Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Debate between Kate Green and David Burrowes

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green]

I agree that Greater Manchester has been innovative. As I say, in my discussions with Greater Manchester, the trust was preparing for exactly this approach, at least a year ago, and had the brakes put on. It was told that it would not be able to bid in the process in the way that it had planned, so I would be interested to understand, as I think the hon. Gentleman would, what Greater Manchester and other such trusts will and will not be able to bid for, what sort of entities they will have to establish to enable them to bid and potentially to take a leading role in that bidding process, and whether there will be time for them to create those entities and put in bids, given that, as I understand it, the preliminaries of the process are already under way this month. He and I look forward to some reassurances from the Minister.

A number of my colleagues have pointed out that the Lord Chancellor’s proposals mirror the structure and approach of the Work programme, which he introduced as Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions. Leaving aside the pretty poor performance of the Work programme to date—I am prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt; it may achieve improved outcomes over time, although it is getting off to a depressingly slow start—in the light of everything that has been said in the Chamber this evening about what we have seen from the Work programme and what seems to be being replicated in these contracts, I am concerned that we will have a national top-down driven system, when what we have heard from both sides of the House, about innovative experiments in different parts of the country, is that a localised, bottom-up, partnership approach across a range of local agencies has been what has worked best.

I am concerned that the track record of some of the large multinational providers, who are likely to bid for these contracts—indeed may be the only people qualified and able to take the risk inherent in bidding for these contracts—is that they are not good at developing supply chains down the local agencies. As hon. Members may know, many voluntary and charitable organisations have complained bitterly about their experiences with the Work programme. They complain that they have been used as so-called bid candy, but have not been given any opportunity to deliver activity. They complain that they have had very few referrals, having been included on bids by the large prime contractors. There are real concerns that we are seeing a model that looks very like the Work programme in terms of top-down, Department-led contracting. There are also concerns about whether we can be confident that those problems and pitfalls will not occur in these contracts in the way that they did in the Work programme.

[Mr Burrowes]

Are not the hon. Lady’s fears somewhat allayed when she looks beyond some of the headlines and at some of the private companies? The ones that are delivering results and are effective in reducing offending, which would be paid in the system, are only those that are properly engaged at a local level with small organisations and the voluntary and public sectors. It is only when all that comes together at a local level that they will deliver results and be paid, so their every incentive is to do what the hon. Lady fears will not happen.

[Kate Green]

The same claims were made for the Work programme, but the experience has been entirely different. At the very least we must expect the Minister to give us some reassurances as to why this will be different when the model looks so very similar.

Hon. Members have talked about some of the innovative programmes in their own probation trusts. As has been said, Greater Manchester has had a number of particularly innovative programmes. One in particular speaks directly to the Government’s proposals for post-release supervision for those serving short custodial sentences. I am sure the Minister will be familiar with the Choose Change programme that was developed in Greater Manchester. It has been running for a number of years and we await its final evaluation. I hope that the Government are drawing some interesting and important lessons from that experience, on which I would like to hear the Minister’s comments tonight.

It is clear when we look at Choose Change—a through-the-gate programme, working with offenders in prison, as they left prison and on release—that it depended heavily on being a multi-agency programme in which private, public and voluntary providers were all comprehensively engaged. That included the prison and probation services, corporate partners, the voluntary and community sector, and, crucially, local authorities. I am very unclear how local authorities will fit into the model of provision in this Bill.

It was instructive from Choose Change that the range of interventions needed was extensive. They included interventions in relation to employment, education and training. Many offenders, as the Minister will be well aware, have exceptionally poor levels of literacy and numeracy, so investing in routing them to the right educational opportunities and continuing their education commenced inside prison consistently on release is an important element that will need to be designed into any provision. Income and access to financial services have been a key element of what the Choose Change programme has identified as being important for offenders on release. Housing needs are an exceptionally urgent priority for many on release, as are health needs, particularly mental health needs. It often transpires that offenders have no registered GP to whom they can turn for health care, and their engagement with the health service has been sporadic.

The need for a package of interventions, bringing together a number of agencies and players, and beginning that work inside the prison and continuing it as part of a continuing process—not a broken process whereby the prison services does this inside prison and someone else does it post-release—will be an incredibly important feature of what the Government seek to achieve. I am pleased to see the Minister nodding as I say that. I hope that he will be able to reassure us this evening that there will be a continuum of support, not a form of support that begins only as someone leaves the prison gate. There has been a lot of encouraging discussion this evening about through-the-gate models, but we need to understand how those will work within the prison as well as after release.

