Prisons: Education

Lord German Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, for introducing this debate, and in an obviously personal manner. The holy grail in offender rehabilitation is an holistic approach which looks at both sides of the prison gate: a structure where education, housing support, skill acquisition, work and lots more issues are regarded as a single matter to be handled properly. Obviously—and unfortunately for us—the holy grail has not yet been reached and this debate offers an opportunity to look at one very specific aspect of that failure.

I welcome the Coates review and wish it well. In the past, it has been fairly difficult to fully assess the value of prison education and its impact on reducing reoffending, though we have much anecdotal evidence. However we now have the Ministry of Justice’s Data Lab analysis of reoffending, published last September, which gives an analysis of 6,000 prisoner records associated with matched comparison groups where one group had received Prisoners’ Education Trust grants. Wherever you look at that evidence, whichever subgroup of prisoners you look at, the clear overall picture was that reoffending was one quarter less among those who had had that special educational support. Reoffending rates were down in every subgroup which was measured.

With those results in mind, I would like to press the Minister to give an indication of the actual cash saving which education, in that context, would mean to the taxpayers of this country. We all know the figures for less police time spent and fewer costs to the Prison Service, but now we have some actual hard evidence of the level of reoffending reduction that occurs through giving education. It is important to understand the savings that that would generate—and has generated—for the taxpayer, because that is one way of proving that more needs to be invested in this area.

Much has been said about the need for and the nature of prison education and the potential to attract high-quality professionals, and I understand that this is one of the issues to emerge from the Coates review. I want to press the Minister on the nature of the skills and qualifications which are offered to prisoners. Many of the vocational skills require people to have on-the-job training if they are to get a qualification. For many skills, such as bricklaying, plastering, plumbing and electrical work, that cannot occur inside prison and the qualifications people get need to pass through that gate and be continued outside. This is a plea for having a system where there is continuity between outside and inside the gate.

Dame Sally Coates has said that one of her emerging outcomes is that through-the-gate progression and tracking need to be improved. That is an understatement, because the problem lies wholly in bringing those together. It is more difficult now, with devolution, because responsibility for the education process in Wales lies with the Welsh Government but processes in prison lie with the Ministry of Justice. If this is going to happen, and we are to achieve that holy grail, there has to be a radical rethink of the role and variety of the different organisations and structures which manage this process.