Prisoners: Accommodation on Leaving Prison

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, in his seminal report on the riots in Strangeways and other prisons in 1990, my noble and learned friend Lord Woolf opined that the three factors that were most likely to prevent a released prisoner reoffending were a home, a job and a family or stable relationship—all of which were put at risk by imprisonment. He advocated, so far unsuccessfully—although I have to acknowledge the intent behind the recent recategorising of 70 prisons as resettlement prisons—that prisons should be grouped into what he called “community clusters”, which today would be defined as regional clusters, so that this damage could be mitigated by holding prisoners as close to home as possible, thereby enabling local organisations to be involved in the rehabilitation of their own local prisoners. He said that evidence showed that local ownership of a problem resulted in much greater commitment to finding a solution.

I am very glad that Matthew Purvis’s excellent Library briefing for this debate, for which I am extremely grateful, includes three important non-governmental documents. These are Vision Housing and Interserve’s First Home, Second Chance; Shelter’s Unlocking Stable Homes; and Homeless Link’s Preventing Reoffending and Homelessness. They spell out many of the questions that I had hoped would have been answered in the Ministry of Justice’s May 2013 strategy, Transforming Rehabilitation. This is being implemented without debate in either House. Had today’s debate been held in two weeks’ time, noble Lords would also have had the benefit of another important non-governmental report, No Fixed Abode: The Implications For Homeless People In The Criminal Justice System. This has just been quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Judd, and will be published by the Howard League, as he said, which has allowed me to quote from it.

While the Government’s strategy appears to be strong in intent, it is by no means so strong on detail, suggesting that, rather than lay down what is to be done, they prefer to refer to what they call,

“the broader life management issues that often lead offenders back to crime”,

without specifying what they are.

Confirming the need for something more definite to be done to limit homelessness, the Howard League quotes the MoJ 2012 report, which was also quoted by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater. Three figures come out very strongly from that report: 60% believed that having a place to live was important in stopping them reoffending in the future; 37% said that they would require help in finding somewhere to live, and 84% of those said they would require a lot of help; and 79% of those who had been homeless before custody were reconvicted in the first year after release, compared with 47% of those who had had accommodation.

If such detailed requirements and their implications for reoffending were known by the Ministry of Justice in 2012, why were they not answered in detail in 2013? What about laying down what ought to happen? In some prisons that I inspected, I found that housing on release was tackled from initial reception through a dedicated housing unit, sometimes staffed by prisoners, which asked every prisoner on reception whether they had somewhere to live on release; this was followed by action taken to ensure that they had. Why was this not made common practice in every prison?

The Ministry of Justice would also, if it had looked around, have come across—and hopefully have been able to change—a policy introduced by the then Conservative Government in 1995 that I believe has massively increased the problem, particularly for women. This policy stipulated that council accommodation had to be surrendered if the tenant was absent for more than 13 weeks, against the advice given to the Minister at the time that it ought to be for a year.

Reflecting on probation, which has already been mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby, have the Government done anything about the short-term prisoners who are going to have to undergo a year’s supervision? Where are they to live and what about the cost of getting from accommodation to the place of supervision? Summing all this up, it seems to me that there is a great need to co-ordinate a great deal of good practice that is going on locally and being done by people who are taking the initiative on their own behalf.

As always, five minutes is far too short to do more than scratch the surface of concerns about the impact that a stable accommodation has on reoffending rates. In thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell, and congratulating her on giving us this opportunity, I hope that the Minister will reflect on the points raised and tell us what the Ministry of Justice believes to be the answers to them. I hope, too, that on reflection, the Ministry of Justice will realise that the impact on reoffending rates of its strategy could have been greater if there had been debates in this House. If the points made today had been brought out much earlier, they perhaps would have been able to impact on the strategy.