Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Guy Opperman Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

The proposals contained in this Bill will be delivered within the existing budget for our probation services.

In saying that they want to oppose and destroy the Bill, the Opposition are actually trying to set back for years the task of dealing with our biggest criminal justice challenge. That would simply create more and more victims of crime, which could have been prevented. Their short-sighted wrecking strategy will get them absolutely nowhere.

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for giving way. I declare an interest in that I published a book last year entitled “Doing Time”. I support the Bill. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the policy being proposed in the Bill was originally put forward in the previous Government’s custody plus programme, which was derived from the Offender Management Act 2007?

[Chris Grayling]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. Labour has argued for this, legislated for it and U-turned on it. The shadow Secretary of State has stated endlessly over the past few months that the Opposition now support the principle, but they are going to vote against it tonight. That is a sign of how poor an Opposition they are, how unfit they would be to govern, and how out of touch they are with the criminal justice challenges in this country.

It might assist the House if I started by summarising the issues facing short-sentence offenders. Many need housing; 38% of them need help finding a place to live when they are released. Many are out of work; only 30% have found employment within two years of being released, while 83% will have claimed out-of-work benefits in the same period. Huge numbers of them need help with education, with work-related skills. A fifth had a mental health or an emotional problem, a third self-report as having a drugs problem and 65% have used illegal drugs in the four weeks before going into prison custody. Those are the people who Labour Members want to leave prison with no support at all.

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[Chris Grayling]

The powers will certainly remain. What will be different is that having a 12-month supervision period—a period of mentoring—for people once they have left prison, or for those going through a community sentence, will provide much more of a pressure-point to get them to turn up for rehabilitation and go for mental health treatment, because there will be someone working alongside them who gets to know them and to understand them, and who can cajole and encourage them.

It is worth highlighting the experience we have had so far in Peterborough. There has been a huge drop in the relative level of reoffending; the number of crimes committed by the cohort going through the Peterborough trial is much lower than that committed by their equivalents in other parts of the country. The overall reoffending rate has fallen as well. That is a success story we should build on, and we will build on it.

[Guy Opperman]

It is not just Peterborough, is it? There is also Doncaster prison, which is the flagship of modern prisons—and I should say that it was set up in its present form under the Labour Government, and rightly so. It has also seen drug-use figures fall. Some 80% of the prison intake was drug addicted or committed drug crimes, and that figure is now down to approximately 30% upon release, under the current programme. Does the Justice Secretary agree that that is a good thing?

[Chris Grayling]

I join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to the work being done in Doncaster. There is good work being done in many parts of the prison estate. The Doncaster model is slightly different from what we are looking to deliver across the whole of the justice system, but it is equally delivering reductions in reoffending and that is to be welcomed and supported. Anything we can do to bring down reoffending rates has to be the right thing to do.

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[Sadiq Khan]

One cannot will the ends without the means. It is nonsense to suggest that simply pulling a lever will make that happen. It will not happen. We tried to do it, and I will shortly come to our efforts to put in place custody plus.

On the other side of the debate are a few loyal Back Benchers and the Justice Secretary who is purposely not bringing before Parliament his plans for restructuring probation, thereby avoiding proper scrutiny and debate, and is rushing ahead at breakneck speed in implementing these plans, not interested in whether there is any evidence that his plans will work, dismissing expert evidence and instead basing his decision to roll his plans out on his gut instinct—the same gut instinct that brought us the failing Work programme in his former role.

[Guy Opperman]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sadiq Khan]

One last time. I must make progress.

[Guy Opperman]

I thank the shadow Secretary of State for giving way. He talks about breakneck speed, but does he recall that in May 2006, when the Labour Government were still planning to introduce custody plus and a large proportion of the measures that we see today, in the House of Lords the noble Lord Bassam of Brighton, the Justice Minister, said:

“We estimate that, in 2007–08, 49,400 offenders will be starting custody plus orders”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 4 May 2006; Vol. 681, c. 566]?

Why does the right hon. Gentleman not now back a plan that has been in the offing for more than 10 years, which has finally been produced by this coalition Government?

