Offenders (Day of Release from Detention) Bill

Rob Butler Excerpts

3rd reading
Friday 3rd March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)]

I support the Bill wholeheartedly. I congratulate both my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mark Jenkinson) on introducing it before he entered the Government, and my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) on guiding it through the legislative process so thoroughly and well.

As many Members will know, I have a strong and passionate interest in reducing the number of victims of crime by improving the rehabilitation of offenders, having been a non-executive director of HM Prison and Probation Service and, for a very short time, the Minister responsible for prisons and probation. I was released very early; I am not sure that it was for entirely good behaviour. [Laughter.] I am very pleased that my successor has embraced the Bill and is doing such a fantastic job across the whole portfolio.

Prisons play an important part in the process of rehabilitation, with a wide range of classes, training courses and programmes that are designed to help people acquire the skills and habits they need to live a life free of crime once they are released. I praise the fantastic work that is done by teachers, tutors and coaches in our prisons. The job is not easy, but it can be extremely rewarding, and I am pleased that the Government are investing much more in prison education services and recruiting more staff to these vital positions.

However good the rehabilitation efforts are when somebody is in custody, one of the riskiest moments for reoffending is immediately after a prisoner is released. The order and structure of the prison environment suddenly disappear, and instead there is the potential for anxiety, confusion and temptation. This is the time when it is essential to get support in place to ensure that there is somewhere to live, something constructive to do and someone to go to for help and advice. What matters most when someone is released from jail is for them to be able to go immediately to a probation office, to sign up with a doctor, to go to their new accommodation and perhaps to visit the jobcentre. Those immediate first positive steps can make all the difference between going straight and going swiftly back behind bars.

Unfortunately, those crucial and relatively simple steps are impossible when someone is released on a Friday afternoon, has to travel for several hours to get home and then finds that all the services they need have closed for the weekend. As my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness said, the impact can be particularly severe for women, because they are frequently imprisoned even further from home than men are. It is a race against time that is rarely won by the person who has been newly freed from prison.

With a third of all releases taking place on a Friday, a significant number of people are at risk. This matters, because 80% of crime is committed by reoffenders, and reoffending overall costs the taxpayer £18 billion a year. If we in this place truly want to support people as they come out of prison and reduce that cost, we can play a role in doing so today by making the simple change of ending Friday releases, which will relieve the time pressure to access services, helping to ensure that newly released prisoners can have a fresh start.

While I accept that this is not a magic bullet to end reoffending, it will go some way to reduce the burden on the taxpayer, and it boils down to a simple administrative change, as my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness outlined admirably. The move is supported by charities, the voluntary sector, those working within the prison system, the probation service and ex-offenders themselves.

I draw particular attention to the work done by the charity Nacro, which has long campaigned for this change. Its 2021 report entitled “Friday Prison Releases: Collective Voices” says that

“Friday prison releases are needlessly setting people up to fail”.

It is hard to disagree. The report quotes a prison leaver as saying:

“I had to sleep at a fishing pit until the Monday because that was the next day the person [at the council] was back in her seat at work.”

There are other quotes in Nacro’s report that are worth highlighting, including from a prison:

“We have lots of issues with Friday releases, which are particularly problematic for people with substance misuse support needs”;

from the police:

“The police often have to pick up the pieces where people fall through the gaps, and this happens more often when people are released from prison on a Friday”;

from a council accommodation officer:

“People who leave prison on a Friday do not get the early intervention… which is unfair and is more likely to lead to further offending”;

and from the charity itself:

“I would say that most people who are released from prison on a Friday and need to report to the council for housing end up being homeless as they didn’t have the time”.

Nacro’s chief executive has said that ending Friday releases

“will give people the best chance at a second chance”.

I completely agree.

At a time of challenging public finances, this is a policy that will cost the taxpayer virtually nothing—perhaps just a bit of administration to update working practices and procedures. I am delighted that the Minister has confirmed on multiple occasions that the Government support this important Bill. I congratulate everybody who has been involved in getting it to this stage, including the officials from the Ministry of Justice, some of whom I recognise well, and especially my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Damian Hinds)]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) for his excellent work bringing this important Bill to the House and navigating it through to this stage. It is a great credit to him that there is such support for this legislation. My hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mark Jenkinson) has played an important role in this Bill to date. I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Aylesbury (Rob Butler), for Loughborough (Jane Hunt), for North West Norfolk (James Wild), for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis), who spoke passionately about their local communities and the great work carried out by the voluntary and charitable sector, and with particular insight as local representatives. I also thank the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter), who speaks for the Opposition, for the manner and content of his remarks in welcoming the Bill. It is a good and positive thing when we have legislation coming forward with wide support from different parties in the House and different perspectives and traditions to do something sensible in the interests of our society.

