Oral Answers to Questions

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Blunt]

My hon. Friend will have realised, given the number of pilots we are conducting—I am sorry, Mr Speaker, that the list was too long for me to deliver satisfactorily—that we are testing the different elements of the system to identify the best and most effective way to deliver payment by results. I hope that, in the end, we can deliver the offender-centric process on which my hon. Friend relies, once we have identified which part of the system makes offenders best respond to effective rehabilitation measures.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

Do any of those projects help to test whether providing housing for people leaving prison helps them to be less likely to reoffend?

[Mr Blunt]

Housing—having a home to go to—is plainly a key crime desistance factor, but an awful lot of other key factors, such as work and drug addiction, are well-documented. We want to get out of the business of identifying exactly what inputs people must deliver to offenders, but make all sorts of institutions responsible for focusing on the outputs and let them take the decisions about which are the appropriate desistance factors to address for the offenders whom they are treating.