Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Mike Wood Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith]

It is our intention to report quickly on these aspects of the probation changes. There has been a considerable delay since the Bill completed its passage through the Lords, as was referred to by the shadow Secretary of State. Although the process for implementing the Government’s changes is fairly rapid, the consideration of the Bill has been relatively leisurely by parliamentary standards. It is my intention that the Select Committee will still influence the shape of what emerges.

When the Justice Committee reported on the probation service in 2011, we said that a more seamless, through-the-gate approach to dealing with offenders was vital and that less of a probation officer’s time should be wasted on bureaucratic processes that do not involve direct engagement with offenders. We saw potential in payment by results, but some dangers as well.

We also wanted something that the Government do not intend to give us, which is local commissioning. That would enable decisions about what is provided to be taken in the context of local circumstances so that we no longer have the absurd position whereby prison is a nationally provided free good, in that it does not engage local authorities through the provision of any expenditure. It is a national expenditure, whereas almost all other kinds of provision have to be financed and funded locally.

The Justice Committee reported earlier this year on women offenders. I welcome clause 11, which relates to the concern expressed in our report that the system was designed to meet the needs of male offenders and must make appropriate provision for women offenders. The argument is not that women who commit criminal offences are less guilty than men who commit criminal offences, but that the circumstances that generate the offences committed by women and the means by which women can be guided towards not committing further offences are often different. That is another area in which we have given advice that is relevant to the Bill.

There are some important questions about the Bill and the structure of the probation service that will be necessary to support it that must be considered. The first is whether there is a market out there. Are there enough potential providers that could take on the contracts and that could engage, as is necessary, with the wide range of charities, voluntary organisations and other bodies in which there is expertise? [Interruption.] I heard a reference from the Labour Benches to G4S and Serco, and the contracts of both those companies, which were brought about under the previous Government, are now the subject of serious fraud inquiries. One implication of that is that a number of companies may effectively be excluded from the bidding process. We must await the outcome of the inquiries as we cannot reach conclusions at this stage, but even were the process still going on, it would exclude at least two major companies working in that field.

[Mike Wood (Batley and Spen) (Lab)]

In view of those allegations, does the right hon. Gentleman think it would be appropriate for the Secretary of State to withdraw or suspend those companies from the bidding process until the matters are resolved? So far he has refused to do that.

[Sir Alan Beith]

There are complex legal reasons that I will not try and go into now, but I cannot imagine that this House would want a company that is currently the subject of a serious criminal investigation to be awarded a criminal justice contract. Both companies, of course, have contracts in criminal justice in other areas of activity or other parts of government, and they have perfectly satisfactory ratings on some of those. It is a difficult issue to deal with.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gareth Johnson]

It is highly unlikely that the Ministry of Justice would give any kind of contract to an organisation that it did not regard as fit and proper to provide those services.

I repeat that charities and private sector organisations are already involved with administering some unpaid work requirements and drug treatment orders. This can, and often does, work extremely well, and we should certainly not turn our back on it. I fear, however, that the genuine help that charities and private organisations can provide will not be made available if the instinctive rejection of the private sector by some Members results in the Bill being voted down. Some Members oppose the Bill simply because they do not want the private sector to become involved in state affairs, regardless of whether that would reduce crime.

Let us not lose sight of the central argument: the public are screaming out for less crime. I believe that the Bill will achieve that. It matters not to a burglary victim whether the perpetrator is helped to stop offending by an organisation in the private sector, the charity sector or the public sector. What matters to that victim of crime is that there should be less crime, and that they will not be the victim of further offending.

[Mike Wood (Batley and Spen) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman suggests that the public are crying out for a reduction in crime. Will he tell us by how much serious crime has been reduced in the past 20 years?

[Gareth Johnson]

I can tell the hon. Gentleman that, since this Government took over, we have seen a reduction in crime of some 10%. We should be proud of that. We have achieved that through Government initiatives as well as through initiatives involving the police and, yes, the probation service, but there is so much more that could be done, particularly for those serving short sentences. Prisoners who serve sentences of under 12 months are the most likely ones to reoffend and push up the crime rates, and we must use that knowledge to ensure that we reduce crime by supporting those people. The Bill will help that to happen.

