Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kate Green and Jeremy Wright

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)]

As my hon. Friend knows, we do not decide what the future use of the site will be as that will be a matter for the local authority. I am always keen, however, to keep parliamentary colleagues updated at key points in the process, such as when a site goes on the market and when we have reached the point of negotiating successfully with a preferred bidder. I will of course do the same for him, and if I can give him any more information I will seek to do so.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

T4. In a written answer on 6 May, the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) listed several domestic violence programmes for women in prison. His answer included some programmes that I am told do not actually exist. Can he tell me how many women are waiting, or being transferred to other prisons, to get the programmes they need? If he does not know now, will he write to me with the answer?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kate Green and Jeremy Wright

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright]

My hon. Friend is right that the scheme operates from more than one Government Department. It is important that we work together with our colleagues in the Health Department to deliver what he is describing. We will monitor that progress, as will the Health Department. It will be monitored across Government because we want people with mental health problems to be diverted from the criminal justice system.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Under the transforming rehabilitation reform programme, there will be 21 contract package areas but 12 reducing to 10 women’s prisons, so not every area will have a women’s prison, but every area will receive women when they are released from prison. What arrangements will be in place to ensure continuity of support through the gate when a woman returns to a different area from the prison in which she has been incarcerated?

[Jeremy Wright]

The hon. Lady is of course right that there are fewer female prisons than there are contract package areas, but that is in many ways a good thing because it means that we have fewer women to incarcerate. She is right that we need to think about how the new system will work. The way we will do that is to ensure that rehabilitation providers have the opportunity to be located in a prison. It may not be a prison located within their own contract package area, but they will have a presence so that everyone coming through the custodial system and being released out of it will have the opportunity to speak to a rehabilitation provider and to make the necessary connections while in custody.

Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Debate between Kate Green and Jeremy Wright

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green]

The timing is of serious concern, and is driven more by electoral imperatives than a desire to make sure that we devise a system that is effective and right.

There is much to welcome in the intentions behind the Bill. Like many others who have spoken, I warmly welcome the wish to introduce post-release supervision for those serving short-term custodial sentences. As many have said, there has been a gap in our system up till now, and it is good to begin to explore ways in which it could be filled. I am also pleased to see a provision in the Bill on considering the needs and circumstances of women offenders. We have been pressing for that since Baroness Corston’s excellent report; it is approaching five years since it was published. It is welcome to see that making an appearance in the Bill.

However, those welcome objectives in no way justify a pell-mell destruction—a wholesale dismantling—of the public probation service that is not founded on logic, and does not appear to be founded on good or consistent evidence. That is why clause 1, with all its flaws—I accept some of the flaws that have been suggested—is important. We should not pursue these far-reaching changes without proper parliamentary scrutiny of the detail of what will be put in place. If the Minister would like to come forward with ways to improve the clause, and suggest to what degree that parliamentary scrutiny is appropriate, I would be happy to hear what he has to say, but it seems quite wrong to continue down the track of implementing the proposals when such serious concerns are being expressed.

[Jeremy Wright]

This is probably an unfair intervention, as I see that the hon. Lady does not have a copy of the Offender Management Act 2007 with her, but does she know where in that Act anything comparable to clause 1 appears?

[Kate Green]

No, that is not my point. My point is that we are going into a wholesale rearrangement of the public probation service—a service that has existed to manage the totality of risk, and take overall responsibility for it. That is what is being broken up. It is extremely important that we do not go down that track without proper parliamentary scrutiny of the implications and consequences, and that scrutiny is what clause 1 seeks to achieve.

[Kate Green]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend.

There are concerns about the contracting structure that will be introduced as a result of the Bill. I want to repeat some of the concerns that have been expressed about the way in which the contracts will be priced. It has been presented by the Lord Chancellor this afternoon and more generally as predominantly a payment-by-results model which will seek to introduce new private funding into a marketplace where, within the public sector, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) pointed out, it would be difficult to find those levels of additional funding, particularly in these times of public spending constraint.

The point is that a very small proportion of these contracts, it seems, will genuinely be payment-by-results contracts. Substantial elements of these contracts will be subject to meeting court requirements, which means that there will have to be enough money in those contracts to ensure that those court requirements can be adequately met by the contractors. That, for a start, will leave relatively little room for manoeuvre in pricing a more discretionary element and an element that is about payment by results.

It is also the case, as my right hon. Friend pointed out, that within the existing spending envelope not only are these providers to manage about 150,000 existing offenders subject to supervision, but to take on board a further perhaps 50,000 within the context of the same funding envelope. That is not credible. It means either that we will have a very poor quality of intervention and/or cherry-picking, with a substantial number of those offenders receiving no support of any value at all.

I am also concerned about the way in which the pricing structures will respond to what a number of hon. Members have talked about—the changing risk profiles that we see when offenders are subject to supervision. As others have said, offender risk profiles are not static. Risk profiles can vary. Offenders can be beset by a range of external pressures and circumstances—bereavement, loss of a job, ending of a relationship, becoming homeless and so on—all of which can take a relatively stable low to medium-risk offender and suddenly catapult them into being high risk. At that point, we understand that the low or medium-risk offender would switch from being supervised by a non-statutory provider into the public probation supervision system. They would be supervised within the statutory sector.

But I do not think we have been told—perhaps the Minister will intervene on me if he has information to share about this—how that would be reflected in the pricing and the reward for the private contractor, and what additional resources would be made available to the public probation service if the risk profiles that had been assumed in the initial pricing of the contract turn out not to be what is experienced in practice.

[Jeremy Wright]

rose—

[Kate Green]

I sense that the Minister is going to offer me some information.

