Offender Rehabilitation Bill [HL]

Lord McNally Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2013 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord McNally]

That the Bill be read a second time.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)]

My Lords, the purpose of this Bill can be summed up very simply: to improve the support we give to offenders in order to break the cycle of reoffending. There are many noble Lords speaking today who have championed reforms on this topic with successive Governments. Faced with such experience and expertise, it may seem unnecessary to dwell on why we need an Offender Rehabilitation Bill, but let me remind the House of the problems that have inspired this Bill, and of what has driven those who have campaigned long and hard for those reforms.

Last year, around 600,000 crimes were committed by people who had broken the law previously. Almost half the offenders released from our prisons offend again within a year. That goes up to a staggering 58% for those sentenced to prison terms of less than 12 months. And yet there is no statutory requirement for most of this group to receive supervision and support after release. As a result, many of them leave the prison gates with little more than the £46 in their pockets.

Such offenders have a host of complex problems: a shocking number of them will have been through the care system, and many have come from broken homes and are addicted to drugs and alcohol. As noble Lords will know, a greater proportion of women than men in custody are serving sentences of twelve months or less—21% compared with 10% of men in 2011—and many of those women will themselves have been victims of domestic violence.

The Bill aims to transform the support available for offenders given short prison sentences by introducing a 12-month period of rehabilitation in the community after release. The first part of this period will involve release under licence, in the same way as with longer-sentenced prisoners now. Indeed, the first clause of the Bill extends release on licence to all offenders given custodial sentences apart from those of a single day. However, for many offenders, this will not give long for those providing services to intervene. That is why Clause 2 creates an additional supervision period, solely for the purpose of rehabilitation, which will “top up” the licence so that every offender released from a sentence of less than two years has at least 12 months of supervision after release.

The conditions of this supervision period, which are set out in Schedule 1, reflect its explicit purpose of rehabilitation. They can include visits from the offender’s supervisor, drug testing and appointments in relevant cases, and participation in activities that the supervisor thinks will support rehabilitation. Activities may cover a wide range of different interventions. For example, they could include restorative justice where appropriate and where both victim and offender consent. I remind noble Lords of the Government’s strong commitment to increasing the use of restorative justice. In particular, I take pride in the fact that the Crime and Courts Act 2013 now puts pre-sentence restorative justice on a statutory footing for the first time.

We might also expect to see providers make greater use of mentoring. Excellent work is already going on, for example, in prisons. My right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister in a speech this morning drew attention to the work being done in Peterborough prison, where older, longer-serving prisoners are actively mentoring those serving shorter sentences. Given their experience, those who have been through the criminal justice system themselves can sometimes be most effective in convincing others that they really can and should turn their lives around.

Supervision after licence will allow maximum discretion for the professionals who work with offenders to tailor their interventions to the needs of each individual. However, it also balances that with a period long enough to tackle the complex issues that prisoners released from short sentences often face.

The Bill also creates a new role for the magistracy in overseeing the effectiveness of supervision after release. While the supervision period will apply automatically to all short-sentenced prisoners after release, magistrates and district judges will be able to hear cases in which an offender is alleged to have breached a requirement of supervision. Clause 3 will give them a range of options for dealing with a breach, including a fine, unpaid work, a curfew or, ultimately, committal back to custody for up to 14 days. This will give magistrates a much greater oversight of the delivery of sentences for this group of offenders. We intend to engage with the Judicial College and the Sentencing Council on the support and guidelines that this new role might require. I look forward to hearing the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, on these matters, given his experience as a magistrate.

I now turn to the wider Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. Noble Lords will know that, on 9 May, the Government published their strategy for reforming the services delivered to offenders in the community. We will create a new public sector National Probation Service, working to protect the public and building upon the expertise and professionalism which are already in place. The National Probation Service will report to the Secretary of State as part of the National Offender Management Service. This will give the probation service a stronger role within NOMS and the Ministry of Justice. The National Probation Service will play a fundamental role in protecting the public from the most dangerous offenders in our communities. Probation professionals in the National Probation Service will continue to work to protect the public from those who pose the greatest risk of harm and have committed the most serious offences.

