Offender Rehabilitation Bill [HL]

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

I, too, welcome the intent of this Bill, but I am afraid that the devil may well be in the detail; that is what we will discover in the days and weeks to come. It would be rather disingenuous of me not to welcome much of the intent, because such things were being worked on in the previous Government. Indeed, I tremble to confess, particularly to my own Front Bench, that I was probably the first person to discuss payment by results with the Treasury. I was doing so in relation to children in care and the relationship between central and local government. We discussed how one would look at outcomes when the young person was, say, 22 or 23. If they were in work and in a stable home, should the local authority not be rewarded for that? On the other hand, if they were in the criminal justice system, should it not be paying some of the costs of that to the state? Even then, I was interested in a more innovative means of ensuring that the most vulnerable in our society were looked after, because I had to accept that very often in our society the value we place on a service depends on money. That was what I was concerned about, and the Treasury went on to do a lot more work in this area.

There are one or two things, however, that Ministers have either not been concerned about or not taken seriously enough. First, if you are going to enter into this area of activity, you have to have a very good database and evidence base. Much of what I wanted to do when I was Minister for Social Exclusion could not be done because our initial baseline data were insufficient, even on domestic violence. We therefore set in train a whole series of measures to collect better data so that we could then see how to measure movement, change and so on. I am concerned that the Secretary of State does not seem to believe in evidence bases. He says, “Anybody needs to go and look at Peterborough and see that the social investment bond there works” and so on. Actually, however, those of us who have been trying to develop models of social investment bonds in order to invest in payment-by-results programmes know that there are many things that you must right and must know about before you can enter. I suggest that that is why the real excitement created around Peterborough has not manifested itself in lots of other social investment bonds and lots of other work.

There are two things of which the Government need to take account, and I say this in my role as chair of the Cyrenians, which is based in Newcastle. I am beginning to think that there is a sort of a north-east conspiracy here; I hope that does not say anything about offending in the north-east, but rather about what good programmes there are in the region to tackle it. Indeed, the right reverend Prelate used to be on the board of the Cyrenians and the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, also has a role as a mentor and supporter of my chief executive, so we all have a little insight into this.

We have been approached by both the Ministry of Justice and the DCLG to develop social investment bonds. We have a real problem in the areas for which they want us to do that simply because we do not have the numbers going through. That is particularly true for people sleeping rough because we do a very hard job making sure there are not dozens of people on the streets of the north-east sleeping rough. I do not want it to be otherwise, but that means we cannot then develop the model which gives us the levels of investment in order to do a PBR programme. However, that is also true of other programmes. One of the programmes that I think is extremely successful, and is absolutely relevant to the Bill, is what the women themselves call the WoW project—the Women Outside Walls project. That is an example of what the Ministry of Justice would call a Corston project established with support from the MoJ to keep women out of prison. Evaluation of the first two cohorts of women who took part in the project shows a 45% drop in reoffending rates. I think that we all welcome that figure and I know that the Ministry of Justice welcomes it. Small numbers were involved; the two cohorts amounted to some 53 people, but the project was absolutely the right thing to keep them out of prison. Some 90% of the women with whom we were working had experienced abuse, rape or domestic violence. Our support did not comprise merely seeing them once a week to sort out their needle exchange or address whatever was the practical immediate issue. We offered very important support of a different nature given the background of those women. More than 80% of them had a range of health needs, which included a high prevalence of mental health issues. Therefore, we had to access not only mainstream health provision for them but get them involved in group and other situations which addressed the issues that had led to their offending.

The Minister knows I am a bit concerned that Northumbria probation’s redesigned programme is a box-ticking exercise. We will not engage with it on that basis as we know that it will not have the same results as the work we have undertaken. We are looking to see whether we can supplement through other means what the probation service is able to offer given the cutbacks it has undergone. If we can do that and we can secure other funding, we will continue with the project. The Minister needs to understand that that is the reality on the ground.

It is a case of numbers and length of time. We have a very successful programme for getting people into work. We have got people back into work who had been written off. Delegations from the DWP have come to see how we have done that. The main lesson we try to instil is that you cannot do this in three months. That is why we have not been able to take part in the Work Programme and why we continually have to look for other independent funding, so projects are done on a piecemeal basis year by year. If you want effective interventions which prevent reoffending, you cannot do that on a short-term basis. That means you have to put sufficient investment into the small charities. We are quite a large charity employing more than 250 people in a range of work but we cannot do anything on a sustained, long-term basis without investment in our projects. There is no evidence at all that the Government will match their ambition with that reality. The Government must get hold of the detail in both time and numbers.

I know that everybody else will talk about probation but I want to make one point in that regard. When I was a Member of Parliament, I had a very good relationship with the probation service. Whenever a difficult offender was about to be released into the constituency, the probation service would talk to me. I would work out the relationship of the schools with the service because it did not know the details in the small villages and so on. On one occasion, when an ex-probation officer who had been involved in child pornography was coming out of prison, we worked with the school and we had a public meeting. That was very successful. We worked with the parents on ensuring that they helped their children to understand what was going on in a way that did not damage them. The fragmentation will make that very difficult, but, again, I am not sure that Ministers have thought about that.