The probation service is good at what it does, but it does not have a monopoly on wisdom in tackling reoffending. We have heard some rash statements today to the effect that the changes will jeopardise the safety of the public and put them at risk, but it is the current system that puts the public at risk, not our reforms. Under the Bill, the causes of lower-level and more serious offending will be tackled for the first time. Tackling the causes of crime will lead to the success of the measures.

It makes complete sense to give private providers the opportunity to help to reduce reoffending and, if they succeed, to reward them financially. It makes sense to ask the taxpayer to pay for what works, rather than for what does not. Payment by results is hardly a new concept. Tendering out has taken place right across the public sector for years, and there is no evidence to suggest that it has not worked in the criminal justice system. I see no reason why the tendering out of these services should not be a success.

The Opposition have said that they support the supervision of short-term offenders, but they also say that they do not support fundamental reform of the probation service. I cannot see how those two statements can be reconciled. How can we help 50,000 new offenders simply by asking the probation trusts to take on a few more clients? That simply would not work. The Opposition’s stance of supporting extra help for many prisoners without making changes to the system simply does not stand up to scrutiny.

The changes will help some of those who are in the greatest need of help—the perpetual reoffenders who appear before the courts again and again. I am not suggesting that it will be easy for any contractor to help those people, but it is absolutely right that they should try. For years, we have worked on the assumption that we could lock someone up for a short period of time and expect that, miraculously, on release, they would not reoffend. We now know, of course, that that theory was completely misplaced, so if we want to tackle reoffending rates, these reforms are not only overdue, but vital.

I maintain that this Bill represents one of the most significant and important provisions that the Government have put forward since I became a Member of Parliament, so I sincerely hope that it will receive its Second Reading.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Burrowes]

My point is that there have been many different pilots in the past few years that have considered different ways of ensuring that we are more driven by outcomes than by process. One of the great failures of the previous Government, not least on drug treatment, was that it was all based on process and on ticking a box. Indeed, the so-called payment by results was payment by activity, driven not by rehabilitation and outcomes but by the numbers of people getting into treatment. That is why it is important to recognise that payment by results has a crucial role to play across all public services, but will vary from service to service. We must therefore handle with care how we deliver payment by results on criminal justice.

I want to offer some advice on the LASARS, or the local area single assessment and referral systems—we are all into acronyms when we have service changes. They have had a particularly good effect, not least because they are locally based. They are also based on single assessments and many of us involved in the criminal justice system will be all too aware of the repetitive assessments throughout the system that lack continuity and delivery of change. LASARS allow a single assessment in the criminal justice and non-criminal justice worlds. Payment by results offers us the opportunity to get away from the criminal justice mindset in that regard. Public health interest concerns, mental health concerns and educational concerns must be dealt with under a wider remit than that simply required by a criminal justice model. That is why we need to make the most of the opportunity offered by the LASARS, which would help refer people to the right places through a single assessment.

Co-design is also important and we must recognise its value. One such example can be found in London, where the Mayor, Boris Johnson, has helped pilot Project Daedalus, which focuses on the rehabilitation of young offenders through the resettlement wing at Feltham. That cohort had appalling reoffending rates at 70%, yet through the scheme he did so much better. The project was radical in that there was a resettlement broker who could negotiate with employers, accommodation providers, drug rehabilitation providers and others to try to ensure that rehabilitation was delivered.

[Mike Wood]

Is the vast improvement at Feltham the reason that the Government plan to close it?

[Mr Burrowes]

The hon. Gentleman will note the welcome fall in the number of young people in custody, for which the Government can take credit. Feltham is a good example of new models and new ways of doing things. The old Feltham, based almost on a borstal-type approach, is past its sell-by date in many ways—

[Mike Wood]

Why close it?