Alongside this, we will open delivery of services for offenders in the community to a diverse range of new rehabilitation providers, as envisaged in the Offender Management Act 2007. We expect to see a wide variety of voluntary and private sector providers, from local community groups to regional and national organisations. In particular, we want to see a system which values and utilises the local expert knowledge of the voluntary and community sector. These providers will work alongside the National Probation Service and will manage the vast majority of offenders. We expect that most staff currently performing probation roles will transfer to the new providers. We will put in place a new system where the skills and expertise of probation professionals, coupled with the innovation and versatility of voluntary and private sector providers, support the rehabilitation of all offenders.

Opening up these services will allow us to make savings which we will invest in rehabilitation. It will also allow us to make better use of the money we already spend on managing offenders. We will create incentives for providers to focus relentlessly on reforming offenders, giving those delivering services flexibility to do what works and freedom from bureaucracy, but only paying them in full for real reductions in reoffending. Our payment structure will ensure that providers have to work with all offenders, including the most prolific and hardest to reach.

Finally, we will also put in place an unprecedented nationwide through-the-prison-gate resettlement service. This will mean that one provider will give most offenders continuous support from custody to the community. We will support this by ensuring that most offenders are held in a prison designated to the area to which they will be released for at least three months before release takes place. I hope that noble Lords will be as enthusiastic about this last reform as we are. It has long been recognised that closeness to home is an important factor in an offender’s resettlement process—and something on which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has long campaigned. Our reforms will draw on the best that organisations across all sectors have to offer, allowing access to offenders at the start of their time in custody through to release and beyond.

Linked to these wider reforms, parts of this Bill will support individuals working with offenders—whether they are staff of the National Probation Service, voluntary and community sector workers and volunteers, or those working for new rehabilitation providers—to use their experience of working with offenders to provide innovative services. Just as the new supervision period provides the maximum discretion, so we have tried to match that for non-custodial sentences. For community orders and suspended sentences, Clause 13 will create a new rehabilitation activity requirement. This combines the existing supervision and activity requirements and gives those supervising an offender more discretion to tailor activities to their needs during the course of the order. Clauses 14 and 15 make similar reforms to the programme and attendance centre requirements. These reforms build on the efforts we have already made to strengthen community orders, so that sentencers and the public can be confident that they are a robust sentence which combines punishment with effective rehabilitation.

I am sure that today we will hear genuine concerns about the pace and direction of our reforms, but I remind the House that a number of noble Lords across all Benches have campaigned for many years for greater support to be given those sentenced to less than a year in custody. They have argued for better through-the-gate services and for more effective and better respected community sentences. These are ambitions which this Government share and this Bill gives a real opportunity for them to become a reality. The hard fact is that without our wider reforms we would not be able to afford to extend rehabilitative support to offenders released from short sentences, but neither could we afford the status quo, with offenders passing through the system again and again, with more victims hurt and more communities damaged. It is the need to tackle that cycle of reoffending, particularly for offenders released from the shortest prison sentences, which drives these reforms and is the central purpose of this Bill. If we can cut deep into the 58% reoffending rate for those sentenced to less than 12 months, it will change lives—not just for victims but for offenders, whom it may well help to move away from a life of crime.

I know that the objectives underpinning this Bill are supported by the whole House. The provisions themselves will be subject to close and careful scrutiny today and through every stage of the Bill’s passage through this House. But I believe it is a piece of genuinely radical reform deserving of your Lordships’ support, and I commend this Bill to this House. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, first, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, for that measured response. I thought his peroration wandered into Beecham territory, but for the most part it was moderate and constructive, and for that I am most grateful. I see him as a kind of David Beckham figure, coming to dazzle us on the Front Bench and then all too soon going away again. However his participation today and, I hope, in Committee and at other stages of the Bill is now guaranteed.

It is very difficult responding to so comprehensive a debate. It is one where Governments can never win. We pilot, analyse and consult, and then we run out of steam. If we push ahead with radical ideas, we are going too fast and failing to consult. I am not quite sure how to respond to the tour de force of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. He ended on “The Tempest”, but his message was more from “Life of Brian”. He is quite sure that the Secretary of State is,

“not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy”.

One rather more serious point, which I make in all comradeship to both the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and my noble friend Lady Linklater, is that sometimes if a department makes any move at all, they are so precise about what is wrong that you lose all sense of whether they are supportive of at least the attempt. Of course, there are questions about so radical and innovative a policy. I will try to cover some of them in this reply and I will also look forward to a very thorough examination in Committee.

