Rehabilitation of Offenders

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement—it is generous of him to share his thoughts with the House on this important subject so soon after briefing the national media. He is right that one of the best ways to cut crime, the number of victims and the cost of our criminal justice system is by tackling reoffending. It is disappointing that it has taken the Government three wasted years to reach that conclusion, but we welcome the intent of today’s announcement.

Reoffending rates are too high. We started to reduce them when we were in government—especially the rate of youth offending, which breaks the cycle of reoffending at an early point—but much more needs to be done. This is an ambitious programme. Unfortunately, it is based on fewer resources, on untried and untested methods and on putting faith in exactly those private sector organisations that have failed to deliver other major public sector contracts.

Let us take the proposal for support for everyone leaving prison—an extra 45,000 offenders on the Secretary of State’s figures. Can he explain to the House whether that is an uncosted demand for more resource or whether existing moneys will be spread much more thinly to deliver it? Resettlement prisons, as he said, represent a major restructuring of the prison system. What is the cost of that restructuring and what additional resources will go into preparing offenders for release? He knows that the prison estate is still chronically overcrowded and understaffed, so does he seriously think that a reorganisation can take place against such a backdrop? In London there is a major shortage of prison places, which means that offenders from London often end up housed hundreds of miles away from home and family, so how is resettlement to work here?

On release, even those who have served the shortest sentences are promised a year’s supervision and support with addiction, housing and employment. Who will pay for that at a time when drug treatment centres are closing? Housing is perhaps the most expensive item for newly released prisoners. On the “Today” programme, the Secretary of State speculated that housing associations would help out, so during the worst housing shortage for a generation are ex-offenders to get priority for social housing?

Who will fund the army of mentors, and who will vet them to ensure that the right people mentor offenders? The probation service has been cut by almost 10% so far and those cuts will continue. The service, which received an award for excellence two years ago, is by definition not to blame for rising reoffending by short-sentence prisoners, because they are currently unsupervised. However, it is not probation officers who will now undertake 70% of the supervision. The Justice Secretary places a great deal of faith in reformed old lags helping out, but he admitted on the “Today” programme that they will have to be paid. Professional probation officers sacked and replaced with ex-offenders: is this the Justice Secretary’s brave new world?

In reality, it is the Secretary of State’s old friends Serco, G4S and the rest of the cartel who will profit from today’s announcements. The 21 contracts are too large for smaller providers. An extra £500 million of public contracts are going to the people who gave us the Work programme and security at the Olympics. Now he is to impose his untested and untried payment-by-results methods on probation. Perhaps most seriously, a dangerous chasm will open up between public and private providers on the basis of an offender’s risk level, taking no account of the fact that in 25% of all cases offenders move between risk levels. Therefore, contrary to his assurance, private firms will be in charge of the most serious criminals, and we genuinely fear that that will put the public at risk. Failures in delivering probation services even to medium-risk offenders will mean that those guilty of domestic violence, burglary, robbery, sexual offences and gang activity will walk our streets unsupervised. Regardless of whether private sector providers deliver, they will still get paid at least 90% of the money. Do they have the incentive or the skills to supervise dangerous and violent people in the community?

Reducing reoffending while maintaining public safety should be our twin priorities. A focus on reoffending is to be welcomed, but the Government’s ill-thought-out policies and total reliance on payment by results are putting at risk the safety of communities up and down the country.

[Chris Grayling]

I plead guilty to having done a couple of media interviews this morning, but I am at least in the House right now. My opposite number, the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), also gave some media interviews this morning but has not made it to the House, which is rather a surprise to me.

We learned an important lesson in opposition, which is that sometimes when one aspires to be a Government it is necessary to accept that something is the right thing to do. That is a lesson that today’s Opposition have not learned. I do not understand why they are coming out with this faux anger about what we are doing when the legislative foundations that enable us to push through these reforms were passed by the previous Labour Government. If they supported the concept then, why do they not support it now?

The hon. Gentleman asked about costs. That highlights an important difference between us and the previous Government. They believed that a problem would be solved by throwing money at it, and they ended up with an over-bureaucratic, over-complex system which simply did not deliver. Thanks to the work done by the Select Committee, we know that probation officers spend only about a quarter of their time at work on supervising offenders, while about 40% of their time is spent on providing support services. Are the Opposition really saying that it is not possible to run that system more efficiently and deliver support where it is needed to the offenders who are most likely to reoffend when they leave prison? Again, there is a divide between us and them. They think it is a question of spending more taxpayers’ money and having higher taxes; we want to get better value from the taxes that we already raise.

On resettlement prisons, again, it is about making our system work more effectively. At the moment, we move far too many prisoners all over the country in a fairly haphazard way. Over the past few months we have worked with prison governors and prison officer teams to work out a better way so that short-sentence offenders will almost always stay in one place and longer-sentence offenders will go to a prison close to where they will be released to ensure that when they are released we can deliver continuity of support through the prison gate. The Opposition should welcome that. It is the right thing to do and it should have been done years ago.

The hon. Gentleman asked about the past three years. It is only a few months since the Opposition were attacking me for not undertaking pilots on this issue. In fact, for the past few years we have been looking at how such a system would work, in Peterborough prison and in Doncaster prison. The work that has been done there is first-rate. It has also shown how effective older prisoners who are turning their lives around can be in supporting and mentoring younger offenders who have yet to do so. The hon. Gentleman needs to go out and look at what is happening, not in the world of big businesses, which his party’s Government contracted with regularly, but in the voluntary sector with some of our first-rate charities, where there are living examples of former offenders who have gone straight and who are now helping to turn around the lives of the next generation of offenders. I want to capture those skills in helping to bring down reoffending.



The hon. Gentleman questioned payment by results, but why is it such a bad thing in the eyes of the Opposition? They want to pay a whole-contract fee, but I believe that we should pay part of a fee based on whether the taxpayer gets a good deal or not. We should pay not unconditionally, but conditionally, and that is what we will do under these contracts. I want to pay for real results that bring down reoffending and crime.

Under the previous Government, reoffending barely changed. We ended up with a situation in which people were going round and round the system. We finally have a set of proposals that will start to change that. It is shame that this did not happen, not three years ago, but 13 years ago, when the Labour party was in power.