Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Selous Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

7. What steps he is taking to provide relationship skills programmes for prisoners.

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

Currently, commissioning services for offenders is devolved to directors of offender management in the regions and Wales. They are responsible for deciding what services they wish to commission to meet the needs of prisoners in their area. We are examining how reforms to the justice system could enable delivery of more programmes from a broader range of local providers of greater relevance to the many rehabilitation needs of offenders.

[Andrew Selous]

Given that there is a mass of academic evidence from the UK, the US and the Netherlands that strong family relationships reduce reoffending and, therefore, cost to the Minister’s Department, can I ask him to stress that in the Green Paper and when he and his colleagues speak to prison governors?

[Mr Blunt]

I tend to agree with my hon. Friend. We have to get to a position in which those people who are charged with the rehabilitation of offenders have a much freer hand to deliver the interventions that will be effective for the offender who is in their care. If we over-prescribe exactly what has to be done from the centre, we will have a much less effective system. That process will be central to the rehabilitation revolution of delegating responsibility and authority for these decisions to a local level.