educational opportunity for prison officers and turn that into a shared preoccupation. I have certainly come across prison officers with a passion for education and a wish for learning, who care about what they are doing. I suggest that that approach would make a great difference.

My other particular concern at present is last week’s announcement of the ending of the Youth Justice Board. The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed said that he hoped its work would continue elsewhere. He acknowledged that the work of the youth offending teams, bringing the different professions together in tackling youth offending, has been quite successful. My worry is about the fact that the expertise on youth offending and what can work in tackling it does not lie in Departments. It is not the sort of thing that civil servants do well. They are good on policy development, and so on, but from ministerial experience, I would say they do not have the professional expertise that the Youth Justice Board provided in support of the youth offending teams. We need that expertise somehow to be reinstituted, or the Minister may find that the effectiveness of work with young offenders starts to move backwards.

Justice reinvestment is not about massively increasing the resources that we put into the criminal justice system. Indeed, it is potentially about reducing them by using the available resources in a much more targeted and effective way. It is therefore an approach that should be attractive to the Government, just as it provoked a positive response from the previous Government. Does that mean that we have a boring consensus across party lines? No, I think that we had a very exciting convergence of views in the Select Committee, driven by the evidence rather than by the media. That is in the public interest, for three reasons: first, it is in the interest of good administration and governance; secondly, it makes the best use of available resources and stops demand for them getting out of hand—and we have seen how great the risk is, under successive Governments, of the demand for prison resources in particular getting out of hand; and thirdly, it delivers on the victim-centred agenda of reducing the likelihood that people will become victims a second or third time.

The Justice Committee’s report is the product of remarkable consensus among Members of Parliament in the four main parties. The members of the Committee put in a considerable amount of time. That was true not only of the Chairman but also, on the Conservative side, the new Chairman of the Treasury Committee—there should be an ally there—the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie), and on the Labour Benches myself and my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead). When we came to the writing of the report we expected we would be up against it. We expected a degree of cross-party controversy. However, perhaps it says something about the quality of the evidence and about the considerable investment of time in the inquiry over two years, as the Chairman of the Committee said, that we found ourselves in passionate agreement at the end.

I revert to comments by Professor Jonathan Shepherd, cited in paragraph 309 of the report, who

“advocated offender management schools and institutes in research intensive universities, similar to the police school model, and argued that such institutions can be cost-neutral.”

In analysing crime—what causes crime and what can drive it down—methodology is absolutely crucial. That is central, as well as a proper understanding of the actual experience of crime at a local level. The way forward is to put correct methodology at the centre, then trusting people to apply it locally, understanding the needs of their community and communicating those needs and the methods with which they are approaching them. That is precisely the approach to transparency and accountability that the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) asked me to underline. The justice reinvestment report offers an agenda that it would be wise for Government and Opposition to support in the coming months and years.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Buckland]

My hon. Friend hit on an important point about NOMS. While we welcome the dedicated and hard work of members of NOMS, some of us wonder whether the synthesis between dealing with offenders in the prison estate and offenders in the community was ever achieved by NOMS. That was one of its purposes. It was to look in an overarching way at the whole system, and to provide some synthesis which, frankly, has not happened.

Tempting as it is to lament the rise and fall of various quangos—some speakers referred to this but, with respect to them, that misses the point—their best point, which the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth mentioned, is that we must not lose the expertise and knowledge of the people who worked so hard within those bodies. The Minister, I am sure, has taken that point very much on board in the case of the Youth Justice Board.

I make the point now, I hope clearly, that we must remember that youth justice ought to be treated in a discrete, separate way. It is not appropriate to meld the system of youth justice in with that of adult justice. They are two different beasts, which require two different approaches, and we must not forget that. At the same time, the issue of transition between the youth justice system and the adult system can be difficult—practically, for sentences, in terms of the gymnastics that they have to go through in remembering which particular regime fits what. My point is that the public interest is best served, when it comes to young offenders, by the sort of focused, early-intervention approach that I know everyone in the Chamber and in the wider community supports.

My point is about the public interest and how it is best served. I have talked about reoffending rates, but will now look in some detail at the part of the report that dealt with confidence in community sentences. That has been the issue about which politicians have danced for many years. They have worried about weak community sentences being poorly monitored and implemented, resulting in higher rates of reoffending.