[Mr Burrowes]

The hon. Gentleman comments from a sedentary position, but I ask him to allow me to finish. If the number of people going into an institution is in decline, one must reconsider the question of value for money. I encourage him to consider the consultations on secure colleges, with the opportunities for us to upscale what has been lost in Feltham. We talk about training and education, and we should try to ensure that we have more intensive rehabilitation that, although it takes place in custody, does not take place in custody on the same model as at Feltham. I agree that Feltham is another example of an institution that is past its sell-by date and needs change and radical overhaul, but that is why we recognise that we cannot go on with the status quo of the Felthams of this world or with the status quo for those people who come out of Feltham and other institutions and do not get the rehabilitation they and the public need.

Project Daedalus was very much focused on such a goal and was able to reduce reoffending, as I understand it, to 53%. That was an encouraging rate. The lessons learned from that project, which I saw from an early stage, are important. The brokerage system is important, but so are the connections back to the London boroughs. That relationship is important. I recognise that some partnerships are working now, such as the offender management programme in London, which brings together the offending management teams. Those relationships need to be continued under payment by results. We learned from the drug recovery pilots that the way to do that is to ensure that the co-design process brings local authorities along with it. It is important that there is accountability, too.

The importance of LASARs lies in their independence from providers and, in some cases, commissioners. They provide some accountability in the system, independent of the provider, and ensure that there is an advocate. We know that offenders will not all go in one direction; when they go in different directions, the advocate will make sure that there is a proper referral system that works all the way through a reoffender’s rehabilitation.

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[Mike Wood (Batley and Spen) (Lab)]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt), but I want to go back to the opening remarks of the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes), who is no longer in his place. He regretted the fact—he said it was a great shame—that we could not all come together in agreement on this Bill. I would have thought, however, that by the time he spoke it was totally apparent—it certainly is now—that, on the issue of reducing recidivism, which would be beneficial to all parties and to the whole of society, there is enormous agreement on both sides of the House that supervision of and support for petty offenders should have been introduced a considerable while ago, certainly under the previous Government. I, like many others, regret that they did not find the money to do that.

I also think that there is almost a consensus that, in some cases, it would be beneficial to have extra licence requirements for those who have served sentences of up to two years. I think, therefore, that there is a great deal of consensus about what we are told is the whole corpus of the Bill. Where the consensus falls down is on the means by which to achieve those high ideals and aspirations.

None of what the Government say they want necessitates the privatisation of the probation process and the destruction of our first-class professional probation service. Indeed, as we have heard repeatedly throughout the debate, if the Government were serious about their objectives, they would be turning to the probation service, not undermining it. They would be looking to the people who have proved that they can deliver those kinds of objectives, not doing the very reverse.

The Government should be looking to services such as my own in west Yorkshire, which consistently rates among the best. I place on record my thanks to Karen Ledger and Andrew Sinclair from that service for their briefings to me, which have been extremely useful, and to Gail Wilson, a constituent of mine who wrote to remind me that in 2013 alone the West Yorkshire service has received the Investors in People gold award, is the only trust in the Stonewall top 100 employers index and has won three Butler Trust awards, and that, at the same time, between 2005 and 2013, it reduced reoffending by 14%. As we have heard, every probation trust throughout the country has met and continues to meet every target that the Government have set. The Government rate them good or better than good. That is why the consensus falls down.

[Jenny Chapman]

My hon. Friend rightly points out that trusts are consistently awarded good or excellent ratings on inspection. Does he agree that now is the time to raise the bar and ask more of our trusts, such as asking them to deal with short-term prisoners, and not to be abolishing the very trusts that are performing so highly?

