Probation Services

Bambos Charalambous Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

I am very grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend, who served with distinction in the Department I now lead. He is right to make that point that this is not about blind ideology, but about people and the shared values we have across the sector. That is very much within the CRC. I will make this point, and he will remember this: it was this Government who finally created licence and supervision periods for people on short-term prison sentences. That was a singular omission from the system that the previous Government failed to address.

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

Two years ago, the Justice Select Committee, on which I served, produced its highly critical report, “Transforming Rehabilitation” on the performance of the privatised probation service. One of the criticisms was how those contracts were measured on outputs, not outcomes. Will the Secretary of State confirm that sufficient funding will be available to tackle the issues of heavy caseload, poor IT systems and the need to work with specialist services and the voluntary sector to ensure that probation officers can deliver a decent service and help reduce reoffending?

[Robert Buckland]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who I know has a long interest in these issues, but I remind him of what I said a few moments ago about the £155 million uplift in this current financial year that we secured as part of the highest increase in the Ministry of Justice revenue budget in more than a decade. We will continue to match that in the years ahead with more investment, and he can be confident that that will translate not only into reduced workloads, but increased sophistication and development when it comes to the harnessing of new technologies and better ways of working. We have learned a lot from the current crisis about how we can do things even better.