The question of confidence is key here, but how do we achieve that? We have already been shown several important pointers, such as the Diamond project. The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed referred to the issue, but it is important that we reiterate it. Community sentences will fail if they are not properly policed, and they will be ineffective if they are not adequately monitored. There are some good examples of community sentences that work. For example, the drug rehabilitation requirement sentence, which is a high-intensity sentence, involves a regular review—it can be monthly or it can be held at less frequent intervals—by a Crown court judge or magistrate. Under such regimes, judges will see defendants on a regular basis and open up a dialogue with them. They will challenge the defendant if the requirement is not being met and assist them if a particular issue needs to be addressed, such as non-compliance because of work restrictions or requirements or problems with a methadone prescription if the defendant has been convicted of possessing or supplying a controlled drug. Such sentences are having a really positive impact on not only the individuals themselves but the communities in which they live.

The power to review sentences regularly already exists in section 178 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The Government, in their response to the Committee, referred to their piloting of the use of section 178 in a range of different orders. I am interested to know—I will forgive the Minister if he does not have an answer today—the results of that pilot. I want to know the extent of it and the different types of orders that were used. It seems that if we give judges more involvement in the policing of community sentences, it will have a greater impact on the offender and go a long way towards promoting confidence in our sentencing regime.

The Diamond project used a range of mechanisms to enforce compliance with the order. Police officers or community support officers regularly knock on the doors of the homes of offenders to ensure that they attend the community project. We were looking at unpaid work in Lambeth the other day. We discussed how the scheme worked and we met offenders and former offenders who were working in the project. The input of former offenders—the euphemism nowadays is service users, which is relevant in this context—was vital, because they had gone through the system, come out successfully and were not reoffending. They were, I suppose, setting an example to those on the current order who, at times, were having difficulties or issues. It was wonderful to see people of experience assisting those who were on the order.

We spoke to some of those on the unpaid work scheme. Most of them understood the purpose of the order. They knew that it was not just about them and their rehabilitation but about their punishment. One gentleman I spoke to—I will not quote him out of court—did not quite get that point. It is important to hold such conversations because it helps us to understand the nature of punishment in our society.

For many years, the role of punishment in the criminal justice system has been hotly debated. Many protagonists say that punishment has no role in the criminal justice system, but, with respect, they entirely misunderstand where we are with punishment now. Their view of punishment comes from the 19th century, and we have moved on a long way since then. Punishment encapsulates not just custody and loss of liberty but a range of approaches that can be taken within the community. The example I would give is the one alluded to by my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed when he mentioned one of the witnesses who gave evidence before the Justice Select Committee last week. The witness talked about her wish to be challenged by probation officers. Challenging people’s behaviour and facing up to them is a modern form of punishment. I am talking not about having a cuddly cup of tea but about saying, “Look, what you are doing is wrong. The way you are behaving is inappropriate. What are you going to do about it?” That is challenging the individual to face up to what they have done, to understand why they did it and to move on to be a better citizen.

It is wholly artificial to divide punishment from rehabilitation and public protection. The truth is that they all elide to. In many ways, getting the punishment right will ensure that the offender is rehabilitated and the public are protected.

I come back now to the point that I made at the beginning of my address, which is that the public interest is best served by a system that results in a lower rate of reoffending. That is why justice reinvestment is common sense. It not only saves the Exchequer massive amounts of revenue and protects the public but makes better citizens of those people who end up in the system.

The right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth made a vital point about access to information about local rates of offending, where the hotspots are and what the problems are. It is vital that sentencers—the judiciary and lay magistracy—have full access to the hard facts, because it will help them reflect local sentencing priorities. I am not saying that Cardiff has a particular problem. In fact, it is very well managed by Jonathan Shepherd, the University Hospital of Wales and the local police. There are other parts of the world in which crimes of violence are still a huge problem. The public of those particular towns or cities demand, quite rightly, that sentences be passed to reflect those problems.

[Alun Michael]

Although I agree with what the hon. Gentleman says, there is another side to the coin. If people see the correct trends—what is actually happening—that can inspire more confidence, too. For example, St Mellons had very high burglary levels at one period. Much was done and there was a massive drop. If we hear that there has been a slight incremental rise in the area, and we look at it against a 10 or 15-year perspective, we see that it is only a slight ripple rather than a major increase. It is just as important to give the good news to local communities as it is to identify hotspots.

