Oral Answers to Questions

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Nick Herbert]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. We must improve the multi-agency approach to tackling reoffending. That means bringing together the police, probation, prisons and local authorities, and ensuring that they work together more effectively. The key is to get offenders off drugs and into work, and, in particular, as he says, into housing. If we can do that, we have a chance of reducing the unacceptably high reoffending rates that we currently experience.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

But how will the cuts that have just been announced to the future jobs fund, which provides employment for ex-offenders in my constituency—a third of a million pounds comes from Connexions and an equal sum from Positive Activities for Young People—contribute to reducing reoffending in Slough?

[Nick Herbert]

Clearly, the Opposition still have not grasped the scale of the fiscal deficit that the country faces or their responsibility for creating it. Reoffending costs the criminal justice system and wider society billions of pounds a year. If we can succeed in reducing reoffending and capture some of that money to invest in rehabilitation services through a payment-by-results model, which we proposed in our rehabilitation revolution, we have a chance of producing the rehabilitation services that the previous Government lamentably failed to provide.