Transforming Rehabilitation

Nick Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 9th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

This is an important issue that was raised with me this morning by the probation trust chairs. Of course, we provide a number of specialist accommodation blocks already. As part of the work we do over the next two or three months, we need to look at exactly how we ensure that the right vehicles are available to address accommodation needs. I want to see what I saw this morning at St Giles Trust, which has a small team of professionals who are very good at finding young people who are out of prison somewhere to live and stabilising their lives.

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

I want to press the Justice Secretary on something. On his watch, the Government have cancelled the probation service’s payment-by-results pilots before we have heard the evidence. Is not risk to the public increased when we do not have the results of those pilots?

[Chris Grayling]

I sat through a decade in opposition watching the previous Government so often piloting something, with nothing ever happening. The number of pilots that the Labour Government went through in office was endless. There is something in the work that is being done in Peterborough and the voluntary sector that I want to capture now, not in a decade’s time.