[Mr Buckland]

Absolutely. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for putting the matter in context. I have been talking about the end result—clearing up the spilled milk—but a lot of the targeting work is all about intervention to manage out the problem. That is a very important point here. A lot of the work that the Committee did was about not just looking at the end result of sentencing but intervening at an earlier stage to get it right and to avoid having to rely on a criminal justice system that does not always deal with problems appropriately, particularly when it comes to young offenders. The restorative justice concept is a prime example of the alternative approach.

I will end by reminding the Minister of the meeting that we had some weeks ago in Birmingham with key players in mental health. It was a very productive round-table discussion, hosted by the National Centre for Mental Health. We were lucky to be joined by senior consultant forensic psychiatrists and the mother of a young man who, as a result of serious drug problems, ended up with a mental health problem and was treated inappropriately by the criminal justice system.

I make this plea—I hope that the Minister will forgive me for making it because he has heard it from me before, but I make no apology for that—that we must get the diversionary therapies and methods absolutely right when it comes to mental health, not only in the Crown court and the magistrates court, in terms of making it easier for sentencers to pass mental health treatment conditions as part of a community order, but at the police station too. That means ensuring that if a desk sergeant or even a duty solicitor or any person who comes into contact with an arrested person, an accused person or a suspect is able to have recourse to community psychiatric nursing help—[Interruption.] I do not know if the person who is in charge of the amplification system wanted me to make that point more clearly. [Laughter.] However, I am happy that it has been amplified and made more clearly.

The intervention of community psychiatric nursing at that level and the professional input of mental health services will go a long way to ensuring that people who have genuine mental health problems end up being treated appropriately rather than in a criminal justice system that far too often fails them, resulting in inappropriate prison sentences being imposed and in the alarming statistics that we are all depressingly familiar with regarding the number of people in our prisons who have mental health conditions.

At the top end of the scale, I would argue that the Mental Health Act provides very important and valuable services for those people with acute mental health problems. However, it is more towards the middle and the bottom end of the scale that the system is, I am afraid, quite simply deficient.

It is very much a question of commissioning. The Minister will agree with me that collaborative work with the Department of Health is essential if we are to get the mental health services that we need. So I urge him to do all he can as a member of the new Government to ensure that, by the time we get to the new commissioning regime next year, mental health services are at the top of the list when it comes to new provision.

On that note, I conclude my remarks, Mrs Main, and I am very grateful to you.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Llwyd]

As I said, I went to the States with a preconception that I would not approve of the veterans court. However, other courts refer to that court as a means of disposal. Other courts deal with ex-service people who have committed such offences, and if they think that the person concerned would benefit from Judge Russell’s assistance, they are referred for disposal to the veterans court. In effect, it is not a twin-track system for any class of society, but it is a different disposal. The scheme is well worthy of examination.

[Alun Michael]

The problem cited by the Minister is a lawyer’s problem, rather than a practical problem. There should not be too strict an adherence to the tariff as anything other than a starting point for sentencing. The tariff should be calibrated according to what will work in the particular set of circumstances, as well as according to the nature of the offences. That is a much more intelligent way of approaching these matters.

[Mr Llwyd]

I realise that the right hon. Gentleman has a great deal of experience in the field of sentencing and I take on board what he says. I commend the set-up I have mentioned to everybody here today, because it is well worthy of examination and it could be adapted for use in England and Wales.

We also need to change the way in which we approach punishment, particularly in respect of less serious offences. The Committee wisely said:

“We are concerned that an unthinking acceptance has evolved of punishment—for its own sake—as the paramount purpose of sentencing, and as the only way of registering the seriousness with which society regards a crime.”

In my view, there is a one-eyed approach to the matter, which may be a product of tabloid mania over the issue. It is very difficult to have a reasonable and reasoned debate about the issue without being drowned out and dictated to by the unwelcome drum beat of the tabloid press. The key elements of sentencing have always been and still are: punishment, deterrence and rehabilitation. All three are vital to a humane and purposeful sentencing strategy. Sadly, at the moment, scant time is paid to rehabilitation, which is key if we are going to get away from the revolving door scenario, which plagues society, the taxpayer and all of us.

If we take a different line regarding justice, we must consider the proposals in the report, which suggests shifting resources towards rehabilitation services, not cutting them. It also suggests investing in what it calls “prehabilitation”—in other words, preventing more crimes from taking place. That would mean pouring extra resources into areas outside the criminal justice system. Social exclusion, low educational engagement, substance misuse, mental health problems, unemployment, the lack of social housing and other issues must all be tackled.

