Offender Rehabilitation Bill [HL]

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I have to admit that I am deeply uneasy about the Bill, not because I do not agree with its general objective of reducing reoffending—of course I do—but because of the many questions about the implementation of its associated strategy that remain unanswered and the speed with which it is being rushed through this House. I entirely associate myself with the wise words and caution expressed by my noble and learned friend Lord Woolf.

The problem with the Bill is not what it contains so much as the fact that it is a cart being put before a horse before we know whether it is going to be pulled by a horse or a tractor. Knowing his support for the probation service and his appreciation of the practical, I welcome the fact that it is the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who will take the Bill thorough the House, while sympathising with him in his role of conveyor to the messianic Secretary of State of the fears expressed by many noble Lords in this House.

Until last summer, the criminal justice system was embarked on a rehabilitation revolution led by a Secretary of State whose method included careful examination of practicalities and attention to the all-important role of people in the rehabilitation process. In the new rehabilitation revolution on which we are now embarked, people appear to be made to play second fiddle to the market, while the timing appears to be determined by the need to present tough achievements to the electorate in the 2015 election manifesto. The problem with it is that in addition to punishing offenders it also punishes those who work with them, particularly the probation service, for all the wrong reasons.

My unease stems from the inconsistency in two statements by the Justice Secretary. First, in launching the consultation associated with Transforming Rehabilitation on 9 January, he said:

“Despite significant increases in spending on probation under the previous government, almost half of those released from prison still go on to reoffend within 12 months”.

This confirmed my fear that—for entirely illogical reasons, because this is the one group of offenders for whom the probation service currently has no responsibility—he blamed probation for the fact that three-quarters of the annual cost of reoffending could be attributed to this group and was bent on total reorganisation, despite all the various changes that had been imposed on the service over the past 15 years and the fact that it was hitting all its targets.

Secondly, in his foreword to Transforming Rehabilitation: A Strategy for Reform, published on 9 May, the same day as the Bill, he says:

“Through the savings we make, we will extend rehabilitation support to those on short-term sentences, who currently have the highest reoffending rates but who are typically left to their own devices on release. This support will be guaranteed through legislation, which is the only way to ensure we target the hardest to reach and most prolific offenders”.

When has legislation ever been able to guarantee the consistent availability, provision and affordability of the money and people required to produce that support?

To go with my caution, I have many questions about the practicalities of the transforming rehabilitation exercise but I intend to focus on the impact assessment, which became available only four days ago and is about as thin and inadequate a document of its type as I can remember. I have discovered in the past that the quality and content of an impact assessment invariably reflects the quality and quantity of the thinking behind the measure it is designed to assess. The fact that, although signed on 9 May—the same day as the publication of the White Paper and the Bill—it was made available only last Thursday, makes me wonder whether Ministers had it during their work on the Bill or whether it was written later to justify decisions that had not only been taken but laid down since before the consultation exercise was launched.

To question the few assessments it contains of the implementation of a policy whose objectives it states will be reviewed at a date to be determined, may I ask the Minister what factors were taken into account in estimating that there would be a cost of only £25 million a year associated with the breach of licence and supervision conditions for short-sentence prisoners? How many offenders were assessed as likely to breach? Were any facts, and therefore costs, deliberately excluded from the assessment? What factors did the Government consider in estimating that there might be additional police costs of only £5 million a year? What is the Government’s estimate of the cost of providing a rehabilitative service to offenders released from custodial sentences of less than 12 months and how much of that are they looking to recover through competition? Surely, the Government know the cost per individual of drug testing and treatment and, based on existing figures, how many offenders are likely to qualify for the testing and treatment that this legislation purports to guarantee? Why then has the cost not been quantified on that basis so that the affordability of the measure can be assessed? Finally, does “not applicable” in the box showing the full economic assessment on page 2 mean that the Government made no assumptions in coming to their decision and believed that there were no associated sensitivities or risks? What about the risk to the public?

Those are all the assessments that the document contains. There is no mention of the cost of extending rehabilitative services to short-sentence prisoners—an expense that the previous Government found to be unaffordable—or evidence to explain how it may be balanced by competing services. There is no mention of any assessment of the ability of the private sector, which failed so spectacularly to provide security staff for the Olympic Games, and to provide trained and accredited staff who can be relied upon to provide the regular contact needed with offenders, whose chaotic and dysfunctional lifestyles are described in the White Paper. There is no mention of the cost of the proposed reorganisation of the probation service, of any assessment of the cost of training and accrediting non-public sector responsible officers, or of whether the requirements of the Private Security Industry Act will apply. Nor is there any analysis of the timeframe or content of the results for which providers will be paid, or any estimate of inevitable IT costs. There is no mention of how reoffending will be measured. In this connection, I wish that the Government would drop the use of “reoffending” when talking about measurement because, as the Home Office statisticians told me on my first day as Chief Inspector of Prisons, when I asked what it meant, it simply cannot be measured because nobody knows. We all know that reconviction rates can be measured, so why do we not just use those?

On top of all that, there is no assessment of how many additional short-term sentences are likely to be awarded or of the impact of the new provision on either prisons or the supervision of those awarded community sentences. Then there is what I can describe only as spin in relation to some other measures. Nothing is worse than announcing something that is unanimously welcomed, only to have to admit that it cannot be delivered because it cannot be afforded. I am always suspicious of the word “new” when all that is meant is a redistribution of existing responsibilities. In connection with this, there are many questions about how the governance of the probation service will be exercised, many of which have been asked already. However, I am currently concerned that probation trusts are in the lead of an array of essential local partnerships that I will not list. Under the Government’s proposals, it appears that these trusts are to be abolished. How are these partnership responsibilities to be reallocated? How do the Government think that the introduction of the market will improve existing arrangements in this respect?

On prisons, I am glad that the Minister mentioned the welcome intention of regrading resettlement prisons. However, this, too, is incomplete and comes 22 years after the original direction from the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, then the Home Secretary, following the recommendation made by my noble and learned friend Lord Woolf. Bearing in mind that everything done with and for prisoners during their sentence should be aimed at helping them to live useful and law-abiding lives, why not go the whole hog and, instead of disrupting half the prisons in the country, activate regional clusters to enable local rehabilitation of local prisoners to take place throughout their sentence and not just at its tail?

In conclusion, while I accept that there are good things in the Bill, I am concerned about the timetable. The Government justify that by alleging that, by legislating early, they can give potential providers clarity over the service that will be required, allowing them to prepare their bids and form partnerships. However, while the Bill may be clear to those who have drafted it, there is a considerable lack of clarity about the achievability of what it is designed to enable. I ask the Minister to seriously consider delaying the Committee stage of the Bill—which I note is to be on 5 June, three days after the House resumes—because it leaves precious little time, either for noble Lords to prepare amendments or for the Government to provide answers to the questions that have been asked this afternoon, including those that the Secretary of State was unable to answer on a recent Radio 4 interview.

I admit that, during all the thinking about the Bill, some words of Shakespeare have been coming into my mind, from act 3, scene 2 of “The Tempest”, in which Caliban says:

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not”.

I am afeard that the isle that is the transforming rehabilitation exercise, including the Bill, is full of soundbites and hot air that give hurt and delight not. Like other noble Lords, I look forward to having those fears allayed during the passage of the Bill.