As the House has heard, the Bill ensures that offenders who have resettlement needs will no longer need to be released on a Friday or the day before a bank or public holiday. It will do that by enabling a release date to be brought forward by up to two eligible working days, so these offenders will be released earlier in the week. In practice, this means that offenders with resettlement needs will no longer face that race against the clock, which my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness set out, to find accommodation, access medication and access finance support all before services close for the weekend. As he outlined, that is particularly challenging for people with more complex needs, of whom there are many, such as drug dependency or mental health illness, and, crucially, for those with a long distance to travel before they can access those services. The Bill will achieve that by tackling the practical challenges that Friday releases can create. It will address the issues that can lead to an increased risk of reoffending by ensuring that custody leavers have a better chance to access the support they need to reintegrate into the community and to turn their back on a life of crime.

As my hon. Friend said, the Bill also applies to children sentenced to detention. It will ensure that the release provisions relating to Friday, bank and public holiday, and weekend releases exist in respect of all youth settings, including the recently created secure 16 to 19 school. Despite the various safeguards and legal duties that exist for children leaving custody, being released on a Friday still means that a child would go for at least two days with no meaningful contact with their youth justice worker exactly when they are at their most vulnerable.

[Rob Butler]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the impact on young people and children is accentuated by the tremendous success there has been in reducing the number of children in custody from around 3,000 in 2007 to around 400 today? That means there are fewer secure settings for children, so they are frequently further from home and it takes them much longer on the day they are released to get to where they need to be.

[Damian Hinds]

My hon. Friend is spot on and speaks from great personal experience and expertise. It is true that far fewer children are being locked up than in 2010. We know that being incarcerated at a young age means people risk becoming more criminal and it exposes them to a whole range of different risks. Of course, sometimes that is exactly what we have to do—we must be able to imprison people where necessary—but where it is possible to avoid it, that is often better for the individual and for wider society. An effect of that, and this exists for women prisoners as well, is that a person is much more likely to be far away from home. Because there are fewer of these institutions, they are more spread out, so access to services, which my hon. Friend identifies is an issue, can be particularly acute for younger people.

In practice, it will be for heads of establishments to apply the power in bringing forward an offender’s release data. Aided by policy guidance, they can allow an offender additional time to resettle where it will support their reintegration into the community and reduce their risk of reoffending. As the House will be aware, the Government have made significant progress in tackling the £18 billion annual cost of reoffending and protecting the public.

Data show that the overall proven reoffending rate for adults decreased from 30.9% in 2009-10 to 25.6% in 2019-20, which is truly significant. The rate is still too high, however, and we have to do all we can to bring it down further. We are investing substantial sums to achieve that, including in prison leavers’ access to accommodation, about which several hon. Members on both sides of the House have spoken; and in building stronger links with employers through dedicated prison employment leads and prison employment advisory boards where business leaders can interface with their local prisons.

We have also seen encouraging improvements in employment rates for prisoners on release, which is an area where hon. Members can play an important role through their discussions with local employers by putting them in touch with this opportunity. We are also investing in offering more prisoners the chance to work while inside prison; developing the prison education service to raise the skills of offenders, about which my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury also spoke; and increasing access to drugs rehabilitation through the recruitment of health and justice partnership co-ordinators to better link up services for offenders inside and beyond the prison perimeter. The hon. Member for Hammersmith was exactly right to identify that we need to think of it as a holistic process that starts inside and continues outside; it must be as linked up as possible.

We are also making large investments into youth justice to tackle offending by children. As my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough said, there is a lot that the Government and the Prison Service can do, but charities and voluntary organisations, including the four that she mentioned in her constituency, are an absolutely irreplaceable and fundamental part of that fabric.

Those interventions should improve resettlement opportunities for all offenders and help to reduce reoffending, but they cannot fully address all the practicalities that are presented by being released on a Friday. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East vividly illustrated that journey to the House. This common-sense Bill will help to achieve that. I reiterate my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness for bringing this important Bill before the House and I confirm again, with great pleasure, that the Government support it. I wish it all the best in its progress through the other place.