People who fall into the criminal justice system are often caught in a vicious cycle, particularly those incarcerated on short-term sentences. Evidence shows that people serving short-term sentences are far more likely to reoffend and that they do not learn anything from their experience in prison. A vicious cycle can be interrupted and can become a virtuous cycle. Improving preventive measures, such as effective investment in housing, employment and alcohol and drug services would reduce the burden on the Ministry of Justice’s purse. Such an approach would also involve local and central agencies proving that we can work together in a big society—or whatever the term might be.

Evidently, the impact of the spending review on these plans will be fundamental and possibly uncompromising. Reinvestment is simply not possible if there is no money to reinvest. How can we know where the money will be after 2014? Considering the negative swing we will see as an effect of the cuts to probation, clerks, court clerks and court services, the burden on the prison estate will only become greater by 2014. I hope that I am wrong, but the cuts have been rushed. They have not been properly thought through and the position has possibly been compromised because other Departments have been given preference—although I do not know whether that is the case. Such an approach is simply not going to work. I desperately hope I am wrong, because we all know that justice is essential to the well-being of our communities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Goodman]

My overriding point is about a target for the prison population irrespective of what is happening to crime rates. I agree that crime rates have fallen, and they did so in large measure because of the Labour Government’s excellent policies over the past 13 years. The hon. Gentleman is laughing, but the truth of the matter is that if policy has an impact on behaviour, that is as true of the policies that have been pursued over the past 12 years as it is of any that may be in his mind.

[Alun Michael]

We are in danger of losing track of the key point because of the slightly partisan approach. Surely, as my hon. Friend says, setting arbitrary numbers is not what will bring success in reducing offending or prison numbers. Doing the right things will reduce offending and reoffending. I suggest that that is the key point of the report.

[Helen Goodman]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I am grateful to him for digging me out of that hole.

What is really valuable in the report is the clear emphasis on reducing reoffending, improving rehabilitation services for people with drug and alcohol problems and mental illnesses, and the demonstration that alternatives to custody can be cost effective. Without lower reoffending rates, it will be difficult to make progress in reducing prison numbers, and I would like to echo the Committee's contention that it should be a guiding principle of the judicial system that each offender should be less likely to reoffend after they complete their sentence than they were before. There is likely to be strong agreement on that point on both sides of the House, and I am pleased that polling shows that 72% of the public also believe that more should be done to rehabilitate offenders. Providing appropriate training and education and alcohol, drug and mental health support are all absolutely central to cutting reoffending rates. Although one would not know it from the crude depiction by the Justice Secretary and other hon. Members of the prison system under the previous Government, Labour made real progress, and the report acknowledges that.

I remind hon. Members that today’s crime statistics show an 8% fall over the past year, as well as rising confidence in the criminal justice system. Reoffending rates have fallen by 16% since 2000, and overall crime fell by more than one third over the lifetime of the Labour Government. During that time, funding for drug treatment programmes saw a fifteenfold increase, and there was a 26% rise in the number of offenders who successfully completed rehabilitation courses. We trebled spending on prisoner education programmes, and our response to the Bradley and Corston reports showed our commitment to improving mental health treatment for prisoners and the position of women offenders.

Given yesterday’s statement by the Chancellor and the savage cuts to the Department’s budget, will the Minister assure us that funding for those programmes will not now be cut? I echo the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) and the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd). If cuts are to be made, will that not undo our good work and make serious problems even worse?

We know that the number of front-line staff will be cut by 11,000. That will mean 15% fewer prison staff and probation officers, although the number of prisoners is projected to fall by 4%. Will it be possible to do more work with offenders and cut reoffending rates? The documents published yesterday said that people with mental health problems will be diverted at an earlier stage, and many hon. Members said that that would be a positive development. It will be a positive development if people in the Ministry of Justice have agreed it with their colleagues, and if the NHS has made provision for the additional resources needed. That is another point on which I would like to hear what the Minister has to say, either today or later in writing.

The report also warns that the Government should not move away from contracting probation and rehabilitation services to small organisations with a strong track record. Will the coalition’s plans for payment by results not have precisely that impact, with larger groups with good cash flows being better positioned to win contracts and squeeze out smaller competitors? The Government will not be able to make a success of their policy to reduce numbers in prison if they do not redirect resources into tackling the social exclusion that lies at the root of much criminal activity. They must provide the rehabilitative services that offenders need, particularly at a time when we can expect unemployment, and consequently acquisitive crime, to rise.

