Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Sadiq Khan Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I intend to keep my comments short. The Bill has many worthy objectives that we support, although I will have to mention those things that are missing. First, however, I want to begin by thanking colleagues in both Houses and on both sides who have worked hard to refine and revise the Bill, as the Lord Chancellor has just explained.

I would also like to pay tribute to Paul Goggins and express on behalf of both sides of the House our particular thanks to him. My hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) and the probation services Minister began their contributions on Report with kind, moving words about this decent, conscientious and kind man, and the Lord Chancellor did the same just now. Paul brought to the House his enormous experience of criminal justice, as a passionate advocate for the excellent work done by our probation service. His contributions to the Bill’s Second Reading, a previous Opposition day debate and the Bill Committee were of the highest quality. He spoke with a depth of knowledge, and the House will be the poorer without him. Many of us will miss him enormously.

I have previously outlined how the Bill is controversial more for what is not in it than for what is. I am pleased about the provisions on drug testing and rehabilitative support for women offenders. We have sought to include provisions to address rehabilitation for former members of the military services, and late in the day, to be fair, the Government have partly come round to the importance of this, although they have not gone as far as we would have liked. In winding up, the Minister was going to give time scales for the review, but he ran out of time. Will he write to me about that?

[Jeremy Wright]

The right hon. Gentleman is right that time was short, but I got the chance to say that it would take six months for my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) to report back to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State.

[Sadiq Khan]

I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the six-month time scale.

No one can disagree with the objective of extending supervision and the accompanying help to all those released from prison. In this regard, I want to place on record our admiration for the massively important work that professional probation staff around the country do to rehabilitate some of the most troubled individuals while keeping the public safe. Much of the public do not realise the work of the probation service, and it is a sign of its success that the Government will leave to it the most high-risk offenders. It is welcome that offenders released from sentences of less than two years will be subject to at least 12 months of mandatory supervision in the community, but it is multi-national companies with no track record in this area that will be responsible for this, rather than the probation service, which we know can do the job very well.

It has always been an anomaly that short-sentence prisoners—the group with the highest risk of reoffending —are the ones left to their own devices when released from prison. As has been mentioned and the House knows, the previous Labour Government tried to address this with custody plus, but financial constraints prevented it from being implemented. The House also knows, from Paul Goggins’ Second Reading contribution, that by contrast the Government have no idea how much the extension of supervision to those serving 12 months or less will cost. Their impact assessment skirts around this, saying that

“the cost will be dependent on the outcome of competition”.

The Government have done nothing to update the House on this and so the plans remain uncosted.

The Justice Secretary and the Minister with responsibility for probation say that extending supervision will be paid for by privatising probation. But if that is the case, one would assume that the Justice Secretary and his officials must have figures to support it. It is hardly surprising that experts and others are suspicious about why the Government will not come clean on the numbers. The Justice Secretary has linked the cost of extended supervision to savings delivered by privatising probation, so the Bill is directly related to the wider probation privatisation plans. The two issues simply cannot be separated, which is one of the reasons new clause 1 was inserted by the other place.

The changes that flow from the Bill are untried and untested and will see supervision of serious and violent offenders fragmented. I must give credit to the Justice Secretary, whose plans have created an impressive coalition of those opposed to them: probation officers, chief executives and chairs of probation trusts, The Economist, his own officials and, most recently, the chief inspectors of both probation and of prisons, who questioned the system’s ability to cope with his plans. The chief inspector of probation warned that the plans would lead to

“an increased risk to the public.”

The Economist called the plans “half-baked.” The Ministry of Justice’s own risk register warns that there is an 80 per cent. risk of an unacceptable drop in operational performance, which when dealing with offenders can only lead to higher risks to public safety.

But still the Justice Secretary pushes ahead, with the same arrogance and dismissal of expert advice that led to the disaster that is the Work programme—a Work programme so bad that someone has more chance of still being in work after six months if they do not go on it.

[Chris Grayling]

We may be going slightly off track, Mr Speaker, but may I just point out that the Work programme is doing about twice as well as the predecessor programme that we inherited from the last Government?

[Mr Speaker]

That is totally irrelevant to the Third Reading of the Bill.

[Sadiq Khan]

I wish the Justice Secretary was right, but he is not.

Imagine that shambolic record being repeated in a privatised probation service, with someone’s chances of being rehabilitated being better if left to their own devices than if they go through £600 million of supervision by the likes of G4S, Serco, A4E and Capita. By the way, for those who believe that G4S and Serco will have nothing to do with the privatised probation service, that is not necessarily the case. On 19 December, the Justice Secretary said that the Government had left open the possibility of either supplier playing a supporting role, working with smaller business or voluntary sector providers to support their objective of achieving a diverse market. Once more, there is smoke and mirrors from the Ministry of Justice, more hiding the real facts. G4S and Serco could still be involved in the probation service.

The best way to pursue plans that lead to massive changes of this kind and affect public safety are through piloting and testing to see if something works before rolling it out, rather than a big bang. Perhaps the Justice Secretary should also consider asking probation trusts to take on the extra supervision rather than ignoring them and opting for big private company involvement instead. That is precisely the kind of piloting and testing that his predecessor planned and which the Justice Secretary cancelled in his first week in his job in a fit of pique, when he announced that his own gut instinct trumped evidence and statistics. Does the House really think, without any evidence whatever, that a privatised and fragmented probation service will be able to deliver the provisions in this Bill? The Justice Secretary has nothing to point towards to support this—not the Peterborough scheme, as he claims, which is a totally different model. That is comparing apples with pears.

It is a double risk because at the same time as supervision is extended the institutional landscape responsible for supervision will be radically overhauled. This will see the Government abolishing local probation trusts, commissioning services on behalf of local areas direct from Whitehall, splitting responsibility for offenders based on a non-static risk level between public and private organisations and handing over to big multinational companies supervision of serious and violent offenders, and all at breakneck speed without any evidential base: a monumental gamble with public safety.

Of course we support attempts to reduce reoffending; we support extended supervision of those in custody for fewer than 10 months; we support attempts to provide through-the-gate support for those leaving prison; we support attempts to get more charities, voluntary groups and small and large businesses involved—but we do not support reckless, half-baked plans without any evidence that they will not put public safety at risk. We cannot support something that undermines public confidence in the criminal justice system, and we will not support ideologically driven leaps in the dark.

It is simply wrong for the Justice Secretary to argue that those who are concerned about his plans are against reducing reoffending just because we are against his particular half-baked and reckless proposals. We happen to believe that his plans are precisely that, and those concerns are shared by experts, staff, the chief inspector and even his own officials.

The Bill will now return to the other place. I hope colleagues there will insist that their clause—to ensure that probation privatisation should not happen without both Houses having the opportunity properly to scrutinise the Government’s detailed plans to change the structure of the probation service—is reinserted in the Bill. I see no reason why the other place should back down. The concerns reflected in the clause it inserted are as important now—if not even more so—than they were last summer. Scandals involving private companies have increased, and more evidence has come to light about concerns from the chief inspector of probation and from the Ministry’s own internal assessment of the risks. It is thus only right and proper for the Government to submit their full and detailed plans to proper parliamentary scrutiny, and not rush things through. We cannot afford to take reckless gambles where public safety is concerned. The Government’s plans risk doing exactly that, which is why we cannot support them.