[Mike Wood]

That is exactly the way forward. Were those extra requirements to be introduced, the probation service would meet them. Despite the attempt to obscure the reality of the Government’s plans, we learn that the probation service will not even be given the opportunity to do so, for some completely fallacious reason to do with not risking public money. That comes against the background of a Bill that will risk £20 billion of public money by giving it to untried and untested private companies. It is true that were the extra responsibilities and work to be offered to the probation service, it would meet the challenge.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

In my hon. Friend’s discussions with West Yorkshire probation trust, were any concerns raised about the work load of probation officers? My intuition is that it has gone up a great deal and that trusts have delivered incredible results. Obviously, the whole service is put at risk if officers are put under too much pressure to achieve the results that are required of them. The stress levels for probation officers are certainly very high.

[Mike Wood]

The large case loads of probation officers is a continuing concern. There is concern across the board about the proposals, but the work load for probation officers and probation trusts is a matter of record, as is the fact that they have in the recent past cut their costs. They have become more efficient, not less.

There are other problems with the proposals. They are untried and untested. The Secretary of State is now at his banquet and we all hope that he enjoys it enormously. In the first week that he was in post—before he even knew where his desk was—he cancelled out of hand the two planned pilots, which would have given us the evidence base by which to judge the proposals.

Payment by results, which has been lauded this afternoon, is unique in criminal justice systems throughout the world. By definition, therefore, we have very little evidence on the efficacy or potential of such a system. We do know that when it has been researched, it has not come out too well. For example, the Social Market Foundation, a cross-party think-tank, has said that even if the private companies reduce reoffending rates by more than 3% and achieve the payment-by-results reward, that would be limited to a reduction of 5% as anything more than that would require huge investment in rehabilitation programmes. It states that most companies would make their profit by cutting costs on staff and interventions, allow reoffending rates to rise by 3%, if necessary, and rely on the fee for service to produce their profits.

The myth has been perpetuated today that payment by results will have an enormous enervating and driving effect on the private companies who take part. We know that that is nonsense. The Government started with the intention that 30% of the fee should be related to results. We know that in the so-called negotiations, that was reduced to less than 10%. As the think-tank points out, the companies will earn a vast amount of their money by winning the contract. That is how they will make their profit. To extend the payment beyond that would be a bonus. Any suggestion that payment by results can have that effect therefore flies in the face of what will actually happen.

[Lorely Burt]

I admire the hon. Gentleman’s visionary understanding, because I have no knowledge of the reduction to less than 10%. I put the example of the 3% straw man to the Justice Secretary and his colleagues. That percentage was described to me as “noise in the system”. In other words, 3% either way would not be indicative of strong work. Should the targets not only not be met, but go backwards, my understanding is that there would be—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Interventions must be very short. The hon. Lady has made a speech already, and I am bothered about the time.

[Mike Wood]

The hon. Lady referred to “noise in the system” and I was beginning to understand what she meant. She has already made her speech.

I was suggesting that rather than being motivated by the wonderful new system of being paid only by results, the companies, will find a way to operate in which so-called results are unimportant in determining how much profit they make. That might be difficult for the hon. Lady to accept, but we ought to consider the kind of companies that the Government are talking to and that will be central to the new way of organising the probation service.

Many attempts have been made to downplay that point. The hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate, among others, said that we cannot make judgments about G4S on the basis of minor indiscretions because it has 74,000 employees. Companies that engage in Government contracts and then defraud the Government, that make claims for transporting prisoners who are dead or for providing services to people who have long since left the system, and that are under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office are not the kind of companies that the Government should consider offering further contracts to. Although the Minister was offered the opportunity earlier to tell the House that the two companies that are under serious investigation will be debarred until cleared, he has failed, yet again, to give that assurance. Apparently, companies that behave in that disreputable and dishonest fashion will be considered perfectly acceptable to play a part in the new system. I find that completely unacceptable.

As recently as today, we have heard more evidence of the performance of G4S. Three of its members falsified documents and were guilty, as far as I can see, of perjury. Judge Mostyn said:

“The three officials behaved disgracefully”.

He added:

“When agents of the state falsify documents it undermines, if not fatally then certainly very seriously, the trust of the people in the operation of the rule of law. It makes no difference if, as here, the agents are private contractors to whom the secretary of state has outsourced her powers. Corruption by state officials is insidious and corrosive.”