Much of that spend is outside the Ministry of Justice, but cuts to housing and youth services are likely to be a particular problem. Ministers are clearly using the well-intentioned and prudent proposal to reorientate spending as a smokescreen for cuts in spending on prison places, while failing to invest in the support services that are desperately needed if a more community-orientated approach is to prove effective.

The policy outlined by the Government of cutting spending on probation, rehabilitation and preventive services at the same time as there are significant funding cuts for prison places, is not coherent. As the Committee warns in its report, front-line spending cuts for prisons and probation would

“undermine the progress in performance of both services.”

In short, it would simply exacerbate the problems that the report seeks to remedy.

We need coherent, joined-up responses to the proposals that will allocate resources for our prison population and support the investment in prehabilitation and rehabilitation services that we need in order to reduce long-term offending and reoffending rates.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Crispin Blunt)]

First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) who is sitting opposite me. We have followed a similar path from our respective Whips Offices to Front-Bench responsibility, and I congratulate her on becoming a shadow Justice Minister. I notice that she did not spend an enormous amount of time defending the record of the previous Administration, which was probably wise.

In recounting the record, she commented on the number of courses that people have completed, and the expenditure on programmes. I want to draw attention to one way in which things are changing by saying that those are inputs. We are not going to measure inputs; we are going to measure outputs and what is achieved by the system. We will give those who operate the criminal justice system and in whose charge offenders are placed, as much professional freedom as we can to enable them to exercise their best professional judgment and effect the rehabilitation revolution that we so badly need.

[Alun Michael]

The Minister makes an interesting point by suggesting that he will measure things by outcomes. That is a sensible way to proceed but he must tell us how he will manage it without the inputs.

[Mr Blunt]

I would like to draw the attention of the right hon. Gentleman to a passage in his contribution where he talked about methodology. I was trying to write his remarks down, but he went through that part of his speech rather too quickly. He said words such as “the requirement of that methodology”, “centrally driven”, “clinically measured”, “setting targets” and “evaluated annually.” I recommend that he go back and look at such passages in his speech, and imagine what that language is like for someone who is on the receiving end of the methodology and targets that flow from it. That is the system we have inherited.

I have talked to professionals in the field, particularly the youth offending teams who are overseen by the Youth Justice Board. The leaders of the youth offending teams spend far too much of their time looking upwards to respond to the oversight that they receive from the Youth Justice Board, rather than looking downwards to deliver their services. If the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me, that is an example of where we have got the balance wrong and where changes are needed. It is the same for the probation service and the performance measurements and targets that are imposed on it. We must move to a system that gives professionals more freedom to exercise their judgment in the best interests of the people in their care.

[Alun Michael]

rose—

[Mr Blunt]

I will give way for the last time, otherwise I will not get a chance to reply to the debate.

[Alun Michael]

I am grateful to the Minister for generously admitting that he was not keeping up with my explanation. It had nothing to do with the work of the Youth Justice Board; I was pointing out that the simple methodology of partnership working by local people in a local area who work together to identify the problems and produce solutions, has worked through the crime and disorder reduction partnerships over the past 12 or 13 years. The problem with the youth offending teams is not that of looking upwards or at centrally-set targets. The issue is about whether the professionalism exists in the Minister’s Department and the Home Office to support that sort of work. I suggest that it does not.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alun Michael]

That is enough spin.

[Mr Blunt]

Well, I am grateful to receive support, wherever it comes from. I welcome the repentance of the Leader of the Opposition.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Blunt]

That realism probably reflects my own assessment of the situation. We have to do what my hon. Friend describes. It is our responsibility and duty as parliamentarians to say and do what is right.

[Alun Michael]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Blunt]

Will the right hon. Gentleman forgive me if I do not? Otherwise, I simply will not get through my remarks.

[Alun Michael]

I will be brief.

[Mr Blunt]

Well, if the right hon. Gentleman accepts that I will not finish my remarks, I will give way to him.

[Alun Michael]

I counsel the Minister that now is the time, when there is still something of a honeymoon going on, for him to build bridges across the Chamber as well. Contributions that are a little less partisan and some recognition of the considerable achievements of the last Government would help to create the consensus across the Chamber that will be very important for Ministers in future, as well as for good practice in Parliament.

[Mr Blunt]

I can well understand, given the quality of the inheritance that we received, why the right hon. Gentleman would be anxious for me to pursue that line.