[Jeremy Wright]

I accept the invitation. On the first of the two points that the hon. Lady raised, in relation to what happens to the income for the provider if someone moves out of the medium and low-risk category and into the high-risk category, the answer is that that individual will stay within the cohort for payment-by-results purposes, so there is no financial incentive—that is the purpose of this—for the provider to move someone on to the public sector. On the second issue that she raised—how the public sector attracts the money to do the extra work with the extra people—the money should follow the individual.

[Kate Green]

I am not sure that I have totally understood this. It seemed that the private provider would retain any income attached to the result—the outcome—although we do not know what proportion of that overall payment to the private provider will be for the result and what will be a fixed payment for having to carry out the basics of supervision. It is welcome that the Minister says that resources will follow the offender, and therefore that if there is extra activity to be carried out in the public sector, the public sector will receive the necessary resources to carry out that work, but I am not quite clear where that funding will come from if the private provider is also to be remunerated in full for the work that it has carried out and for any ultimate outcome that may be achieved. Perhaps the Minister will be able to provide more detail as the Bill proceeds on its parliamentary passage. It would be useful to understand the cash flow and funding models in more detail.

Concerns have been expressed about the way in which prisoner risk categorisation will be undertaken. We have quite a long established system—OASys, or the offender assesment system—for determining levels of risk. It is being suggested that one of the things that the Ministry of Justice may wish to do is to revisit that risk assessment system to try to change the profile of the offender base so that more offenders can be deemed to be low or medium risk and supervised in the private or non-profit sector rather than, as would be suggested on current risk assessment tools, within the public probation service.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kate Green and Jeremy Wright

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright]

The hon. Gentleman is right: education is extremely important, especially for offenders who have very low levels of educational attainment before going into custody, of whom there are many. We are working on that. More prisoners are now doing education courses—more this year than last year. Of course, it is also important that prisoners go to work while they are in custody, and more hours were worked last year than the year before. I hope very much that that trend will continue.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Just last week, I met the Prisoners’ Education Trust and was told that much prison work is low skilled and does not in any way improve employability on release. What will Ministers do to ensure that prison work increases people’s qualifications, improves their CVs and gives them a genuinely better chance of taking up work following release from custody?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kate Green and Jeremy Wright

Tuesday 21st May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

4. What the Government’s strategy is on the future of the probation service.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)]

As part of our transforming rehabilitation strategy, we will create a new public sector national probation service, which will work to protect the public and build upon the expertise and professionalism already in place. The national probation service will work alongside new contracted rehabilitation providers and, in the future, the skills and expertise of probation professionals will be utilised across the public, private and voluntary sectors.

[Kate Green]

The Government say that private providers will support lower-risk offenders and will be paid by results, but private providers are already saying that they will accept only a small proportion of their fees from the results that they achieve. What is the real risk that providers will take and what proportion of their fee will genuinely be payment by results?

[Jeremy Wright]

The hon. Lady will understand that in respect of these contracts there will be a requirement for providers to meet the expectations of the courts, so in relation to court orders there will be limited room for manoeuvre as to what is done, and offenders on licence will be expected to meet the requirements of those licences. These contracts could never be 100% payment by results. We will determine the percentage they will put at risk—they will put their own money at risk in this—by consulting all those involved in this business and all those involved in rehabilitation in the future. We will reach the right conclusions; we will work through this with all those involved.

Probation Service

Debate between Kate Green and Jeremy Wright

Wednesday 13th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Wright]

I very much hope that the kinds of projects the hon. Gentleman describes are successful, but we do not believe that the funding necessary to do what we are discussing will be released quickly enough in this case. The best way to do it is to engage in exactly the course of action we have set out. Payment by results is not, as some believe, ideological at all. It is very practical. It is about paying for what works and investing taxpayers’ money in it. After all, taxpayers expect us to invest their money wisely in effective outcomes. In this case, the outcome is simple: the reduction of reoffending. That is what we are after. It means fewer victims, less misery for communities and lower costs to the taxpayer.

An argument has been made about pilots. Why not pilot? Why not spend more time exploring and experimenting? It is a myth that we do not already have learning on payment by results—we do. We have learning from pilots undertaken and stopped early. It is not the case that one can learn nothing from a pilot unless it runs its full course. It is equally not the case that one can learn nothing from a pilot unless it succeeds; sometimes you can learn as much from what does not work as you can learn from what does.

I shall change the subject entirely. The Work programme has also been mentioned. Of course, I do not accept that the Work programme is a failure in the way it has been characterised, but it is true the programme is a source of learning for this project. We do not intend to lift the Work programme from the Department for Work and Pensions and deposit it into the Ministry of Justice, because it is different. There are differences because we expect those who take on the work to carry out the orders of the court and meet licence requirements, which is why such contracts, under any payment-by-results arrangement, will not be 100% payment by results.

[Kate Green]

I suggest, in passing, that it might be sensible to wait for the Work programme to demonstrate its successes before using it as a helpful model to run ahead with this programme. Some Work programme providers will undoubtedly bid for contracts for probation provision and supervision provision. Given that we have identified employment as a key way out of offending behaviour, are those providers likely to be paid twice, once as an offender’s Work programme provider and a second time for providing their criminal justice supervision?

[Jeremy Wright]

In our system, we will look for justice outcomes under the payment-by-results contracts. We will be interested in whether people have reoffended. I shall come back to some of the difficulties with metrics, which were mentioned, in a moment. The Work programme is different in that providers are rewarded for getting people back into work. On the hon. Lady’s first point, I must say that if we should wait two years to find out whether the Work programme is a success, she should wait two years before she deems it a failure. Until we wait for those two years, she cannot say what Opposition Members have been saying loudly for some weeks.