Since he was one of the last speakers and his name is at the top of my pile of notes, perhaps I may thank my noble friend Lord Bates for his intervention. It gave me a breather and he made a very important point about education. We will be bringing forward thoughts on education and its place in the youth sector, but it also has an important role to play in rehabilitation in the adult sector. It ties in with a point that is often made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about mentoring and the benefit of initiatives such as the Toe by Toe project, whereby literate prisoners help illiterate prisoners to master reading and writing.

I will try to cover the major points in my response and note some of the key ideas. I will follow up the idea from the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, on ex-service personnel because there is growing concern about how many of our ex-servicemen seem to end up in the criminal justice system as offenders. We will look at ideas that have worked and we will certainly follow them up.

A number of noble Lords expressed concern about whether there will be scope for small providers. We intend to put in place market stewardship arrangements so that the smaller voluntary and community sector providers can bid to be a prime provider or to be a partner. We are running a two-part £500,000 grant to support VCS organisations to overcome the barriers to participating in the rehabilitation reforms and, as has been said, this morning my right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister announced further funding. I should also like to follow up with my noble friend Lord Marks the idea of a chartered institute of probation officers or some such body. That is something that sits well with the idea of a National Probation Service. I have said many times from this Dispatch Box that I have great admiration for the probation service and at no time have I suggested that it is the fault of the service that we have a 56% rate of reoffending, or indeed any other percentage. The service does an excellent job. What we are doing here is not a condemnation of the probation service but an attempt to restructure provision in a way that gets us better value from the money that we are making available for rehabilitation. I take the point made by a number of noble Lords, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Howe and Lady Healy, about women. It is something that we may explore in Committee.

I will deal with some of the broader points made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle later, but I do not think that ever in my political life have the words, “Public is bad, private is good”, passed my lips. It is an absurd assumption and is certainly not part of the motivation behind this Bill. However, diversity, variety and flexibility are good, and those are what we are trying to promote in what we are doing. I will deal with the matter of breach, raised by my noble friend Lady Berridge, later, but perhaps I may flag up that I have visited one of the Clink restaurants, and very good it was too. They are a real and functioning example of rehabilitation; the hospitality world is one in which the range of skills required matches well with those of prisoners.

I have noted the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, that the previous Government themselves examined payment by results and were none the worse for that. As we have pointed out before, much of this restructuring depends on the 2007 Act. I am not scoring points here; I just want to make the point that it has been a direction of travel for a long time in both prisons and probation because, as has been said a number of times, the private and voluntary sectors have been involved in rehabilitation for a long time. I have seen provision by St Giles Trust, Turning Point and others that demonstrates that. We want to look again at social investment bonds. As the noble Baroness said, they could and should be a major long-term part solution to some of the issues we face. However, I acknowledge her experience and take her advice about the need to find a long-term basis for such investment.

My noble friend Lord Dholakia let it out of the bag that he is my long-term mentor on criminal justice matters, and I hope that I am all the better for that. He made the important point that we should not confuse voluntary with amateur. The voluntary sector has a great deal of professionalism to give us in this area. I hope also that we can press forward on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, and we certainly intend to do so as soon as possible.

I take on board the warning from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, that we should proceed with caution and about the danger that what we are doing will somehow legitimise and justify an inflation in short-term sentencing. I do not think that will happen. As the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, recognised, we are talking to magistrates and the Sentencing Council with this very much in mind. The noble and learned Lord also made the point that this kind of attempt has been made before with custody plus, and we will try to learn some of the lessons from that.

As well as raising the issue of women in prison, which I am very willing to explore further in Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, warned against setting people up to fail. I see that as a proper warning and one that we will take to heart when putting these reforms in place. I was glad that my noble friend Lady Linklater welcomed the emphasis on mentoring. She, too, expressed concerns about the probation service and mentioned that it is now 100 years old. I do not believe that we will lose the skills base through these reforms. They will be redeployed across the sector. However, I will say quite frankly that I believe that a National Probation Service along the lines that we are contemplating will have far more status and influence on policy than the service did as, if I may say, the poor relation of NOMS within the Prison Service. Under our new structure, the National Probation Service will have within NOMS direct reporting to the Secretary of State, and I think that that is an advance on what has gone before. My noble friend Lady Hamwee also welcomed mentoring, and I take to heart the importance of getting a complete buy-in to this from prison staff.