Let me comment on some of the other contributions to the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) made the point that we can be either smart or stupid about our attitude to crime. He spoke about the need for confidence in community sentences, to which I want to return.

The hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) was kind enough to take interventions from me in relation to his experience of a veterans court in the United States. I re-emphasise that I shall want to consider the evidence that he provides to me in that area. I just caution him to be slightly careful, in terms of commenting on leaks, numbers of job losses and everything else, about taking the opinion of some trade unions in this area too directly. Their record of accuracy is not highly precise. The National Association of Probation Officers over-estimated the number of veterans in the justice system by about a factor of three.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Blunt]

I fear not. A very careful study by the Defence Analytical Services Agency assessed the number at 3.5%, but let us not be diverted by that. I was making a wider point about the reliability of the people whom the hon. Gentleman was adducing in evidence. I think that as the position becomes clear with regard to the consequences of the spending review, the probation service will realise that the Lord Chancellor has batted for it in a particularly effective way. If we are to address issues and change the balance in relation to short sentences—we do not expect any savings in terms of the prison system if there are changes in patterns and fewer people being given short sentences—the first thing to say is that we will not end the capacity of the magistracy and the judiciary to use short prison sentences if they feel that that is necessary, but we would obviously hope that their use would be reduced. That means either community sentences or longer sentences. Those are the two alternatives that arise from it, so it would be unwise to assume any reduction in the overall number of prison places required, as a result of a change in policy in that area, because some of the changes will involve people going to prison for longer so that they can be effectively rehabilitated within the safety of custody.

The other point that I want to make to the hon. Gentleman is that the public sector is not the only source of money. I commend to him the social investment model that has begun at Peterborough; it is a model that we will wish to widen. If we can get external investors to invest, so that savings can be made—that is much at the centre of the principle of the justice reinvestment report—it frankly does not matter where that extra capacity comes from.

In the end, this is not about just money; there is an enormous capacity in the community. In the voluntary sector, the charitable community and the private sector there are people who want to give their services, in whatever form, to the Ministry of Justice and to the state, to help us with the task of rehabilitating offenders. At the moment, our system is not very good at making it easy for those people to give their services, or to sell them to us, on a not-for-profit or indeed a for-profit basis, to grow this country’s capacity to deliver rehabilitation. The responsibility that sits on me now, in terms of designing the policies—on rehabilitation in particular—that we will present in the Green Paper, is to create a system that will make it that much easier for us to draw on the capacity that is sitting out there in the country; to ensure that in co-ordination with the existing state services, in probation and elsewhere, we can deliver a much more effective rehabilitation package than we do today. This is not about replacing those services but about adding to them.

The other half of that process is to ensure that all the existing state services, particularly those delivered at a local level, are co-ordinated that much more effectively, to deliver the interventions that are needed to address the multifaceted problems that normally afflict most people who are on a cycle of reoffending and who need particular help to break free from that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) referred to our right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and to the very good report that he oversaw as chairman of the Commission for Social Justice. Early intervention is not about just the criminal justice system but about what I have described as the entire life cycle of the offender and the potential offender, and that is why I have a place on the Social Justice Cabinet Committee, which is chaired by my right hon. Friend, precisely to start making interventions earlier and earlier in the process. It is about trying to keep children out of care. It is about looking at the whole business of family intervention programmes for when the indicators start arriving, such as when children are excluded from school and are sent to pupil referral units. Good work was done by the previous Administration, and I happily acknowledge that, but we have to encourage a culture in which we invest early to prevent problems later. At the same time, we are of course left with the responsibility of dealing with the problems that we have now, which is why it is essential to create extra capacity, in whatever form we can.

The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner), who I think will make a welcome contribution to the work of the Justice Committee, acknowledged that the previous Administration were perhaps not as tough on the causes of crime as they might have been. When the then Leader of the Opposition coined the slogan, “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” that slogan was empty, as is now clear in his own diaries and in his account. The policies to deliver on that had not been developed when the slogan was coined in 1994, and that is one of the dangers of dealing in rhetoric without there being the reality underlying it and—[Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth is chuntering. The policies began to be developed from that point on, but at that point they did not exist. One has to be careful about the catchphrase that sounds great but does not have the policies—

[Alun Michael]

That is very petty; that is not true.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. I ask the right hon. Gentleman not to intervene from a sedentary position.