Crime, Reoffending and Rehabilitation

Lord Bellamy Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Bellamy) (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is an honour—and, I must say, something of a challenge—to make my maiden speech in response to this particularly powerful debate. First, I thank all those who have made me so welcome in this House and assisted with my introduction, not least my supporters: my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook and the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich. I also thank noble Lords for their personal kindness and for the courtesy with which they rightly raise the most direct and challenging questions.

To give, briefly, a little personal background, I take my title in respectful tribute to my birthplace, the ancient settlement of Waddesdon in the Vale of Aylesbury, which was rebuilt in the late 19th century as a so-called model village to house the estate workers of the newly constructed and amazing edifice known as Waddesdon Manor, now in the care of the National Trust. My late father, then recently returned from the war, was the local GP in a sprawling, single-handed rural practice. In those days, the 1950s, a family doctor, as well as holding morning and evening surgeries, spent his day largely on the road, in home visits, visiting his patient in the local hospital—it was your duty as a GP to go to see your patient in hospital in those days—and, as often as not, the call would come in the middle of the night, in the mud and the snow, to deliver the baby on some distant farm.

I mention those things because this occasion enables me to salute not only that generation, the founding generation of the NHS, but all those, then and now, who dedicate themselves to front-line public service, often under the most appalling pressures. In the present context, I make special mention of the staff of HMPPS, who are working in most difficult circumstances, as has been pointed out, picking up the pieces of what has already gone seriously wrong at a much earlier stage. As the noble Lord, Lord Bird, pointed out, it is the social crisis that has led to people being in prison in the first place. Many prisoners have already fallen through the cracks: that, essentially, is our challenge. I disclose, as I should, that I have a niece who works for HMPPS in the probation sector and that my sister, also “of Waddesdon”, has spent a lifetime in this sector.

One point I would make, relevant to our debate today, which perhaps resonates with one of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, is that the rural society of the 1950s I have just been describing was not, in any sense, a prosperous society. Few possessed a car, a telephone, a fridge, a washing machine, a television or, indeed, a bathroom; but as I recall it, there was in the village and the surrounding area a sense of community, of social cohesion, of family stability. I would argue that there was a social strength despite material poverty. That kind of stability has, I fear, frayed in the meantime under the pressures of modern life; this has perhaps contributed to the causes of crime and the problem of reoffending which preoccupies us in the debate today.

So, to delay the debate and the Government’s response to it no longer, I hope noble Lords will allow me the briefest, telegraphic description of my own career. I spent 22 years at the Bar, from timid beginnings in the London magistrates’ courts—a salutary education in the school of real life—and at the legal advice centre in north London mentioned by my friend, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, all those years ago. Then I became a little more specialised and found myself at one stage as one of the UK judges in Luxembourg. There was the setting up of the Competition Appeal Tribunal, followed, some years later, by a long period on the other side of the profession, working with one of London’s major international law firms, chairing one of the firm’s global practice groups, working all over Europe and in the US, Asia, the Far East and elsewhere—a striking reminder in this last period of the global reach of the common law and the strength of the UK in that sector. However, that is all for another day. Personally speaking, it has been something of a zig-zag career, and whether my present role turns out to be a zig or a zag will be for your Lordships to decide.

On to today’s debate, I first particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and his advisor Dr Callan, not only for his speech today but for his extremely valuable reports of 2017 and 2019, for his ongoing work with the ministry, and his tireless and constructive interest in the matters under discussion. I cannot in the time available deal with all the points made; we have ranged extremely widely. I will do my best on other occasions to follow up those points or deal with them outside the context of the present debate. One of the matters I do not think I can really deal with today, in terms of rehabilitation of prisoners, is sentencing policy. With the House’s permission, I will not deal with the problem of IPP sentences but I have assured the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, that I will come back to him and the cross-party group on this subject, and that we will come to grips once again with that intractable problem.

Many other issues have been raised: I think of older pensioners and alcohol abuse; I think of rape and youth justice. All those things are extremely important but I would like to concentrate today on the main themes of the rehabilitation of prisoners, what the ministry and the Government are trying to do about it, and where we are going. I readily recognise that this is a difficult and intractable subject that many of us have been thinking about and discussing for years and years, but perhaps your Lordships will arrive at the conclusion that, at long last, we are really beginning to come to grips with the detail of the problem. Your Lordships have already heard mention during the debate of some encouraging matters: the new centre in Swansea, the New Futures Network mentioned earlier, the work initiatives mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester, and other matters. The Government’s, and my own approach, is as follows.

The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, is entirely right to regard the importance of family life, family connections and the maintenance of family relationships as the golden thread that runs through the whole problem. But a thread by itself needs to be woven into a stronger fabric to form, if you will, the warp and weft of a fabric that can sustain, develop and last into the future in a robust way. I would select today, respectfully, five other threads in the fabric that the Government will seek to strengthen and develop in the coming period.