I suspect I shall run out of time for all the other issues. We are trying to give discretion to the courts when they are sentencing. Applying the provision to all offenders then setting the appropriate level of supervision is a much more practical approach than deciding at the time of sentencing not to supervise an offender and then realising too late that they actually pose a risk of reoffending and need supervision. A blanket, one-size-fits-all type of supervision will not be applied; there will be proportionality and judgment in taking this forward. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, gave an example of somebody who has been in prison for an offence that is unlikely to be recommitted and has a minimum requirement for supervision: that is exactly what will happen.

My noble friend Lord Dholakia, the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, spoke about the danger of raising the threshold for imposing custodial sentences. The Bill is focused on improving rehabilitation for those whom the court decides need to go to prison. We have already made changes to the community order in the LASPO Act and the Crime and Courts Act to ensure that sentencers have tough community sentences at their disposal. The fact remains that, as the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, said, some people need to go to prison, even if only for short periods. The current custodial threshold is already high. The court must not pass a custodial sentence unless it is of the opinion that the offence is so serious that a final community sentence cannot be justified. Other matters on the details of application would be better left to be dealt with in Committee.

The noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, asked me specifically whether 14 days committal for breach activates its own 12 months of supervision. It does not: committal is the ultimate sanction for breach but the objective is to get the offender back on to the original rehabilitation programme. That also covers how we intend to extend this to 50,000 offenders and apply it with a sense of proportion in each specific case.

On the question of women, we have, through my honourable friend Helen Grant, taken on a women’s advisory board and will be taking forward proposals on female offenders. I welcome the opportunity to discuss this in Committee.

A number of noble Lords, including the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle, the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, my noble friend Lord Dholakia and the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, raised concerns about the participation of small charities. Our reforms will open up the probation service to a far wider range of potential providers. We want to encourage partnerships between voluntary or charitable organisations and between VCs and the private sector. In reply to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle about faith group involvement in rehabilitation, I recently went to Liverpool as a guest of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool and saw some of the projects being run there. The noble Baroness, Lady Healy, may be interested to know of Adelaide House, a very interesting project for the resettlement of women offenders. I want to put on record my appreciation of all the faith groups, which already have a network and a committed flock who readily make themselves available for rehabilitation work. That is something we want to work with and build on. In St Albans and Norwich, which I have visited in the past couple of years, the cathedrals are being used as centres for getting the various groups together on projects that work.

Lest I get into trouble for going on too long, I will just deal with the question of payment by results. Our payment mechanisms will ensure that providers have to work successfully with all offenders, including the most prolific and hardest to help, if they are to be paid in full. There will be a fixed fee for service, ensuring that they deliver the sentence requirements, and licence conditions for every offender. The remainder of their payment will be dependent on the reductions they make in reoffending. To be paid in full, providers will need to achieve an agreed reduction in both the number of offenders who go on to reoffend and the total number of offences committed by those in their cohort. So they cannot just focus on the easy wins; they will have to work with the most prolific offenders and keep working with those offenders who have already reoffended. We will be developing the details of our payment mechanism in discussions with providers and practitioners. I am sure that will be developed in Committee.

[Lord Beecham]

Could the noble Lord clarify whether it is the intention to bring those details back to the House or to Parliament for approval? In what way will there be parliamentary scrutiny of the detail?

[Lord McNally]

Those are matters of contract with the providers, but the noble Lord can probe me further on that in Committee, when I will try to give more specific answers.

It does not surprise me, given the speakers list today and the range of experience and expertise on view, that a lot of questions have been asked. I hope we can delve deeper into this in Committee. I do not accept that this is not worth pursuing. Most people have welcomed the objectives and, as I have told the House before, we must accept that, in these straitened times, the department cannot call on other resources to fund ambitious programmes. However, we are spending just less than £1 billion on the wide range of rehabilitation services. We have heard about holistic approaches and making sure that we have buy-in from other departments and from local government; these are all important to its success and I passionately believe it is worth trying. I understand the dangers but, in the end, you can spot so many dangers that you are paralysed. I do not believe that is the right approach. We should press ahead with this, let this House use its expertise to examine it in detail and see if we can put in place a piece of legislation that will give the framework to bring in ideas, flexibility, innovation and value for money in an area where there is a great deal of common agreement about objectives, as today’s debate has shown. As we take this Bill forward, our job is to see if we can tease out the practicalities so that it is also effective. I beg to move.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.