[Sadiq Khan]

Because if done properly, it would cost £194 million a year. We could do it on the back of an envelope, as the Justice Secretary wants to do, but I do not want to do that. It is a risk to public safety.

Let me remind the House that at the same time the Justice Secretary says that he wants those who receive less than 12 months’ custody to receive probation supervision. Instead of supporting probation, as he should, what are his plans for it? Those plans are: abolishing local probation trusts and instead commissioning services direct from his desk, in Whitehall, on behalf of local communities; splitting responsibility for offenders on the basis of their risk level, despite risk not being static in 25% of cases; handing responsibility for serious and violent criminals to G4S, Serco, Carillion, A4e and the like; imposing an untried and untested payment-by-results model on providers; and, as I said, all at breakneck speed, adding up to a half-baked, reckless reorganisation of probation, without any evidential base—a monumental gamble with public safety.

Let us be frank. The Justice Secretary has wanted to keep all the major changes he is making to probation below the radar, purposely avoiding bringing those plans before Parliament. If not for the Opposition day debate, MPs would never have had the chance to debate them. He said in the Chamber 12 days ago that he was not afraid of debating his plans, but he left the Chamber almost immediately after his speech, not staying to hear any of contributions from worried and concerned MPs in all parts of the House. That is not debate in anyone’s book. Instead, it shows a disdainful arrogance towards Parliament and towards genuine concerns at his proposals. If he had stayed, he would have heard in the time-limited debate l8 MPs from all parts of the House express concern. More MPs wanted to speak, but there was insufficient time. Just three Members spoke in favour. I can see that he has done a better whipping operation today than he did 12 days ago. Many MPs, stakeholders, prison and probation staff and charities are labouring under the false impression that this is the privatisation of probation Bill. It is not. The Justice Secretary is trying to use the 2007 Act to do that.

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[Sir Alan Beith]

I think the right hon. Gentleman has made his point and I have given my response. The Ministry of Justice has not provided an indication of how much it would additionally need to save to afford the cost of implementing the proposals, or said how quickly those savings would be realised. That puts my Committee in a difficult position when assessing the viability of the proposals.

There are also difficulties of risk management. The public probation service will have to assure itself about the risk management of up to 200,000 offenders for whom it has no direct responsibility, and we will need to ask many questions about how information will be passed between the public probation service, the police, and private sector providers. At the moment, transfer of information is relatively easy, but under the proposed arrangements it will become more complex and difficult. I hope the Minister will say something about that. That also affects other areas. I had a discussion with a victim liaison officer who is concerned about how far information of the kind she is able to get now will flow when reassuring victims about restrictions being placed on an offender, and whether that information will come so readily through the system the Government propose.

There are key confidence issues about how the proposals can be made to work. There is a confidence issue for the police on sharing intelligence. If police officers feel inhibited about sharing intelligence with the provider of these vital services, the effectiveness of the whole process will be impaired. There is a confidence issue for magistrates when considering how they can rely on a community sentence—a significant part of the Bill is on community sentences. We want magistrates to be able to pass community sentences confident in the knowledge that they will be carried out effectively. There is a confidence issue for those who deal with victims and, currently, for probation office staff, who are uncertain as to where they will end up. If they take no definite action to locate themselves in the new system, will they finish up in the public probation service or the private sector? Which way should they go if they want the opportunity to exercise their skills?

[Guy Opperman]

I echo the concerns the Chairman of the Justice Committee outlines and accept their validity, but the idea that there is no example of partnership between charitable organisations and the police is surely negated by the St Giles Trust—the Committee has looked at the trust in great detail. The trust is a charitable sector organisation that works throughout people’s time in prison and outside in partnership with the prison, probation and all other services. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the St Giles Trust is a good example of how things can be done?

[Sir Alan Beith]

There are plenty of good examples—my Committee has looked at a number of them—but no one should start from the presumption that the existing system is the only way of managing prolific and frequent offenders. On the contrary, the reoffending figures should tell us that we must do something differently. We must harness the talents that exist in the charity and voluntary sectors, which may also exist in the private sector.