The first thread, which I would regard as the most important, is the question of education. That has been raised several times before, and rightly. The Government have established—perhaps I should say re-established—a prisoner education service with the specific role of improving literacy, numeracy and technical skills in prison. It is entirely right that a very substantial proportion of the male prison population is dyslexic; it is as simple as that. For that reason, as eloquently explained earlier by noble Lords, many of the prisoners the system is dealing with have simply dropped out of school and fallen through the crack. Those difficulties have not been addressed earlier. This underlines another aspect that has come across so forcefully in this debate: the fact that we are dealing with widespread social problems that just happen to finish up in the prison sector.

The words that cropped up most frequently today included “holistic”, “interdepartmental” and “cross-government”. All those aspects need to have a co-ordinated response from government as a whole. To give one very small example from a Ministry of Justice point of view, I intend to make it one of my personal priorities to focus on the special educational needs tribunals which are responsible, as the House knows, for dealing with the provision of special needs in the school system, working with local authorities and the Department for Education to help address that problem at an earlier stage. But we have to think laterally the whole time when dealing with these types of problems. Better education of the prison population is the first thread, weave or strand in the overall approach to the situation.

The second strand, also mentioned today, is accommodation. Some 12,000 people a year are discharged from prison with no home to go to. The Government are setting up a community accommodation service with the objective that no one should leave prison with nowhere to go. That has been rolled out so far across five regions of the government: that accommodation should be provided for a minimum of 12 weeks, and homelessness protection teams and strategic homing specialists should be fully involved in the accommodation needs of discharged prisoners. That is, at least, another first step. One of the questions I have asked of my department in recent days—I am still quite new to all this—is how you plan in advance a prisoner’s release so that he knows he has accommodation to go to, the family knows what is happening and everything is already set up, as it were, across all the relevant services and departments. I gather that one of the initiatives in train is that a proper discharge packet should be prepared so that the prisoner has an ID, a CV, a certificate that he is fit to work and a home to go to. These are detailed, small steps but they are vital. Accommodation, therefore, is the second thread.

The third is employment. As your Lordships will know, it has always been difficult, to an extent, to overcome employers’ reluctance to employ offenders. I submit that this is perhaps beginning to change. An employment innovation fund of £21 million has been set up to improve work on how to get prisoners back into employment. The intention is to have an employment advisory board in every prison, so that prisons themselves can start equipping their prisoners with the skills they need to enhance their chances of employment.

Those boards will be chaired by a local business executive who knows what the employers are looking for. That will, over time, improve the situation. About half our prisons now have such an advisory board, and it is hoped that the rest will be installed by April of next year. The prisons themselves will have prison employment leads in them to match candidates to jobs. It is hoped that by April of next year, all 91 resettlement prisons will have such a mechanism to again encourage prisoners into employment.

I make particular mention of the New Futures Network, already mentioned by the noble Lord, which is an online resource broking and matching prisoners to available vacancies and jobs. We shall later on introduce legislation to facilitate prisoner apprenticeships, which is being welcomed by employer organisations. In this context I again salute a particular employer that has been mentioned: the Timpson Group, which is particularly active in this area. The proportion of prison leavers employed at six months post-release rose by two thirds between April 2021 and March 2022 and now stands at around 23%. Not high enough, I know, but slow progress upwards.

In continuing the threads, the next one, which I will mention briefly because it is a large topic, is control and improvement of substance misuse. It is no use releasing prisoners if they are still in the grip of substance misuse. As noble Lords know, the Government have appropriated more than £900 million to deal with drug problems generally. A substantial proportion of that goes to the prison community. Important measures have been taken in prisons to reduce drug availability and drug usage, and that is a key element of the programme.

Finally, there is the integrated probation service, which has been reorganised entirely over the last few years. It has had a considerable uplift in resources and is a vital part of the ongoing need to support and encourage prisoners when they are released.

So, those five threads are woven together with the family considerations, which I venture to suggest are now pretty firmly embedded in the culture of the Prison Service. The governors are very alert to and supportive of this. Every prison has to publish its policy on family matters. There are various initiatives, particularly virtual family video calls to maintain family contact; there is the “stories with Dad” or “stories with Mum” type of call. There is always more to be done, of course, but with the encouragement and leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, I think that that is now, as a matter of culture, growing in the Prison Service. Also, there is the Grand Avenue project in Cardiff—it too has been mentioned—which is part of the programme. So, there is a lot being done.

According to my figures, over the past 10 years, the number of reoffenders—that is, the number of people who are released and then reoffend—has halved, roughly speaking, from nearly 800,000 to just under 400,000. However, that is not the end of the story, because those who do reoffend are reoffending more often. Just over 25% of offenders who received a caution or a non-custodial conviction or were released from prison in 2019-20 reoffended within a year. That has fallen by about 5% over the past 10 years. It is not enough but it is at least a decline in the trend. Those are the matters on which we are working.

In conclusion—and I must finish, I am afraid, although I could go on for a long time—we are very conscious of the issue of staffing in prisons, which my noble friend Lord Farmer and the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, raised, and the need to increase the number of prison officers. The intention is to increase the number by another 5,000 over the next few years. At the moment it is not easy to recruit people of the necessary calibre, but the Government are conscious of the problem and we are doing our best to resolve it as soon as possible.

I have not got the solutions to the problems raised but I can, I hope, assure noble Lords to some extent that we are on the case and doing our best to improve the situation.