Crime, Reoffending and Rehabilitation

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise to the House for speaking in the gap; I was not quite properly organised enough to get on the list, but I will not make a habit of this.

When it comes to the prison system, most of us here have long memories. I remember working over 30 years ago for the Apex Trust, which tried to deal with the offending cycle by getting people into work. Most of the problems that I bumped into on my first day are still there. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, put his finger squarely on the primary one: that the group you are recruiting from is chaotic and educationally underachieving. Most of them—the scholars among them—have made it to year 9; the rest were out of the education system before that. Secondary education has been patchy at best, and primary education may not have been much better.

The incredibly high percentage with what I would call the hidden disabilities—I remind the House of my interest in dyslexia and related fields—is so overrepresented as to make it ridiculous. These are people of, shall we say, a working-class background—the non-exam-passing classes—where you do not find this. Dyslexics like me who had a tiger parent who expected them to get through identify the problem, but the rest do not. A good reaction to the system is then, “Well, I don’t like school, so I won’t go”. If you are an 11 year-old who is at the bottom of the class, failing everything and unable to handle the situation, that is a perfectly logical thing to do. No one is telling you otherwise; no one is getting into it. The prison system has to deal with these people who have failed.

The special educational needs review will do a better job of giving some more information here, I hope, but it is a big ask. The prison system will have to back up that work by identifying such a person and telling them, “You’re not terminally stupid. You have a problem with learning that is called X”. Just think how much easier that person is to deal with after that. Think of the psychological effect of saying, “You haven’t been written off”.

What can you do to address this lack of confidence? One thing—to which the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, referred—is sport, which is a good thing for this predominantly young and male population. Remember that these people have been out of school, and the normal links to sport and organised activity have been removed from them. Their families probably do not provide this or back it up in other ways. These young people are stuffed in an institution; why not give them some exercise and structure? Professor Meek’s 2018 report—the pandemic means that it is still very current—says that, if you get in there and give a positive role model to people, they will respond well. If you teach a sport, you teach discipline, organisation, control and regard for rules—you cannot succeed without these—and you give a positive role model. This is not surprising. I am sure that the arts can do a similar job for other groups.

When he sums up, could the Minister, whose maiden speech I look forward to—I wish he had a few more friends here—give us an idea about how these types of interventions will be structured in the ongoing situation? One thing that we are agreed on is that what is happening now is not working.