Privatised Probation System

Debate between Rory Stewart and Joanna Cherry

Monday 4th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

Absolutely. As my right hon. and learned Friend points out, if we are to reduce the number of people serving ineffective short prison sentences, we must improve the quality of community sentences. That means that we need better supervision of offenders, better sentence planning and more use of technology, including electronic monitoring. One of the key objectives of the reforms that we will be bringing into probation is to reassure not just the public but the sentencers that good community protection exists.

[Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)]

In Scotland, the probation service role is carried out by criminal justice social workers, who are part of local authorities’ social work departments—in other words, it is a public service, and I believe that that is as it should be. Effective reintegration and rehabilitation of offenders is at the heart of the Scottish system—rather than profit and hitting targets—and lately in Scotland, of course, we have had great success with getting rid of short-term sentences, which has led to a fall in the rate of reoffending. Does the Minister accept that probation should never be run for private profit and that reunifying the probation service under public control is the only way to properly protect the public across England and Wales?

Finally, this fiasco is part of a long list of scandalous wastes of public money for which the Minister’s colleague the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), has been responsible in his roles as Secretary of State for Justice and Secretary of State for Transport. This is one of two such scandals that have come to light over the weekend. We are hearing rumours that he is not coming to the House later today to answer the urgent question about the ferry tendering disaster, so I ask the Minister, for whom I have the greatest respect—I realise that none of this is his fault—to tell us when the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell is going to be held to account for his shocking irresponsibility with taxpayers’ money.

[Rory Stewart]

As hon. Members would expect me to say, these things have more nuances and complexities. The basic idea that it is impossible for anybody except the Government to deliver good probation services was disproved, in fact, by the Labour pilot—the Peterborough pilot—which by bringing in the voluntary sector and social investors was able to reduce reoffending by a staggering 9%, particularly by providing something that we are developing at the moment and that does not fully exist yet in Scotland: a fully integrated through-the-gate service linking the prison officer in the prison with probation in the community. We need to take into account that this is not a binary choice.

HMP Birmingham

Debate between Rory Stewart and Joanna Cherry

Tuesday 4th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

I will take those two matters separately. As for responding to the inspector’s recommendations, we have changed—the Secretary of State for Justice has driven this through—how our management systems work to put the inspector’s recommendations and reports at the heart of the way we set objectives for the Prison Service. We had our own independent assessment under the previous system, but we expect the House to see that how we manage prisons much more closely reflects inspection reports in the future.

On the question of old Victorian buildings, there clearly is a pattern, but it is not an absolute pattern. There are old buildings, such as Stafford, that are well run, good prisons, and there are new prisons, such as Nottingham, that have managed to get themselves into trouble despite the new buildings. However, generally speaking, running an old Victorian prison adds to the problems, and we should ensure that our investment in 10,000 new places endeavours to remove the worst-affected prisons from our system.

[Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)]

It is clear that prisons in England and Wales are suffering from excessive budget pressures, inconsistent policy and a lack of direction. The Minister recently visited the prisons system in Scotland, and while prison staffing levels in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have fallen by around a third since 2010, in Scotland they have increased by 14%, and we have minimised cuts to our justice system, resulting in a 43-year crime low. Overcrowding has been addressed by the Scottish Government’s successful presumption against short-term custodial sentences, which has been increased today to 12 months in the Scottish Government’s programme for government. Having visited Scotland recently, will the Minister tell the House what lessons from the experience of successful prison reform in Scotland does he intend to apply to the system in England and Wales?

[Rory Stewart]

I genuinely pay tribute to some of the things that are happening in Scotland in relation to prisons, and I was privileged to visit HMP Perth, which is a good example of a busy, challenged local prison that is being run well. Prison officers in Scotland would also say that there have been significant cuts to their numbers since the early 2000s, and they, too, have had to make serious efficiency savings, which they have done well, and they are running good prisons.

We are watching closely what is happening on short sentences in Scotland. Like the Scottish Government, our priority is to protect the public, but the evidence on what could be done to reduce reoffending by not overusing short prison sentences inappropriately is a good lesson from Scotland, from which we wish to learn.