Prisoners: Work Programmes

Lord Myners Excerpts

Tuesday 15th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Myners]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate in this debate secured by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. It is a timely debate in the context of the Government’s announcement last week of planned changes to the prison estate and to post-release supervision and support. I look forward to the Minister’s response. I know that he has taken an active interest in prisons. He told me that he has recently visited Peterborough prison, where no doubt he had the opportunity to see, among other things, the excellent initiatives being developed there by Social Finance under the chairmanship of Bernard Horn and the leadership of David Hutchinson. I declare my interest as the successor to the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, as president of the Howard League for Penal Reform.

As the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said, some prisoners are paid for doing chores but it is a derisory sum. It is pocket money; in fact, it is less than the average pocket money paid per week to teenagers. It does not constitute employment or a meaningful preparation for release. Prison may, necessarily, have a punitive element but it should not deny the dignity of prisoners. It should focus instead on preparing offenders for a return to the community in an economically and socially purposeful and productive manner.

For many prisoners, life behind bars is sluggish and boring. Too little time is spent on education and helping them to develop the skills necessary to overcome what, for many of them, have been chaotic and painful life circumstances. As the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, noted, and I saw in a recent visit to Brixton prison, there is a great wealth of talent in prison. There are prisoners who want to stop lives of crime and re-establish productive lives which are no longer chaotic, but we are failing them in not taking as much action as we could to prepare them to return to the community and not be drawn back into offending and a life of crime. I found it painful to listen to two extremely bright prisoners who had the right motivation but were desperate about what was going to happen on their release because they did not feel in any way prepared to walk out through those gates and back into a safe, secure and hopeful life.

One of the most productive things prison can do is to prepare offenders for the world of regular and paid work. For some of them, this might be the first opportunity in their lives to develop work skills that can be applied in the formal economy. The way to get good outcomes—for prisoners and society—from the time spent in prison, is to provide a life-changing opportunity rather than the current practice, prevalent in so many prisons, of the prison being a warehouse or even worse.

I therefore urge the Government to focus their resources and ability to mobilise employers, to seek ways to create opportunities for prisoners to be gainfully employed, earning a fair wage and paying tax, and to provide the opportunity for prisoners to make a contribution out of their earnings to their families. Many of them feel that the link with their partners, wives, husbands and children is completely broken. I endorse the observation made by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, about Titan prisons, which will inevitably increase the distance of travel between a prisoner and his family. If the Government want to reflect on this, I suggest they look at the views expressed by Mr Dominic Grieve, who, when he was shadow Justice Secretary, demolished the proposals for Titan prisons made by the Government of which I was a member.

We want to provide effective linkages between prisoners and their families. Through paid employment at a competitive and fair rate, prisoners will be able to make monetary contributions to their families, which will make them feel a continued link, a responsibility and a sense that they have retained their dignity, rather than the current conventional practice in which the conceit of treating a prisoner’s partner as a single parent ignores any opportunity for continuing economic linkage between the prisoner and their family. We want to seize the opportunity to allow prisoners to learn transferable employment skills that will reduce the risk of reoffending, to their own benefit and that of the community.

This is not going soft on prisons or prisoners. It makes assuredly good economic and social sense. It reduces the risk of a vicious circle. Providing training and work is a very real way of breaking that circle. Paid work creates additional motivation and fosters a sense of near-normality. In so doing, we might be making a positive step to address the desperation of prisoners released with little support and little prospect of employment in the formal economy because of the absence of any training or working experience during the period of their imprisonment.

There are, of course, practical issues. What is the right rate for the job? How do employers have access to the prison estate? How do we ensure the continuity of service that a business will require? These challenges can be overcome if everybody has the will to do so. The right reverend Prelate has referred to the importance of the governor. I would also emphasise the importance of ministerial activity and leadership. I read in the Sunday Times Mr Steve Hilton’s views on how difficult it was for Ministers to make change. I urge the Minister to take a personal interest in this area. Can he get together with other Ministers, including in the Department for Business, with employers and trade unions—we will hear in a moment from my noble friend Lady Dean—and with other agencies like the Howard League to see if he can place his mark on this particular area and be the Minister who changed the way in which prisons operate in preparing people to return to the economy as effective workers?