That was this week’s horror story; last week’s was about the torturing of prisoners.

[John McDonnell]

It is important that we are aware of what happened today. The judge found that G4S had redacted papers that took out information and evidence that the person had been tortured and that therefore that person was eventually deported back to a place that had put his life at risk.

[Mike Wood]

Absolutely. We are talking about people who collude in torture, and allegations that people are torturing prisoners in their care. Apparently, however, those people are perfectly acceptable and might play a part in privatising our probation service out of existence. We could, of course, also look at Serco, which is one of the other main contenders.

In spite of what the hon. Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson)—who is no longer in his place—said earlier, the experience of Serco in managing the London unpaid work scheme is instructive. Reports from that scheme and other parties working, or hoping to work, in partnership with Serco—partnership is crucial in this area of our service—state that they have huge difficulties getting through to Serco’s helpline when they need to speak to it about any issue relating to an individual offender. They also said that Serco has failed to provide adequate information to offenders and probation staff, leading to unnecessary costs to the taxpayer through breach orders and subsequent court costs, and that previous good relations in partnerships have been destroyed by the actions of that private company. In spite of attempts to downplay such issues, those are the kinds of company that will win these contracts should they be let in the way that we are told they will be. We will have G4S responsible for probation, and Eddie Stobart responsible for legal aid.

The hon. Member for Solihull again used the R-word when she assured the House that both parts of the coalition are up for this revolutionary change. We need not revolutionary change, however, but testing, piloting and evaluation, and we need a far more cautious approach for two reasons, the first of which is the danger to the public, which has been mentioned extensively during the debate. I am in the Chamber representing 120,000 people —men, women and children—in my constituency, just as every other Member is doing. I have a responsibility to look to their safety, and these proposals will lessen that safety. My constituents will be more likely to become victims of crime as a result of dangerous, volatile, difficult-to-predict, sometimes professional criminals and offenders being supervised by untrained, unqualified, poorly paid, temporary, unmotivated, so-called probation staff. There is an enormous danger to the public inherent in and right at the heart of these proposals.

Secondly, I think that so far in the debate—I have been here since the beginning—no one has mentioned the danger to the criminal justice system. There is the idea that we can take on work with at least another 60,000 offenders a year and that the whole system will not become swamped, even though we are cutting resources at the same time—well, we are told that it will be within the same cost envelope, but that is 40,000, 50,000, 60,000 or 70,000 extra offenders a year to be dealt with within that same cost envelope. I am trying not to say that this does not add up, but it does not add up, does it?

We need a much more cautious approach because the Bill is being introduced with the lie that it is about high-minded aspirations to provide a service for petty offenders, those on short-term sentences and the like. We know, however, that the proposals are a blatant attempt to take public money and transpose it into the coffers of private companies. We also know what happens if we introduce legislation on that basis. Think of the Child Support Agency. How many years has it taken to get the CSA—which was introduced by the previous Tory Government, on a lie—back to something fit for purpose? How many lives have been ruined? How many injustices caused? Yet that is exactly what is being proposed in the Bill.

I have considerable concerns about the Bill, and to conclude I would like to place on record a few of the issues that cause me particular concern. First, the Government’s own impact assessment is one of the most vacuous documents that I have read for a long time. There is no costing anywhere in it: “We don’t have to cost it; we know what the cost will be, but we are not going to tell you. If we told you, the private companies involved might know.” There are estimates and guesstimates about the implications for the number of offenders, including those in breach of an order or going back to prison—the spectrum is so wide that it is rather like the weather report: “Tomorrow, there’s going to be weather.”

We are told that 600 extra prison places will be needed —we are talking about a new prison. We were told as recently as last month that in a prison estate of 85,000 places, there were 800 vacancies on the day in question. In fact, earlier in the debate, we were told that the figure is now down to 600. Is every one of those places to be filled by someone in breach of an order under the proposals? Surely not, yet that is the logic of 13,000 to 17,000 extra breaches leading to 600 extra prison places being needed. Any suggestion that that will be achieved by the expenditure of £15 million of extra public funds is, as again we all know, nonsense.

