Crime, Reoffending and Rehabilitation

Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for securing this debate, and I welcome the Minister and his maiden speech. Others have spoken of his great attainments, but what must now be half a century ago, he gained first-hand experience of the real problems that people needing legal advice face in day-to-day life when we worked together at a legal advice centre. I shall return to this in a moment.

I do not want to speak about the causes of crime—that is impossible to get into in a few minutes, although the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, did so eloquently—but will deal instead with what needs doing now, what works and what does not work. First, I want to say a word about IPPs. I could not equal the eloquence of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, or the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in dealing with the sentence, but I think we ought now to appreciate that although there are just over 1,500 people who have not been released, there are nearly 1,400 people who have been recalled. We overlook the importance of rehabilitation. One appellant described to me once that she felt like a puppet on a string when released. We need to address the problems caused by indefinite detention and the possibility of recall. We have to await the report of the Justice Select Committee on other matters, but I very much hope that we can address proper support to those released so we do not find so many coming back.

Secondly, I turn to women offenders because here, again, there is something that works. Obviously, there are some crimes for which we must send women to prison for a significant period of time, but sending a woman to prison for short-term offending is, in my view, almost invariably wrong. When I chaired the Commission on Justice in Wales, we recommended in our report that:

“A commitment should be made, in our view, to establish a number of women’s centres and the supporting interventions. This would overcome the well-documented problems of women’s imprisonment and would enable women to serve their sentences in their home areas. These centres take a holistic approach to reducing offending by women, offering court-ordered support and supervision, access to mental healthcare and treatment for addictions, skills for employment, financial management and debt advice, parenting support and the opportunity to gain and maintain safe housing.”


The Minister has first-hand experience of knowing how vital those issues of safe housing and employment are to dealing with people.

I wish to say how grateful I am to see that the Ministry of Justice, in conjunction with the Welsh Government, will open next year a residential women’s centre in Swansea that will be an alternative to short custodial sentences. This is a very important development, but key to it—I am not sure how well understood this is—is the holistic support that is to be given. The probation service does an excellent job, but in dealing with offenders you need to bring in the whole community, including the voluntary sector. Certainly, it is quite clear from pathfinder projects being undertaken in Wales—there is not time for me to set out the details—that there is success not in criminalising people, to which I shall return in a moment, but in providing holistic support for them in the community, with debt advice, safe housing, employment and dealing with the consequences of abuse: a one-stop shop for rehabilitation.

It has shown in Wales that it works; it is one way of trying to stop reoffending and rehabilitate effectively. I commend the work being done by the Ministry of Justice and the very significant sums being spent by the Welsh Government on subsidising the third sector on a more permanent basis and funding the work being done.

Thirdly, I turn to the other aspect that needs urgent attention. In the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act passed earlier this year, Sections 98 to 121 dealt with cautions. I very much hope that urgent steps are being taken to get the legislation under way, because another cause of reoffending is criminalising at too early a stage. The success of the projects in Wales, particularly those in Dyfed-Powys and north Wales, has shown that if you give people community rehabilitation and do not criminalise them, you can stop them going on to offend. I very much hope that urgent work is being undertaken by the Government to get the statutory instruments that are needed, and the necessary guidance, so that we can properly stop criminalising people and look for an alternative, rehabilitative approach.