Joint HMI Prison and Probation Report

Ed Davey Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

I am happy to continue to update the House on progress. The Worboys case taught us some important lessons about pre-sentence reports and connections between the Ministry of Justice and the Parole Board, and we are conducting an extensive review of that. It is important to remind the House that in the most extreme cases—MAPPA 3 cases—we have very significant protections in place for the public. I can hold forth on that in more detail if Members want to talk about the protection arrangements.

[Sir Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)]

This report is littered with shocking findings. One of the most shocking is when the inspector writes:

“in 40 per cent of cases there had been no work focused on reducing the risk of sexual offending at all”.

How has that been allowed to happen? When will we have the trained staff to put it right? This is a matter of urgency.

[Rory Stewart]

The specific issue there is around the provision of accredited programmes, and there are two problems. The first is that accredited programmes are not suitable for all sex offenders. At the moment, we do not have programmes that are able to reduce the risk of reoffending significantly. In fact, some of the past sex offender treatment programmes can increase rather than decrease the chance of reoffending if they are delivered to the wrong type of sex offender. We have to distinguish between lower risk and higher risk sex offenders and ensure that we are delivering programmes in the right way. The Horizon and Kaizen programmes, which we have rolled out, are key to that, but they are not the key for everyone. I agree that we can do more to assess and to record, but I politely disagree with the inspector’s implication that we should attempt to deliver accredited programmes to 100% of these cases.