Community Sentences (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Friday 26th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, both the prisons crisis and, more happily, the very wide welcome that has been given to our new Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, in the media and during the debates on Wednesday, provide a perfect backdrop for this debate on the report from our Justice and Home Affairs Committee, then chaired by my noble friend Lady Hamwee. The Minister’s background as a former chair of the Prison Reform Trust and in his family business, which practices what he preaches, gives a great deal of heart to those hoping for deep reform of the criminal justice system.

The Lord Chancellor, in her recent announcement on prison capacity, said:

“Longer term, we will also look at driving down reoffending, because the entrenched cycle of reoffending creates more victims and more crime, and it has big impacts on our ability to have the capacity that we need in our prison estate”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/7/24; col. 180.]


She made no mention of how to reduce the use of prison, such as community sentences, but my right honourable colleague Alistair Carmichael did, saying:

“The answer surely has to be more than just building more prison capacity. The problem is not that our prison estate is too small; it is that we send too many people to prison, and that the time they spend there does nothing to tackle the problems of drug and alcohol dependency, poor literacy and numeracy skills, and poor mental health, which led to their incarceration. Can we hope to hear in the very near future the Government’s comprehensive plan to tackle the issue of the time that people spend in prison?”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/7/24; col. 180.]


So it was heartening to hear the Minister in an interview with Channel 4 refer to the Dutch experience, saying:

“They have shut half their prisons. Not because people are less naughty in Holland. It is because they have got a different way of sentencing, which is community sentencing, so people can stay at home, keep their jobs, keep their homes, keep reading their kids bedtime stories and it means they are far less likely to commit crime again”.


That completely gels with the report, which emphasises that too many low-level and non-violent offences are dealt with through short sentences, but that these can be counterproductive and more likely to compound the issues that lead to crime in the first place. If someone needs support to move away from non-violent crime, they will have better access to the services that can help them if they are being supervised in the community.

The report’s very first sentences are:

“Crime can be reduced through rigorous sentences served in the community. With the right investment, intensive community sentences can succeed where short prison sentences fail”.


“Rigorous” and “intensive” are key adjectives. The report points out that community sentences are

“demanding on the offender and help them stop committing crime, thereby protecting the public. Breach mechanisms mean that offenders are being held to account”.

It also points out that community orders can save the public purse money, not only through reducing the use of expensive custody—since even the most intensive types of community orders cost less than prison—but through a reduction in reoffending.

But courts are not utilising community sentences as widely as they might. Over 151,000 community sentences were issued in 2012, but the number steadily declined over the following decade to just 69,000 in 2022—a reduction of over half. So the committee understandably reports that there is untapped potential for keeping offenders out of prison and supporting them to avoid reoffending, but the scope for effective results needs to be better understood.

One barrier to overcome is the all-too-widespread perception, reinforced and hyped by much of the media, that community sentences are a cop-out for offenders. The Justice Committee in the other place, under the excellent chairmanship of Sir Bob Neill, said in its report on public opinion and understanding of sentencing:

“Low levels of understanding of sentencing have an effect on the quality of public debate on sentencing, which in turn can have an influence on sentencing policy … There needs to be a step-change in the Ministry of Justice, the Attorney General’s Office and the Sentencing Council’s efforts on public legal education”.


Is there more that the Minister believes can be done in this regard? Will the Government be robust when predictable quarters of the press accuse them of being “soft on crime” and point out that in fact changing behaviour is jolly hard work?

Another barrier to greater use of community sentences is the sorry state of the Probation Service a decade after Chris Grayling launched his ideological and disastrous “transforming rehabilitation” so-called reforms, which actually involved fragmentation and part-privatisation. The role of the Probation Service is key, as the report highlights. Lack of sentencer confidence in probation’s ability to effectively deliver community sentencing must have been shaped in part by the chaos and constant policy churn in the Probation Service, which has suffered a disastrous impact on its staff retention.

The Lord Chancellor made a welcome commitment to recruit 1,000 more trainee probation officers by March 2025 but, as she has acknowledged, this is not new investment but a “redeployment of resources”. This is not particularly encouraging. The committee stresses the need for manageable case loads, as probation officers are often managing more than 70 cases. As my noble friend pointed out, the Chief Inspector of Probation in England and Wales, Martin Jones, was reported on Monday as saying that the current model for the Probation Service was not sustainable; unfortunately, one of his suggestions was to reduce the demand on probation officers to monitor people released from prison. Will the Minister respond to those concerns about the non-sustainability of the Probation Service?

Some commentators believe that the issue goes beyond money and that the Probation Service needs a strategic focus, with national leadership and accountability coupled with localised service delivery. There are suggestions around for reorganisation. The committee’s report suggests:

“When services are provided locally, various agencies can cooperate effectively. The co-location and co-commissioning of services are the gold standard”.


Do the Government have any thoughts on the Howard League’s suggestion—I am pleased that its president, the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, will speak in the gap—of delivering probation work through local community justice partnerships, each with a board including representatives from the police, local authorities, local voluntary groups and members of the community, sentencers, health boards and regional prison management?

The committee’s report stresses that pre-sentence reports produced by the probation service are an essential part of the sentencing process. However, the probation service has been under great stress and has not always been able to produce these reports. Do the Government have any new thinking on how to encourage the greater production and scope of pre-sentence reports?

As others have said, our committee’s report points out that:

“The need for mental health, and alcohol and drug treatment far exceeds the current rate of imposition of Community Sentence Treatment Requirements, which itself exceeds the availability of treatment”.


How will the Government ensure better provision of treatment facilities?

The report wants incentives to be created to encourage low-level, repeat offenders to engage with rehabilitation, and says that

“The approach which underpins Ireland’s ‘integrated’ Community Service Order is a helpful model”.


Do the Government see scope in looking to what Ireland is doing?

The report comments favourably on the effectiveness of “wraparound rehabilitative support” offered to female offenders and some young people, wanting it to be a model for probation services generally. Do the Government agree with those suggestions? Does the Minister have any thoughts on how to avoid the cliff edge at 18, which the report stresses?

Finally, the committee’s report stresses the importance of the availability of housing, saying:

“Being homeless makes it difficult”—


if not impossible—

“to comply with the requirements of a community order”.

I am glad that the new Government are giving long-overdue prominence to the supply of housing, but is the connection to offending being given specific attention?

We clearly have great hopes of the new Government bringing a new approach to criminal justice. We wait with eagerness to hear the detail of the Government’s commitment.