We also need to understand that the interventions will be made in the right sequence. Some things can only happen easily post-release. It is quite difficult to do much, for example, about housing until someone is near the point of release. But other things, such as education and preparing for employment, can be started much earlier. The sequencing of interventions inside prison and post-release will be very important, and I would be grateful if the Minister said something about how he sees that working in these new contracts.

It will also be important to know how the programme that will be put in place through the contracted provision will work with other programmes already running in the community in relation to criminal justice. That includes how it will work with prolific offender programmes, integrated offender management programmes and programmes such as Spotlight in Greater Manchester, which enables the police and other criminal justice agencies and social services to keep close tabs on those in the community, perhaps not serving sentences but known to the system. How does the Minister envisage those different community-based initiatives will be linked into what is being proposed?

The Minister will also want to look carefully at the learning from Choose Change, which shows that intervening with offenders who have long histories of offending behaviour is particularly challenging. Some offenders who are serving their eighth, 10th, 15th or even their 20th short custodial sentence will be particularly difficult to work with on release. Therefore, it would be useful to understand how the Minister envisages these contracts being able to cope with, on the one hand, those who may have had one experience of custody, where it is to be hoped that with good post-release supervision they could be quickly taken off the track of offending behaviour and we could see some effective rehabilitation, and on the other hand, those who may have 10, 15 or 20 years of offending history. The lessons from Choose Change are that that is a very challenging group of offenders to work with, and simply wrapping some fairly basic post-release supervision around them is unlikely to be sufficient to change the course of their offending behaviour.

How does the Minister envisage the contracts being structured to incentivise inter-agency working and in particular how working with women offenders will be made financially attractive to providers, which has been mentioned by a number of hon. Members?

I agree with the Chair of the Select Committee—I will return his compliment by saying that I rarely disagree with him—that there are many good examples of women’s organisations and centres producing extremely strong support programmes for women offenders. In Greater Manchester we have the extremely successful Women MATTA—Manchester and Trafford Taking Action—initiative, which has worked with the Pankhurst Centre, the local authority, the probation service and so on. However, many of those women’s projects are now under severe funding pressure. They are not cheap to run. I hope that the Chair of the Select Committee agrees that women’s special needs and circumstances mean that cut pricing will not necessarily be very effective for women offenders. I am therefore keen to hear whether the Minister is confident that the structure of the contracts will reward providers for working with the especially challenging circumstances faced by women offenders and how they will be incentivised to make use of the very good practice and experience of the women’s centres across the country that have been delivering such programmes in recent years.

In conclusion, I must say on behalf of the Greater Manchester probation trust and a number of Opposition colleagues that our opposition to giving the Bill a Second Reading is not the result of wholesale opposition to introducing a mix of private and voluntary providers, which has been a feature of the effective working we have seen in Greater Manchester and across the country in recent years. We are concerned that there is little evidence that that particular approach to wholesale contracting out with an arbitrary cut-off point at the level of medium to high-risk offenders is the right way to structure the participation of private and non-statutory providers. There seems to be little opportunity for the very good programmes that have been run by the public probation service to compete effectively in a rapid time scale and continue to be major players in the provision of the services that the Government are now seeking to introduce. There are real concerns that strong local relationships and structures will be disrupted by the bidding process. Finally, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Justice Secretary said, there are real concerns about the risk consequences for the public. I hope that the Minister can offer more reassurances in that regard than we have had so far this evening.

Finance Bill

Debate between Kate Green and David Burrowes

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green]

I cannot question the hon. Gentleman’s evidence about Northern Ireland, but I can say that the position across the United Kingdom as a whole is that a higher rate of marriage correlates with people in higher socio-economic groups. We were helpfully reminded by the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) of an important question, which relates to the second point about the evidence: even if we could do something to spread the advantages of marriage across wider society, would a tax break do this? I have seen and heard no evidence, either this evening or during the many years that I have studied this subject, to show that a tax break persuades people to get married or to stay married. In that sense, particularly in these constrained fiscal circumstances, it seems extraordinary to spend public money on a mechanism that has no evidence to prove that it works effectively. There are real issues to address in respect of what the evidence shows us. Saying that does not devalue, in any way, the importance of marriage; I merely say that when we spend money, we need to know what outcome we expect it to achieve.

[Mr Burrowes]

I, too, recognise the hon. Lady’s expertise. It is difficult in these debates to unite on what we are for. She opened her contribution by discussing children’s well-being, and surely she would agree that there is evidence to suggest a correlation between children’s well-being and marriage. This issue should not just be the preserve of the few and the privileged; it should be an issue of social justice and extending it to the poorest, who can benefit from incentives and support in relation to marriage. That is what we are about, so surely we should unite in this House on that issue.