Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Andy Sawford and Jeremy Wright

Tuesday 14th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Attorney-General]

My hon. and learned Friend is a distinguished former Law Officer and played a significant part in bringing forward deferred prosecution agreements. He should be proud of what he did in that regard. So far as the future of the SFO is concerned, I take the view that the Roskill model on which it is based, which combines lawyers, investigators and experts of other kinds into specific teams to deal with what are very complex and difficult investigations and prosecutions, is the right model. As I have said, it is achieving some creditable results. Although I do not set my face against any change in the future, I do think it is worth preserving that model. I know that the Solicitor-General and I will wish to make that argument very strongly.

[Andy Sawford (Corby) (Lab/Co-op)]

Has the Attorney-General received from the Serious Fraud Office a request for an emergency injection of funds? Is he aware that it is struggling and estimates that it needs an additional £19 million to continue its work?

[The Attorney-General]

The hon. Gentleman may know that the funding model for the Serious Fraud Office is very unusual. It receives core funding, but it is recognised, not least by the Treasury, that there are a number of cases that, because of their nature and scale, require additional funding. That is standard practice for the SFO in terms of its funding. It received a large extra amount of money to deal with those so-called blockbuster cases last year and that will no doubt be the case this year. When we are in a position to set out figures for this year, we will do so, but it is in no way unusual that that should happen and it is a sensible model for what is effectively a demand-led organisation.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Andy Sawford and Jeremy Wright

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that that is the right objective. We have negotiated a compulsory prisoner transfer agreement with Albania, which is a high-volume country. That was concluded in January. We are making better use than ever before of the European Union prisoner transfer agreement. My hon. Friend will be pleased to hear that some 200 cases are currently processing through that method. We will remove as many as we can because, as my hon. Friend has heard me say before, the right place for foreign national offenders is their own country, not ours.

[Andy Sawford (Corby) (Lab/Co-op)]

T6. Is the spoof Twitter account @FailingGrayling a reference to the failing Work programme or to the rushed probation reforms, which are sure also to fail?

Probation Service

Debate between Andy Sawford and Jeremy Wright

Wednesday 13th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Crausby. I congratulate the hon. Member for Leeds East (Mr Mudie) on securing the debate. I thank him and all the other hon. Members who have spoken in the course of what has been a good debate. I shall try to deal with as many of the points as I can in the time that I have.

The first thing that I want to say is that it is no part of my case today, or the Government’s case for reform, to make the argument that there is not good work going on in probation trusts already. Clearly, there is. I have seen it, and other hon. Members who have spoken have seen it for themselves, too. However, I am also sure that the probation officers whom they have seen and I have seen would agree—as many of those who have spoken in the debate agree—that we can do better than we are doing at the moment.

The hon. Member for Leeds East was right to accept that reoffending rates are too high and that we need to bring them down. That has been a common theme in the debate. The truth is that despite significant extra investment, of the order of 70% over the past 10 years, reoffending rates have not come down by as much as they should have. I think that it was the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) who said that the rate of reduction in reoffending—we are talking now not about short sentences, but about the overall rate of reduction—was 3.1%. That is 3.1% for a 70% additional investment. We can do better than that. I think that people in the probation service accept that, too. It is therefore sensible to consider how we can do things differently.

Bringing prisoners serving sentences of 12 months or less into the ambit of rehabilitative services is another thing that also has widespread agreement in the debate, and I do not think that it met with disagreement in the consultation or beyond. We will include such offenders in the cohorts dealt with by those taking on the work across a set geographical area. The crucial question, which was raised a number of times is, how do we pay for those extra offenders? It is a fair question, so I shall start there.

The truth is that payment by results and competition for the rehabilitation of medium and low-risk offenders will release the savings that enable us to pay for those additional offenders. The difficulty we have, which is again widely recognised, is that we are not in a position to expect large amounts of extra investment to pay for the additional offenders, so we need to find another way of doing so. If the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) has a way in which he intends to pay for them, beyond releasing savings from the existing budget, it would be interesting to hear what it is, but we do not believe that such funds are available.

[Andy Sawford]

The Government have made disappointing progress with community budgets, which are precisely the kind of approach, building on Total Place, that would enable us to look at the kind of interventions that would release funding though better social outcomes to make the investments we all want to see.

[Jeremy Wright]

I very much hope that the kinds of projects the hon. Gentleman describes are successful, but we do not believe that the funding necessary to do what we are discussing will be released quickly enough in this case. The best way to do it is to engage in exactly the course of action we have set out. Payment by results is not, as some believe, ideological at all. It is very practical. It is about paying for what works and investing taxpayers’ money in it. After all, taxpayers expect us to invest their money wisely in effective outcomes. In this case, the outcome is simple: the reduction of reoffending. That is what we are after. It means fewer victims, less misery for communities and lower costs to the taxpayer.

An argument has been made about pilots. Why not pilot? Why not spend more time exploring and experimenting? It is a myth that we do not already have learning on payment by results—we do. We have learning from pilots undertaken and stopped early. It is not the case that one can learn nothing from a pilot unless it runs its full course. It is equally not the case that one can learn nothing from a pilot unless it succeeds; sometimes you can learn as much from what does not work as you can learn from what does.

I shall change the subject entirely. The Work programme has also been mentioned. Of course, I do not accept that the Work programme is a failure in the way it has been characterised, but it is true the programme is a source of learning for this project. We do not intend to lift the Work programme from the Department for Work and Pensions and deposit it into the Ministry of Justice, because it is different. There are differences because we expect those who take on the work to carry out the orders of the court and meet licence requirements, which is why such contracts, under any payment-by-results arrangement, will not be 100% payment by results.