Offender Rehabilitation Bill [HL]

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, I will speak only briefly on the purpose of this Bill, as I spoke on these matters in response to the gracious Speech. Again, I declare my interest as a trustee of the charity Kainos Community.

When I looked in more detail at the outline of the release on licence and the supervision requirements for offenders serving less than two years, I could not help but think, “Why have we not done this before? It seems so obvious”. The Bill will increase public confidence in our sentencing regime because short, sharp shock sentences will no longer seem derisory and will no longer be easy, cheap headlines for newspapers. In fact, as is outlined in the very helpful Explanatory Notes to the Bill, a six-month sentence will comprise three months in custody, three months on licence and nine months of supervision. This is a total of 15 months during which, either by virtue of the original sentence or for the period of supervision, the offender will be under the purview of the courts. This is the best blend of getting tough on crime while also increasing the focus on the rehabilitation of the offender.

Although it is now many years since I did many breach of community orders in the Crown Court, it was very rare for the person to be sent back to prison. This led to many offenders not taking seriously the requirements of their community penalty. In fact, I always remember seeing the usher call a case, only to have to go and wake up the defendant, who was having 40 winks in the waiting area, such was the gravity he placed on the breach of his order. Although ultimately it is a matter for judicial discretion, I hope that the sentence of up to 14 days in prison is utilised. However, does the Bill mean that that short period of imprisonment for breach of a supervision order will trigger, in and of itself, a supervision order? I would be grateful if the Minister could clarify that point.

I am also very pleased to see clarity in the Bill, rather than in a statutory instrument, about which functions connected with bringing court proceedings for review of a community order, a suspended sentence or the drug rehabilitation requirements are exercisable only by a public sector provider. With the expansion of the involvement of the private and voluntary sector providers, such clarity of functions is essential.

The most pertinent parts of the consultation, and now of the Bill, are competition in the delivery of rehabilitation services, ensuring that the new system is responsive to local needs and paying providers for their services according to results. The highly imaginative concept of payment by results is, as I understand it, already part of the provision of rehabilitation within the prison estate. I would be grateful to know from the Minister what the practical experience is of calculating the results that have been achieved. What will be the position, once the Act is in force, if someone under a supervision requirement provided by one charity goes back into prison and on to a project, such as St Giles in Peterborough, then goes back under a supervision order provided by a different charity and is then reformed? How is it determined whose result this is—or is it a score draw, with everyone getting paid by the state for the outcome?

Furthermore, how will the new structure of the probation system ensure that it is responsive to local needs? The Ministry of Justice, along with the Department for Work and Pensions, issues huge contracts. Will Serco, Atos and G4S be the providers, with SMEs and local charities unable to get involved? How these principles will work in practice will depend on this, and some indication from the Minister would be most welcome.

Tucked away in paragraph 129 of the Explanatory Notes is a major key to the outcome of these initiatives. The paragraph suggests that it is anticipated that a large part of the funding for this additional service provision will be,

“dependent on the outcome of competing provision of probation services”,

which is not directly part of the Bill. It is essential for the success of the Bill that this “competing provision” delivers a service that is effective in qualitative terms. With the design of the new probation structure, it will be important that this is done with certainty from the outset, as I can say as a trustee of a voluntary organisation that the many reforms and changes to NOMS and ROMs were very destabilising. The new service needs to be robust in order to maximise the likelihood of the Bill having the intended highly beneficial effect.

Finally, we often speak of the low levels of literacy, mental health problems and drug issues of many prisoners, and of course that is true. However, when I have gone into Her Majesty’s Prison Stocken in Rutland to see Kainos work, I have always been struck by how talented a lot of prisoners are. Of course, there are some whom you would not wish to bump into in a dark alley. However, when I hear in conversation of their complicated family backgrounds and of how many people, usually men, came and went in their childhoods, I cannot keep track. It is like a family tree where part of it is stuck on temporarily with Velcro and then torn away. When playing dominoes on one occasion, a prisoner insisted that he was really good with numbers. My response was, “Yeah, yeah”, partly because I thought he was blagging and partly as I have to concentrate very hard on the dominoes because beating prisoners at pub games is very difficult. However, I had to eat my words when I discovered that he had got eight years for a first offence. It turned out that he was the banker for a multimillion pound drug racket. I then told him about the Prince’s Trust and starting his own business.

Although our role is to review and scrutinise legislation, I wonder whether practically your Lordships’ House could help with rehabilitation. In the Robing Room the largest painting is entitled “Hospitality”, which is something that the House does so well. Some noble Lords may be aware of a charity called The Clink, which runs restaurants in certain prisons where prisoners are trained to work in the hospitality industry. It is most successful, and it would be an excellent role model if the House employed a graduate from The Clink. Noble Lords may think that ex-offenders might fail our stringent security test. My contention is that while the House has ex-offenders on its Benches, ex-offenders should serve at its tables. I hope that the Bill succeeds and that short sentences will become part of reducing crime rather than having their current adverse effect of just equipping prisoners for further criminality.