The proposals on drugs and drug testing deserve a debate of their own. We have heard an enormous amount of nonsense about what will be achieved by drug testing, and by the requirement to appear and private organisations that can drug test if they choose to. They will, of course, have to bear the cost, so we can be fairly sure that they will not choose to test very often. A Government Member has said that extending testing to class B drugs was to catch people who are on cannabis. That might be a laudable aim in all kinds of ways, but to what effect in terms of reoffending? The Blenheim project in London—a drug and alcohol project—has said that the measure seems

“to be based on a misplaced belief that comparatively widespread use of cannabis amongst prisoners indicates a strong link to offending behaviour”,

yet the UK Drug Policy Commission—no less—reports that

“users of other drugs have much lower rates of offending than those who use heroin and crack and are less likely to have committed a crime to get drugs or when under the influence of drugs”.

If we are not careful, petty offenders who have been released from prison on licence and who have amended, or who are coming to grips with, their offending behaviour, will be caught out by testing for cannabis. It will be found in their system and they will go back to prison. How does that save money? How does that improve the situation for that offender or for society?

If the Minister had read any one of the three volumes of prison diaries of his erstwhile colleague, Lord Archer, he would know that what happened in the prison system when it introduced mandatory drugs testing will happen outside the prison system. If a prisoner has a drug in his or her system that can be discovered for four weeks, they will move to a drug that cannot be discovered in that time. That is what has happened in our prison system where, as was reported recently, it is easier to get crack cocaine than a bar of soap. Prisoners have opted to move from cannabis to heroin. That is what will happen outside. What on earth is that about?

DrugScope, which has been referred to and which is probably the leading independent centre for drug expertise, has expressed enormous misgivings, as has just about every other organisation involved with drug addicts. They work daily to achieve results. The Government will not listen to probation trusts or probation officers, but those organisations are another group of experts doing the job that the Government believe they know better than.

We are told that a national probation service will be formed. We should remember that it will be responsible for the most serious 30% of offenders—the murders and rapists and the like to which the hon. Member for Solihull has referred. It will be responsible for multi-agency public protection arrangements and for breaching, yet it will be based regionally. We are going to tear the heart out of the relationship between officers and the serious offenders. The larger geographic area will make a difference.

I have been a probation officer and can tell hon. Members that getting a probationer to appear in my office was the first part of the job. What if I move the office 50 miles or 100 miles further away? Does anyone believe that that would improve the chances of the probationer appearing? Does anyone consider that it will lead to less offending? It will not. Let us not forget that such offenders are not petty offenders, but dangerous people. I therefore have grave doubts. Are we setting up the so-called national probation service—the public part that picks up the bits that the private sector does not want, cannot handle, has failed with and so on—to fail?

The Ministry of Justice has said that the Bill encapsulates

“a complex, large-scale change programme to be”

introduced and

“completed within an aggressive timetable.”

The situation is that what works will be replaced by what will not work, on the basis of an ideological hunch from the Secretary of State. Here in the House on 9 January—do hon. Members remember?—he said:

“Sometimes we just have to believe something is right and do it”—[Official Report, 9 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 318.]

The Secretary of State himself told us that that was the basis and justification for doing away with the two pilots that would have given him an evidence base. Even though he was new to his job, he knew in the first week that they would not have given him an evidential basis for anything of the kind.

In last week’s debate, several Members recited the number of incidents of reoffending in any one year, and one of them said, “Something has to be done.” That is the cry of the impotent and the powerless the world over. It has now apparently become the watchword of the Government with regard to the criminal justice system. That just will not do. We deserve much better, and the public need and deserve much better. The Government have to rethink this proposed legislation radically.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. There are six speakers left and an hour and a bit to go, so I will have to introduce a limit of 11 minutes.